An Amazon deal, the Vilros kit was on sale a while back, so I now have a Raspberry Pi 3 B to see what all the fuss is about. First thing up was to boot NOOB (New Out Of the Box software) and install a basic Raspbian system, the LibreElec (just enough Linux for Kodi) and […]
It’s like the Upstart and Systemd upgrades to the Linux init system. Boy, did that get some people upset. This time around its Snap, Flatpack, and other efforts to solve application compatibility and security issues. (see 2daygeek). The thing is, software applications often depend upon common libraries of functions. Some of these libraries are provided […]
Lucandentella describes a Chrome App that displays serial port information. During the development of my electronic projects, I sometimes need to develop a graphical user interface (GUI) that talks using serial communication with the devices I create. In the past, I usually chose to develop those interfaces in C# and using the .Net Framework; framework […]
Anthony Watts reports: NOAA/NWS to stop ‘yelling’ at the public in their forecasts. New forecast software is allowing the agency to break out of the days when weather reports were sent by “the wire” over teleprinters, which were basically typewriters hooked up to telephone lines. Teleprinters only allowed the use of upper-case letters, and while […]
When the sale came up with the $50 tablet (Fire 7) for $35, the cost to benefit equation got a bit skewed. This is a large company branded complete tablet that is getting into the noise on the price point. Consider the $5 Rasberry Pi or the $15 Pine 64 (kickstarter) or the other $9 […]
Jon Evans’ Three Reasons Why Your Software Is So Far Behind Schedule got me thinking about Winchester House (wikipedia)software development. His rationale is that it is “technical debt” rather than an irrational effort to keep ghosts at bay – but maybe technical debt is indeed just such an effort? “Technical debt is not always a […]
Finding a few PIC12f683 microcontrollers in a $1 thriftstore music on hold box stimulated another look at the feasibility of implementing development tools. There is a bit of synergy, too, because Microchip now has a cross platform IDE and C compiler available at no cost. A problem is that Mplab X runs in a netbeans […]
It’s a Field Programmable Gate Array. Dave Jones explains what it is at his EEVblog #496. If you are into the design of (extremely, extraordinarily) complex digital circuits, the FPGA is your prototyping solution. The device is an array of thousands of configurable logic blocks embedded in a configurable wiring grid attached to configurable I/O […]
Fifty Billion is quite a mark and Askimet has just hit that number for spam comments blocked on blogs. TechCrunch has the story. “In April, Akismet blocked 1.8 billion spam messages, or 60 million pieces of spam per day, 2.5 million per hour, or 700 per second.” … “According to stats from the company, 92% […]
AskLeo answers the question Why do things that aren’t broken keep changing? The basic answer is that the owner of those things wants to remain viable. “I actually get this question periodically about almost every major online email service. Google Mail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail all go through periodic major updates, and some set of […]