Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 13, 2023
=> Security Leftovers | 10 Best Free and Open Source Linux Typing Tutors
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=> ↺ Bombadillo
=> So I built a HRNG - how do I know if it's any good?
Out of curiosity, and to use up some of my big bunch of quad op amps, I decided to build a hardware random number generator. It is comprised of 16 individual 12V-Zener-Diode noise generators, which feed into 8 comparators to generate 8 output bits at once. Those 8 bits can be sampled as a single byte by a microcontroller and then sent over UART to a PC. The principle is based on the Lampert circuit, where two uncorrelated noise sources are fed into a single comparator, to avoid biasing problems due to a shifting operating point in the Zener noise sources.
=> phones, queueing theory and a software project
It seems evident to me that if everybody keeps buying a new phone every three years, there are going to be some problems. Running out of certain metals is one that's on the horizon, and most people reading this will already be familiar with the growing global problem of e-waste. So I consider it more or less a responsibility to use my devices for as long as possible. In particular: I'm currently still using my first smartphone, an iPhone 5s that I got in 2015. Unfortunately, I'm seeing some signs that I might not be able to keep that up for much longer. By all accounts, iOS 12 has received its last update and will likely be designated end-of-life later this year, and with it the 5s. That electronic devices have an "end of life" is one of those things... if only it wasn't the norm for software to always become bigger and more demanding.
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I am an iOS developer for a Fortune 500 company. I taught myself and started developing iPhone apps in 2009. I later joined the mobile team of the company in 2010. So I have been using and programming the iPhone from the beginning. Apple opened up development and the AppStore for the iPhone in 2008.
While I liked the iPhone for what it was, I remember telling my boss in 2010, "What I really want is an iPhone that I could plug into a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and it would give me a full OS X desktop" (later renamed macOS). He told me that the technology to use a phone as a full desktop exists, but that companies were not marketing it. I don't remember if he said why, but I can imagine that it is because companies like Apple want to sell you both a Mac and a phone. There is no economic incentive to give you an "all in one" device.
Granted I do not much listen to music these years—or too much if I'm obsessing over something like the second section of a Menuet, but that's not really what most would call listening to music. If I want some background noise there is the "music player"
So this is a pie-in-the-sky project I'm not going to pursue for a long time (if I ever do), but I'm sure you could make a really neat cyberdeck in the style of '80s microcomputers using an AVR. “But they're microcontrollers not microprocessros, and Harvard architecture to boot!” you might say, but they can easily self-program though their “bootloader” mechanism. So the bootloader could be like a “system ROM” running BASIC or Forth or an assembler or whatever, and then the rest of flash could be dedicated to the user's programs (which nicely get persisted through power cycles, unlike most microcomputers!). If you want to get really elaborate maybe have separate ATTiny's abstracting the display and keyboard handling so the main AVR can deal exclusively with user code, but even the ATMega328 can probably handle all that just fine. And of course there'd have some way of storing programs and data outside of the internal flash, probably an SD card or CompactFlash.
=> Random generators on wiki pages
This camping trip has been a lot of fun and a lot of work. It’s been forever since I’ve slept in a tent, and using Gemini over low-bandwidth connections just feels right.
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