I recently finished building what I call the Mythic I. You can find
pictures of it and an essay that I wrote describing the philosophy and
construction here: https://mythic.computer/essays/origins

My hope is that I can turn this into the way I make my living,
operating as a luthier would — building these rather time intensive,
and therefore expensive, machines serially for clients. I'll summarize
many of my overall thoughts more contextually with two pertinent
section titles of Ploum's original essay.

>Software
I found that using NixOS to bundle together a minimal set of
applications with a Linux kernel was the easiest approach. All
open-source, too. You get all of the standard utilities you're used to
for free, and can very easily choose what else you'd like to tack on
by using a simple config file. At the user-level it can only run bash,
wordgrinder (a ~modern wordperfect clone), and kakoune. After deciding
on which applications I'd like to have, I took out the wifi card and
disabled networking — for my personal use-case, I didn't want email or
CLI internet access, but these could be trivially added in the future
(the ethernet port is still available internally, but visually
obscured). I also exposed a USB port and wrote a tiny syncing utility
so that when I want to transfer files from the Mythic I to another
machine (e.g. writing), I type 'usync', and when I have files on a USB
stick that I want to transfer to the Mythic I (e.g. reading), I type
'dsync'. I've been using this 'stack' everyday for about a month and
it works just fine.

>Hardware
I have a history of woodworking (mostly guitars), so I agreed very
strongly with Ploum's assessment of the 'felt' weight of objects. Wood
and leather, as opposed to metal or plastic (sorry 3D printers), imbue
objects with a warm, timeless, and powerful feeling. The Mythic I is
made from solid walnut and maple, and uses full-grain,
vegetable-tanned Italian leather for the wrist-rest. I spent a great
deal of time modeling what I thought the body should look like by
mulling over a huge number of beautiful pieces of furniture,
presentation arms, classic cars, cathedrals, etc. Aesthetics of form
are vastly more important than I think has been traditionally thought.
As an aside, I found that by merely considering those sources of
aesthetic inspiration for long enough and then sitting down with some
modeling clay and paper/pencils, one intuits their forms. Aspects of
all of them then leap out from the clay in totally serendipitous ways.
Something else that really makes an object sing and feel as though it
has purpose is 'ritual tactility'. I was heavily inspired by fighter
jets on this front. With a very simple circuit, I modified the
power-on and off processes to require the turning of a key and
pressing of a rather beefy momentary toggle switch. The various stages
of the process are mirrored with the lights on the left-hand panel:
when you turn the keyed switch the red light turns on, when you engage
the momentary toggle switch the yellow light turns on, and when power
delivery begins to the main internal computer the green light turns
on. If you don't have the key, the toggle does nothing and the
computer cannot turn on, so it really does function as a key. A clever
person could, of course, hotwire the thing though.
The guts of the Mythic I are an Intel NUC. This is perhaps suboptimal,
but hardware innovation takes a very long time. I figure that if the
CPU craps out, or the RAM, or the NVMe drive, I can just replace it
piecewise. Everything is organized internally so that this would
simply require undoing a few brass standoff screws. I think Ploum
perhaps misunderestimated the degree to which most PCs these days
already have easily replaceable parts. The screen and keyboard
(despite a visceral feeling of cringe I still get while thinking about
this) are HDMI and USB interfaces, respectively. Despite having less
control over those devices' internal logic, I gained the freedom to
replace them extremely easily if they break — it'll always be a part
swap or cable swap that doesn't require desoldering. I admit that I
spent a significant amount of time writing a driver for an e-ink
screen, but they are unbearably slow to refresh and overall fickle
pieces of hardware, all the vendors are Chinese (communication was
difficult), and swapping the screen in case of failure would've been a
gigantic mess.

...

Overall, I found that (1) exploring the aesthetics of the form of the
computer was one of the highest leverage points for overall
improvement, (2) existing hardware satisfies many of the desired
design specs, and (3) existing software satisfies many of the desired
design specs. It's mostly a matter of putting everything together.
Would love to hear everyone's thoughts.

-Keegan McNamara

On 23/03/29 11:22, Keegan McNamara - keemcn1 at gmail.com wrote:
>I recently finished building what I call the Mythic I. You can find
>pictures of it and an essay that I wrote describing the philosophy and
>construction here: https://mythic.computer/essays/origins

Little note: the page is really hard to read for me as pictures are
loaded only upon scrolling which create flickering on my screen. Also,
the picture seems to be large but displayed with in a smaller canvas
which leads to strange artifact. This is slightly out of topic but I
raise the issue nevertheless in case you have the time and motivation to
fix it ;-)


>
>My hope is that I can turn this into the way I make my living,
>operating as a luthier would — building these rather time intensive,
>and therefore expensive, machines serially for clients. I'll summarize
>many of my overall thoughts more contextually with two pertinent
>section titles of Ploum's original essay.

Let’s cut short: I’m really interested to be one of your customer (as
long as you are in my budget and you can deliver to Europe in a way or
another). That’s really the kind of service I was hoping to see: a
custom computer maker. That’s awesome. I understand that this would, of
course, not be a cheap computer.
>
>>Software
>I found that using NixOS to bundle together a minimal set of
>applications with a Linux kernel was the easiest approach. All
>open-source, too. You get all of the standard utilities you're used to
>for free, and can very easily choose what else you'd like to tack on
>by using a simple config file. At the user-level it can only run bash,
>wordgrinder (a ~modern wordperfect clone), and kakoune. After deciding
>on which applications I'd like to have, I took out the wifi card and
>disabled networking — for my personal use-case, I didn't want email or
>CLI internet access, but these could be trivially added in the future
>(the ethernet port is still available internally, but visually
>obscured). I also exposed a USB port and wrote a tiny syncing utility
>so that when I want to transfer files from the Mythic I to another
>machine (e.g. writing), I type 'usync', and when I have files on a USB
>stick that I want to transfer to the Mythic I (e.g. reading), I type
>'dsync'. I've been using this 'stack' everyday for about a month and
>it works just fine.

