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?
Most things I've tried.
Most recently it was Satisfactory. I play it through Steam. Some Steam games support Linux but not this one.
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.
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
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).
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
It's running very well for me under whatever version of proton-ge AUR provides right now.
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.
Agreed, open source shit puts the fun back in tech. Way too much UIs and shit these days is so same-y.
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
I have a pinecil it's cool af and also surprisingly cheap
