I know the Raspberry Pi has that huge community behind, but alternatives like this one can spark the interest of kids who need incentives to grow, and this one offers well above the minimum necessary without serving them the whole dinner ready to eat. When I cut my teeth with M68k asm in the early 90s all I had was a terrible book poorly translated in Italian whose code examples were written half in German and half in English, a local BBS and no Internet; they can do a lot more with today's tools without any need of a huge community.
$136 on Amazon ($99 from AliExpress). Color me very impressed. Given the modern web, probably too under-powered to be a great experience for a daily driver, but probably not terrible if you are not a tab addict like myself.
My problem is the ARM chip and how likely I am going to have problems running a non-blessed OS on the thing. A year from now, will it be able to install a new kernel?
I also have to face reality in that I have zero real applications for the thing other than a cute novelty. I think almost everyone would be better served by a NUC ($400+) or refurbished SFF PC ($100-200 can be very competitive hardware).
> My problem is the ARM chip and how likely I am going to have problems running a non-blessed OS on the thing.
ARM shouldn't be a problem for a long time; there's a huge number of boards out there using that architecture and most of them are well supported by Linux.
Here are some Armbian images: https://users.armbian.com/balbes150/opi800/
The user is reliable and a regular Armbian contributor/maintainer.
> zero real applications for the thing other than a cute novelty
I think the main selling point of these devices is for kids to carry them in their backpack when they study with their friends, so that they have all their stuff in a single device that is more usable and safe than a cellphone and needs only a video connection, without messing with the family computer.
A relatively low cost independent device with exposed gpio ports could also have some uses in a lab to drive external hardware, microcontrollers programming, etc. If I had one I would probably use it for such tasks, including audio measurement by adding an external sound card.
As for "why not" the alternatives, it's because they get no ongoing support, and don't run mainline Linux, so you're stuck with what they ship with, and can never update them.
All the raspberry pi alternatives have some really Achilles heel software problems where they don't properly support everything the raspberry pi does. I will never buy one just because I want to run software on these computers and 90% of the time the thing I want to just doesn't support these things natively.
How can you know about them if you'll never buy one, and I presume you don't have any?
I have all RPis minus the CMs, the Zeros and the 400, then I also have a bunch of Orange Pis and NanoPis, one old Hackberry A10, one Odroid C2 and a couple Beaglebones I just bought used and still have to find the use for (possibly network services because of eMMC better reliability compared to sdcard). I loved playing with all of them, including the RPis.
I however stopped buying Raspberries (except maybe the Pico which I find a lot more interesting than the bigger ones) because of both their insane pricing and that "alternative"[0] boards can do whatever I need, and if something doesn't work, which happens rarely, I'm pretty sure it can be sorted out by searching and trial+error.
[0] Industrial boards aside (PC104 et al.) which predate those boards by a decade at least, for people who were playing with stuff like the Foxboard LX832 [1] as soon as it was released (2006), the Raspberry Pi became later the alternative, not the other way around. Granted, the Etrax 100lx was slow as a dead sloth compared to the RPi1 BCM, RAM and storage were constrained, and no WiFi, but hey, it ran Linux! I sold them on Ebay long ago, but kept their super cool Tux shaped plastic case [2].
One problem with this for kids is if it is connected to the monitor with a cable, kids used to wireless keyboard may try to grab it and get a surprise when it gets disconnected or pulls the monitor down with the keyboard.
Is it more powerful? Well, more memory, better video, but in terms of OP/s?
But I don't think it's such a great thing for kids per se. It depends on the experimentation environment they get. The hardware is almost irrelevant. Something as direct as a Commodore 64 looks more appealing to me than VSCode on a Raspberry.
Unless they’re following a particular course based on a specific thing like a Pi they’ll probably be better off with some older repurposed hardware, an old desktop PC with some sort of Linux perhaps.
The Pi shines when you’re interfacing with relays and sensors and stuff, for software alone a PC or laptop will be fine.
