Gareth HalfacreeIt's #Hackster round-up time, and your five today starts with the DSTIKE-DA - a compact ESP32-powered Bluetooth speaker (3W, mono)... in a gumstick format. Yeah, with a USB Type-A connector on the end.
Then Canonical, with the announcement that #Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will need 6GB of RAM minimum - up from 4GB for previous versions.
Weirdly, this now gives Ubuntu a higher minimum RAM requirement than Windows 11, which will officially run on 4GB.
I mean, not *well*, but it's the official minimum.
Bit of #science next as a team of researchers come up with an on-device machine learning model ("AI") which can filter out the noise from a drone's own props to make ultrasonic sonar obstacle sensing work.
I might have to make myself one of these, 'cos it looks awesome: the Flash Bee, not a kid's walkie-talkie but a Franklin lightning detector that can work out when there's been a strike within 40km... and how powerful it was. And how many there have been recently. And how powerful *they* were.
Last but not least, a desktop robot that'll play a game of catch.
Kinda: it's static, and you just throw the ball at a net in the back - but then it works out how far away you are with an ultrasonic distance sensor and revs up a drum to fire the ball back at just the right speed.
Those stories are also available via the #GeminiProtocol, too:
DSTIKE-DA Bluetooth speaker:
gemini://tilde.club/~ghalfacree/202604/20260402-dstike.gmi
Ubuntu's new RAM requirements:
gemini://tilde.club/~ghalfacree/202604/20260402-ubuntu.gmi
Ultrasonic obstacle avoidance for drones:
gemini://tilde.club/~ghalfacree/202604/20260402-bat.gmi
The Flash Bee:
gemini://tilde.club/~ghalfacree/202604/20260402-flash.gmi
Catch-playing desktop bot:
gemini://tilde.club/~ghalfacree/202604/20260402-ball.gmi
Murdoc Addams 🧛🏻
🇨🇦@ghalfacree
"Not well"
Ah, takes me back to my first copy of Windows 95. Min reqs called for a 386 with 4 mb ram. I had a 486 with 4 mb, so I thought I'd be fine. Took a whole day to install the thing. But once it was, it did work. I mean, it took 10 seconds just to load the Start menu, and programs? Those were often measured in minutes. (Basically everything was running off of the swap drive.) But boy was it fancy looking. It even came with free music video from Weezer. Ah those halcyon days...
"Not well"
Ah, takes me back to my first copy of Windows 95. Min reqs called for a 386 with 4 mb ram. I had a 486 with 4 mb, so I thought I'd be fine. Took a whole day to install the thing. But once it was, it did work. I mean, it took 10 seconds just to load the Start menu, and programs? Those were often measured in minutes. (Basically everything was running off of the swap drive.) But boy was it fancy looking. It even came with free music video from Weezer. Ah those halcyon days...
River City Random ☑️@murdoc @ghalfacree was the Weezer music video watchable on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM? I remember it was a little choppy even on my AMD-K6...
@rivercityrandom
Sorry, that I don't remember. All I remember is being amazed at how they were able to insert themselves so seamlessly into an episode of Happy Days.
@ghalfacree oh great, I wonder what vibe-coded privacy-destroying corpo-bloaty AI slop they put in to choke out us 2010 netbook users who for some reason are still using full-fat Ubuntu with just 4 GB of RAM