Welcome to issue #16 of the Dithering Digest Weekly Tech Roundup of geeky news and links.
Another week, another amazing Home Assistant update, this time for Pi 5. Plus some doorbell camera security shenanigans.
Have a lovely weekend, and enjoy the links.
Home Assistant support for Raspberry Pi 5
Home Assistant OS 12 adds support for Raspberry Pi 5 and ODROID-M1S boards, with the Linux kernel updated to 6.6. Additionally, backups have become faster, and add-ons can now signal when they should not be auto-updated.
This should make for a pretty awesome Home Assistant server using the extra power and speed of the Pi 5 and the ability to have it run from an nVME drive for reliability.
🔗 https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/02/26/home-assistant-os-12-support-for-raspberry-pi-5/
Samsung releases new SD cards with SSD level performance
This should be interesting for those of us running Raspberry Pi boards at home. The microSD cards are convenient but can be a data bottleneck. Samsung claim to be using some advanced new tech to make microSD cards capable of 800MBs speeds to rival SSD drives.
I expect some Raspberry Pi YouTubers will put these claims to the test in the near future, so keep you eyes peeled for results!
🔗 https://www.howtogeek.com/samsung-sd-express-microsd-cards/
nGinx gets forked to Freenginx following developer dispute
nGinx (pronounced “engine x”) is a free open source web server that currently powers around a third of the web. Maxim Duonin, one of the main developers, has left the project to form the new Freenginx fork as he feels that the original project is no longer fully free and open and is being held to too many corporate interests.
nGinx is a brilliant piece of software and it will be interesting to see over the coming months and years how far apart these two projects diverge.
🔗 https://www.makeuseof.com/freenginx-nginx-fork-web-server/
SetApp will be an alternative App Store for iOS
The amazing developers at MacPaw behind the subscription service SetApp have announced that they will bring an alternative App Store to iOS in April. This is made possible by the recent EU fair market rules brought in compelling Apple to open things up on iOS.
I am excited to see this happen as a very happy SetApp subscriber but as I am in the UK I am not going to be able to avail (just yet, UK government are looking into implementing similar legislation that will force Apple to apply these rules to the UK in due course).
🔗 https://macpaw.com/news/setapp-ios-beta-announcement
Beware of cheap doorbell cameras
Cheap doorbell cameras are a security threat according to Consumer Reports. Certain models have been found to be lax about sending data over unencrypted links and some models can be accessed just by knowing the serial number (which are likely sequential and potential easy to guess).
As more and more IoT devices find their way into people’s homes it is going to become more important to find brands that can be trusted (and hopefully ones that submit to independent security auditing)
Computer Joke of the Week
I get anxious whenever I have to use the default Microsoft web browser.
Using Chrome helps take the Edge off.
If you have any cool projects or tinkering you are doing, let us know and we will feature it in future issues of the digest. I would love to hear what you are all dithering on!
Until next week, happy dithering!
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