My Devices - Galaxy Tab 4 for nighttime viewing

In general, I don’t pay much attention to PC hardware. This is due to my inability to afford new(ish) hardware and that I don’t care what the hardware is capable of, but instead what real people are doing with it. I desperately want to know what you and everyone else is doing with their computers. Reading or seeing what people do always ignites my imagination and leads to me working on more projects.

So, I’ve decided to start a series of posts introducing the hardware I use on a regular basis with the emphasis on what I use it for. For the first post I am introducing my bedside screen, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4.

Specs

• Model: Galaxy Tab 4 10.1 SM-T530
• Codename: matisse; released 2014
• CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon 400
• RAM: 1.5 GB
• Storage: 16 GB
• WLAN: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, hotspot. It does not have 5 GHz wifi.
• Screen: 1280 x 800 pixels, 16:10 ratio (~149 ppi density)
• SD card slot w/max 64 GB

ROM installation

I am using an unofficial LineageOS 18.1 install, found here and archive version here.

Standard install, nothing to write for more notes on for install.

I did install GApps so that things can stay more up-to-date. It uses armv7 Android 11 GApps.

How do I use the Tab 4

My wife picked this up for me from Goodwill Finds site for my birthday last year. Turns out it belonged to a nice person who traveled Europe before donating it and left all their travel photos on the SD card, which I promptly formatted as I don’t want to know whatever they were up to.

I use this tablet to watch TV shows while I lay in bed at night and fall asleep to them. My entire life I’ve had troubles sleeping, both falling and staying asleep. Growing up my parents slept well into the afternoon and then stayed up most of the night, which meant I and my siblings all developed poor sleeping habits. I would often stay up until 4AM and then sleep until 2PM. As an adult I have worked hard to break this and now that I’m in my 40’s I think I finally have it under control.

Once I climb into bed I typically watch an episode or two of The Simpsons, Futurama, Star Wars The Clone Wars, or the original animated series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Most nights I only make it about 10 minutes into an episode and pass out. Works like a charm.

Since this is such as old tablet and doesn’t use dual band 5GHz wifi, I don’t connect it to the internet. I own all the shows I like on DVD, so I simply ripped them and then put the files onto the tablet. This means I don’t need anything else for it to function. No media server or file sharing necessary.

I used MakeMKV to rip the discs and Handbrake to encode the episodes with subtitles burned in. I am extremely hard-of-hearing and I watch everything with subtitles. This also means I’m used to not caring if the sound is on for anything I watch. At night I watch my shows with no sound and subtitles so it doesn’t disturb my wife.

On the tablet I use VLC to watch everything. Since it is only used for 10-40 minutes of video playback with wifi, bluetooth, and anything else all turned off, I get about 2 weeks of battery out of it.

The real winner in this setup is another gift my wife got me. I struggled to find a way to hold the tablet in position while I lay on my side to watch the shows. I tried a bunch of configurations and then my wife got me a Pillow Pad. This is one of those “as seen on TV” products that looks ridiculous and gets a lot of old people to order. But, its perfect for me.

I want to know what computers you have, and specifically, what you use them for. As you can tell, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy or geeky. Yet, I want to know!

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