Adam Brisebois (YesterGearPC) @yestergearpc@ccrvb.com

Come to Mastodon, they said. It'll be boring, they said.

About two weeks in. Some sort of berry consortium hires a surveillance cop, whose main qualifications seem to involve owning Star Wars toys and an expertise in pretending to be a bush outside of people's apartments or something-- and this fruit company then launches a libelous attack through the media on the admin of the tiny instance I joined.

I should probably be a lot more careful posting about those mandarins I bought.

I'm a maker. I've been using your boards for years. I've recommended their use to countless people, advocated for your goals, and remained excited for everything you had done to further coding in education. You were doing good work, and had an immense amount of goodwill within the maker community. Have credit where it's due.

But your recent antics are wholly unacceptable.

Firstly, you have abandoned the maker community in recent years by prioritizing your industrial customers over them. The very same maker community that fueled the wide adoption of your products, the people who tirelessly evangelized your mission, are being left behind.

You're right - people are cross that they can't get your products any more. And that's because you're not making them for us any more. And we know it.

Secondly, your recent "Hey, we hired a cop!" post is concerning. UK law enforcement has a long history of terrible behavior in infiltrating activist circles, establishing sexual relationships with activists, and in some cases abandoning the children they fathered in those relationships.

This is a well-documented pattern of behavior, and is still playing out in the courts. The individual you hired most likely had a direct hand in enabling that behavior, as his role was in developing surveillance techniques. That history should be considered shameful, yet somehow you've decided it's a selling point.

This raises further concerns when considered within the context of your recent pivot towards prioritizing industrial customers over the maker community. In many perfectly reasonable ways, this could be considered a signal to government and law enforcement agencies of your willingness and intent to expand your business with them.

After all, you also manufacture small cameras as well as small, network-enabled computers. Now you're advertising that you've brought someone in-house with extensive experience in law enforcement under a dubious title (what exactly is the job description of a "Maker-in-Residence" anyhow?).

It's clear that your original vision has changed, and not for the better.

All of this is concerning enough. But when these perfectly valid criticisms and concerns were brought to the attention of your Fediverse instance, your brand ambassador responded with glib dismissals and began blocking the very people who have supported you for the past decade.

Not to mention the absolutely ridiculous recent claims by your co-founder, Liz Upton, that this backlash is due to not putting a CW on a picture of pigs in a blanket. That's patently absurd, and had she taken any time whatsoever to seriously look at the conversation, she would know it.

But, again - we're not the customers you care about any more. And we know it.

The fact is, you have managed to burn down a decade's worth of goodwill in the span of a day or so by being condescending, inconsiderate, and tone-deaf towards your most loyal customers and their extremely valid concerns. And on a personal level, I'm wildly disappointed and feel a certain amount of betrayal.

Of course I'll be vigorously recommending your competitors from now on, for both moral and practical reasons. There are far superior alternatives on the market already. At the basest level, I'm quite comfortable forgetting that #RaspberryPi is even an option for a single-board computer, and never mentioning the name to another potential maker again.

Not that it matters, since we can't even get your boards without an obscene markup anyways.

#RaspberryBye

crochetmac

Twitch have added a bunch of new charities to their list, and two of them are the LGB alliance - a transphobic hate group - and Autism Speaks - an ableist hate group.

This can't be allowed to stand. Please use the link below if you have a twitch account to vote for this issue:

https://twitch.uservoice.com/forums/945934-charity/suggestions/46058314-remove-hate-groups

Well, if you're interested in such things, I wrote up a case study on the Raspberry Pi thing that happened yesterday/today

https://eiara.nz/posts/2022/Dec/09/a-case-study-on-raspberry-pis-incident-on-the-fediverse/

I ordered a TinyNES (by Tall Dog Electronics) from CrowdSupply and it turned up today and works exactly as one would expect (just like the original NES). It's a modern, tiny replica using the original CPU and PPU chips, which is pretty neat. The only NES cart I had on hand was HACK*MATCH from Zachtronics which worked as expected.

They appear to still have inventory available:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/tall-dog-electronics/tinynes

#RetroGaming #NES

my most obscure #retrocomputing find of recent years was this Dynalogic Hyperion luggable computer - arguably, the world's first portable (sorry compaq!)... built in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

the machine was stored in a wet barn for 35 years, and I got it with a lot of corrosion and rust. i love the patina this adds to its already fallout-like amber CRT aesthetics.

this machine is destined to be in one of my vintage time machine installations.. specifically: a #Fallout shelter.

Okay, so let me tell you about my doorbell, from a #networking perspective.

When you push the button by the door, it sends a message over the #zigbee wireless mesh network in my house. It probably goes through a few hops, getting relayed along the way by the various Zigbee light switches and "smart outlets" I have.

Once it makes it to my utility closet, it's received by a Zigbee-to-USB dongle, through a USB hub (a simple tree network) plugged into an SFF PC. From there, it gets fed into zigbee2mqtt, which, as the name implies, publishes it to my local #mqtt broker.

The mqtt broker is in the small #kubernetes cluster of #raspberrypi nodes I run in my utility closet. To get in (via a couple of #ethernet switch hops), it goes through #metallb, which is basically a proxy-ARP type service that advertises the IP address for the mqtt endpoint to the rest of my network, then passes the traffic to the appropriate container via a #linux veth device.

I have #HomeAssistant, running in the same Kubernetes cluster, subscribed to these events. Within Kubernetes, the message goes through the CNI plugin that I use, #flannel. If the message has to pass between hosts, Flannel encapsulates it in VXLAN, so that it can be directed to the correct veth on the destination host.

Because I like #NodeRed for automation tasks more than HomeAssistant, your press of the doorbell takes another hop within the Kubernetes cluster (via a REST call) so that NodeRed can decide whether it's within the time of day I want the doorbell to ring, etc. If we're all good, NodeRed publishes an mqtt message (more VXLANs, veths, etc.)

(Oh and it also sends a notification to my phone, which means another trip through the HomeAssistant container, and leaving my home network involves another soup of acronyms including VLANs, PoE, QoS, PPPoE, NAT or IPv6, DoH, and GPON. And maybe it goes over 5G depending on where my phone is.)

Of course something's got to actually make the "ding dong" sound, and that's another Raspberry Pi that sits on top of my grandmother clock. So to get *there* the message hops through a couple Ethernet switches and my home WiFi, where it gets received by a little custom daemon I wrote that plays the sound via an attached #HiFiBerry board. Oh but wait! We're not quite done with networking, because the sound gets played through PulseAudio, which is done through a UNIX domain socket.

SO ANYWAY, that's why my doorbell rarely works and why you've been standing outside in the snow for five minutes.