These people are actively willing George Orwell’s nightmare into being.

The Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population went barefoot.

You’ll pay through the nose, but look at digital signage panels. They are bristling with I/O, configurable to the nth degree, wonderfully over-engineered and utterly free from bloat.

A phone would be a bit much, but an ereader with a solar charger loaded up with Wikipedia and a chunk of Project Gutenberg would probably last with a bit of care.

That’s a joke-turned-plot element from one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books. The protagonist, a human everyman stranded with a primitive culture on a distant world realises he has no idea how electricity, steam engines, medicine, etc works but he becomes a respected member of their community by making sandwiches.

IF the phone can output enough power with it’s OTG port AND has the correct drivers for that cheap-ass looking USB framebuffer graphics thing AND that’s an active HDMI to VGA adapter rather than some shitty vendor-specific implementation based on some unholy bastardisation AND the phone supports external displays… then I still don’t think it’d work, tbh (but it won’t (it might though (it won’t))).

It’s called “eliminating competition”.

Even an Oxford comma couldn’t save that one.

“We’ve emailed a code to ••••••@••••••••m - you’ll need to enter it to continue.”

Yeah, but it’s, like, super patchy and you keep having to redoing the captive portal bit.