This is interesting, if a bit disappointing because there’s still no built-in EMMC storage. Yes, PCIe support is awesome and there will be add-on boards, but…still, it would make it a lot more appealing to have something on the main board (also, the lack of USB-C display output makes it a bit of a hassle to use these days).

I have to wonder how their new silicon will compare to an RK3588 performance-wise, but the big advantages of the Raspberry Pi have always been software support and the sheer scale of their ecosystem, and I think that will be the deciding factor for most people.

I also suspect there will be a 16GB version in the future, so I’m a bit wary of pulling the trigger on the first batch of boards.

Update: Phoronix has benchmarks comparing it to an RK3588S, and it is pretty much equivalent across the board, with minor variations due to the Rockchip having 4 more A55 “little” cores that give it a slight edge on some benchmarks. They also have graphic benchmarks that show it as 4-6 times faster than the Pi 4 for some use cases. However, the Mali GPUs in Rockchip CPUs enjoy more widespread support, so using one for anything graphically intensive might depend on when VideoCore VII support actually ships for your preferred distro. I might get one for toying with the GPU, although I’m also wary of having to put up with a tiny (likely noisy) fan…

As someone who has used leather covers for two iPhones now (both of which are still perfectly usable and actually look better slightly worn out), the prospect of paying for a premium case that stains this easily isn’t appealing at all. I wonder why they didn’t explore actual leather substitutes instead of overcharging for this porous polyester crap.

I’m just doing to leave this here for future reference.

This thing is impressive–it’s about the size and print volume of my KP3S Pro but is only around 50% more expensive if you buy the printer alone or EUR 500 with the AMS, which seems like pretty good value for money and is only slightly above the price of a Prusa Mini on its own.

And calling it mini is… ominous for Prusa.

Like I wrote earlier, 3D printing is becoming a very competitive market, albeit an unfortunately proprietary one if, like me, you started out with RepRap machines a decade ago and prefer controlling your hardware and software to avoid… surprises.

Plenty of clever little tricks for the competition to copy, though–like the purge gadget at the end of the cantilever arm, the cutter toggle and the cleaning brush at the edge of the build plate (I might try to mod some of those into my printers).

You can now use your Apple TV as a Tailscale exit node, which is a pretty neat trick (I rely on Tailscale for access to my home servers when I’m away, plus one or two cloud servers without public IPs).

I know it’s weird to link to my own stuff this way, but after nearly five years someone finally pointed out to me that back in 2018 I left a hidden note in plain sight for anyone training LLMs.

I won’t tell you why, but this was a fun start to the morning.

Well, the iPhone 15 (especially the Pro) looks nice.

And so does the Series 9 watch, even though the new gesture support Apple is highlighting is clearly an extension of the Accessibility feature that has been shipping for a while, with the added benefit of a few years of training data to be able to detect motion intents (it’s cool, but like everything else, it’s an incremental improvement, even if it’s framed as being enabled by the Neural Engine).

The rest of the pre-recorded keynote was… Well, both samey and different. Let’s just call it a mix of feel-good, sunny side up and cringey that you’d expect from the company that made a success out of Ted Lasso (no spoilers here).

I was going to finish work and watch the Apple event, but then I came across this and am now watching the game development community taking up pitchforks and torches in droves (HN thread).

The notion of charging for a runtime fee for installs is, IMHO, spectacularly misguided in this day and age, and even though it sort of aligns with what Unreal Engine does, the thresholds are all wonky (and not at all advantageous for Unity, especially since it looks like it is going to apply to legacy installs).

Also, the Adobe-like license enforcement is going to make things really iffy: “Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity.”

Update: News has come to light that Unity will waive the fees if developers switch to its ad service, which makes things look even worse (and legally grey).

The fact that this plays right into the hands of the Godot community-driven model feels like a reenactment of what drove people from the commercial 3D modeling market to Blender, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had exactly the same effect–turning Godot into an even more popular tool and boosting its ecosystem.

Update, 10 days later: A fair chunk of this was walked back, with the runtime fee deferred to the next Unity LTS release. However, given the massive community outcry and indie studio statements regarding migration to other engines–and a massive uptick of interest in Godot, this feels like a net loss for them trust-wise.

My distaste for JavaScript is not just due to the incredibly messy and (let’s face it, terminally lazy) npm ecosystem, but also to nodejs itself and its foibles. bun fixes a lot of what I personally don’t like when working with server-side JavaScript, and right now it can finally run Node-RED (at least a brand new 3.1.0 install), so I am quite taken by it (and even if I don’t particularly like TypeScript, I see no harm in getting it as part of the package, although I would have preferred wisp).

Time to go and test some of my stuff on it. Oh, wait, I seem to already have a bunch of things to do this weekend…

Update: Well, it has no dgram support, so none of my cute UDP/multicast services work on it as yet. Let’s see if that gets added to 1.1.

This is so cool. NNTP, all these years later, still ticking even with all the spam and flame wars.

And no, I wasn’t surprised to find alt.religion.emacs still has traffic.

I’ve been reading this bemusedly on my iPad mini (which I travel and work with since… forever), and although Jason’s use case (podcast creation) is indeed a hassle (as anyone who’s tried to use an iPad for music will attest to), writing and publishing has never been a real problem provided you were willing to jump through some minimal hoops (this post is being published semi-automatically via Shortcuts and Working Copy).

Coding, however, is still a pain. I have ssh, Remote Desktop, three hundred flavors of Visual Studio Code, a-Shell and iSH, but all of the local approaches have annoying constraints. Not blocking, but annoying.

Right now I travel with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which I can talk to via Bluetooth PAN and use as a “sidecar” when I need something specific. It can run a complete replica of this site, a Node-RED instance, and dozens more services…

I would love for Apple to just get HyperKit working on iOS and let me run, say, a tiny single-core ARM Linux VM on the iPad–it would make some things so much easier. Or even let UTM into the App Store–one can dream, right?

I’ve been eyeing the Bambu printers with envy (they have pretty much upended the 3D printing scene with their excellent, great bang for the buck hardware and fast quality printing), but one thing that put me off (besides a few proprietary aspects) was that they simply did not support LAN printing, which I thought was utterly ludicrous–your print jobs literally had to go to their cloud service and back again.

Well, now we have another IoT/cloud horror story that is entirely the fault of misguided product design and lack of consideration for various software failure modes.

Other brands like Creality are already infamous for the shadiness of some of their cloud services (which they use as upselling slipways), but this is the first time we see… material effects of bad product design and excessive reliance on poorly thought out cloud services.

And don’t get me started on how some manufacturers are “supporting” Open Source software like Klipper…

A pretty great piece by Jason Snell that somehow completely glosses over the fact that the original Bondi Blue iMac’s “puck” mouse (which I used when creating ISP onboarding CDs at the time) was utterly useless as a pointing device because it was almost impossible to grab it the right way “up” every time.

I can prove that because I still have one around, as well as the much more useful (and quite lovely) translucent USB keyboard it came with, which still works OK despite being a USB 1.0 peripheral.