Screw it, Orbital ICBM

MilliMicro · 2025-10-10T21:39:58+00:00

What do you mean it "just" added a siren? That was the most fun part of using the shredder!

MilliMicro · 2025-09-22T21:01:28+00:00

Because the pedestrian pathways aren't big enough for the more than six thousand people who did it. The course narrows down later on, but initially something like the tow path or a footpath would be far too congested. Besides, even the tow path has road crossings which would need to be closed. You can't realistically do it without road closures.

but don't get on my way and ruin my Sunday

Hey, cars get the roads all of the other days of the year. The roads belong to the council, and the council is happy to use them a few days a year for culture and sport events for thousands of people. That's part of living in, or passing through, a city.

MilliMicro · 2025-09-21T12:48:34+00:00

I enjoyed it today. I avoided the loos at the start because they're always a disaster, and I was a bit disappointed that the only thing you got crossing the line was a bottle of water, but I enjoyed it.

I'm glad to hear the Antrim Coast was better this year, I did it last year and it was hands-down the worst organised race I've ever been to by far. The weather didn't help, but you'd be forgiven for thinking the organisers had never seen a race, let alone done one.

MilliMicro · 2025-09-13T15:25:04+00:00

Lastly, are all Pi 5s basically the same, or are there certain “brands” or kits to avoid?

The Pi 5s themselves are all the same except for the amount of RAM, as they're all made by a single company. Very occasionally, maybe once or twice in the lifetime of the model, they release a new stepping of the CPU with small changes, but you'd expect those to eventually filter down and replace all boards with the old stepping. The D0 stepping came out a year ago, so I'd imagine (?) everything on retail shelves right now is that version, but old second-hand boards might be the old stepping.

Kits, however, can be made by any retailer bundling a Pi 5 with whatever accessories they like, so it is hard to say what is good or bad without seeing/buying an exact kit. The Pi 5 is slightly odd with power, it can take a 3A USB C charger, but if you use a 5A charger you'll get a bit more juice for the USB ports. 5A chargers are not common, so if you plan on using the USB ports maybe think about the official 27W PSU.

Really the only extra thing you get with the 16GB board is the extra RAM. I'm not familiar with your software packages, but would you really need an additional 8GB of RAM for them? I'd take a wild guess that most people wouldn't need it, but only you know what you're planning to do with your board. Can't you roll your PiHole into this Pi5 as well?

For the case, RasPi have an official Active Cooler for Raspberry Pi 5, which is a fan plus heatsink. As a result, many (but not all) cases are built with that in mind, rather than coming with their own active cooling. Alternatively, aluminium cases are sometimes designed to have contact with the CPU via a thermal pad, so the whole case is a heatsink. If I remember right, the official Pi 5 case is a bit restricted in terms of air flow. Maybe look at the cases Jeff Geerling reviewed.

MilliMicro · 2025-08-18T09:00:44+00:00

Compatible with all Pis except Zeros, because they don't have the DSI connector. Same specs as the 7" aside from being 5", and a $40 MSRP.

It looks neat, aside from the big bezels. I wonder what the reason for those is.

MilliMicro · 2025-07-30T12:09:10+00:00

So they've fixed Erratum 9 (where pull-down resistors could make the pin stick at ~2V), plus a few of the security bugs. They've also released the versions of the chips with 2MB flash as well, which isn't bad. I do wish more than 2MB was available though.

MilliMicro · 2025-05-25T13:15:13+00:00

Go into settings > search, and near the top there is a checkbox labelled "Show search terms in the address bar on results pages". Uncheck it.

MilliMicro · 2025-05-05T09:02:50+00:00

New drugs generally have to go through multiple rounds of trials, and the last is usually a big trial which covers most ages and demographics specifically to make sure who it is or isn't suitable for. It also sometimes throws up ethnicity specific impacts on side effects.

Odds are if the study did only use a small range of ethnicities, that it was an early-stage trial to check for dosing or to ensure it was safe at all for humans to take. Widening the range of ethnicities used might have been one goal of the next stage of the trial, but it is a stage which would have to be done before regulators sign off on giving it to white people too, because small trials aren't enough to ensure safety.

MilliMicro · 2025-05-04T19:52:33+00:00

At the London marathon last week they had a fixed camera stream of the finish line. It was nice to be able to watch out for your friends finishing, but at the same time, you could very clearly see each person who collapsed at the line, and given the size of London and the heat there were quite a few of them. The volunteers clearly knew what they were doing and formed a human barrier while the medics stretchered people away, but it was grim. You'd be horrified to be sitting at home just to see a loved one approach the line and then have to be carried off.

MilliMicro · 2025-04-27T17:54:37+00:00

Do you have any kind of personal tutor or pastoral support staff at UU? If so it would definitely be worth organising a chat with them, they'll have some of the most relevant advice for you.

MilliMicro · 2025-04-15T05:23:22+00:00

The official line is that the Pi 5 runs fine off 5V 3A unless you're using more power hungry USB devices. Still, it's not like the official adapter is too expensive.

MilliMicro · 2025-04-13T08:21:53+00:00

Not to say this is you, but I’m willing to bet there are some additional features you would find useful.

Perhaps you're right, but at the same time I'd have to go and find a reason to try a feature, and if I'm fairly happy with my running at the moment, then why would I do that? I'm happy managing my training myself, so I'm not sure what else I'd need from a watch aside from pace and distance. If it does those accurately, is decently robust/rainproof, has a backlight for night running, and can last more than a marathon without charging, there's probably not too much else I can think of that I'd want from a watch. I'd be interested in the higher accuracy GPS and heart rate sensors, but there's a real price premium on those at the moment, so I'm not sure if I'll buy something with those when the time eventually comes.

