The existence of things like the Pinecil is proof that putting computers into things that don't seem like they should have computers in them is actually cool and good and we should do it more. It's only capitalism that makes everything awful.
The Pinecil is an open source portable soldering iron with a 32 bit microprocessor. It uses the computer for all sorts of cool shit, mostly power management. It automatically tunes it's pids to keep an extremely stable temperature in a wide range of conditions that thermal mass alone can't manage. It also uses the computer to allow the display and controls to be flipped for left handed people. And a bunch of stuff like allowing you to adjust all sorts of parameters like sleep timers, power limits, etc. Being open source you can program it to do whatever you want if you know how. It also regularly gets firmware updates to add functionality.
It takes a dc jack and USB C for power input. You can plug almost any power supply into it, including phone chargers. It won't work on cheaper phone chargers because they aren't capable of delivering enough current, but it will still let you try. So in practice it is limited to "only" 9-21 volt power supplies. Anything in that range works. You can also plug drone/rc batteries into it. The chance of you ever being in a place where you need a soldering iron but can't find a power supply for it are basically zero because of this.
Oh, and because it's open source anyone can download the schematics and make them so they are like $30. Most open source hardware is like that. It's only capitalism that makes every new technology awful. Like seriously, how do they manage to make something as simple and awesome as "you can control your home ac and lights and stuff from your phone" an awful nightmare?
(I apologize for how directionless this post is.)
proprietarians love gas lighting you, recently I had a conversation like:
Me: "I wish windows didn't have such poor and anti-user design"
Shill: "wow how could you say something so uninformed, as if there is anything wrong with windows!"
Me: *list of like 20 big ticket items*
Shill: "I've never heard anyone complain about any of these, you're making these up. I've never even heard of ${something with long damning Wikipedia articles about the subject}"
Me: *evidence that things almost everyone hates about windows exists*
Shill: "Well if you don't like windows don't use it!"
Yeah as if Microsoft wasn't a monopoly holding the entire computer market hostage.
What doesn't work in wine/proton?
Valorant? Personally I find kernel-level anti-cheat offensive enough that I'd rather play anything else - and everything else has worked great on Linux for at least the past year.
What doesn’t work in wine/proton?
Most things I've tried.
Most recently it was Satisfactory. I play it through Steam. Some Steam games support Linux but not this one.
Hmmm. Might be because it launches through the Epic Game Store. Try Lutris, it'll let you log in to EGS and launch it directly in wine.
edit: the sole thing I've had issues with is GNOME's wayland session not playing nice with certain Unity games. Everything else has worked.
uh... huh. Guess I was wrong. Satisfactory originally launched as an EGS exclusive before making it over to Steam. I figured it did the same thing as like, EA titles, where you install them on Steam but launching the game through Steam launches Origin or whatever, where you can actually launch the game.
anyway that should be even easier, check out protondb: https://www.protondb.com/app/526870
ahhhhhh multiplayer!! i forgot multiplayer exists as a thing you can do in games. multiplayer in linux is really hit or miss, and as a result I just don't play multiplayer games
tf2 was good for like a year and a half, and there's a couple of co-op titles that don't suck, but in general yeah doom 2 is it
Oh no! I just booted up Satisfactory on Manjaro linux- it runs pretty well definitly follow wantonviolins' advice and check out protondb
I use Arch (btw) so that's a good sign. So I just need to install proton and then it should work in steam as if I were running Windows?
Edit: 185 dependencies :kitsuragi-depress:
In my experience, when an AUR has this many dependencies one of them is bound to be a broken AUR.
Edit2: Looks like only two of the dependencies were other AURs, thank GOD.
Steam should handle Proton as part of its runtime without you needing to install it separately. There's probably a hidden setting somewhere to make it run "unsupported" games through proton.
You need to right click on the game on steam, go to Properties, and in the compatibility section 'Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool', and pick Proton Experimental (or try different versions).
yeah! I'm obsessed with this game- but yea you can enable proton in steam (play on linux) and I have it on proton experimental and it works great! a lot of games work pretty well out of the box with proton. theres only a few that don't and sometimes even then with tinkering you can get it to work
I'm on the latest nvidia drivers as well if that's relevant (gtx 1080)
no wait thats "Steam Play" now I guess... then under advanced, check Enable steam play for all other titles
Oh yeah and another key thing I learned the hard way is that steam on linux really prefers that you don't use NTFS for your games library- idk if that's gonna be relevant to you but once I switched over to ext that helped a lot of games
Linux in general does not get along with NTFS. The most common NTFS driver is an old, slow, and buggy FUSE driver that I've had endless issues with.
Naw it's all good unless you're doing something crazy like RAID 56.
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status
I love my snapshots.
I've been using RAID-Z1 on a four-disk ZFS array on my fileserver and it's been great. ext4 on my boot disks, though.
It's running very well for me under whatever version of proton-ge AUR provides right now.
Yes, that is what they are.
You should also consider adjusting the makepkg config to tune to your CPU microarchitecture and to enable parallel compilation, as well as to use zstd compression if that's not default yet.
Agreed, open source shit puts the fun back in tech. Way too much UIs and shit these days is so same-y.
I haven’t used this particular iron, but I can attest that my new tiny cheap soldering from China outperforms my old Weller soldering station for a fraction of the price. The tech is real.
What projects have you been working on? I've found it hard to start much of anything lately.
Good post 👍
Likewise, isn't it suspicious how a laptop having a 1080p+ display is bordering on premium feature even in 2022, but apple sells a tablet and a keyboard stand "case" (making it essentially a laptop) for $450 with an excellent 1440p display and specs that blow anything under like $700 out of the water? The tradeoff of course is that you can't do any arbitrary thing you would like on it, and have to pay $2 here and $3 there for basic functions, the content creation is not there, privacy is impossible, you cannot run arbitrary software or your own OS even though you own the thing. And then apple is trying to push it as a laptop replacement without adding these features.
The reason is obvious, they want strict control over what you do with your own computer, but computer guys won't put up with that, so they sidestep that problem by making a computer that is not a "computer". The plan is working too because gen Z is growing up not even knowing how to use a keyboard, or understanding what they're missing out on.
Don't even get me started on the phone-ification they're pushing on computer UIs
TS-100 tips. It's basically a cheaper, better TS-100 with a RISC-V CPU.
The firmware, IronOS, was originally written to extend the TS-100 and Pine64 hired the author to port it to the Pinecil.
I have a pinecil it's cool af and also surprisingly cheap
