I just bought a raspberry Pi zero, and hoped to use it for a kiosk in a local realtor’s office. However, the default browser, chromium, was a total pain to use–actually, it is unusable on this little computer… So I ordered a Raspy Pi 4, and a day passed, and I thought… why not look for a lightweight browser? See if that will work? And of course I got one and it’s working fine! That’s a win for patience and persistence.
Category: tech
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About the Internet Archive
Brewster Kahle’s work to archive all human knowledge and make it publically available to everyone. That’s a noble intention!
“What is best known about the Library of Alexandria, version 1, is burning. So don’t just have one copy, so in addition to SF (on the San Andreas fault line), one in Alexandria (in the middle east [perpetual war zone]), and one in Amsterdam (in a flood zone). So we’re hedging our bets here.”–Brewster Kahle
World Situation: Is this archive going to be public or private? (Corporations want to control it.) Or universal access of all knowledge for all mankind.
“Free to the People”–Inscription at the Entrance to the Carnegie Library , Pittsburgh
Ted Talk
& a 12 minute audio interview. -
Raspberry Pi Alternatives
I like raspberry pi PCs because they (were) cheap when I bought them (around $25) and they’re the size of a deck of cards, and use little electricity. The alternatives are now a better bang for the buck since 2019 when availability went down and they started being scalped. Hopefully later this year or next year the production runs will go up and bring the prices back down.
I currently have 4 running Raspy Pis:
- 2 in a local realtor’s offices displaying Lake County Ca properties (using a boot-time chrome to display the houses using a webserver I maintain)
- 1 running a DIY nas in my office
- 1 running a music webserver (volumio) in the bedroom
Here’s a short youtube video on the Raspy Pi alternatives.
A new video came out on May 18 with an Eben Upton (creator of the Pi) interview, where he says supplies will catch up in later half of 2023.
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What will it take for Apple to disentangle itself from China?
The tech giant increasingly finds itself beholden to America’s biggest geopolitical rival. But is diversification even possible?
This is a fascinating article on making iphones in China. Basically the whole infrastructure exists on such a big scale that no other country is in the same league as China.
“Look at the smartphone manufacturing hubs that China has created,” he says. “I don’t know where that can be replicated.”
Chan, the Foxconn labour researcher, predicts that as media attention dies down Apple will quietly increase its investments in the country. “China has so many advantages,” she says. “From the moderately educated and skilled workers to the really high level engineers and PhDs — those providing expertise in cutting-edge knowledge.”
Chan adds: “Apple would have too many difficulties to find the human resources and infrastructure that is parallel — or even close — to the scale provided in China.”
From the Financial Times Article -
Learning to Code
Give a computer program to a person to frustrate him for a day. Teach computer programming to a person and frustrate her for a lifetime.–some Computer Science Professor
A vast majority of people who try to learn to code will get frustrated and give up.
I sure did. I got frustrated and gave up. Several times.
But like other people who eventually succeeded, I kept coming back after a few days, and tried again. —Quincy Larson from How to Learn to Code & Get a Developer Job in 2023 [Full Book]