While my last few posts on IT have been work related, most of these are on hardware and software and tend to be more hobby and fun related.

Hardware links:

• For  Raspberry Pi Pico W fans, here’s a beginners’ components tutorial
• Here’s how to power a pi pico with external batteries 
• Helpful: Raspberry Pi GPIO Pinout
• Pi Car …get in and drive
• For the young person (and not so young):  Computer coding projects for kids and teens
• Pimoroni has good Pi products, like the inky wHAT 
• Cool: intro Making a Tiny Mac From a Raspberry Pi Zero : 18 Steps (with Pictures)
• Robot fans, here’s a pi driven robotic dog with an arm
• Old but cool:  using a raspberry pi with a crt television
• Speaking of old, here’s something on the history of the floppy disk. Sun computing fans, you can relive the glory days of sun workstations here .
• Regarding smartphones, Apple has reportedly canceled the next iPhone SE. We will see. Relatedly, the next SE may get their displays from China. Or not. Non-Applewise, here’s something on  Nokia’s diy repairable budget android. Check out Google’s Pixel fold.
• In other hardware news, check out the best cheap laptops. Chromebook fans, chromebook gaming is here. I don’t recommend any of these devices that allow you to do urinalysis at home. Yikes.

Software links:

• I was playing around with this:  Simple Pure Javascript Countdown Timer. Helpful if you need such a thing.
• If you need names for testing, use this  fake name generator.  Relatedly, here’s a   random number generator you can try. More such things, here: www.worldnamegenerator.com. Here’s some more useful tools: HTML Color Names
• I was also automating my  google calendar with python using the calendar api and that helped.
• Here’s how  wolverine gives your python scripts the ability to self heal. Cool.
• For fans of either of these:  python for lisp programmers
• Something good on rust
• You know you want it:  Fortran examples
• Also:  cobol compiler on linux x86
• More legacy:  IBM WebSphere Java SDKs for WebSphere Application Server traditional V8.5.5
• Here’s how to Start MySQL Server on Windows and Linux 
• If you need webhooks for bitbucket
• For Springboot fans, check out  api spring boot and this: how to create rest api with spring boot. Relatedly, spring boot vs quarkus
• A good reference  pattern for distributed transactions within a microservices architecture
• An interesting essay on  brown vs green languages
• VS Code and makefiles
• Helpful:  Top 10 programming languages employers want in 2023
• Also helpful:  the awesome power of well documented code

Hope something there was useful! As always, thanks for reading!

P.S. Before I forget… here’s a piece on how a hacker brought Doom to a payment terminal. Love it!