Backing up your smartphone images usually involves sending them to the cloud or manually syncing them to a computer. Seamless? Maybe, until you have to start paying monthly storage fees. And while you can plug a hard drive into many modern smartphones, it isn’t quite user-friendly or universal across all smartphones.
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PhotoCube PD+, launched via Kickstarter and Indiegogo by Hong Kong electronics company Photofast, aims to make cloud-free physical backups of phone photos more straightforward.
Built for USB-C devices, the PhotoCube PD+ attaches directly to your smartphone or tablet and is compatible with both iOS and Android. It accepts microSD cards with up to 2TB of storage space, and you can interchange your cards if needed.
Supporting SD cards up to 2TB in size, the PhotoCube PD+ can be configured to automatically back up photos when plugged in, as well as additional data like contacts, without the need for additional cables.
An obvious downside is that the device won’t work with iPhones older than the iPhone 15 or any other device that doesn’t have a USB-C port. Android users shouldn’t have an issue using the portable device, even with slightly older handsets.
While there’s no monthly fee, PhotoCube PD+ obviously costs money upfront. Also, PhotoCube PD+ doesn’t come with built-in storage or a card included, so prepare to bring your own.
Note/disclaimer: Remember to do your research with any crowdfunding project before backing it. Pledges to crowdfunding campaigns are not pre-orders. DPReview does not have a relationship with this, or any such campaign, and we publicize only projects that appear legitimate, and which we consider will be of genuine interest to our readers. You can read more about the safeguards Kickstarter has in place on its ‘Trust & Safety‘ page.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team’s systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel. The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.
"When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organization moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless," Vowles told The Race. Because of the multiple states each part could be in — ordered, backordered, inspected, returned — humans are often left to work out the details. "And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are." The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many. Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team’s factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was "viciously expensive," Fry told The Race, and making up for the painful process required "humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking."
The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12-$16 million each, with resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters, and it actually makes sense, if you’ve ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized organization. Then again, it’s not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport Formula One’s Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines long — more than three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution in 2023.
Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This leaves F1 teams "susceptible to the plague of legacy software," Anthony wrote, though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system that year. (Renault was also "a big Microsoft shop" in other areas, like email and file sharing, at the time.) One year prior to Anthony’s excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go "Beyond Excel." "If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel," Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it. Banks cited Tim Worstall’s 2013 contention that Excel could be "the most dangerous software on the planet." Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.
Enlarge/ A pit stop during the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix in early March evokes how the team’s manager was feeling when looking at the Excel sheet that managed the car’s build components.
ALI HAIDER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
There’s a new boss at a storied 47-year-old Formula 1 team, and he’s eager to shake things up. He’s been saying that the team is far behind its competition in technology and coordination. And Excel is a big part of it.
Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team’s systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel.
The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked for information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.
"When you start tracking now hundreds of 1000s of components through your organisation moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless," Vowles told The Race (which uses British spellings). Because of the multiple states each part could be in—ordered, backordered, inspected, returned—humans are often left to work out the details. "And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are."
The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many. Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team’s factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was "viciously expensive," Fry told The Race, and making up for the painful process required "humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking."
Williams’ driver Alexander Albon drives during the qualifying session of the Saudi Arabian Formula One Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Jeddah on March 8, 2024.
Joseph Eid/AFP via Getty Images
The devil you know strikes again
The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12-$16 million each, inside a resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters, and it actually makes sense, if you’ve ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized organization.
Then again, it’s not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport Formula One’s Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines long—more than three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution in 2023.
Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This leaves F1 teams "susceptible to the plague of legacy software," Anthony wrote, though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system that year. (Renault was also "a big Microsoft shop" in other areas, like email and file sharing, at the time.)
One year prior to Anthony’s excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go "Beyond Excel." "If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel," Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it.
Banks cited Tim Worstall’s 2013 contention that Excel could be "the most dangerous software on the planet." Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.
But spreadsheets continue to show up where they ought not. Spreadsheet errors in recent years have led to police doxxing, false trainee test failures, an accidental $10 million crypto transfer, and bank shares sold at sorely undervalued prices. Spreadsheets are sometimes called the "dark matter" of large organizations, being ever-present and far too relied upon despite 90 percent of larger sheets being likely to have a major error.
So Excel sheets catch a lot of blame, even if they’re just a symptom of a larger issue. Still, it’s good to see one no longer connected to the safety of a human heading into a turn at more than 200 miles per hour.
Have you ever worked on a hobby project where modifying and compiling the source code for a Linux-based emulator was possibly the easiest and most straightforward part of the whole thing?
