Posts by Blogitus Maximus

Summoning the spirit of the BBC Micro with a Pi 500+ and a can of spray paint

I've been working on a redesign myself since it's release and already made the custom keys via these guys:

https://yuzukeycaps.com/c/a66ff8d9-a4b5-4d18-9da7-4a0b74553076

I've got other fruity versions, this one is blueberry orange pi. I've also got Cherry Apple underway.

https://yuzukeycaps.com/c/8c5ea7e5-5363-4079-9341-f2ce2e696dc3

Here's the mock-up for sizing of the components inside the original case. Hopefully I can get some acrylic cut or *maybe* 3d print some of it.

https://i.postimg.cc/jS1DwKkL/tink-pi.png

https://i.postimg.cc/hGgt7j1T/pi-mock.png

And here's the caps on the existing pi500+

https://i.postimg.cc/TwLhqsFg/PXL-20251221-135443058.jpg

Could really do with an Mmmm pi icon :)

Microsoft sets Copilot agents loose on your OneDrive files

Re: Windows' Search

I abandoned built-in windows search years ago and exchanged it for Void Tool "Everything" which is considerable faster and feature rich or just ignore the features and just enjoy faster searches.

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

I read an estimated 700,000 tech jobs lost of the last 4 years [BBC], and many of those were related to this AI slop giving bonus hungry CEOs the impetus to fire their underlings. I've been working in the tech sector for 26 years and wonder where this is all really going and how long till the AI bubble will burst. I don't like how the web is today with its corporate enshittification, spying, government intrusion and advertising infestation.

Bring back the small web of circa 2000, which incidentally was around the time of the last dot-com bubble.

Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome

Re: DuckDuckGo

I've been defaulting to startpage lately. DDG went a bit sideways.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Use the memory luke!

'This is the OS of an IT Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a mobile app or Windows install; an elegant OS for a more civilised age.'

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/unix_v4_tape_successfully_recovered/

"...the kernel was some 27 kB of code." Kinda extraordinary when you think about how much we use now.

Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it

Stay on the left..

"Note that this covers over the Start button and taskbar icons if you have your Start menu aligned to the left."

Which of course, in my view, irritates many users as its entirely sane to return the start menu back to the left after Win11 tries to go all 'Mac' on you.

What a pointless change.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: Micro- and Soft- Brain ?

I believe their incredulity is performative. They know precisely what they're doing and its all tied to cash, which unsurprisingly pushes M$ to continue expanding it's evil production.

Someone somewhere wants a return on all this AI "investment" come hell or high water. Expect it to be shoehorned into every little thing you plug in.

The real answers to all this is to either a) not use it at all if you can or b) use your own locally hosted stuff. For the uninformed there will be plenty of monthly subscriptions to pay for when it all gets enshiffified.

Makers slam Qualcomm for tightening the clamps on Arduino

Essentially dead to some hobbyists

The first step to enshittification was flogging this community driven thing into the arms [*] of big tech vampires.

"It's dead to me" will be the likely refrain going forward for hobbyists like me. I've only ever used Pi stuff and was considering a look at Arduino for a future project, but no longer.

*No pun intended.

Colt gets greenlight for £2.5bn London datacenter splurge

Re: Hot air on offer you say?

I'll just leave this here: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/sustainable-data-centre-heating/

Kinda surprised to learn how close to the top we are in terms of quantity of DCs.

AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

Re: "Smart home" stuff needs to support a local cloud

It's not nearly as complex as people think and there are off-the-shelf options now albeit early arrivals, so there's risk of complexity, but the support has been pretty amazing. Check out home assistant green. They even have cloudy AI plugin but that's paid for and for me defeats the purpose of DIY automation.

Things only really get complicated if you try and run your own device installed from scratch on say a PI and start getting into customised things like your own wakewords.

You can go your own way...

Strangely I missed the ai-dumbspeaker-semi-apocalypse.

That might be because I'm using home assistant and host my AI locally. </smug>

DGX Spark, Nvidia’s tiniest supercomputer, tackles large models at solid speeds

Re: Great review

I'd like to see comparisons to something like this: https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-gtr9-pro-amd-ryzen-ai-max-395?variant=47842426257650

tbf, even if the Spark outperforms it, probably a little bit, the price tag loses.

Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

Re: Reading the comments here, on ArsTechnica and Heise seems to indicate...

It's a sign of the whole wrongheaded approach.

Fancy sorting out the telemetry of an unknown and unteasted technology, whilst putting your very real data into that tech, and only *THEN* figuring out how to measure what 'success' looks like.

The hubris attached to those billions invested is breathtaking.

Renewables blow past nuclear when it comes to cheap datacenter juice

Re: We can always hope ...

Every week is free of farcebook when you delete the account and block it via ABP.

There is no such thing as Social Media. Antisocial media is all there is and it's largely a poison.

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

Re: What I'd like...

If you're building your own check out https://thepihut.com/products/uninterruptible-power-supply-ups-hat-b-for-raspberry-pi

Re: Very nice!

Check out the dopesplay lapdock. This is what I'd be using for any PI that's not in Keyboard format :)

Re: Very nice!

Me too. I had a RP5 in my basket with memory/board/NVME and some other bits and yes that would have been cheaper if it weren't for the case I was looking at (Pironman 5-MAX) but I've decided to save a bit and forget the dual PCIE from the Pironman. This will do very nicely for my experiments with Home Assistant, Voice Assistant and tapping it all into local LLM.

Just a shame the Hailo-H10 isn't out yet.

Reg readers have spoken: 93% back move away from Microsoft in UK public sector

With a name like Creese we really should send in Daniel San to have a word.

He's literally saying the opposite of what is true, perhaps he's a MAGA supporter?

DOGE accused of duplicating critical Social Security database on unsecured cloud

Re: Get a grip

Go back to bed Elon, its too early for your shit.

Microsoft crams Copilot AI directly into Excel cells

The only question now is...

IF it can be disabled, how does one do so?

Ebuyer website bought by Fraser Group plc

Re: Sad times

Always on my rotation of sites to check when building new kit and I've spent a lot there over years too.

New rotation, scan/awd-it/CCL/overclockers/Amazon.

NASA boss calls for nuclear reactor on the Moon

Re: Space Race!

It really feels like an opportunity to not be an idiot species and perhaps work together on a project like this, similar to the ISS. Takes the pressure off and allows for the best thing to be deployed at reasonable timescales rather than a headlong rush job.

GitHub CEO: Future devs will not code, they will manage AI

Re: If future devs "will not code"...

I'm so glad you said pie hole.

Faced with £40B budget hole, UK public sector commits £9B to Microsoft

Re: National Linux infrastructure development needed

*nix 101 should be taught in all schools. Once the general populace are familiar with it there will be less resistance to adopting it, Offer some tax incentives for laptop makers to offer FOSS on their hardware would be a nice sweetener to steer the market toward better alternatives.

Not to mention US companies can not guarantee the US Gov wont insist on backdooring US generated code.

"enhanced value across Microsoft's portfolio of products and services."

The only enhanced value here is the enhancement of M$'s balance sheet. We should be taking a leaf out of the Germans book.

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1bw7fdz/german_state_ditches_microsoft_for_linux_and/

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Re: Terrible Journalism

I'm confused. Did Labour MPs not advocate banning/blocking or restricting VPNs in some way? If they didn't then down with GF. If they did...

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty

Re: There have been so many things

That seems...unexpected.

Frozen foods supermarket chain deploys facial recognition tech

Re: Hmm

Shop local. Problem solved.

Big brother. Because it'll be a cold day in Iceland before I step foot in their shops again.

Logitech's latest keyboard and mouse combo is wired, quiet, and suspiciously sensible

A wired keyboard...

...how quaint.

Anthropic CEO frets about 20% unemployment from AI, but economists are doubtful

Schrödinger's A.I.

It is simultaneously "nearly magical in its world-changing abilities" whilst it's "not made a significant difference in employment or earnings in any occupation".

Companies wont be happy when they find out they've spent billions, will have to spend billions more and can't fire whole swaths of their expensive meatsacks.

Unless of course all this is marketing BS...

OpenAI wants to build a subscription for something like an AI OS, with SDKs and APIs and 'surfaces'

"...OpenAI wants to build a subscription"

In my house, the proliferation of subscriptions is one of the top signs of enshittification. Oh yeah its LLM, nothing new to see here, move along.

