Welcome to issue #3 of the Dithering Digest Weekly Roundup! Kick back and enjoy these articles we think will pique your geek interest. Oh and we finish with a new joke section ;)
Black Friday / Cyber Monday
Don’t forget that the Internet is awash with deals for the next week or two (not that you could miss it!!). Amazon tend to have deep discounts on their Fire TV range of products and the Alexa line (over 60% off in many cases) and a totally bananas invite-only Prime deal for a 55inch TV for only £149 (down from £549.99)!
And I may or may not have ordered myself a 3D printer…….. posts to come about that in the future!
8 Best Productivity Apps for Mac
This post from HowToGeek lists some of their top time-saving apps for Mac. I definitely agree with 1Password and Alfred for sure (although I am tempted by rayCast having seen some of their awesome plugins!). Have a read and see how it compares to our previous article on how to Supercharge your Mac with app from SetApp
🔗 https://www.howtogeek.com/best-productivity-apps-for-mac/
Raspberry Pi Code Editor Updates
Raspberry Pi have released some nifty updates to their online Code Editor. It now supports coding in HTML and CSS in addition to the Python it already supported. It also supports mobile devices.
This should make it excellent for trying out bits of code and especially useful in the classroom for computing teachers with tablets and iPads. The editor is also open source so you can host it yourself if you want a little code playground to hack around on in your home lab!
🔗 https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/html-code-editor/
8 Custom GPTs You Can Start Using Right Now
This post from MakeUseOf lists some of the most useful GPTs you can use today. GPTs are small bots powered by ChatGPT that have been built and customised by users to perform a specific task better than a generalised ChatGPT. This is a fast evolving area as there are hundreds already and ChatGPT only released these a week or two ago!
Have a look and see if any take your fancy. I plan to have a go at building a few for myself to help me in my day to day work.
🔗 https://www.makeuseof.com/best-custom-gpts/
Also don’t miss this video from OpenAI introducing what GPTs are:
10 Basic Programming Principles Every Programmer Must Know
I found this post very interesting. I am not a programmer by any means, but through my tinkering with Raspberry Pi and Arduino, and cobbling together some custom systems for automation in work I have picked up a bit of Python and PHP.
I could definitely use some of the ideas in this article to sharpen up my code and who knows I might even try to write an app someday!
🔗 https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/basic-programming-principles/
Free Arduino Course for Everybody
This free YouTube video course from FreeCodeCamp is over 10 hours long! Covering all manner of topics to get up and running with Arduino and other electronics it could be just what you are looking for to get started. And while there, have a look around FreeCodeCamp’s channel. They offer free courses on a huge range of topics and they are great quality. A truly amazing resource.
Computer Joke of the Week
I love jokes. Especially bad ones. So I intend to inflict one on you every week from now on in this final section of the newsletter.
Don’t use “beef stew” as a computer password. It’s not stroganoff.
See you all next week! Stay safe and keep dithering!
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