PC keyboard hides an interesting secret
linuxjedi.co.uk
linuxjedi.co.uk
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
By the way, people say it's a great learning tool for kids but when I search for "kid using pi400" on youtube there are zero results.
But I don't think it's such a great thing for kids per se. It depends on the experimentation environment they get. The hardware is almost irrelevant. Something as direct as a Commodore 64 looks more appealing to me than VSCode on a Raspberry.
The Pi shines when you’re interfacing with relays and sensors and stuff, for software alone a PC or laptop will be fine.
So Why not this one which is roughly the same thing but is available for purchase in hundreds?
http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontro...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyRGnLPBe8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS7qhKF8wGE
I know the Raspberry Pi has that huge community behind, but alternatives like this one can spark the interest of kids who need incentives to grow, and this one offers well above the minimum necessary without serving them the whole dinner ready to eat. When I cut my teeth with M68k asm in the early 90s all I had was a terrible book poorly translated in Italian whose code examples were written half in German and half in English, a local BBS and no Internet; they can do a lot more with today's tools without any need of a huge community.
My problem is the ARM chip and how likely I am going to have problems running a non-blessed OS on the thing. A year from now, will it be able to install a new kernel?
I also have to face reality in that I have zero real applications for the thing other than a cute novelty. I think almost everyone would be better served by a NUC ($400+) or refurbished SFF PC ($100-200 can be very competitive hardware).
ARM shouldn't be a problem for a long time; there's a huge number of boards out there using that architecture and most of them are well supported by Linux. Here are some Armbian images: https://users.armbian.com/balbes150/opi800/ The user is reliable and a regular Armbian contributor/maintainer.
> zero real applications for the thing other than a cute novelty
I think the main selling point of these devices is for kids to carry them in their backpack when they study with their friends, so that they have all their stuff in a single device that is more usable and safe than a cellphone and needs only a video connection, without messing with the family computer. A relatively low cost independent device with exposed gpio ports could also have some uses in a lab to drive external hardware, microcontrollers programming, etc. If I had one I would probably use it for such tasks, including audio measurement by adding an external sound card.
You picked a bad time to complain about this, because a whole bunch of Pi 400s have been popping up in stock over the past few days.
rpilocator doesn't track the 400, but they do tweet when they see them in stock: https://twitter.com/rpilocator
As for "why not" the alternatives, it's because they get no ongoing support, and don't run mainline Linux, so you're stuck with what they ship with, and can never update them.
[0] Industrial boards aside (PC104 et al.) which predate those boards by a decade at least, for people who were playing with stuff like the Foxboard LX832 [1] as soon as it was released (2006), the Raspberry Pi became later the alternative, not the other way around. Granted, the Etrax 100lx was slow as a dead sloth compared to the RPi1 BCM, RAM and storage were constrained, and no WiFi, but hey, it ran Linux! I sold them on Ebay long ago, but kept their super cool Tux shaped plastic case [2].
[0] https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/01/07/iphone-12-bill-of-m...
This is probably pretty common, and there's so much opportunity for abuse. I can only assume that for all of the security out there, a trip to thrift stores and garage sales would keep your average identity thief busy for very little money.
Today, I use whole-disk-encryption on everything, but I still wonder if there's ever a hidden partition or unallocated space with something on it, and it's not worth worrying about it.
https://books.google.com/books?id=BjoEAAAAMBAJ&dq=hard+disk+...
> Platters are typically made using an aluminium, glass or ceramic substrate. As of 2015, laptop hard drive platters are made from glass while aluminum platters are often found in desktop computers.
> In 1990, Toshiba released the MK1122FC, the first hard drive to use a glass substrate... It was originally designed for laptops, for which the greater shock resistance of glass substrates are more suitable.
If you want or need to render the data on a drive inaccessible by any and all means, there really is no option other than physical destruction of the drive.
But my understanding, both as an industry standard and as common sense (insofar as common as computer literacy is), is that the only true way to ensure data destruction is total physical destruction of the physical medium the data resides on.
But most people don’t even bother. And with browsers saving passwords it’s probably even a worse idea now.
I do not think I have seen any credible threats that over-written data extraction works on modern drives. Maybe there are tricks where the SSD knows better and allocates blocks off to the side where it is not getting wiped, but those are supposedly addressed by TRIM (with dubious vendor support)
If someone comes across a drive that is zeroed or randomized, who is going to attempt some forensic investigation to retrieve the contents?
The NSA don't have some big magic machine that can recover data that's been overwritten. It's gone.
The idea of using some latent amount of data on the disk and somehow averaging it all out to get the old data might maybe have worked a tiny bit on old MFM drives in the 1980s.
A low-level 0 write just takes a long time on a drive of even 1TB. So I sledge. And then I can look at the drive and know it's OK to toss.
Last time around it was IDE drives.
OS encryption would prevent controller from understanding what's on the drive and managing it correctly, up to and including effectively disabling trim command as controller would never see blocks as empty.
This is back in days of ocz vertex. It wasn't like advertised / warned on the box, it would work... Just like western digital didn't warn about wd red becoming SMR drive while being advertised for Nas. But it would eventually kill performance and drive. You'd have to read Tom's hardware and anadtech etc to learn about it. I don't really follow anymore so I don't know how nicely os full drive encryption and ssds play today.
"Newport man's plea to find £210m hard drive in tip"
The word processor was in ROM, it had a slot for playing Coleco game cartridges, with two game controllers, and then there was its tape deck. It came with tapes for Buck Rogers and the BASIC interpreter. Once BASIC had been loaded, then you could swap in your own tapes for saving and restoring programs. It generally took a couple of minutes to use the tape drive.
I would not have been impressed by the constant churning of the HDD though (just a guess).
Average laptop speakers have no bass today; I have no idea what this person is on about.
That's why sites go to pains comparing the speakers on flatscreen TVs when they're all terrible, I mean they're tiny speakers aimed out of the rear or underside of the TV.
Hell, people can even be led to believe that 9.1 audio can come out of a small soundbar, and they'll buy the 9.1 soundbar over the inferior 7.1 one...
People with a Radeon 9700 64MB, 512MB of RAM and a PIII 1GHZ did it better.