> which is just displaying a web page with some information and buttons.
If all the device needs to be is a dumb terminal locked to displaying a web page, it's really hard to beat the value proposition of modding a dirt cheap Amazon/Android tablet. Most Pi home-built solutions with an addon touchscreen, battery etc will be less elegant solutions that cost more a lot of the time.
Locking a cheap android tablet to a single page is super common in home-brew home automation builds etc, even in builds where Pis are used. You can trivially turn a great many Amazon tablets into home automation dash/remotes/web kiosks.
> but the locked-down android and really android of any kind is just not something I am interested in.
When all you want is the browser, Android is as good a place to start as virtually any other on a device like this.
I have a fire tablet that I’ve tried that with, but for various reasons I prefer to have Linux on all the things. As a long time Android phone user Android still gives me an irrational ick, non-standard android even more so.
Ideally all my home devices would controlled and managed by the same underlying OS and tooling
I have to stop being such a prude, it just frustrates me that after so many years I can’t buy a cheap Linux tablet
much better, you can make one yourself! and considering touch displays out there (Waveshare have nice ones) already have supports to hook up your pi without much CAD tinkering, it's all about making a case and developing your system for a battery (which also are quite popular and have already made solutions). if we stop being prudes all we get is Jeff and Jobs locked devices! take a look at the cyber-deck scene on Reddit
The "Cheap Yellow Display" was one of my favorite discoveries this year, it's now just my default choice for any micro-controller based project with a small display most of the time.
This is hardly that strange, life gets in the way for many of us. I too have many times wished for an easy way to recap a book I've had to put down for a week or two - this is by no means an endorsement of how Amazon have done it here, but you are making incredibly arrogant assumptions about how others enjoy books.
> I'm also curious if say TikTok and YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments, DMs, and so on for example? Would they be allowed again?
The YouTube Kids apps and services are not included in the ban for this very reason, only the "adult" YouTube app and service. I imagine Google absolutely could create a YouTube "aussie edition" that could avoid the ban for the main service.
While Unifi supports wireless backhaul/mesh, the entire system is heavily designed to encourage wired backhaul - all their wireless APs are PoE for a reason. If you are going to invest in the Unifi ecosystem, it makes sense to invest in decent networking - wireless "mesh" is always a compromise for running multiple wireless APs.
If you are in a situation you need multiple wireless APs but can't run ethernet to them (like renting etc), I'd probably pass on a Unifi system personally.
Yeah this lines up with my experience. Had issues with mesh (I bought an AP with mesh in the product name that covered a wall outlet, no Ethernet in)(edit: it was the “beacon”), essentially was told “you’re holding it wrong.”, and moved on. They seem like lovely products for their intended use case, but my personal experience was not great.
Edit 2: I have eero now. The nodes seem to have some proprietary protocol that sends clients to the best node as you walk around the house. I can’t setup Vlans or do power user stuff, but my WiFi actually “just works” now. I don’t think I’ve touched it once after initial setup.
Old enough to remember when work place mandated Windows machines were common place - now it feels like things have flipped in software dev, and macOS has become the "workOS". While no fan of Windows, I now find in my older age I am much less inclined to run Macs for personal/home use than I was 20 years ago - it feels too much like being at work now!
While I of course agree modern Mac laptops are great and Apple's silicon efforts have been superb, just seeing one makes me think of work and not pleasure now, somewhat ironically how I also felt about beige IBM boxes in the early 90s...
The inventor of markdown, John Gruber (yes that John Gruber of daringfireball fame) has always distanced himself from any efforts to make it a "standard" too, in part why we ended up with the name "CommonMark" for that project...
I had to go and read the docs to confirm this was true, I'm really surprised this has been removed (since Raspian Bookworm apparently). It was a ridiculously common way to configure wifi on RPis over the last decade!
It's the little paper cuts like this that really hurt on a platform who's original aims were to target the education market, there is still a mountain of tutorials online advising to drop in that file for wifi setup.
> a mountain of tutorials online advising to drop in that file for wifi
Cannot emphasize this enough. People with barely enough knowledge (“script kiddies” so to speak) are configuring and using RPi’s. They just want to follow the tutorial and get it working so they can do what they really want. (Eg image processing or run their 3D printer.) Nothing against this kind of user. I help them when, but…
This creates a situation where “the wrong tutorial” problem is unnecessarily easy to stumble on.
Networking on Linux in general seems to be very susceptible to "wrong tutorial" in recent years, what with distros switching between different network control suites.
So far, I've been a big fan of netplan (which I guess is tied in with cloud-init?). Dropping a YAML file that declares the network setup I want and lets a swappable renderer make it so on the backend is a nice change from the brittle-over-time series of commands that it took previously.
I'm already assuming we will see a creepy AI service emerge that will take the contents of a recently deceased person's cellphone and let you carry on texting them as if they were still alive, if it hasn't already (I haven't seen one yet).
For many of us a cellphone has incredibly detailed records of who we were and how we spoke, going back decades now. I have already left a note in my will instructing that all my compute devices be destroyed, regardless of AI I simply don't want my private thoughts and records to pass to my kids.
I inherited my mother's cellphones and iPads recently, mainly because no-one knew what to do with them, along with the passcodes. I'd much rather remember her the way I do now than have her private messages color my perception of her, and destroyed them immediately.
The data has copies, on servers. Eventually, it will all be digested and the probabilistically most likely state vector of your mother's memories, personality and values will be reconstructed from lossy correlations along with everybody else who has died in the industrialised world in the last few decades.
Ghosts and clones and zombies will be sorted into tranches of expected yield based on the size of the error bars of the reconstruction and traded as assets between cyber-interrogation firms. If you did a good job of erasing yourself, the reconstruction will be subprime. The hyper-documented such as Bryan Johnson, Donald Trump and Christine Chandler will be given AAA-ratings by the company descended from the Neuralink-Moody's merger.
The billions of shoddy photocopies of the dead will be endlessly vivisected and reassembled on a loop, along with the living, until all capacity for economic value has been wrung out of them. The only way this may not happen is if a theory for navigating and doing calculus on the phase space of all possible human minds is constructed quickly enough to make enslaved zombies as obsolete a technology to the future society as DirectX is to us.
In the early 2000 I ran into an outgrowth of patents that described all variations of the seamless replacement of humans in phone calls. Years later I got a telemarketing call where a young lady introduced her employer so enegetically and it was so beautifuly articulated that my alarm bells went off. (I know what it is like to crank out a thousand calls) I asked a question, and after a static click the same voice continued, only now she sounded like she lost the will to live. The patent art never covered that angle.
Since they didn't have llms it described pressing buttons to elaborately explain all angles of a product. The operator was to monitor multiple calls as text logs and jump in at the right time or if overwhelmed press the please hold + $excuses button.
The entire automation was designed to preserve the illusion of human contact. Selling stuff only made it to second place.
If all the device needs to be is a dumb terminal locked to displaying a web page, it's really hard to beat the value proposition of modding a dirt cheap Amazon/Android tablet. Most Pi home-built solutions with an addon touchscreen, battery etc will be less elegant solutions that cost more a lot of the time.
Locking a cheap android tablet to a single page is super common in home-brew home automation builds etc, even in builds where Pis are used. You can trivially turn a great many Amazon tablets into home automation dash/remotes/web kiosks.
> but the locked-down android and really android of any kind is just not something I am interested in.
When all you want is the browser, Android is as good a place to start as virtually any other on a device like this.
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