I like Chrome Remote Desktop for ease of use and for the ability to get to all of my machines no matter where I am. Great when using Chromebooks, too.

ESP32 or Raspberry Pico, if you want something easy to use, reasonably feature full, easy to interface, inexpensive, and medium form factor.

ATTiny, if you are strapped for physical space and don’t have anything super complicated to interface with. Also, really inexpensive. I like it for basic electronics projects where even a Pico would be overkill.

On the other extreme, if you need more complex software, then a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 is a great option. Fortunately, the supply situation for Raspberry Pi has been improving a bit, at last. Sometimes, it’s nice to be able to use all sorts of high-level software libraries, and then you hit a limit with the ESP32s and Picos of this world.

You can also mix and match. A PiZero talking to a Pico is a great combo. A ESP32 and an ATTiny can also sometimes turn out to be the more pragmatic choice.

Oh, and if you need even more oomph, then I really like the Raspberry CM4. Lots of nice carrier boards to choose from. But that’s really not a microcontroller, so might not fit OP’s question.

There are plenty of other boards out there. But they frequently have poor support, or are released only for the vendor to immediately abandon them. Maybe fine for one-off projects, but I generally prefer to stick with designs that last for a couple of years. Much easier to support, if I need to revisit my project down the line.

If I don’t need all the fancy modern features (snapshot, replication, …) that modern file systems advertise, then XFS is my filesystem of choice. It’s a very performant and reliable filesystem. If you already have a RAID controller that addresses your needs for replication, then this would be a great option.

But if you need those fun modern features, then you have to choose between BTRFS, ZFS or BcacheFS. I really wished that the author of that website had reached out to the BcacheFS developer(s) and asked for assistance. That’s what we need to do if we want it to mature enough for general usage. And the failure sounds surprising considering the generally good reputation that it appears to have among early adopters.

I am really rooting for it here. But I also agree that I wouldn’t (quite) use it in production just yet. My personal choice would likely be ZFS. But it’s really hard to decide. All of the possible options have their pros and cons. ZFS can have performance issues in some situations, and it doesn’t deal great with changing RAID configurations (e.g. adding/removing devices).

I have previously had to wait three or four days for the OTA to show up on T-Mobile, when it was already available for download from the site.

I believe both all of the video conferencing services (Zoom, Teams, Google, …) are currently incompatible with German law, as far as allowing kids to use them. I don’t remember the exact details, but I recall that it was actual some EU wide regulation that triggered this issue, but national laws don’t always fully implement all EU laws. So, some countries might have been more relaxed. Also, some schools in Germany were initially more pragmatic and allowed the use of video conferencing.

But most of these programs got shut down by the authorities after making national news.

I didn’t even expect that much. Video conferencing would have been awesome. But I was perfectly prepared to settle for email. Turns out, even that wasn’t allowed in our school district

Since the image has been released, you can just sideload it. It’s not very difficult.

Otherwise, you’ll have to wait. It’s not unusual for it to take a couple of days between images showing up and the OTA getting pushed.

If I know that I have a very specific use case in mind, and it doesn’t require a lot of CPU power, then I get a Raspberry Pi. I have learned the hard way though, that I should try to by original Raspberry and not one of the many alternatives that latch onto the same brand name. So, personally, I wouldn’t go for something like an Orange. Raspberry Pi might not be the cheapest nor the fastest, but it has the most reliable infrastructure and software support.

And I find that all of my devices inevitably live longer and need to be supported for longer than what I originally anticipate. And that’s a big pain, with hardware that has unpredictable and spotty software support.

If I need more power, then I absolutely prefer a full PC. As is, x86-64 still has the best support. I am getty too old to want to tinker for months on end to make my hardware work, when I could have spent a little more money to get something that works right away.

For containers/clustering, the nice thing is that you can split them across hardware devices pretty easily. A single powerful PC can run tons of containers that otherwise would need to be distributed across multiple smaller devices.

Having more than just one physical device can have advantages when upgrading gradually. But other than that, I would avoid gratuitously buying more devices than necessary. That just increase the burden to administer all these devices. More moving parts means more things that will break.

I have never done this myself either, as I love cooking with very salty water and then draining the excess. I like how if allows just the right amount of saltiness in the pasta itself. And that doesn’t work the same way, if you keep all of the cooking water.

