Hardware

On 11th July 2012, the Ouya burst onto the scene via popular crowdfunding site - Kickstarter. It was billed as “A New Kind of Video Game Console” which sold for $99/£99 at launch. It was essentially an Nvidia Tegra 3 based ARM System on Chip crammed into a tiny box which sat under / near your TV and was operated with supplied bluetooth game controllers. They far exceeded the target of $950,000, reaching $8,596,474, setting some high expectations among the backers and interested onlookers.

3 months ago I bought a Eufy RoboVac 30C (affiliate link) vacuum cleaner. Now feels like a good time to write a review. Before The Event we had a cleaner at home who came once a week. We no longer have a cleaner and I’m now the only adult in the house, so figured I could do with some help cleaning up. In short, yes, I’d recommend it, if you have similar requirements to me. No, it’s not perfect, and is no replacement for a full vacuum cleaner, but it helps, a lot.

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was the second computer I ever owned, a natural upgrade from the Sinclair ZX81. I still own a small collection of Spectrums which work perfectly after a bit of light refurbishment thanks to Mutant Caterpillar.

They’re not often setup to play with, due to the space needed.

Some Many of the Spectrum games are absolute classics, and still remain fun to play now though. There’s plenty of ways to play under emulation on desktops and laptops. But sometimes you just want to have a quick blast while out, or away from a PC. There’s been a couple of commercial attempts to make portable Spectrum’s, but the least said about those, the better.

The trick: Read the manual.

I pay for 100Mb/s downstream Internet connection at home. For months I’ve been getting around 50Mb/s at my desk, and 100Mb/s over wifi on my phone, under optimal conditions. Here’s how I ‘fixed’ the ‘slow’ Internet (essentially LAN speed) connection at my desk.

I use a bunch of TP-LINK “Powerline” adapters around the house to get wired networking to each room.

“Well, that’s your first problem, Alan.”

Over on r/mk you’ll find a community of mechanical keyboard enthusiasts. People who enjoy collecting, building and showing off their primary computer input device. Like any collector community, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the world of people passionate about something we all likely have used, but don’t feel especially invested in.

I’m certainly no MK afficianado, but I use keyboards all day every day, so like wine, I can appreciate a relatively good one, but I’ll also tolerate a cheap and crap one if pushed. There’s three keyboards I use on a daily basis, both old and new.

I’ve never really been a massive watch nerd, my daily driver had been a Casio F-91W - the choice of the terrorist (apparently) - and retro classic.

I’d seen other nerds using Pebble smart watches (monochrome, more industrial looking), and absorbed their positive influences about the devices. I wasn’t super enamoured about the overall design of the watch though, and it appeared to have some limitations I wasn’t happy about.

This article previously appeared on listed.to. I’ve moved it here to consolidate my blogging

About 10-15 years ago, back in the heady days of Hampshire Linux User Group, we had a Wiki. It ran a heavily patched version of UseModWiki that we’d modified to add anti-spam and anti-abuse protection. We’d affectionately called it “AbuseMod”. It’s still kinda there, but I don’t think the content is ever touched. We used it to co-ordinate meetings, take notes, and some other fun sillyness. One such fun was Hugo’s Random Benchmark (Note: Not a benchmark). It was a single line we’d each run on our computers to see whose was fastest (Note: Again, not a good benchmark). It did this by counting to 100 Million in Perl. It’s a super simple single-line shell script which just times how long the computer takes for perl to go from 1 to 1e8 (100 million).

This article previously appeared on listed.to. I’ve moved it here to consolidate my blogging

Every 3 years at Canonical we get a laptop refresh fund. With it we can buy whatever devices we need to work. I used my last one to buy a ThinkPad T450. The most recent one arrived in November this year. I was considering replacing the ThinkPad with a desktop computer of some kind. I can certainly keep the T450 for portable work, but I mostly sit at the same desk all day, so figure I may as well get a desktop rather than a laptop.

This article previously appeared on listed.to. I’ve moved it here to consolidate my blogging

I hang around in technical support back-alleys. All too often a new person turns up asking for urgent help. Their system is catastrophically broken and they have no easy way to fix it. With a bit of help they can usually come to a fork in the road. Do they wipe and re-install, or keep fighting with the computer to get it working. It’s a knowledge, time, effort and convenience trade-off as old as technology itself.

I recently ordered a Raspberry Pi 400, I couldn’t resist. I’ve bought a few Raspberry Pi’s over the years, with a couple installed around the house. The Pi 400 struck me as quite the game-changer though, with a built in keyboard-enclosure and accessible connectors. The fact it reminded me of my youth with memories of the Sinclair Spectrum where everything is housed inside the keyboard helped a bit.

One omission which struck me as odd was the lack of audio jack. I’m sure there’s sensible cost or logical, technical reasons for it, but it’s a bit of a pain for me. Neither of the displays my Pi 400 is connected to have any kind of speaker or audio jacks. I don’t often need the audio output, but sometimes I’m testing applications which require an audio device.