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

Re: Mad

Your A.I. assistant will only argue with you until it replaces you.

There. Problem solved.

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

Re: Laughable

"You cannot just replace Google overnight..."

Strangely I was able to replace it immediately with startpage.com and prior to that DDG (before it became a bit enshittified). The one any only use for Google.com now is maps.

Palantir loves the smell of DOGE budget cuts in the morning

Re: Who will get the contracts?

Sneaky little hobbitses, wicked, tricksy, false!

Pint because Hobbits like nothing more than singing, boozing and dancing.

Elon Musk's X revenues in the UK crashed in 2023, down 66%

Re: Still, there IS a chill8ing effect,,,

Those wascally wabbits!

Meta to feed Europe's public posts into AI brains again

Re: Legitimate interest

There are plugins to handle such obvious efforts to get people to capitulate through consent fatigue, part of the Enshittification series by big business.

Here's the one I recommend: https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic

Microsoft Copilot shows up even when it's not wanted

Wont you have to do it all again after the next round of windows updates?

WhatWhatsApp

"...WhatsApp can't be turned off either."

Not quite true, I turned off the WhatsApp "AI feature" by uninstalling it and going exclusively to Telegram.

Problem solved, until/unless Telegram becomes infected with LLM dross.

Europe hits Meta, Apple with €700M in fines for flouting DMA

Re: Cue the snowflake whinging

I really hope the likes of Led by Donkeys have a stunt up their sleeve.

Congress wants to know if Nvidia superchips slipped through Singapore to DeepSeek

"People get arrested, fined and jailed for this all the time..."

If only the American government were as concerned about the rule of law when it comes to other obvious criminality, insider training and human rights.

Sherlock, because he's the only one who can say whether or not all the misdeeds of the current USGOV cabal will ever be answered for.

Free Blue Screens of Death for Windows 11 24H2 users

It isn't. My Father, in his mid 70s installed Ubuntu and never looked back. He is a typical 'user' level type person so it was a proud moment for me.

OK great, UK is building loads of AI datacenters. How are we going to power that?

Re: Hmm

It might make sense to put the chillers underneath the solar panels.

Ex-NSA grandee says Trump's staff cuts will 'devastate' America's national security

Re: He's a Russian asset

The old golden shower kompromat must be real.

Putin seems to have grabbed Trump by the pussy.

Fanboi, coz Trump is Putin's biggest fan obviously.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Re: Yeah I had this cobblers with my bank yesterday...

Which is why its such a breath of fresh air to receive good support from a friendly human, in good time over the phone.

This is how companies can differentiate themselves from the likes of HP, who's products are now Hardly Purchasable.

Some workers already let AI do the thinking for them, Microsoft researchers find

"AI-infused world"

Never has a darker and more ominous phrase ever been uttered.

I'll continue to avoid this nonsense at all costs, thank you very much.

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Re: I considered downloading. . .

Well, we all know what they say after trojans have got inside...

Improved Windows Search arrives... but only for Copilot+ PCs

The search application you're looking for...

Forget windows 'search' which has been as slow as it is useless for years.

Search using 'Everything' - https://www.voidtools.com/

UK government tech procurement lacks understanding, says watchdog

Re: "an overemphasis on acquiring the minimum requirement or cheapest resource"

Ahem.

https://metayellow.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/5/0/125075342/753310342.jpg

CISA: Wow, that election had a lot of foreign trolling. Trump's Homeland Sec pick: And that's none of your concern

To vote for an incompetent narcissist who is unable to string more than two words together.

Welcome to the origin story for Idiocracy.

Now to see whether there's anyone left with a backbone to keep the Felon in Chief in check.

Microsoft tests 45% M365 price hikes in Asia-Pacific to see how much you enjoy AI

Re: I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further

And so the march of subscription services continues toward the sunlit uplands of Enshittification.

Shittier version of Amazon Prime with adverts- check

Shittier version of Netflix with adverts or crappier quality - check

Shittier version of M365 infested with fake AI - check

The list, of course, goes on. I would never ever lease software from M$ and still enjoy a perpetual license for office professional plus 2016. It was bought using a student discount, so was reasonably priced at the time. Still works fine, and if it ever doesn't there's always open office.