You have to take your hat off to Apple: it knows how to transition from one processor architecture to another, completely incompatible one. It did it in the mid-1990s with the switch from the Motorola 680×0 series to PowerPC, then again a decade or so later when it put Intel inside new Macs. Now we get ARM.
The Raspberry Pi 4 is now capable of booting from a USB Flash drive without requiring an SD card to kick-start the process. Here’s how you set it up.
I don’t quite know how I missed this, but I’m guessing plenty of Pi users might have missed it too so here it is. If you’re tired of the Raspbian desktop’s too, too laggy mouse performance, there’s a very easy cure. Poor mouse responsivity was the only thing preventing me from using the Raspbian desktop on a regular basis. Here’s how to fix it.
I have revised my Python drivers for the Holtek HT16K33 display controller, combining Micropython and Circuitpython versions into one and adding support for Adafruit’s Bi-colour 8×8 Matrix in the process.
The Hugo static website generator is an incredibly flexible site builder, but this very flexibility means that the way it matches page templates to page content can seem unclear. I’ve been using Hugo for some time now and I only ‘got it’ just recently. What follows is essentially a summary for my future reference, but hopefully it’ll help other Hugo users too.
The package manager I use on macOS is Homebrew, Brew for short. This is a great open source tool for installing command-line apps and utilities, and keeping them up to date. It’s essentially the Mac version of the Raspberry Pi’s apt. So much of the software I use on a regular basis — the nano text editor, Node.js, Python 3, the shellcheck shell script linter, the hugo website builder, the sass CSS wrangler and a whole load more — were added and are maintained using Brew.
Updated The Serpente R2 from Solder Party is yet another addition to the now long roster of compact Atmel microcontroller-based breakout boards aimed at the maker community.
Another day, another update. This time it’s PreviewMarkdown, my macOS utility for providing QuickLook file previews and icon thumbnails in Finder. It runs under Catalina and above, and this version makes some adjustments to support Big Sur.
You can read more about using PreviewMarkdown — just run it once to register its app extensions, and that’s it — it the product page here. You can download PreviewMarkdown from the Mac App Store.
Fontismo, my iOS-based utility which provides completely free and account-less access to 50 great open licence typefaces, now works on iPhones as well as iPads. It’s also fully compatible with iOS 14 and features improved font previewing, including pinch-to-zoom scaling.
The latest version of MNU, 1.4.0, can be downloaded from my software site. The focus of this update is to support the changes brought in by Big Sur’s updated, iOS-esque UI: in this case, no more roll-down sheets, and iOS-style dialogs and square icons.
