Coreman’s Colourful Cavalcade of Computing

As this is my new stop to log my wanderings, I am about to post about some of the upcoming toys and projects in my near future. I’ll be taking a short moment first to thank you for stopping by my rickety shack of misspellings, aweful puns and alliteration. This site is here as my daily changelog as I try to gravitate away from the horrid grips of Facebook and Instagram as well as their distasteful practices. I could preach on this subject for days but will get to the intended task. It’s Amazon day and I chose to order a new modem and router. They aren’t the latest and greatest but my house needed replacements and I’m on a super tight budget. Also I don’t like supporting the evil giant Amazon but on my very low income, it was very much necessary as well as the Amazon day deals were far too good to pass up on. I decided on an Asus ac66u. Merlin may have dropped support for it, but there is a fork that will continue to release security patched that is referred to as John’s fork, a fork that focuses on stability. For those of you who don’t know asus-merlin firmware is like a bridge between oem firmware and Linux firmwares like Openwrt. I love that the drivers are usually very stable and well built but the features are very hackworthy for enthusiasts like myself. You can use entware, ssh, cron jobs, and scripts. The router may be a legacy option but ac1750 bandwidth and gigabit ports are enough for me. Finally the 60 dollar price for the refurb makes it a perfect pick for a network-phile on a budget like myself. Being broke and on a budget brings me to my next order in a few days when my pennies are all in a row. As you may know, being a tech nerd hopefully as my targeted audience, that the raspberry pi is the most recognizable and influential device in the enthusiast and tech world today. You may also know of the latest news regarding it, the raspberry pi 4 just dropped. I currently have a raspberry pi 3 sitting in my living room cabinet acting as a dlna/smb/ftp server, basically a cheap nas system. Me being a frugal script kiddie, I’ve always been in love with the single board computer market. Being torn between upgrading to an odroid hc2, xu4, banana pi or a pine64 device, I was super delighted when the pi foundation interrupted my careful shopping with a true milestone release in the history of the pi. Things that the pi have had going for it are it’s cheap tag, it’s very capable features and it’s availability. There are amongst all the pros in this tiny computer some hindrances that have customers going to other sbc(single board computer) options. The raspberry pi in it’s more recent revisions has still had it’s Ethernet controller tied to the USB controller. Making its dreams of being a budget nas not fully attained by everyone. It works just fine for me as my nephew’s server that I keep all of his children’s shows and movies on there so that we can easily play him a quick Pixar movie or the wiggles anywhere in my house. The pi also isn’t marketed as a nas to complain and I can’t complain at my use case as I’ve had no problems. The community and myself have loved the pi for its endless capabilities, now it is more so than ever a capable, small, and affordable device for almost any computing scenario that doesn’t require the thousand desktop rigs. True gigabit Ethernet, a speedy 1.5 gigahertz quad core processor, up to 4 gigabytes of ram, wifi/bt and all of this for the price of a couple sticks of desktop ram. Pick one up just to have it in the drawer, pick one up for your next project, or have one to learn Linux or replace a home server function. Now that they are in stock some places in the net, I’ve decided to snag one to upgrade my nephew’s server thus freeing up the still very useful raspberry pi 3 I’m currently using. So to conclude this rather wordy post go check out Amazon day still going on the 15/16th of July but go say some hail Marys for enjoying the fruits of the penny squeezing that Amazon does.