Are the raspberry pi still produced? They are always out of stock unless for very brief periods on some random stores, which makes me believe some may purchase some old stock once in a while but nothing is getting out of a factory.
The original pis were made to sell some chips that Broadcom had a ton of excess inventory for, and needed to move (hence why the price was so low compared to other SBCs at the time - the main SoCs were free). The modern version is now competing for a chip that's in demand, and can't offer the same price that other people can. They are still being produced since Broadcom doesn't want to cut them off completely, but not nearly as available.
Do you have source for the claims? I doubt especially of free parts. As of rumors I have heard about Broadcom it is extremely "capitalistic" company. If you move a lot of chips price can go down a lot (due the fact that NRE divides to more units). The cost of chip manufacturing alone is not that big - example Apple A14 bionic chip was estimated to cost 17$ to manufacture [0] and it should be waaaaay more expensive than anything in RPI.
I think that is something YouTube rolled out a year or two ago to isolate adult YouTube from kids. You know sometimes a video gets marked with a YT kids banner and comments are disabled and recommendations on the side bar replaced with generic videos.
I can think of a pretty obvious reason why the hard drive wasn't wiped: they didn't know it was there. A normal person processing a pile of donations would probably look at this and think "huh a strangely heavy keyboard," then move on to the next item.
Maybe the previous owner was deceased and it was gathered in an estate sale? Or left in a storage locker which the owner missed a payment on? There are many reasons!
> The one glaring issue here, is that this machine’s hard drive has not been cleaned out. I bought it from a computer recycling company so I would have expected the hard drive to been erased. But a quick skim of the drive and I can find documents, emails and unfortunately even porn.
This is probably pretty common, and there's so much opportunity for abuse. I can only assume that for all of the security out there, a trip to thrift stores and garage sales would keep your average identity thief busy for very little money.
At the height of bitcoin I wonder if the value of e-waste magnetic storage should have technically been higher due to the possibility of salvaging a lost wallet. Like ore mining, but for data.
I have not exploited this but can say with certainty that it would be an effective means of getting things like online banking credentials. But I imagine a venn diagram of people who have a local wallet and those who wipe or destroy their drive before recycling an old computer is extremely close to a circle.
When I need to destroy a hard drive, I use 1TBSP of Thermite (or stump remover if you go to the local ag supply store). Of course, the drive isn't very useful after, but it's so much fun.
People throw their PCs away. Many places gather "e-waste" in special piles for recycling. Just digging through that pile will get you more than you wanted.
Not that I ever have anything untoward on my computers, but this is why I sledgehammer all my PC drives before recycling them. (My biggest fear is there's enough information to get access to a bank account, or otherwise impersonate me.)
Today, I use whole-disk-encryption on everything, but I still wonder if there's ever a hidden partition or unallocated space with something on it, and it's not worth worrying about it.
This seems unneeded waste, maybe 10 random complete writes (or/and usage of paranoid safe deletion utilities) would be sufficient to erase the disk effectively?
Single pass disk encryption or zeroing is fine if you are not facing a nation state actor.
I do not think I have seen any credible threats that over-written data extraction works on modern drives. Maybe there are tricks where the SSD knows better and allocates blocks off to the side where it is not getting wiped, but those are supposedly addressed by TRIM (with dubious vendor support)
If someone comes across a drive that is zeroed or randomized, who is going to attempt some forensic investigation to retrieve the contents?
I'm not worried about a nation state spending a billion dollars. I'm worried about someone looking at an unalloated section of the drive, or in the sectors that the drive marked "bad", etc.
A low-level 0 write just takes a long time on a drive of even 1TB. So I sledge. And then I can look at the drive and know it's OK to toss.
Zeroing it is fine no matter who you're facing, to be honest.
The NSA don't have some big magic machine that can recover data that's been overwritten. It's gone.
The idea of using some latent amount of data on the disk and somehow averaging it all out to get the old data might maybe have worked a tiny bit on old MFM drives in the 1980s.
