Bought any computing stuff today?

[Kim]

* networking (it may have a wifi connection so it can get to NTP via a hotspot on my iPhone and get the time right as Pi doesn't have a battery powered internal clock to keep the time when it's not powered on)

You can get realtime clock modules for the Pi, might be more reliable than a phone as a hotspot.

Or even use a GPS receiver - I've done that on barakta's alarm clock as a backup in case it comes back from a power failure without networking - but it's probably less good for this application as it can take a while to get a fix and there's no benefit to having a stratum 1 NTP server on a football pitch.

Same goes for MSF receivers - they inherently take over a minute to get a valid time, with the additional problem of being fussy about orientation.

[Greenbank]

* networking (it may have a wifi connection so it can get to NTP via a hotspot on my iPhone and get the time right as Pi doesn't have a battery powered internal clock to keep the time when it's not powered on)

You can get realtime clock modules for the Pi, might be more reliable than a phone as a hotspot.

It's only a one-off connection it needs in order to do a single ntpupdate at boot time to get the correct time. It won't need the wireless network during the game. My phone is in my bag which will be close enough for the hotspot to work. Just have to remember to enable to hotspot before the game and disable it afterwards (I don't want to leave it on.)

The Pi Zero will already have a 4-port USB hub on top of it so adding another module may be a pain in the arse if the relevant pins are occluded (it comes without a GPIO header, and I don't want to have to solder one on).

Depending on how much work they need to do I may need two raspberry pi zeros (if it's USB bandwidth and micro-SD card writing bandwidth that's a problem) or a quad core Raspberry Pi 3 (Model B) if it's CPU bound. If I have two pi zeros I'll need to get them to talk to each other and an ad hoc wifi network will work for that.

[Kim]

* networking (it may have a wifi connection so it can get to NTP via a hotspot on my iPhone and get the time right as Pi doesn't have a battery powered internal clock to keep the time when it's not powered on)

You can get realtime clock modules for the Pi, might be more reliable than a phone as a hotspot.

It's only a one-off connection it needs in order to do a single ntpupdate at boot time to get the correct time. It won't need the wireless network during the game. My phone is in my bag which will be close enough for the hotspot to work. Just have to remember to enable to hotspot before the game and disable it afterwards (I don't want to leave it on.)

My point exactly.  A human remembering to do things in the right order is a major reliability problem.  (Though you may not actually care, and can simply turn the phone on and reboot the Pi).

The Pi Zero will already have a 4-port USB hub on top of it so adding another module may be a pain in the arse if the relevant pins are occluded (it comes without a GPIO header, and I don't want to have to solder one on).

Ah, forgot it was a zero.  That's a reasonable reason.  (Except won't you be using the GPIO header for the 7-segment displays and switches?)

[Greenbank]

(Except won't you be using the GPIO header for the 7-segment displays and switches?)

Ah, yes, good point (you can see I've thought this through a lot). More soldering practice and I can mount the header on the underside of the board just as easily.

The 4 port USB hub just uses contact pins/patches so no soldering required.

[Kim]

TBH, it might be simpler to just go straight for the Model 3.  It's a one-off so the difference in cost is marginal (it will surely be dominated by expensive things like the displays and enclosure anyway), you'll have your GPIO header ready to go, and it means you can do away with the USB hub entirely.

[Greenbank]

£15 (£4 for Pi Zero + £10 for USB hub and £1 for a header[1]) vs £30 for a Pi 3 (Model B).

It may end up being a Pi 3 but I'd like to try building it with a single Pi Zero first.

Display is likely to be £35 (4 x 4" high 7 segment displays plus a couple of controller chips and resistors).

Enclosure will be a few quid and bodged. The non-waterproof version is probably just going to be a tough metal grille bent into place with a few larger holes cut out so the displays can be seen easily. The waterproof version will probably just be the whole lot in a clear perspex cover sealed with silicone and behind the same grille.

1. Yes I know they are available elsewhere for much cheaper.

[Kim]

You can knock off the cost of the WiFi dongle, too.

[Greenbank]

PiHut order received but they've sent a Pi Zero Essentials Kit (£6 worth) instead of the actual Pi Zero (£4). Oh well, it'll be another few days before I can start on this project...

