At the moment, the Mac Mini is unique in that it spans three processor architectures (although this is very likely to be matched by the iMac).
Apple Product Ranges and Processor Architectures
Leave a reply
Category Archives: Computers
Raspberry Pi 4 Minecraft Server
The new(ish) Raspberry Pi 4 makes a great little Minecraft Server, especially if you only have a handful of users. Daniel Lemire’s blog post is my go-to guide for getting it working.
My Pebble Watchface – gWatch
After some trial and error (and leaning heavily on the tutorials and sample code available online) I have built a Pebble watchface (named gWatch for obvious and boring reasons). It’s fairly basic – see the screenshot below.
Pebble Development in 2020
After a fair amount of trial and error I now have the Pebble SDK working on my Mac (macOS 10.15.4 Catalina). I was working from the guide here. I can now create, build and deploy programs and watch faces to my Pebble watch.
Firstly I had problems with the virtualenv command:
cd ~/pebble-dev/pebble-sdk-4.3-mac
virtualenv --no-site-packages .env
source .env/bin/activate
CFLAGS="" pip install -r requirements.txt
deactivateIt turns out the –no-site-packages flag is not required and should be omitted (see here for details).
I then had issues with no SDK being installed (and the scripts trying in vain to locate the SDK on the Internet). After trying:
pebble new-project testingI was greeted with:
No SDK installed; installing the latest one...Consulting Google yielded:
The key part of the reddit post is path to the SDK. I used the following to successfully install the SDK:
pebble sdk install https://github.com/aveao/PebbleArchive/raw/master/SDKCores/sdk-core-4.3.tar.bz2The last fix was disabling the analytics tracking by creating a NO_TRACKING file in the SDK directory.
iPad Keyboards
After using the Logitech K380 Bluetooth Keyboard with my 6th Generation iPad for a while (as mentioned in my previous post), I spotted a second-hand Brydge keyboard online for $50. This was a great deal, worked well and cemented my love of Brydge keyboards.
Fast forward a few months and Brydge have the Brydge 9.7 on sale for $99, another great deal I quickly snapped up. This seems to be a later version (Model BRY1012) to the second-hand one I was using (Model BRY1001A) – it has extra keys on the trip right hand corner (Battery/Bluetooth/Power) which are a great addition to an already fantastic design.
I even typed this blog post up using it 🙂
TempMonHTTP
For a while I’ve been tinkering around with a simple project – an Arduino-based temperature (and humidity) monitor that outputs a webpage on my home LAN. The Arduino I used was the Freetronics EtherTen, a quality product.
Check out the code at https://github.com/gjhmac/TempMonHTTP.
Recently Read: Humble Pi by Matt Parker
I have just finished reading Matt Parker’s book “Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors” (ISBN 9780241360194). It is a very entertaining and enjoyable read. Matt’s background research and analysis on each of the errors is excellent.
Recommended reading for anyone with an interest in Mathematics, Engineering, Computers…
Ahead of their time…
One of my tasks as an undergraduate in the engineering firm I was working at was to look after the website. Back then knowing a little HTML and how to use FTP wasn’t as common as it is now.
The web hosting company we used provided quite detailed logs for all of our virtual visitors. By looking at the IP addresses in the logs it was possible to speculate (the key word here being speculate) which company the visitor worked at.
Our sales and marketing guy caught wind of these logs and suggested we send emails to the companies we suspected had had one of their employees visit our site asking if we could be of any assistance or if they required any further information.
I explained that a) we didn’t 100% know that they had visited and b) this raised all sorts of privacy issues. Plus to me this sort of practice was creepy and not how the Internet was supposed to work.
How naive was I?
A big September coming up
It’s looking like a big September coming up for me with the probable release of iPadOS (for my iPad), iOS13 (for my iPhone) and the remainder of Season 1 of Disenchantment (for my eyes and ears). Exciting times!
The Home Minecraft Server
