Happy New Year, 4714

by Bryan

11 comments

1 Badtux { 02.10.16 at 12:27 am }

My Chinese neighbor celebrated it by turning on his Christmas lights and setting up a Chinese noisemaker hanging by his front door. This is the same Chinese neighbor who celebrated Christmas by setting up a giant blow-up Santa, Snowman, and Hello Kitty in the front yard. (He has a 10 year old daughter, duh). Looks like he gets to celebrate *both* cultures’ holidays, LOL.

2 Bryan { 02.10.16 at 8:24 pm }

The Asian restaurant in the next block featured fireworks courtesy of the kitchen staff on their breaks. They do stay open on Christmas, so they aren’t double dipping holidays, and they don’t use fireworks at any other time.

3 Badtux { 02.11.16 at 10:22 pm }

If they didn’t stay open on Christmas, how else would the Jewish population of the area have their traditional Christmas dinner? 🙂

4 Kryten42 { 02.12.16 at 7:52 am }

The attitude of most sensible people here is: Any excuse for a holiday or party, is a good excuse. 🙂

Well Bryan, I finally succumbed and bought a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B+. I wasn’t that impressed with 1, The 2 was better, but I decided to wait. Now that it has 4 USB, 40 GPIO pins & better support for expansion boards, I decided it was good enough. I’m mainly interested in IoT (Internet of Things) & got both the Intel & M$ IoT kits. Got a bunch of other addons & kits also. Will be fun to play with. 🙂

Funny thing… I checked several Aussie sites selling the Pi, and the cheapest was a company I used to deal with in the late 80’s & 90’s called Radio Spares. I used to have a wholesale account. So out of curiosity I decided to try my old logon, not expecting it to work, and it did! lol Guess their housekeeping is a bit behind. 😀 Price was excellent @ AU$30. If you’re interested:

http://au.rs-online.com/web/p/processor-microcontroller-development-kits/8111284/

I’m guessing you haven’t had much time to play with yours lately. 😐

Hmmm. There was something I was going to mention to badtux… Oh! GOG have one of their rare free game giveaways. But I don’t think it has long to go.

5 Bryan { 02.12.16 at 3:23 pm }

I have eaten there more than once to avoid having to cook on Christmas – a gift to myself 😉

I have been looking at the RΠ2 to see what it can do. The price you got is the same in the US, but it is obviously more expensive here because of the exchange rate – the benefit of a government that devalues its currency in the short term. The price will probably jump with the arrival of the next shipment of boards to Australia.

I use it primarily as a ‘Net terminal. with the ability to clone the SD cards, Hostile crap and history disappears.

6 Kryten42 { 02.12.16 at 8:37 pm }

The exchange rate is killing me. I’ve had to spend almost $US1,000 the past month on mainly software & graphic/web design products (artwork, templates, themes, royalty free photo’s etc). Even though most had generous discounts (between 20-80%) because of “Valentines” (seriously, WHY?) At an average of .66-.68, It cost me around AU$1,500! Not happy!

Still, wasn’t all bad. I scored a lifetime SitePoint Premium account with access to all their tutorials & ebooks for about US$50. Also a couple other lifetime memberships to WP/HTML5 Theme/Template developers, one creates useful WP plugins. 🙂

Now… If only I had Internet to D/l and use all this stuff! Grrrrr…

It seems our incredibly moronic, short-sighed Coalition Government have decided to scrap Fiber To The Premises for the NBN and replacing it with copper! WTF??! How will that make it any different to what we have now?! A recent study shows it will cost more, take longer, and have minimal performance improvements! So, these morons who are always screeching about “The cost!” are going to spend more and give us pretty much what we already have!

I’m looking at places in Qld. that already have Fiber in place. I’ll do a field trip in a month or so for a week to check some out.

I bet if I check carefully, I’ll find Turnbull has a friend that owns copper mines!

7 Bryan { 02.12.16 at 9:04 pm }

Copper is more expensive to buy, to install, and to maintain, while providing less bandwidth than fiber. Fiber is ‘faster, better, cheaper’ but it requires looking beyond the next ouarter or next year. The local cable company, Cox, acquired this area in a swap with Time-Warner, and the first thing they did was pull out all of the fiber T-W was installing. Cox is now looking at the cost of installing fiber to provide the level of service that the people still interested having cable want.

