Facebook Portal, the new tinker toy

What am I doing on a Saturday instead of sitting at home and being lazy? On the only day that I get to be lazy?

Why, being on the road at a 2 hours train trip of course!

I had some news about Facebook Portal now being opened to the outside by means of having adb available. Those things costed quite a lot back in the day, and from what I hear, they are as powerful as the Oculus Quest. I cannot seem to reach the full technical specs though. The moment they opened it up, curiosity hit me so I started looking up in my local marketplace to see if anyone was trying to get rid of theirs. And by luck, I did find two of them.

I decided to message one of them and offered some crisp 30 euros. Bro accepted, so I was happy! The only problem was that I had to pick it up.

Therefore, here I am, on the train, for a fun weekend project.

I was thinking of possibilities for the device. One thing I am wondering is if I can turn it into a Linux server that will wire into my Tailscale, to host some private services that would normally be inaccessible outside my private network. Definitely one option. Another would be to make it into a Jellyfin streaming station for the kitchen, effectively making it into a kitchen appliance. In the future I can just hand it down to my daughter and watch her have fun with it. Open source community is simply amazing so there are so many ways I can utilize such a cheap device in the household. If it works out, I will probably get a few more before people notice it is a commodity. For now though, I’ll just start with one.

It is definitely very chill out here, long train ride, lots of nature and old architecture. I sure appreciate Belgium, they know how to maintain their older buildings well. Way better than my home country for sure.

Got to our meeting stop and got the portal! Goodie, it was bigger than I expected. I’ve had smaller tvs for entertainment in my life. I looked into what I could do with this and discovered that I could load fdroid up. That would give me a nice app store with many options. Might be able to load Firefox as well. Would be perfect if I could load some kind of Navidrome client and Stremio in there. Apparently every inherent feature is disabled, which is very nice, though I doubt they disabled any telemetry. I’ll see if I can disable the telemetry myself, I do dislike it. It will be the most perfect weekend project.

Seriously though, this is gigantic. No wonder it costed somewhere north of 200-300 back in its time. When I was checking the listing I was expecting some 7 inch toy tablet. Also, very heavy. This will add a lot of load on my desk. I’ll consider it as an excuse to finally clean up my desk a little bit. It should be my music player / media player / toy in general, until my baby girl grows an interest in technology (if she ever does, that is).

Credit where credit is due, I’m glad the CTO at Meta had fun with it, leading to everyone being able to enjoy ADB on their Facebook Portal. My turn now!

Note: Will probably update this post later with pictures.