Kindle Fire 7"

My wife has an iPad mini that she uses constantly.  It's a lot easier to on the eyes than browsing and using apps on a smartphone is.  Yet it's lighter and not much bigger than a book.  True, it's not as portable as a smartphone is, and I wouldn't give up my dedicated Kindle Paperwhite for one.  But for indoor use with WiFi, you can't beat it.

I was suffering from tablet envy, but I couldn't bring myself to spending another several hundred dollars for even a cheaper Android tablet.  Then a few months ago, Amazon came out with this.

$50?  Are you kidding me?  At that price it's practically disposable.  Even if it doesn't do everything I wanted it to do, if it's still useful, I'd live with it.  I figured that I'd probably get frustrated with its limitations pretty quickly, especially being used recent generation iPads.  But for $50, I'd give it a try.

Folks, it's worth it, and then some.    OK, it has low res front and rear cameras.  The fact that it has any cameras at all is rather amazing.  Not that I even bother using them.  Yeah, it only has 8 GB of internal memory, but most of my programs and all of my pictures, videos, and music are on a 32 GB microSD card I sprung for it ($10).  I now have just about every app I would want on it, and still have some room on board for more.

OK, it's a loss leader for Amazon, runs on their stripped down version of Android that some apps won't run on, and is a generation behind the curve on performance.  But it works amazingly well.  They did a good job of making it reasonably snappy and it uses a reasonably modern quad core processor with graphics acceleration.  OK, its resolution isn't even 720p, but at 7 inches diagonal, movies run smoothly and they look good enough.  There's no mistaking the text resolution as competing with an Apple "retina display" on their devices, but it's readable enough with small fonts.  OK, maybe it's not nearly as readable as reading a book on a Paperwhite Kindle is, but it's OK.

$10 for a decent case and another $10 for a 32 GB microSD card, and you're done.  But wait, there's more.  They offered it for $35 during Thanksgiving week, so I bought two more as gifts.  I should have bought more.  Never lacking for being cheeky, Amazon also sells them in six packs (buy five, get one free).

Do I recommend it?  YES!  Especially if you're an Amazon Prime member (it's great for shopping, reading Kindle books, and using it with Prime Video and Music).  It's certainly not a high end tablet, but you are getting a lot more than you paid for it.  And for 90% of what you'd want a tablet for, this gets the job done.

Amazon Fire 7", 8GB, WiFi only

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 2

What's a Raspberry Pi?  It's a small $35 computer board that works like a full sized computer.  There are a lot of similarly priced microprocessor hobby boards out there, but you have to program them down to bare metal to do anything with them.  By "bare metal" I mean they don't have an operating system that does the heavy lifting for you, allowing you to use keyboards, mice, monitors, storage, and other devices without having to write drivers to do anything useful.  This thing couldn't be simpler.  Power it using a simple cell-phone charger into the microUSB port and uses a small microSD card for storage after you simply download and copy the operating system onto the card, and plug it in. Plug an Ethernet cable into it, the HDMI output into an existing monitor or HDTV, and borrow a USB keyboard and mouse to get started.  Once you're up and going, you can set it up with a WiFi adapter into one of the USB ports and remote into it (running it "headless"), not tying up a monitor, TV, keyboard, or mouse thereafter.

Why, you might ask?  Think about all the software and projects you'd like to try that you don't want to mess up your primary machine up with.   And wouldn't it be nice to have a computer that only uses a few watts, and with no moving parts, that can be left on 27/4, indefinitely?   OK, it will set you back a few bucks if you don't have a spare reasonably powerful cell phone charger, and you'll probably want to sink $5-$15 into a case for it.  And $10 for a WiFi USB nub, if you don't have an old one around you can't spare.  But that's it.  With a WiFi nub installed, you could hide it in your sock drawer with only a USB cable hanging out.  Hell, run it from one of those USB cell phone charger battery packs, and you won't have even a cable poking out from your sock drawer.

So what do you get for $35?  How about a quad core 900 MHz floating point ARM processor with an integral 1080p graphics coprocessor, 4 USB ports, and an Ethernet port.  Audio and several discrete and serial I/O lines, if that's what you're into.  Yes it can stream HD video and it can be used as media server.  It can be a web server, TOR relay, and Email client or server.  Or in my case, a radio controller and signal decoder.  Or a surveillance camera appliance, detecting motion from a webcam and uploading it to your Dropbox account.  Yes, you can surf the web with it.  The default operating system even comes with a Microsoft Office clone (LibreOffice), a couple of programming languages, a nice desktop GUI, and even a few over the top programs: Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha.  Download more programs if you like, or modify others written for bigger machines, using on-line tutorials and videos.

With its default operating system (Raspian) it's a robust Debian Linux general purpose desktop using cheap cell phone chips and technologies.  You can do a lot more with it than you can with Windows 10 (which you can load onto it by the way, but please don't).

I have an original Pi (single core, half the memory, only 2 USB ports) that I've dedicated to a single purpose, and I recently bought the version 2, described above, still at the same $35 price for general learning and amusement.  They even sell a $5 stripped down version that you can embed in your projects.

For more information, go to:  https://www.raspberrypi.org/

Starting New

Yeah, it's been a few years.  I decided to separate my personal stuff (gmail, google plus, Facebook, etc.) from my technical posts so I don't bore the heck out of my non-technical friends, and don't bore people interested in technical stuff with my personal and family posts.

Stand by as I will probably reformat it.  For now, I've left the old posts there, but I might choose to update them and remove the stale ones.