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“The trick sounds like something from a frugal grandparent: put aluminium foil behind your Wi-Fi router to make the signal stronger. For years, tech experts said don’t bother. Then in 2017, researchers at Dartmouth College ran actual measurements. A curved piece of foil, shaped correctly, pushed signal strength up 50 percent in one direction. The same reflector cut signal bleed into unwanted areas by about 75 percent (a 6 dB drop), according to TechCrunch. The study did not test crumpled foil.…
I had implemented Postiz and n8n earlier this week to migrate away from Make and Buffer. It went OK with n8n doing the heavy lifting for the processing and formatting, but Postiz was way too heavy on resources at around 2.5 GB of RAM. So just put everything on n8n and it is a simpler, cleaner and lighter process!
“The Virtual OS Museum is an epic collection of historically significant operating systems, representing more than 600 OSes across upwards of 250 platforms. It’s all local, so you’ll need a good few gigs of space. The Virtual OS Museum is a giant mixtape for enthusiasts of the history of OS evolution. As an indication of its breadth of coverage, it reaches all the way back to the Manchester Baby – from 1948. Multics, the Xerox Alto, NeXTstep, PowerPC Mac OS X, early versions of Windows NT and…
“Capetonian Eugene Zoghby launched an app to address a common problem in the South African automotive retail market: the many used vehicles sold with hidden historical damage and other issues.” Yes dealers and insurers have had access to this type of data, but for ordinary buyers, they’ve had to take big chances on expensive purchases. This type of app is also incredibly useful even if buying from a second-hand car dealer, because not all of them have exemplary ethics. Just nothing wrong with…
“LEGO and 3D printing may seem like a perfect combination, but there’s more to it than first meets the eye. While you can 3D print LEGO blocks, tight tolerances can produce disappointing results if you aren’t prepared to experiment a bit first. This week’s 3D printing projects are all about making the most out of the LEGO you already have.” So yes, not about actually printing your own LEGO, but rather supplementing what you have, with 3D printing. There are quite a few innovative ways of…
For the past few years I’ve been using the paid service called Make to pull my blog posts from my RSS feed in WordPress, and push that out to various social media services. I am on a grandfathered legacy plan, so I am paying only half of the normal cos, but it was especially complicated to set up for Bluesky. So much so, that in the end I actually ditched make for that and set up a free Buffer account just to post to Bluesky. And make had no support at all for MeWe or Nostr, so those I did…
Many may be familiar with the Meshtastic network which uses cheap LoRa radios (usually linked to a mobile phone app) to send direct text messages or post text messages to a public or private group. This type of network is very useful for direct commucations with neighbours across your city. It becomes even more useful if the cellular or Internet links go down, as this works independently of them. MeshCore is a newer type of such a peer-to-peer radio network. It works in the same license-free…
“A new study from Gartner immediately caught our eye. As Fortune reports, the research and advisory firm surveyed 350 global business executives whose companies are pulling in at least $1 billion annually to investigate whether all these AI layoffs are paying off in the real world.” The bottom line right now seems to be that replacing workers with AI gives no real benefit (let’s not go into those businesses that lost data by letting AI actually manage their data), and in fact a business loses a…
The linked article inspired me to install KOReader on my old Kobo eReader. It was just a question of copying two files to the Kobo’s root directory, and running the install.sh script there. I then also ran an update for KOReader itself once it had restarted. It was as simple as that, and the Kobo software is still on the device. I can even exit KOReader and just go back to the Kobo software as normal if I wish. It is true that the KOReader does feel very responsive, and seems better than the…
