I'm spending time at a new city and Google Maps is shit for walking. It's hard to say exactly what's wrong with it, everything feels wrong. Car centric logic just doesn't work for walking I guess (yes I'm using the walking mode). It feels bad, unreliable, and I'm lost all the time. Yesterday I ended up 2 hours away from my destination and had to call an Uber (big humiliation!). Walking is my preferable way of urban exploration and I hate talking to strangers.

What I want is a simple compass that tells me "go to that general direction and you'll get there". No map, no street names. Just an arrow and a linear distance (like, in a straight line). Like a videogame. Without foreknowledge, street names are just confusing and unnecessary. I can handle the route myself.

Does such an app exists?

A student asked me this question today. They were looking into lithium batteries and e-waste and whatnot.

My initial response was something low, like maybe five or six, but the more I thought about it, the higher the number kept climbing — old phones, key fobs, wireless mice, flashlights, a food thermometer, etc.

I’m not sure I have an official count yet, but the number is WAY higher than my gut reaction. I also thought it was an interesting thought experiment, so I figured I’d ask here to prompt people to do their own inventory.

How many battery-operated devices do you have in your home? (They don’t have to specifically be lithium batteries, but if you want to limit it to just that, feel free).

I will shortly have need for a small, low power (power as in watts, not compute power) system for always-on Home Assistant use. However, Raspberry Pis are out of stock everywhere and while they can be had for extortionate prices on various auction/marketplace sites, I'm not sure I want to spend a load of money on something which might not even be what it claims to be.

Home Assistant suggest Odroid which I'd probably go for the C4 edition but it's relatively expensive (I need to add an MMC and a psu and various other things to the listed main board price)

Any suggestions? The Asus Tinkerboard looks overkill and is very expensive. It needs to be capable of running a standard Linux distro, ideally Home Assistant's own OS. Low power consumption is a definite, 2-3W at idle is probably the maximum I'd be happy with. Wifi is a bonus although not required right now - but the ability to add it if needed is essential. Some amount of expansion capability would be good if I want to add hardware sensors or bluetooth or a Zigbee transceiver or whatever. It needs some reasonably amount of compute grunt I assume but I don't think HA is all that hungry for number crunching power. The machine will more than likely be headless at first but a little bit of GPU and graphical IO would be handy if I want to stick a display on it in the future, which I might want to.

Any ideas? Oh, and also must be easily available in/to the UK.

Well, as the headline says my son wants to join Discord to talk to his friends while playing Roblox on the iPad. Up until now he's been using Teams to communicate while playing. Recently his friends have been switching to Discord so naturally he wants that too.

I only know Discord by name so I'm looking for insight into how it works and how safe it is for children and in general. I'm aware that the age limit is 13.

Pretty much what the title says - I’ve been looking for something small and not too expensive to run a few VMs on recently, and I’m just genuinely amazed at where the tiny SBC space is at right now.

The Celeron N5105 seems to be the go to choice at the moment. You can get an entire machine running that CPU that’s slightly smaller than an old double CD jewel case, for $150. Less than $200 if you want 16GB RAM and a fast NVMe SSD in there too. Four decent quality 2.5GbE NICs thrown in as a bonus. And it’s not that much slower than my expensive full size desktop from late 2020.

Part of me thinks I’m just getting old - phones have been plenty of people’s primary computer for years now, after all - but there’s something about having a real standalone x86 PC that size for literally 1/5th the price of a flagship phone that just blows my mind.