Rui Carmo writes about Macs, iPads, Linux, small hardware, RISC-V, and using LLMs for coding and writing.
HN links it on Apple hardware and software, and the author comments on rebuilding the site's generator in several languages.
P4s have a horrible stall happy pipeline, the RaspPi has a decent GPU, I'd call it even. For a school environment and a good minimal window manager, the new RaspPi would be excellent for web browsing.
> I haven’t tried any normal desktop applications (other than Chromium), but I’d say the Pi 2 is finally worth considering as an full-fledged educational computer (i.e., beyond the introductory toy stage).
from http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2015/02/07/1200
With a newer monitor and the current generation raspberrypi, it should powered directly from the USB hub in the monitor. With a bolt through VESA mount, a wifi dongle and netbooting off an NFS, a rapidly deployable Raspberry Pi school lab should be easily doable.
Yeah, this. http://www.adafruit.com/product/1320 PiBow VESA Mounting Layer Plate
Monitors I would look at are (needs HDMI, speakers, internal USB hub):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6R42AH7073
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824116141
Finding the perfect monitor (internal powered usb hub) for the right price point is difficult, the device that needs to get built is a VESA case for the raspberry pi that has a NEMA 5-15R input and AC pass through, a USB powersupply for the RaspPi and a power switch that turns both the rasp and the monitor off.
DC in is nice, could run the lab off batteries or direct solar for off grid installations.
The problem is the software configuration for the NFS bootserver and making the…
Pedantry:
1. if you click "UTM SE" in this article, you get taken to https://taoofmac.com/space/links/2024/07/14/0819;
2. and this page in turn is apparently of an unusual "commentary on a link" CMS type — where it seems that clicking the little arrow wingding beside the title — or clicking the thumbnail (which is a thumbnail of the page the comment is "about") — takes you to the page that the comment is "about";
3. where that page (https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24198015/apple-utm-se-pc-os-emulator-for-ios) then explains what UTM SE is, across its header and subheader:
> After initially rejecting it, Apple has approved the first PC emulator for iOS
> UTM SE can ‘run classic software and old-school games’ for Windows, Mac OS 9, and Linux on your iPhone.
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This is admittedly confusing and indirect — but that's mostly due to this website's publishing system's weird reading-UX choices, not so much due to the author's editorial choices. (Unless this publishing system is created by the author, in which case...)
A few UX recommendations to the site's designer:
1. fix the rendering for your "Link" resources! Facebook and Twitter have forced the rest of the web into expecting that this kind of resource will be rendered as what they call a "link preview" — using the OpenGraph metadata (og:title and og:description) of the target page. As such, only rendering the page's scraped <title> might produce bad results, as nobody's expecting you to do that, and so hasn't…
In the beginning we used Show Source and Console. As web pages grew in size it became difficult to navigate the source code, and you still had no direct way to view how CSS was being applied.
The first web inspector that I used was Xyle Scope in 2004. It was an early tool based on Apple's new Safari engine. It was a few years before Firebug was released, and even then it took a while for Firebug to beat Xyle Scope in features.
I still have the lingering feeling that Xyle Scope's UI was better at directly inspecting HTML and CSS than our current tools. Although that maybe the haze of nostalgia. I found it hard to find any really good screen shots but here is one:
https://taoofmac.com/space/apps/xyle_scope
Of course, FireBug and its successors do so much more than just HTML/CSS inspection. I would often jump between Firebug and Xyle Scope. Eventually, Cultured Code the developers for Xyle Scope focused their talents on creating their Things task manager.
https://culturedcode.com/things/
Unfortunately Onyx Boox have used sockpuppets and other dirty tricks on Reddit[0] and elsewhere to harass and deter users reporting broken screens. Their international partners have webpages explaining how it's "impossible" that e-ink screens can be damaged or broken without you dropping or sitting on them[1] And in general the company is hostile to anyone with damaged devices or issues of other sorts.
Although no-one is perfect, I really like Supernote and their way of developing as much as possible in the open[2]. The devices are really great to use[3]
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/19czc16/a_general_warning_about_boox_boox_tablets_boox/
[1] https://einktab.ca/dealing-with-a-broken-e-ink-screen-what-you-need-to-know/
[2] https://trello.com/b/l0COP24j/supernote-a5-x-a6-x-nomad-software-roadmap-2024
[3] https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/01/18/2335
Ha. Well, https://taoofmac.com was ported to Hy (https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy) in a week, then I eventually rewrote that in plain Python to do the current static site generator —- so I completely get it.
I am now slowly rebuilding it in TypeScript/Bun and still finding a lot of LISP-isms, so it’s been a fun exercise and a reminder that we still don’t have a nice, fast, batteries-included LISP able to do HTML/XML transforms neatly (I tried Fennel, Julia, etc., and even added Markdown support to Joker over the years, but none of them felt quite right, and Babashka carries too much baggage).
If anyone knows about a good lightweight LISP/Scheme dialect that has baked in SQLite and HTML parsing support, can compile to native code and isn’t on https://taoofmac.com/space/dev/lisp, I’d love to know.
I looked recently into elementaryOS in my quest for a good looking and functional linux distro, as it has been touted for being a good looking distro. It has too many UI problems to my liking. Look at this picture from the OP: http://taoofmac.com/media/AvRn9_F_JHGrGsCSlJwydak6BTc=/blog/2016/10/29/2240/photos.jpg
[edit: the one with caption "Zooming in on a NASA image I had handy"].
- There is a lack of contrast for the text in the left bar.
- The icons in the bottom bar are off: the colors are dull too (too low saturation is a common theme in elementaryOS).
- The size of the icons in the bottom bar is also off. They are way to big if you compare them to the main navigation (left bar). The visual hierarchy is not ok.
If you ask me: the best looking linux distro atm is manjaro kde.