That requires connecting the drive to a working computer and hours of time. Compared to several quick blows. The metals in the drive can still be recycled even if the glass platters are shattered.
> Platters are typically made using an aluminium, glass or ceramic substrate. As of 2015, laptop hard drive platters are made from glass while aluminum platters are often found in desktop computers.
> In 1990, Toshiba released the MK1122FC, the first hard drive to use a glass substrate... It was originally designed for laptops, for which the greater shock resistance of glass substrates are more suitable.
The problem I run into when I finally go through my e-waste (usually when moving house) is that I no longer have any devices capable of operating the thing I'm recycling.
The first rule of erasing a drive is you can't erase a drive, whether it's a solid state or hard drive.
If you want or need to render the data on a drive inaccessible by any and all means, there really is no option other than physical destruction of the drive.
Disk encryption has always been advised for mitigating incidental leakage of data, such as stolen laptops or thumb drives that go missing.
But my understanding, both as an industry standard and as common sense (insofar as common as computer literacy is), is that the only true way to ensure data destruction is total physical destruction of the physical medium the data resides on.
No, definitely not. You can either use the SSD's built-in firmware encryption, which is always on anyways (to allow for fast erase), or you can configure your system to send TRIM commands.
OS encryption would prevent controller from understanding what's on the drive and managing it correctly, up to and including effectively disabling trim command as controller would never see blocks as empty.
This is back in days of ocz vertex. It wasn't like advertised / warned on the box, it would work... Just like western digital didn't warn about wd red becoming SMR drive while being advertised for Nas. But it would eventually kill performance and drive. You'd have to read Tom's hardware and anadtech etc to learn about it. I don't really follow anymore so I don't know how nicely os full drive encryption and ssds play today.
FDE doesn't prevent TRIM, but the dm-crypt implementation defaults to disabling TRIM because it has theoretical security consequences. The option to enable it was introduced in Linux 3.1 (2011)
My first computer! And: sort of. There was a separate box for the CPU, but the power switch was located on the daisywheel printer.
The word processor was in ROM, it had a slot for playing Coleco game cartridges, with two game controllers, and then there was its tape deck. It came with tapes for Buck Rogers and the BASIC interpreter. Once BASIC had been loaded, then you could swap in your own tapes for saving and restoring programs. It generally took a couple of minutes to use the tape drive.
The layout with the Windows sticker photo being the largest and the most prominent made me think that “this is a keyboard with a Windows license”. Back in the day, this was a thing, at least in Poland, with people selling OEM licenses of Windows attached to mice and keyboards and claiming they were legitimate (which I doubt, but I also doubt Microsoft cared).
> The built-in speakers are pretty much what you would expect from 2002, pretty much no bass to them, very much akin to average laptop speakers at the time.
Average laptop speakers have no bass today; I have no idea what this person is on about.
Most consumers have zero idea about speakers, or the physics necessary for accurate sound reproduction, so they believe the marketing.
That's why sites go to pains comparing the speakers on flatscreen TVs when they're all terrible, I mean they're tiny speakers aimed out of the rear or underside of the TV.
Hell, people can even be led to believe that 9.1 audio can come out of a small soundbar, and they'll buy the 9.1 soundbar over the inferior 7.1 one...
I know the graphs but I still find it amazing to see that this 20+ years old system runs with approximately the same CPU core frequency as today's hardware. The amount of RAM wouldn't suffice today, though.
These keyboard PCs were quite popular in the late 90s. I think because many home computers came in that format and manufacturers worried that clunky PCs would not be accepted. Turned out that wasn't the case.
The original owner must have liked using filters in Photoshop. I can’t think of another reason someone would pair a CPU like that with modest(for 2002) 512MB RAM and 40GB HDD
Not sure about today, but there was a time PCs were sold on overspecced CPUs. The consumer would look at the clock speed and think he is getting a "fast" computer. The vendor would pocket the savings on putting in weaker everything else.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
By the way, people say it's a great learning tool for kids but when I search for "kid using pi400" on youtube there are zero results.