Table of Contents
I'm a novelist and have an interest in space science and physics. I've been a programmer for more than 40 years and I like reviewing new and up-and-coming authors.
Please consider registering (see top of page) to help support this site. Your personal data isn't shared with anyone, but it makes me feel good.
Mechanical Clock
I was looking around at some of the projects people have done with their Raspberry Pi computers, and I must admit I'm pretty impressed with a lot of them. Then I came across one I've seen before: a binary clock. A binary clock usually has a set of LEDs that indicate a number in binary, so for example, 25 seconds would be displayed as 11001.
This is all well and good, and a bit (a lot) nerdy, but there are very few people in this world that can read hours, minutes and seconds off such a clock without working out what each of those digits represents. Another base would be better than base 2.
RPi5 Desktop
The Raspberry Pi model 5 arrived in 2023, and although it has the same form-factor as the 4B (the 'B' indicates it has an ethernet socket), and remains the size of a credit-card, it is a significant improvement.
Well, I say improvement, but that depends on what you are looking for. The RPi4 is a very capable machine, and at 5.1v @ 3amps (15.3 watts) very cheap to run 24/7. The RPi4 CPU runs at 1.5Ghz, the RPi5 at 2.5Ghz (5v@5amps = 25 watts). In addition, there are other improvements that accumulate, giving the RPi5 a 2-3x CPU uplift in performance, the GPU gets a boost and so on. In fact, it sounded so impressive, I thought I'd try making a desktop computer out of one.
Mirroring Repos
I've recently installed Forgejo on one of my intranet servers. If you don't know what this is, a quick explanation:
- Forgejo is a private git repository hosting service very similar to GitHub
- GitHub is a public git repository hosting service
- a 'repository' is a software project storing source code and version control information
Home Network
I have far too many computers on my home network, so I decided to start making some of them more useful and see which ones I can make redundant. I have 16 servers, plus a development rig, a laptop, and two Windows machines. The two Windows machines exist because there is some software I have to run on Windows (and doesn't run properly under Wine, Mono or dotnet). One machine is using W10 (and can't be upgraded), so I'm gradually migrating stuff from that to the W11 machine.
For those of you that can count (most of you, I'm sure), that's 20 computers. One of these is a conventional desktop (the W10 machine), one a laptop, five are bricks and the rest (14) are Raspberry Pi's - one of which is a PiZero2, one is Pi3 and the rest are Pi4b.
News June 26 '24
Thanks to the wonderful support people at GitHub, I have regained control of my old account at github/phil-ide. I also added a new repository - another plugin for dokuwiki.