Giovanni's blog

This is less a Part 2 than an interregnum on a walkthrough plan for booting an OS on my 2014-era 1st gen Galileo board that I purchased earlier this year. While it's a lot more productive to write code or actually get the board to boot, talking about what I'm doing might actually interest people who are late bloomers to this hobby (for lack of a better word). I am hoping it doesn't take me all summer, but if it does, it will be a Summer of Code. In the past few days, I have discovered some other hobbyists testing the Galileo board as recently as 2024 and 2025 (and likely 2026 too), who encountered some issues with SSHing into their system, both via the USB to Serial adapter, and via a LAN connection. There are various reasons why this might be, and since I am running an update on Rocky Linux 9.5, I have not included links to save bandwidth on a limited connection. But the gist of the issue is that SSHing into the Galileo board may return a "connection refused" err...

One of the marvels of new technology is the increasing efficiency of video codecs. The first video codec I recall was MPEG-1, along with .avi. It's been a long while since I had much of an interest in codecs, although I have on occasion preferred H.265 when available (over H.264), such as when recording with my Vega 56 GPU, which has a hardware based encoder. This helps keeps screen recording files smaller. I also have an SVT-AV1 software-based encoder on my Ryzen CPU. AV2 and H.266 are being developed, and AV2 is probably going to be released later this year. This will allow more efficient 8k and 4k videos, but there are also improvements in the file sizes for smaller resolutions. Since I have been testing a slow mobile data plan (with "unlimited" data beyond a 1GB alottment), I have been curious how much "bang" I could get on a budget MVNO plan. The answer might surprise you. A couple weeks ago, I was testing out a 128Kbps plan, which if most of the internet...

                Since 2020, I've taken on a Steve Jobs alter-ego (on a very, very part time basis, and often for humor purposes ). The first essay I wrote wasn't even related to hardware, or solar powered-conscious operating systems that began around the same time. It was actually about one of my former jobs, regarding Knowledge Bases. Using one every day, I thought there had to be a better way to integrate steps taken into a ticket management system, to show proof of work. I won't say which system and which company, since it doesn't matter. I thought back at the time, where else did someone care so much about not only user experience, but the employee's experience? And I realize it was Steve Jobs. Here is the essay I wrote, on a higher level Knowledge Base called Experience Base, later included in part of a concept CMS called TicketMS. A month ago, I read an article by Dr. Nathalie Martinek that basically described the exact problem my organi...

If you're like me, you've grown up on desktop "programs." In the late 00's, this got changed to "apps" because the mobile device market took away the leading attention span from computer users (mainly new ones). The first time I heard someone say the word "apps" to refer to mobile phone programs, it was 2011 or 2012. I knew something had changed. Programs no longer had the same pull as they once did, even though they were practically the same thing. It's pronounced " programs ." Whenever you hear someone say "bring back this or that," they always sound like a person raising their fist at the sky. I remember someone who used to follow me on Facebook, who would like or share posts that said, "bring back X penalty for X crime" More often than not, they were just a lonely person. So I am not going to say "bring back program" nomenclature. You can call it whatever you want. Even peach rinds. I know peaches...

 I've had this want for a while, but I haven't been able to put it in words because I have not found a good metaphor for what I am trying to accomplish. While newer fiber optic internet and 5G carriers have been able to deliver magnitudes more bandwidth, a lingering problem for speed issues concerns gaps in service, and how to maintain optimum connectivity when bandwidth is intermittent or slows to a crawl, for whatever reason. For example, when internet is throttled to just 128kbps, one can implement a data saver mode on smartphones to limit background services and notifications. But there isn't really an easy or quick way to check ALL the services, nor toggle them all without spending an hour in the settings. It took me around 2 weeks to get accustomed to some of the finer-grained controls on my Android phone, in not only enabling Data Saver mode, which I have used for years in certain instances, but the permission levels and amount of times apps will "ping home...