I'll get round to it eventually
Ever since the Raspberry Pi was released in 2012, I’ve been fascinated with single board computers. As I have dived deeper into the Linux rabbit hole and the open source support for Raspberry Pi’s has grown they have transformed from interesting learning tools to highly functional every day devices.
Lets take a look at what my collection is currently being used for.
Back in May 2012, a younger and more naive Mike left the world of console gaming for the glorious lands of the PC Master Race. Excited by the pace of advancement, as soon as my new PC was finished I was already planning the next iteration.
2016 was due to bring Intel’s 10nm Skymont CPU’s, and by then I’d have left university and be able to afford a shiny new PC that would leave my old one in its dust. Then…
Nothing…
I finally managed to upgrade my PC, 5 years late (more on that later). Getting hold of parts has not been easy, but why has there been such a shortage of semiconductors?
Continue reading “What Caused the Global Semiconductor Shortage”
I saw an idea for a nerdy gift on Reddit for your significant other. A word-cloud of conversations you have had. That seemed like a quick and easy idea for a anniversary card…
Now that I’m done, I can explain what a massive pain this turned out to be.
Since Covid hit last year, Zoom has become a verb for video chats. Some of their questionable security practices and their ties to China have made some people wary of using it.
Fortunately, if you didn’t want to install something you can always join from a browser, if you’re willing to give up the very useful Gallery view.
I am moving house soon, which means setting a sweet new home network. Exciting times!
Unfortunately the move was pushed back by a week, which is fine, except… hey what happened to the internet? Oooops.
What to do? A jankey interim solution obviously.
The single most useful thing you can do to help fight the Coronavirus is to follow advice on self-isolating, social distancing and washing your hands.
But there is also a more practical thing you can do, running distributed computing programs.
I found a website (k6.io) which allows you to load test websites and API’s using AWS. With a free account you can test from one location with 50 virtual units for up to 12 mins. Spinning up a load test of get requests, Cloudflare served up all the traffic no problem, leaving my minimal VPS web-server alone. Then I tried again with post requests and BAM… 100% CPU load, response time over 6 seconds.
What was happening? Shouldn’t Cloudflare stop things like this?
According to my page revision history, 9 months ago I started writing a guide on using Cloudflare as a free CND for websites. I’m sure I’ll finish that eventually, but for now here is why I think it is so great. Free load balancing!
Being incredibly lazy, I am always on the lookout for ways to automate my life. Something I heard about a long time ago, but never got around to looking at was AutoHotKey. Now it is an essential tool I used everyday for text macros.