Tony is a Geek

Huge CD-Rom archive now back online: Discmaster, provides old CD-ROMs and floppy discs to download.  The site contains nearly 600 million downloads from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, comprising images, documents, music, games, software, animations and videos. CHECK IT OUT for a retro experience :  https://discmaster.textfiles.com/ also, I :love: the old retro-1995 website format, we should return to a world like that :-)  

" You wouldn't let it lie " and I don't mean a Vic & Bob Friday night quote, you have to be a certain age to remember that reference & have a certain sense of humour. I now have many / multiple Heltec LoRa devices, okay, about 6-ish, along with a couple of T-Decks and I've been trying to figure out what to do with them, well, it's obvious for the T-Deck as they have keyboards attached, but the Heltec devices.... that's a different thing all together. I've bought a few new antenna's for usage outside so I can have a permanent outside repeater node, I rigged it up earlier and then I noticed I'd picked up another node 26km away! OMG! That is awesome, right up over by the white horse by Tan Hill, the other side of Devices on the way to Avebury.  anyway, this got me thinking a bit more. I do dislike having to use the Bluetooth connectivity from my phone to be able to interface with the Heltec devices.  The BLE antenna's are crap, you hav...

Okay, so I wasn't going to do this, but y'know...I had the purchase of 2 x T-Echo devices "cancelled", so I some "spare" cash available that was close to the price of this device.....I watched a few YTube videos, scanned a few online reviews & then did some research on the CM4 Pi modules, it looks like it should upgrade to handle the CM5 Pi module, so it "should" have a longer usage life. So what is it? a uConsole . It's a tablet, no, it's a mini-laptop, no, it's a ..... well, it's a thingy.  It's an inbetween & I like it. Back in 2007/8-ish I purchased an openpandora.org device, it was way ahead of its time.  It is a single board computer, no moving parts, just a small keyboard, small touchscreen with a stylus, able to handle 2xSD-Cards with external USB, onboard WiFi and Bluetooth.... it was & still is amazing!  So much so that I ended up getting another one, just in case I broke one.  I did end up chipping the co...

Well, it's been about a year since I was writing some python code ( yes, I did type that & admit that I did that & to be fair it worked okay....as cardboard code ), I was using Llama.cpp, langchain and I wrote RAG and COT code.  I was quantizing my own model on the laptop that I was using, therefore I was fully exploiting the 64CPUs, 16GB GPU & 128GB RAM and was then pushing the boundaries with that spec when using the streaming Q&A, ingesting my own documents & storing in a Chroma vector store and then questioning the content....I actually overloaded and crashed the Windows 10 OS on the laptop & it needed a fresh re-build afterwards... it never quite worked the same. Anyway, my point being I was chuffed that I could run a Llama LLM offline on a laptop & it worked pretty reasonably, I was using code that I'd written & it was doing okay.  I attempted to explain it to other people & it turns out it was too complicated... Then a very early vers...

Bees - by Rudolf Steiner Buy the book ( I just found a copy that I purchased back in July 2002 ).  Read the words. Listen to the audio book.  Learn.  Think.  Smile.  Love.  Enjoy that honey on your toast whilst you give a nod to the cosmos, especially to Venus. "Good Morning, Gentlemen...." the  hexagonal house

Well, totally not unexpectedly, the Lora ECHO devices were "cancelled due to security concerns", so I got a refund from AliExpress.... no cheap devices for me there then. However, remember those 3 x "DollaTek" devices that were basically a very good visual clone of the Heltec v3 WiFi/BLE/LoRa/OLED devices - well, they arrived & they were really well done, you would think they were the originals - the box was branded, the PCB was branded exactly the same, the same components ( from what I could tell ), so as far as I was concerned that's what I was now going to treat them as. After receiving the devices from Mr(s).Postman-person, I then had to head out to Glastonbury to get my haircut - 'cos, y'know I'm a really hippy and all that.  As you can see 11am on a Monday is NOT a busy time: and the actual place I get my luscious locks trimmed is actually HERE - yep the shop with the mural: Rock and Roll! I then spent far too much time on a Monday afterno...

"A what now?", "What is that and why is it needed?" Basically it's a communications device that does not use WiFi or Bluetooth or 4G/5G SMS / GPRS - it uses the LoRa comms protocol, it's basically Radio Frequency output that will broadcast for miles / kilometers - average of 2Km but if you live in a flat area it can reach 20Km.  That's "free" comms between devices, passing "data", ie. small packets of text based data between devices, it's not built for audio or video (that "can" be done, but it's not the purpose).  So when the world ends, or a nuke drops or a solar flare bursts and an EMP pulse fries all the electronic devices (you did store a bunch of these in a Faraday cage didn't you?) you'll still be able to have comms without using smoke signals. There's a bunch of YouTube videos about that sort of scenario - however, that's not what I was wanting to use it for.  I actually just wanted to have co...