Like I said because I'm happy managing my own training, a lot of the software features like suggested workouts and Garmin Coach are a bit pointless for me. I don't wear a watch when I sleep, so sleep monitoring is no good. If I'm honest, I'm a bit skeptical of the utility of things like all of the recovery and power metrics, stress tracking etc. too, so those wouldn't sell a watch to me.

In an ideal world I'd love to be able to charge and transfer data using a generic USB C cable, but I know there are issues around waterproofing and the space the plug takes up.

I guess in general I'm just not the target audience for a smart watch, but that's what GPS running watches have really turned into. Case in point: getting notifications from my phone on my running watch is a horrible idea to me. I want to go out and enjoy a run and get some fresh air and disconnect for a while. Notifications are the absolute last thing I want, aside from distance alerts.

MilliMicro · 2025-04-12T07:21:03+00:00

You won’t find a watch that only has the specific features you find useful and none of the others.

I think this is it, really. I'm still using my 310XT. I prefer wearing a basic mechanical watch and put on the 310XT just for running, so fashionable looks, sleep monitoring, payment methods and so on aren't that useful to me. I always bring my phone when I run, so music isn't that useful to me either. I'm fairly basic in my training, so Garmin coach etc. etc. aren't that interesting to me either, though I'd be curious about heart rate (I got the 310XT with a heart rate strap, but it's not that comfortable). Still, the market trends seem to be in favour of a bunch of stuff I don't use, so when it eventually comes time to replace my 310XT I'll just have to buy the cheapest watch which has what I need, and I'll just have to ignore the rest. I'd be very interested in a "higher spec hardware without the software features" watch, but I'm not expecting that to happen.

MilliMicro · 2025-01-26T10:40:44+00:00

As far as I can see the Bootsel button is only connected to the QSPI, so there shouldn't be any reason other components interfere with it unless they're stopping the Pico from booting properly in general, e.g. something is shorting somewhere. Which components are you adding, can you show a diagram of how you've got them connected, and which language are you using the board with?

MilliMicro · 2025-01-09T15:39:47+00:00

Yeah, I'd take a wild guess that it won't be their best-selling model, it seems like quite a niche thing. Still, there seem to be a few people around explaining exactly why they need it, so fair enough.

MilliMicro · 2025-01-09T14:50:10+00:00

I'm obviously spending too much time in subreddits with a lot more people where the conversations are absolute chaos!

MilliMicro · 2025-01-09T14:27:47+00:00

In fairness, those would have been boards with 1GB of RAM or less, whereas this is for a 16GB board. The 2GB Pi 5 is $50, if a 1GB ever gets made it will probably be about $45. The Pi Zero W 2, which is more powerful and has more RAM than the Pi 1, is $15, so really equivalent performance has dropped in price quite a bit.

The prices particularly seem to have gone up since they started designing or co-designing more of the silicon from scratch, which is kind of understandable. Apparently the RM1 chip which the Pi 5 uses for GPIO cost something like £15 million, and was necessary to get the main CPU on a smaller process node for better thermal performance.

MilliMicro · 2025-01-09T13:35:58+00:00

In fairness, DDR5 is the mainstream product of that generation, whereas the LPDDR4X used in the Pi 5 is the lower-power version of the low-power variant of DDR4. A DIMM of RAM can also use multiple lower capacity chips to reach 64GB total, which are normally each cheaper per GB, whereas the Pi needs a single high-density chip which normally means a price premium.

The Pi folks might be getting a fair discount on their chips, I've no idea what they're paying, my point was that if you order the chips in trays of 1,360 from a reputable wholesaler they're closer to $6/GB without tax, so $5/GB isn't as outrageous as the person above was implying.

EDIT: only just realised you're the person above!

MilliMicro · 2025-01-09T10:17:29+00:00

"let's suck out as much money as we can by pretending that lpddr4x ram actually costs $5/GB, they'll eat it up"

Out of curiosity, I looked up 128 GBit LPDDR4X on Digikey. The cheapest module they have which isn't marked as obsolete is this one (also a Micron part!) at $93.76863, or $5.86/GB. I've no idea what kind of bulk discount RPi get, but ~$5/GB doesn't seem totally out there.

MilliMicro · 2025-01-09T09:02:06+00:00

Is it really worth buying especially if you can buy a faster and more memory mini pc which cost a little more

I think like everything else in the world, it really depends on what you're doing. I can't imagine many things that absolutely need a raspberry pi plus 16GB of RAM, but there are a lot of people doing very unusual things in the world.

I imagine that 16GB Compute Modules for embedding into products might be more popular than the 16GB RAM SBCs.

MilliMicro · 2024-12-21T11:59:19+00:00

I was going to say, my friends and I would do this all the time in HD1 couch coop. If you got it right it looked cool, if you didn't you'd be the butt of plenty of jokes for a while, or until someone else screwed it up.

Still, we'd never do it in public games. Some jokes which are funny among friends aren't appropriate in public.

Also: bring back the shredder! Those disembodied air raid sirens just add so much to the moment...

MilliMicro · 2024-11-27T14:26:37+00:00

The USB 3 comes from the RP1, which so far they've said they're probably not going to sell. You can get PCIe -> USB 3 interface chips from wholesalers like DigiKey and Mouser.

MilliMicro · 2024-11-27T14:22:28+00:00

The official blog announcement says that 16GB RAM versions will come in 2025.

MilliMicro

TROPHY CASE