First steps The case – Corsair Carbide SPEC-06 PSU – EVGA 1000GQ Gold The motherboard – Asus Prime X470-Pro RAM – Corsair Vengeance RGB GPU – PNY GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Putting it all together Wrapping up This should be quick. The Asus Prime X470-Pro motherboard I’d settled on needs DDR4 RAM. The board supports 3600MHz memory. I’ve heard good… Read more »
First steps The case – Corsair Carbide SPEC-06 PSU – EVGA 1000GQ Gold The motherboard – Asus Prime X470-Pro RAM – Corsair Vengeance RGB GPU – PNY GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Putting it all together Wrapping up The motherboard is a critical part of any PC build. Although your decision is guided, to a large extent, by your choice of… Read more »
First steps The case – Corsair Carbide SPEC-06 PSU – EVGA 1000GQ Gold The motherboard – Asus Prime X470-Pro RAM – Corsair Vengeance RGB GPU – PNY GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Putting it all together Wrapping up This was the second purchase for this build, after the case, and is seriously over-specced. But that’s how I like my power supplies…. Read more »
First steps The case – Corsair Carbide SPEC-06 PSU – EVGA 1000GQ Gold The motherboard – Asus Prime X470-Pro RAM – Corsair Vengeance RGB GPU – PNY GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Putting it all together Wrapping up The case is one of the most boring parts of a PC build. But it’s where I had to start because, although motherboards… Read more »
First steps The case – Corsair Carbide SPEC-06 PSU – EVGA 1000GQ Gold The motherboard – Asus Prime X470-Pro RAM – Corsair Vengeance RGB GPU – PNY GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Putting it all together Wrapping up It’s time for a new PC, although it’s also hard to say why. For some reason, I find myself with a hankering for… Read more »
Often, when discussing projects on this blog, I share bits of code. Sometimes more than a bit. But I rarely share whole programs or libraries because, well, it’s a pain uploading it and making sure WordPress hasn’t munged characters. And it’s equally difficult to correct errors and keep code updated. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. “FFS, use GitHub.” And… Read more »
Recently, I found myself wanting to share some code via Github, but realised it contained my wifi password. That’s not a huge issue (see below), but neither is it a good idea. You should never hard-code credentials into your software – in principle. But when you’re hacking together an Internet of Things (IoT) toy for personal use in your own… Read more »
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be – it’s a lot better. Once upon a time, examining the past relied heavily on memory – an unreliable witness at best. Maybe you could dredge up a few old magazines and books, some dusty photos and a few other artefacts. But you were mostly dependent on whatever you’d personally kept from the… Read more »
Pretty much all of the code I’ve written for the Raspberry Pi (and the BeagleBone for that matter) has been in Python. It’s widely regarded as the de facto language for the platform, not least because it is newbie-friendly. But does it have to be this way? Ups and downs of Python It’s not hard to enumerate a long list of… Read more »
Setting the PATH environment variable should be a simple thing. But, for whatever reason, various flavours of *nix seem to have made it wilfully complex. I recently tidied up how paths are set on my iMac, running macOS 10.14, aka Mojave. And as this blog is basically my lab notebook, I thought I’d share. First, I use Bash as my… Read more »
Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of the world wide web. And if you want to get a feel for how far the web has come, try experiencing what it was like in those heady days of December 1990. Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim) built the original web while at The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) as a… Read more »
Go – or Golang if you prefer – is a powerful programming language, applicable to virtually any platform, from single-board computers (SBCs) such as the Raspberry Pi to supercomputer clusters. I tend to work at the lower end of that scale. And I was motivated to check out Go because it has a reputation for being fast – unlike, say,… Read more »
When I started in journalism we were still using manual typewriters to hack out copy that we sent to typesetters to be cast in hot metal. Ah, those were the days. Writing about the flowchart template I acquired a while back made me think about another handy bit of plastic that used to be an integral part of my job…. Read more »
There are three things that are certain in life – death, taxes and blown capacitors in old electronic equipment. But at least you can do something about the last one. Powering up a 35 year-old computer that has sat in a loft for the past two decades is foolish. But we did it anyway. The BBC Master ran fine for… Read more »
Okay, so I’ll be the first to admit that this has nothing to do with computers, electronics, robots or any of the other stuff that is usually the topic of the day here. But this is a big deal for me, and it’s my blog, so… I have a new book out. Finistère Insolite (Exceptional Finistère) is a collection of my… Read more »