But I know that this is a popular technique that has been around for a good while now. I personally haven’t felt the need to add it to my repertoire, but I don’t think it’s wrong per se. So, yes, go ahead and give it a try. If you like it, keep cooking that way. If you don’t like it, then at least you understand what you enjoy about your current way of making pasta dishes.

It’s not just shareholders that have to be concerned, it’s end-users too.

I have lived both in the US and in the EU and move back and forth every so often. It’s surreal to see how far the EU lags behind in technology and userfriendly services. The internet feels completely different from the US – and not in a good way.

Lot’s of things that can be done very easily from my computer while in the US are completely impossible or at least extremely limited when living in Europe. Companies are very afraid of regulatory restrictions (rightly or mistakenly) and simply don’t offer the same online products. It feels very backwards. In fact, even Google search is very different and a lot less useful while in Europe. Subjectively, European web services feel like what the internet was like in the US in the early 2000’s. That’s 20 years behind.

I fully understand why the EU wants to regulate online behavior, but the politicians making these decisions don’t have a good understanding of how technology works; and in the interest of making populist policy choices, they regularly throw out the baby with the bath water.

Just to give an example: I lived in Europe during the lockdowns, and my kids weren’t allowed to send their teachers e-mail, because the school was afraid that doing so would violate my kids’ rights. They couldn’t articulate exactly what their worry was, but there was a lot of fear mongering about EU regulations and punative penalties that they’d expose themselves to. The upshot was that once a week, written letters would be exchanged with the teachers. This completely brought all learning to a standstill.

On the other hand, our US school made sure that all teachers were availably by Zoom conference at any time that the kids needed to talk to them. When we told the European school, they said that this was horrible and would certainly never be allowed in any civilized country…

The nice thing with Raspberry Pi is that they have been around for a very long time, you know what you get, and software support is quite reliable. Even years later, you can still get new distributions for older devices. That’s all really useful, when you want to build a device that needs to run for a couple of years.

At this point, I will buy either a CM4 or a Zero2W depending on my specific needs – and assuming I can hunt it down. Availability is still rather spotty, but has been improving considerably in the last couple of weeks.

RISC-V single-board computers can’t quite compete on the same level. It simply isn’t clear whether a board that you buy today will still receive support six months from now. And performance or price isn’t really a compelling factor either. There are plenty of ARM-based non-Raspberry single-board computers that outperform any of the RISC-V offerings. And they probably have a better track record as far as long-term support is concerned, but not as good as Rapberry Pi solutions.

The reason to buy a RISC-V board would be for you to gain experience with this technology. But honestly, the ISA matters very little. It’ll look just like any other Linux system, with maybe a few gaps in what is supported.

Now, long-term, I am quite optimistic about RISC-V and expect that it’ll push ARM out of the market for these type of devices. But for the time being, there is very little reason to switch just yet.

That sounds like an accurate summary. It’s not a particularly fancy or technical dish, but it’s not meant to. Instead, it’s a good recipe to get people started on cooking basic recipes and not be scared by ingredients. It also encourages you to experiment, and it’s fast and easy, so you can make it on a weeknight.

These are all good things. If you already know how to do all of the above, you probably won’t even need a recipe and you can improvise dishes like this very easily. You probably also already know a bunch of different techniques and can decide when they are appropriate. But everybody has to start somewhere, and this particular recipe wouldn’t be a bad idea to do that.

it was weird to take photos on a smartphone once upon a time.

Really?! I don’t recall that. If you wanted good photos, you had a (D)SLR and a couple of lenses. It was perfectly socially acceptable to do that; it just took considerable dedication thanks to the bulkiness of the equipment.

If you wanted basic photos and mobility was more important, you used a point-and-shoot. Everybody owned at least one, and many people carried them around with them at (most) times. And if you were an early-adopter but didn’t mind the lower quality, you used your phone to take photos.

Nobody really cared much when you did that, as the form factor of the phone looked very similar to a point-and-shoot. If anything, they rolled their eyes thinking that you couldn’t afford a second device and settled for the cheap-looking blurry pictures. Early cameras in phones were honestly pretty pathetic.

Look up “drag soldering” on YouTube. That might be your best bet. Use a chisel tip for the soldering iron and lots of flux, which you can clean up after