The usync/dsync is really a great idea. I guess those scripts could be
extended to allow synchronisation through USB with a remote data
storage.

As for the software stack, I would myself use ZSH/neovim but nothing
fancy. Out of habit, I would also probably prefer Debian but I get why
NixOS makes a lot of sense (it is just that I should learn it).

I guess we can easily include tools that are now mostly standard:
python, ripgrep, fdfind, less, pandoc, git and a few others.

Are you running X or Wayland? (if yes, a WM like i3 would make sense).

Another question: does it have audio? This is something I’ve mixed
feelings. I don’t know if it is a good idea or not.

For my part, I would really be interested by an ethernet connection to
synchronize Offpunk and my emails (currently neomutt/msmtp/offlineimap).
It would be awesome to have a physical button that would :

1. enable ethernet if it is plugged.
2. Run do_the internet.sh (my infamous script which sync offpunk/git
repositories/email)
3. run usync/dsync if an USB is plugged.


That would make the act of connecting really physical.

Really excited by the idea.

>
>>Hardware
>I have a history of woodworking (mostly guitars), so I agreed very
>strongly with Ploum's assessment of the 'felt' weight of objects. Wood
>and leather, as opposed to metal or plastic (sorry 3D printers), imbue
>objects with a warm, timeless, and powerful feeling. The Mythic I is
>made from solid walnut and maple, and uses full-grain,
>vegetable-tanned Italian leather for the wrist-rest. I spent a great
>deal of time modeling what I thought the body should look like by
>mulling over a huge number of beautiful pieces of furniture,
>presentation arms, classic cars, cathedrals, etc. Aesthetics of form
>are vastly more important than I think has been traditionally thought.
>As an aside, I found that by merely considering those sources of
>aesthetic inspiration for long enough and then sitting down with some
>modeling clay and paper/pencils, one intuits their forms. Aspects of
>all of them then leap out from the clay in totally serendipitous ways.
>Something else that really makes an object sing and feel as though it
>has purpose is 'ritual tactility'.

Exactly! "ritual tactility" is a beautiful word.

> I was heavily inspired by fighter
>jets on this front. With a very simple circuit, I modified the
>power-on and off processes to require the turning of a key and
>pressing of a rather beefy momentary toggle switch. The various stages
>of the process are mirrored with the lights on the left-hand panel:
>when you turn the keyed switch the red light turns on, when you engage
>the momentary toggle switch the yellow light turns on, and when power
>delivery begins to the main internal computer the green light turns
>on. If you don't have the key, the toggle does nothing and the
>computer cannot turn on, so it really does function as a key. A clever
>person could, of course, hotwire the thing though.

This really align with my idea of a "connection" button.

>The guts of the Mythic I are an Intel NUC. This is perhaps suboptimal,
>but hardware innovation takes a very long time. I figure that if the
>CPU craps out, or the RAM, or the NVMe drive, I can just replace it
>piecewise. Everything is organized internally so that this would
>simply require undoing a few brass standoff screws. I think Ploum
>perhaps misunderestimated the degree to which most PCs these days
>already have easily replaceable parts.

What’s your opinion of MNT?

The MNT Pocket Reform could be a really good starting point for the
internals, don’t you think?

https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/pocket-reform

> The screen and keyboard
>(despite a visceral feeling of cringe I still get while thinking about
>this) are HDMI and USB interfaces, respectively. Despite having less
>control over those devices' internal logic, I gained the freedom to
>replace them extremely easily if they break — it'll always be a part
>swap or cable swap that doesn't require desoldering. I admit that I
>spent a significant amount of time writing a driver for an e-ink
>screen, but they are unbearably slow to refresh and overall fickle
>pieces of hardware, all the vendors are Chinese (communication was
>difficult), and swapping the screen in case of failure would've been a
>gigantic mess.

That was one of my key requirement: I would like a computer with an eink
screen. It really change completely the way I interact with a screen
but, I agree, a lot of the software stack should be completely
rethinked. Take the terminal: instead of scrolling line after line once
you reach the end of the screen, it should instead refresh the screen
and bring you immediately to the the top (kind of a "clear" command).

Also wondering how to use Vim with eink (the Freewrite managed to do it
so it is not impossible). Another alternative would be LCD screen.
>
>...
>
>Overall, I found that (1) exploring the aesthetics of the form of the
>computer was one of the highest leverage points for overall
>improvement, (2) existing hardware satisfies many of the desired
>design specs, and (3) existing software satisfies many of the desired
>design specs. It's mostly a matter of putting everything together.
>Would love to hear everyone's thoughts.

Another pet requirement of mine is the keyboard. A good, mechanical,
orthogonal keyboard. Examples:

https://www.zsa.io/moonlander/
http://typematrix.com/

Exploring a computer built for a keyboard like the moonlander would be
really exciting.

>
>-Keegan McNamara


Really nice work, looking forward to discuss that with you.


--
Ploum - Lionel Dricot
Blog: https://www.ploum.net
Livres: https://ploum.net/livres.html

On Wed, Mar 29, 2023, at 14:22, Keegan McNamara wrote:
> I recently finished building what I call the Mythic I. 

Oh there you are on this list! :)

The details you wrote here, but not on your webpage, about the software and hardware are just the sort of things I was hoping to know - likely because I'm not an accomplished luthier and I'm relatively out of touch with the physicality of form you found so much opportunity in. :)