[tiermat]

Needed to replace two aging laptops, so went mad and ordered a Dell XPS 13 and a 15, both with 4K displays, lots of RAM, SSDs and i7s.

Now I have to wait a week for them to arrive!

[DrMekon]

MrsMekon has wanted one for forever, and the imminent release of the D3 and D5 has caused a decent price drop - our Neato Botvac Connected is called e-Nid. She has LIDAR, the boys love her, and think of her as a little Google car.

She is brilliant. Genuinely amazed at her navigation abilities, and her foibles are endearing - she has a little wander to plan her activities, then methodically cleans the rooms she's scanned. She takes about 45m to clean our downstairs, and sends a notification when she's done. House is cleaner than when my mother in law stays.

If I had the temperament, there would be all sorts of clever hacking to be done, but I don't. Hopefully there will be Google Home or IFTTT integration in the future. As it is, we're manually triggering a clean through the app when we leave the house, and have scheduled cleaning when the boys are in bed.

Maintenance is straightforward, consumable parts are cheap. Navigation works, and the house is noticeably cleaner. I welcome our new robot overlords.

[andrewc]

MrsMekon has wanted one for forever, and the imminent release of the D3 and D5 has caused a decent price drop - our Neato Botvac Connected is called e-Nid. She has LIDAR, the boys love her, and think of her as a little Google car.

She is brilliant. Genuinely amazed at her navigation abilities, and her foibles are endearing - she has a little wander to plan her activities, then methodically cleans the rooms she's scanned. She takes about 45m to clean our downstairs, and sends a notification when she's done. House is cleaner than when my mother in law stays.

If I had the temperament, there would be all sorts of clever hacking to be done, but I don't. Hopefully there will be Google Home or IFTTT integration in the future. As it is, we're manually triggering a clean through the app when we leave the house, and have scheduled cleaning when the boys are in bed.

Maintenance is straightforward, consumable parts are cheap. Navigation works, and the house is noticeably cleaner. I welcome our new robot overlords.

I've only got a tiny flat, but I loathe hoovering, so the place ends up filthy.   I cleaned it yesterday and already dustbunnies are building up again!   I'm very tempted by one of these,  I'd just have to leave all the doors propped open when I left for work....

[DrMekon]

We've found that, as per the manual that I've now read, if you watch, you can make little adjustments that means more is accessible. Our house is very cluttered, and the boys and i are blind to mess. Moving a box here, a music stand and a chair there... Now she's cleaning under our 11 year olds bed. The amount of hair and filth is astonishing, given we'd already got a Miele vacuum that was used regularly-ish. The difference is that now we trigger the Neato when we leave the house and it's scheduled for when the boys are going to bed - in eco mode is quiet enough that it didn't disturb them. It feels like we're on top of things as opposed to being miserable cleaning on Saturdays.

Am still at the infatuated stage, because of the amount of crap every time it's used. Maybe I'll be less so when we're in maintenance phase. Seeing it navigate through the tiniest of gaps, and find its way home is really cool.

[Kim]

Mrs Barakta's-mum has a Roomba, which she's similarly infatuated by.  Except she has a mental block on the word 'Roomba' and insists on referring to it as "The Robocop".

Having watched its wandering in circles and futile humping of the charging dock, the future of floor enforcement seems to be less intelligent than a particularly unintelligent puppy.

[TimO]

A tangerine 7" 8GB Amazon Kindle, because they're on special (presumably for Black Friday) at £29.99 each, the 7" and 8GB version because feeping creaturism kept on kicking in, and I'm just going to play with it, and tangerine on the basis it makes it harder for me to lose it somewhere around the house.

(I've got a pink Q2 Wifi radio for similar reasons, although the pink one was also slightly cheaper than more conventional colours like black).

I haven't really looked too hard at how difficult it will be to root it, and install something more useful like CyanogenMod, but I'm assuming that even if no one has worked it out for the current version of software, there will most likely be a solution along eventually !

[TimO]

A tangerine 7" 8GB Amazon Kindle, because they're on special (presumably for Black Friday) at £29.99 each ...

For the money, it's impressively good.  I can fairly easily spend more shopping for groceries in Sainsburys!

It doesn't want to play the audio on one of my ripped AVI files (but it's hardly unique having that sort of problem), and somehow I managed to crash it, when the alarm went off, but otherwise it massively beats the performance of my old Nexus 7 that was a lot more expensive when I bought it.

