Open Hardware/Modding and Programming Leftovers
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You can't buy a Raspberry Pi right now
Well, two reasons:
1. Raspberry Pi is one of the few SBC vendors (maybe the only one) to tackle the most important feature for adoption and ongoing end-user happiness: support.
Instead of throwing hardware at the wall, seeing what sticks, and relying on developer communities to support their hardware with distributions like Armbian, Raspberry Pi actively supports their boards, all the way back to the original Pi model B. They ship Raspberry Pi OS. They continually improve their documentation and focus on a great end-user experience for beginners and advanced users.
2. Production limitations because of the global components shortage.
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The Geeks way of checking what the outside wheather is like
Long story short - I was still in the process of recabling the house (running ethernet to every room) and added a serial cable from the machine room to the WS2300, and then did some pkgsrc work and got misc/open2300 and misc/open2300-mysql. I used those to log the data from the weather-station to a mysql database, and later moved that (via misc/open2300-pgsql) to a postgres database.
Now sometime this year the machine running that database had to be replaced (should have done that earlier, it was power hungry and wasteful). The replacement was an aarch64 SoC (a Pine64 Quartz64 model A) - and it had no real com ports (of course) any more. I had experimented with USB serial adapters and the WS2300 before, but for unclear reasons this time I had no luck and couldn't get it to work. Since some of the outdoor sensors of the old weather-station had started failing, I decided to replace it.
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UML: My Part in its Downfall
In this post I'm going to try and explain some of the factors that I think contributed to UML's downfall. To some extent this is a historical document, at least of my perspective. But, with the benefit of hindsight, I feel there are general lessons to be drawn about how both group dynamics and standardisation can develop in unfortunate ways. Be forewarned that I only saw part of what was going on (so I will be unaware of possibly important details), I didn't write a diary (so I will recall things incorrectly), and my recollections are bound to reflect my biases (my ego will inevitably encourage me to relay the story in a way that presents me in a better light than I deserve).
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R tips and tricks – get the gist
In scientific programming speed is important. Functions written for general public use have a lot of control-flow checks which are not necessary if you are confident enough with your code.To quicken your code execution I suggest to strip run-of-the-mill functions to their bare bones. You can save serious wall-clock time by using only the laborers code lines. Below is a walk-through example of what I mean.
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Execute Shell Commands in Java/Scala/Kotlin
The following describes snippets for executing shell commands, in Java, Scala, and Kotlin, using standard functionality. It’s also useful to compare Java vs Scala vs Kotlin for this particular problem.