The good folk at Seeed Studio have sent me a Rock Pi S to review. Since the original Raspberry Pi came out, there has been an explosion in Single Board Computers – but this one is special. It is miniscule – almost dominated by the Ethernet port. And the specifications are ridiculously good – considering…
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I review a lot of tech kit. It is amazing just how bad the consumer experience is when you have a brand-new box in your hands. It can be as simple as difficult to open packaging, to the existential horror of a poorly translated manual. The first time a customer holds your product in their…
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Can a mouse ever be worth £100? Yes. Let’s get that out of the way. If you spend all day working with your hands, you owe it to yourself to give them the best possible equipment to protect them. For me, that’s a vertical mouse with re-mappable buttons to help prevent RSI. Over the last…
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I’ve just bought an LG 360 – at £150, it’s one of the cheapest dual lens cameras on the market. This an excellent bit of kit. Easy to use, impressive results, and an app which works pretty well. A single click button to take photos and videos, recording audio in surround sound, and perfect for…
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The good folks at Ntonpower have sent me this utterly ridiculous, and fantastically over-powered USB charger. It has ten frickin’ ports each one capable of delivering 2.4 amps. So, what’s it like? Straight up, it looks like a plastic toast rack. It’s a chunky beast, but surprisingly lightweight. You won’t have trouble lifting it, but…
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I’ve been sent an Omega2 Plus from Onion.io – it is a $9 Linux computer with built in Wi-Fi, Made for IoT. The obvious comparison is with the Raspberry Pi – and the ultra-cheap Pi-Zero. The Omega2 has a few advantages. It has a (small) amount of built in memory – so even if you…
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We’re entering a golden era for small-batch artisinal hardware. Anyone with an idea and a modicum of talent can build hardware and get it shipped around the world at a reasonable price. Enter “The ReSpeaker” – an open source alternative to Amazon’s Echo. It promises ultimate hackability, speech recognition, and IoT control, wrapped in a…
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I’ve been trying to find the perfect Linux laptop. I need something small, light, powerful, and with an ergonomic keyboard. Hmmm… Perhaps I don’t need a laptop. I could use a tablet and my new Bluetooth keyboard… Enter BQ’s Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition. It promises the Ubuntu experience in a convenient tablet package. I wanted…
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I love my keyboards. I mean, I have an unhealthy obsession with them. I spend a lot of time typing and the cramped keyboards which come with most laptops and MacBooks just don’t cut it for me. Their poor ergonomics leave my wrists in pain. For years I was a devotee of the Microsoft 4000…
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As regular readers know, I’ve turned a BLE Beacon into a wireless business card. Physical Web used the Bluetooth beacon standard to continually broadcast not an ID number, but a URL. If you’re in my proximity, you can grab my contact details. The one problem with the beacon I have is that it has an…
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