Without a Micro-SD card it would rapidly run out of storage, but I have plenty of those, so that's not a big issue.

Surprisingly, it came with a 1A USB charger, which I didn't expect.  Several devices I've purchased recently have only provided a cable, so for a £30 tablet, finding a cable and a charger in the box was unexpected.

The adverts are a little annoying, and there's nothing spectacular about the facilities it provides, so I'll probably put another distribution on it, assuming I can work out how to jailbreak it.  Does anyone have any particular thoughts on what software versions are good for tablets, or should I just go for the current version of CyanogenMod ?

[Afasoas]

Snagged 3x cheap (new) 4GB Unbuffered ECC DDR3L DIMMs from fleabay.
The intention is to give the backup server a reasonable amount of ram (+4GB) so if it's ever relied upon, it can at least manage a bit of ZFS caching.

I had planned to pop the other two sticks in the main server, but it looks like my last updates have relieved memory pressure and I don't actually need it.

[Canardly]

Bought some Crucial DDR3 myself today,  unfortunately, not at bargain prices. Have also ordered a sound card due to still gettting inteference hiss from on board sound chip via Senny headphones. Also need new graphics card but baulking at the cost of anything decent, which attract the usual UK premium.

[TimO]

Not today, but yesterday, another two U2F keys.



Now Facebook supports two factor authentication using Fido U2F keys, it's slightly more useful than previously, when Google was one of the few mainstream companies that did.

At £8 each, they're not too unreasonable, and with several of them, I can lock one up securely, just in case, and always have a couple of others to carry around (and risk losing).  (I've got printouts of single use numbers, too).

Slightly annoyingly but understandably, by design there is actually no way to identify each key uniquely (like a serial number), so I've had to sticker them!  I think I should be able to identify each one, by signing a known phrase, which should be unique but produce a repeatable result.



When it's plugged into a USB socket, if a website needs to access it, you get a popup request access, and if you agree the LED on the key will flash.  You press the button, and the signed response is set back to the browser, and then the website.

[Mr Larrington]

Also not today, but a Creative sound card for the big bugger upstairs.  Upgraded the sound to 5:1, which uses one of the HDMI ports on the graphics card.  Problem is that this makes the graphics card think it's got a second monitor attached, to the considerable detriment of graphics performance chiz.

[pcolbeck]

A Raspberry Pi3 arrived a Chez Colbeck this week along with a little wireless keyboard and a Lego compatible case for the Pi. Now to install Arch Linux on it and set it up as a network monitoring device so I can work out what is causing the dropouts on our network. Once I've sorted that out I am going to try it as a music streamer (will need to order a HiFi grade DAC for it first).

[Mr Larrington]

If you are ever tempted to buy a 5TB Seagate Personal Cloud NAS, here is what to do: don't.  Filling one with treacle would probably improve its performance¹.  In order to stand a sporting chance of completing a full backup of the Big Box before either it or the NAS gets bored, I have effected the purchase of an 8TB Western Digital MyCloud which is currently slurping down data at 6-7 times the speed of the Seagate   To go with the naming scheme for NAS drives (ElGordo, FatBoy, TubbyJohnson) it is called "MrCreosote".

1: Lower capacity models do not suffer from this tardiness.

[ian]

What are running there Larrers, your own bloody datacentre? Taking on Amazon mano-a-mano? Archiving everything that writhes and groans on the internet?

My Buffalo is quite tardy, but that's bovines for you. Useless for mozzarella too. It's called MonsterMunch. Given the names of all our computers, it's probably best we won't be naming any children.

[cycleman]

my computer has been trying to make me upgrade to windows 10 for a while now . i tried to use google earth today and apparently it is no longer  works with my win 7 despite working fine for months . as i can still use google earth on my phone i will stick to use windows 7 as windows 10 seems unnecessary for my light use .

[DaveReading]

my computer has been trying to make me upgrade to windows 10 for a while now . i tried to use google earth today and apparently it is no longer  works with my win 7 despite working fine for months . as i can still use google earth on my phone i will stick to use windows 7 as windows 10 seems unnecessary for my light use .

GE working fine this evening on W7 here.

[cycleman]

i might try and re download it then and see if that works