We recorded MobileViews 596 a day early on February 7, 2026, mostly to stay ahead of the weather. I’m currently under a flood watch in Hawaii, while Jon Westfall has been dealing with the aftermath of an ice storm in Mississippi. We spent some time comparing the “quality” of our power outages—I’ve had five short ones recently, while Jon’s neighbors dealt with a single, brutal nine-day stretch.
In my retirement, I’ve started using mechanical keyboards—I have several now. Surprisingly, I broke my first keycaps ever this month on a Royal Kludge board. The stems on the “O” and “3” keys actually cracked. I’ve been replacing them with a set of Warmier PBT shine-through keycaps, doing about three a day so it doesn’t feel like a chore. Jon is still rocking a 15-year-old Apple keyboard, but I’m trying to convince him to try a 75% mechanical layout with a volume knob.
We had a discussion about the recent tech stock dip following Anthropic’s new Claude plugins. Major players like Microsoft and Oracle saw massive hits, and I can’t help but wonder if CEOs are overreacting to AI’s current capabilities. I see a parallel to the “Advanced Intelligent Networking” (AIN) of the late 80s. Back then, we were told visual “drag-and-drop” programming would replace coders, but that path failed because non-techies didn’t account for error conditions or governance. Jon agreed, noting that while the sky is changing, it isn’t necessarily falling, and companies may soon regret the mass layoffs they’ve justified in the name of AI.
My Boox Note Air 5C journey continues. I recently picked up a Staedtler Noris Digital Jumbo stylus. It looks just like a traditional pencil and features a digital eraser on the end. Interestingly, erasing with the physical end of the stylus is actually faster than hitting “undo” on an e-ink screen. My current workflow involves syncing my daily doodles from the native Boox app to OneNote as PDFs, though I’m still struggling with how OneNote for Android handles the mixture of handwriting and text.
Jon shared his progress on a mobile “Hyflex” setup for his psychology classes at Delta State. He’s using a combination of gear to allow students to participate in-person, synchronously online, or via recording. One software highlight he mentioned is Better Display (the $21 Pro version), which allows for a picture-in-picture view of an extended display. It’s a lifesaver when the classroom projector is positioned at an awkward angle behind the presenter.
Finally, Jon is planning his hardware roadmap for the year. He’s debating between a DIY Linux box for local LLM work, a Unify storage appliance, or waiting for a Mac Mini with an M5 chip. Personally, I’m keeping an eye on the rumor mill for a touchscreen MacBook—I might actually buy one if it ever surfaces.
Check out Jon’s college classroom HyFlex setup video.
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