Businesses will use whatever excuse they can to have a ‘sale’. It is the growth in the corporate marketing departments that have caused this phenomenon.

8 Kryten42 { 02.12.16 at 10:46 pm }

Agreed. Unfortunately, most people just don’t understand, & don’t want to! The NBN is costing billions of taxpayers money. So, to allow them to implement what we essentially already have, is insane. Also, the cost is using NBN to the people who have already paid a fortune for it has increased. Most of the increase goes to Telstra. Why? They don’t own the NBN infrastructure & are just one of many resellers. It should be like Sth Korea and elsewhere, where the peoples taxes paid for their internet, & a small portion of tax paid for upkeep etc. So the internet is provided free. The World is full of people like Edison. A capitalist with no morals or ethics who’s only care was profit. And gullable, naive people willing to be conned by such crooks.

I got an email saying my Pi was on backorder because the case I ordered is unavailable until March 4th. I realised I don’t need the case as a good one comes with the Adafruit-M$ IoT kit, & I think the Intel kit also. So I changed the order & saved $10. LOL

The Adafruit-M$ kit includes Win 10 IoT Core preinstalled on the usual 8GB microSD. It cost AU$140 for the kit. However, to make good use for development, it requires Visual Studio on a PC. There is a limited but free Community edition, or a standalone Pro edition (no annual subscription) for US$499. Will be interesting to see how Win10 fares on the Pi. 🙂

The Intel kit is actually the. Grove starter kit plus – Intel IoT Edition for Intel Galileo Gen 2 and Edison. It was AU$118.

That should stop me being bored & going insane at all the crap right now. That’s the theory anyway. *shrug*

9 Bryan { 02.13.16 at 4:58 pm }

I’m so old that I remember the various paleo forms of what would become the Internet (ARPA Net, NFS Net, et al.) using fractional T1 leased lines, followed by 110 baud modems that you pushed a telephone handset into the rubber circles, Teletype machines, etc. The telcos didn’t design it; the didn’t build the initial backbone; they just plugged into it and started charging people money. I remember using dial-up services like The Source, CompuServe, and AOL before local ISPs were available.

Not only can you not have free access in the US, in many states laws have been passed specifically denying local governments the right to provide Internet service to their residents. In some of these places the telcos have no intention of providing service, but they don’t want any possible competition.

I might upgrade to the new RΠ just for the speed increase and double RAM. It is fun to mess around like it was the 70s and 80s.

10 Kryten42 { 02.13.16 at 11:22 pm }

Oh yes, I remember those days also. 😀 I also had a handsel coupled modem. I connected to AARNet, various BBS’s, & had a CompuServe account. I ran the Melbourn POP (Point Of Presence) for an ISP called DIALix in the late 80’s part time from home. It was all dialin UUCP terminal access mainly used by students. I remember when we upgraded to V90 modems from 2400/4800 baud and the students were all “wow! It’s so fast!” LOL I still have my V90 modem as a moment. Was the best Aussie one available then. Banksia Wave SP 56K FLEX/V90. Remember the AT codes? Spent hours playing with theme to eak out a bit more performance. I discovered the perfect set of codes & posted them to a couple BBS’s, they ended up everywhere overnight! lol

I designed the first 2400 baud modem in Aus. Hell, it may have been the first in the he World! It was based on a Z80 CPU & TI A/D -D/A converters, and some special chips from Nokia when they were just a Company that specialised in Comm’s chips. 🙂 was called the UDM2400 (Universal Data Modem). It’s predecessor the UDM1200 (which just used the AM7910 World Modem chip) was extremely popular. Even sold them to Pursue Uni. from memory. 😀

I was thinking of getting the Arduino. But the Pi is better suited for IoT. I still may get an Arduino. It’s more suited to old-fashioned breadbording & tinkering, which is what got me started in the 70’s. 🙂

11 Bryan { 02.14.16 at 8:18 pm }

For an extended period the backbone was 64K leased lines and only slowly adopted a full T1. Yes the 56K modems were a miracle – you could actually see GIFs without having the calendar change.

There are a lot of choices now, boards that have been around for a while, but were ‘suddenly discovered’ after the RΠ took off and received some media coverage. It is amazing how the media ‘discovers’ things that people have been using for years. Media reporting on technology is no better than its coverage of science … Sighhhhh