A database can be used to plug into any number of applications that run on top of it as well as be easily shared by multiple people and centrally backed up. Auditing, logging, and row and table level access controls, and other measures can be easily added.

Excel files (or even MS Access files) as “databases” are often just people emailing around a file or accessing it from a shared drive. You end up with a split-brain situation at best and at worst you’re dealing with constant file corruption from multiple people thinking they can access it from a shared drive at the same time.

Then you get vendor lock in and are forced to keep MS Office professional licenses because Shawn created some stupid Access “app” 10 years ago which is “THE DATABASE” and no one understands how it works.

Not that I’d own a smart fridge, but if I did and they started shoving ads on it, it’d look like this later that day:

I think the point of 11h is to achieve that kind of range without directional antennas. Basically as a higher-bandwidth version of LoRa.

Yeah, that one took me a minute. I think “drip” or “slow drip”? I know “drip” used to be a term but was never one I associated with “screwball” or “crackpot”. Usually I’d heard “drip” to mean something closer to “dull” or “boring”.

Pretty decent unless there’s a lot of animation / video in them. Calling, texting, looking up something on the internet, bank app, auth app, etc all work great. Some of the stock Android components don’t work super great with it, though, like the quick action buttons (though, arguably, they don’t work great on any Android phone either lol).

Feels sluggish at times but that’s just the e-ink being what it is. I mostly treat it like a dumb phone that’s also an e-reader.

I’ve always joked that coding as a hobby is just digital knitting lol.

I’ve gradually weaned off of smartphones over the last 18 months. Currently daily-driving the Minimal Phone and loving its distraction-free (or at least distraction-lite) ways.

I may not be analog like the article is highlighting, but I have basically eliminated the doom scrolling and have reignited my passion for reading (the one “distraction” the Minimal Phone does well is being an e-reader since it’s got an e-ink screen).

Roughly 1,600 TikTok posts were tagged #AnalogLife during the first nine months of 2025

I’m just going to ignore the irony of that and appreciate it at face value 😆

15 posts for a 3hr old account. Slow your roll, Louna.

The regular R4 is about $250 right now so I’d guess at least that much. A little pricey and probably over-powered for my use cases, but probably a bargain if you need the horsepower.

Ooh, I haven’t tried RTL-SDR on it yet, but I think I’m nearing capacity on what it can do at once lol.

Here’s the block diagram for it (in spoiler below). Everything’s up and running except the Bluetooth Receiver -> Snapcast (it works on the bench but I don’t have the scripting/automation done yet). I’m also adding an SMA connector for an external antenna, but the new base part is still printing. Photo shows it “as is” of this writing.

SSL for the web apps was a PITA since I wanted real certs. Had to make a wildcard domain under my main hobby domain, so all my apps are like “https://{APP_NAME}.mobile.mydomain.xyz/”

As soon as I can get the Bluetooth + Pulseaudio scripting done, I’m gonna try to do a write up and maybe a show/tell post.

I would love to have a small Wikipedia browser that can survive the apocalypse.

I’ve got the full 120 GB Wikipedia dump running in Kiwix on a Raspberry Pi Zero. Works great (surprisingly)

E-ink display, mini keyboard

Have been using a Minimal Phone for a few months now which has both of those. Can connect to the Pi easily.

multiple ways/ports to transfer info,

Add a USB-C hub (or add a hub to the Pi) and you’re set

All wrapped up in a heavy duty equipment case that’s able to survive a building collapses and burns in an earthquake, that’s shielded from EMP.

And that’s where I’m limited - My 3D printer can only do so much lol. 😆

I’ve been working on a side project this week with a Orange Pi Zero 2W (Pi Zero “clone” but with better specs). It’s got the Kiwix+Wikipedia like my older Pi (described above) plus a bunch of other neat stuff. It’s kind of a combination travel router, portable web app server, party box, and extremely over-engineered bluetooth speaker all-in-one. Hoping to put together a show-and-tell post about it when I get the last of it squared away.

What kind of mad person shuffles their whole collection?

Me! lol

The musical whiplash is strong. It’ll go Pantera, Slipknot, Lady Gaga, Children of Bodom, the theme from Three’s Company, Spice Girls, Waylon Jennings, N’Sync, Foo Fighters, STP, Britney Spears, etc. You never know what’s next.

The sad thing is I have a fully functional MPD + Snapcast setup I could use (including a TUI MPD client), but this is just what I’ve always done. Old habits and such lol.

This allows for seamless communication with biological cells

Smartphones in 2040:

Whatever. As long as I can run LineageOS or Debian on it.

Because if we don’t build and profit from the Torment Nexus, someone else will

I do wonder what the refresh rate is like on these. I’ve been daily driving a Minimal Phone for a few months now. While I like it, it definitely took some getting used to. While it’s actually quite snappy, it feels abysmally slow even compared to the Cat S22 Flip it replaced (which is a low-end Android smartphone in a flip phone form factor).

I also wonder why they bothered with a camera on it. The camera on the Minimal is extremely “meh”, but the thing that makes it mostly useless is the refresh rate of the e-ink. You never know if you got a blurry mess of a picture or what. The firmware will put the screen into “fast refresh / low fidelity” mode to try to improve it, but it’s still a roll of the dice when trying to take any kind of photo. About the only thing it’s good for is scanning QR codes.

Can we not go 5 freaking minutes without hearing about Donald Trump?

I think I’m just gonna get some Pi Zeros + cameras and just roll my own. Probably use the NoIR versions and some cheap IR illuminators. Feed those into Zoneminder.

Bonus points if I can find some old CCTV cameras, gut them, and fit the pi camera to those optics.

That’s a real hero move, and I appreciate it.