I wish there were a room around here where we talk about all the gadgets where this stuff is supposed to work.

Cool Uses for Perl might be the place for that - see stevieb and jmlynesjr's Pi-related posts. There's plenty of such discussion which goes on in the chatterbox too, albeit in an ephemeral way. Corion and marto have been discussing various hardware-related projects in there recently.

Also, what is the difference between a phone, a tablet and a laptop besides the topology of the plastic that houses it?

I don't make much of a distinction between phones and tablets - certainly not these days now that phones are too big to fit in a pocket and some are now fold-outs to be double-width. OTOH, a laptop has a physical keyboard and pointer device, a hinged lid with a separate non-touch screen and lots of physical ports on the outside of the case. It is almost always fan-cooled. It is basically a portable desktop with integrated keyboard, pointer and monitor.

It rained last night. There's so much relief in the air. Clouds have returned instead of the creosote, CO, SO2 umbrella. I think we're gonna make it.

Very good to hear. With luck the worst has passed.

I second marto's idea of a web-app. And you can even do it without any paid or free hosting if it's for only a few hours per month. As you can run the web-app on your laptop for those special family meetings. You can even play scrabble in there, chat, video-conference, deposit photos!

You need a web server running on the laptop and with Linux (at least) that's easy. It will be accessible over the internet by using the (dynamic!) IP the ISP has given you for the day - just text it to your family. It's quite straightforward in Linux to open some ports in the firewall and run a web-server like nginx and serve your app. The disadvantage is that you are exposing your laptop to the world, so perhaps use a use-less, data-less laptop for this purpose. What I forgot to mention on your initial enquiry is that I am using Contabo and I am very happy about them and the cheap price/cpu power except that I get hit by quite a few robots scanning ports and trying to ssh in. But I guess that's anywhere. I remember I got a very good deal on a so-called black friday. So perhaps it's worth waiting.

Down south we hit 46 celsius a few days ago! Thankfully no major fires this year! bw, bliako

Rather than think about running perl Nativity on iPhone, tablets etc, couldn't you just write a web based app, accessible from anything with a browser? Various front end frameworks exist, Bootstrap is quite popular.

Has anyone here tried to use perl to script with the target being an ipad?

Same question with Fire HD 8 tablet from amazon?

"A mase of twisty little languages, all different" describes PCs much better than smartphones. Walled gardens making deployment difficult (e.g. Apple charging about 1/12th of what I earn as a Ph.D. student for the right to run own code on hardware bought from them¹), sandboxes breaking assumptions hidden in the language (there is a filesystem, but not for you. Only vendor's spyware has access to most of it), new APIs and paradigms for user interaction that nobody bothered to wrap for your $language_of_choice mean that, typically, you get one or two languages that work best on a given platform (Java & Kotlin for Android, Swift & Objective-C for iOS), a few more that you may be able to get running at the cost of reduced user experience (ever tried to run a command-line application on a 5" smartphone with no keyboard?) and the rest of them forever inaccessible to you despite the platform being very much Turing-complete and being able to run the code. In theory.

¹ With some very interesting clauses about what gets into the App Store. Last time I checked, all scripting languages were forbidden, but they probably relaxed that requirement since (otherwise there wouldn't be a JavaScript-capable browser).