Kevin Noki really, really wanted a functioning Macintosh Plus, complete with a functioning, auto-ejecting disk drive that it could boot from. The German maker already had a Mac Plus (1Mb) from eBay, but it had both a busted power supply and floppy drive. Rather than carve out the busted Plus’ one-of-a-kind internals and slap a Raspberry Pi in there like some DIY slacker, Noki went … a different path.
47 minutes and 25 seconds of a tour-de-force of modern maker technology.
Noki 3D-printed his own Macintosh, the "Brewintosh." I would like you to consider what you think that last sentence means and then wipe your expectations clean. I have watched the entire 48-minute journey of Noki’s Brewintosh, which is both very soothing on some ASMR-adjacent gut level and also low-key maddening for the way it plays down all the individual accomplishments along the way. Any one of the Brewintosh’s pieces would be my entire weekend, and my spouse would not enjoy my mood while I was sunk into it.
The design part of the Brewintosh, which you only see in super-fast time-lapse summary, but which is pretty, pretty notable.
Now the custom board-building, circuit design, and internal space configuration can begin!
The tiny two-part board Noki built to rework serial and ADB input to USB is pretty much its own project (and video).
Detail on the Brewintosh sticker and corner of the finished project.
But Noki, over what he reports as "months," essentially works backward from 2024, using every kind of maker tool and skill to get back to a working 1986 Mac. Not just "classic Mac OS on a properly sized AliExpress monitor," mind you. We are talking a properly sized, colored, and textured box, which takes wall power, swallows 3.5-inch disks, works with both telephone-cord and ADB Apple keyboards and mice, has a screen dimmer, and makes the startup sound (the beep, not the chord). It’s not a "loving" tribute, it’s uncanny and potentially unnerving.
If you wanted a non-historic but ultra-authentic Mac like Noki’s, this is the somehow-not-exhaustive list of 29 things for which you would have to have the tools, skills, and patience:
Meticulously measuring every single surface and angle of a Macintosh Plus
Design your own Brewintosh raised-text stereotype and apply foil to it with a laminator
Create custom-designed Brewintosh multicolor stickers, print them, apply UV resin for a glossy finish, and cure them
Design and print a replica sticker of the original Mac’s back panel
Record yourself doing all these things and edit them into an engaging video.
I didn’t include the smaller ("smaller") things Noki 3D-printed in that list because I respect your scroll fingers. You also have to design and accurately print at least 12 other components. That list includes the feet in resin, a screen board holder, an inner frame, power assembly cover, power cabling routing box, audio jack holder, USB port and SD card holder, internal speaker chassis, disk drive stepper motor attachment, manual disk eject, the brightness control dial, and probably a dozen tiny things Noki doesn’t even mention.
I am not actually suggesting anybody with a biologically limited lifespan attempt what Noki has done here. If you tackled each component and 3D-printed part as individual weekend projects, it adds up to more than 40 weeks. Mind you, printing the 3D parts alone took 48 hours, according to Noki. But even that spread presumes that you’re starting from the obvious familiarity Noki has with all his printers, cutters, and tools. He doesn’t include any mistakes or missteps in his video, but you just know in your heart that you would reach a certain point in the assembly and realize that something just doesn’t fit at all, so you must go back and do it, and possibly two or three other whole things, again.
Watching this video did a number on me. Seeing the astounding number of skills on display, paired with the Steven Jobs-like attention to detail, can be overwhelmingly intimidating or simply affirming and wonderful, depending on how you take it in. Someone in the YouTube comments points out a little bit that Noki himself doesn’t even mention in his subtitle text: that the monitor stays off until the vMac emulator has started and produced the tiny smiling Mac icon. All of that, just to get to the point where you can play 3D chess or use MacPaint in a little beige time machine.
You can serve millions of requests with this package. This package provides cacheable routes for Cloudflare. Thanks to Cloudflare, your static pages are served efficiently, reducing the load on your servers if they are cached for the TTL (Time to Live) duration. You can purge the cache whenever you need with this package.
You can use cache groups for your static contents.
Route::cache()->group(function () {
Route::get('/content', function () {
return'content';
});
});
You can use cache tags, so you can clear your caches easily. Specify custom ttl for expire time in seconds. When you do not pass ttl, it will use default ttl given in the config.
https://planetscale.com/assets/blog/content/the-problem-with-using-a-uuid-primary-key-in-mysql/the-problem-with-using-a-uuid-primary-key-in-mysql-social.jpgUnderstand the different versions of UUIDs and why using them as a primary key in MySQL can hurt database performance.Planet MySQL
Based on the synopsis for Star Wars: The Acolyte, you can expect more than just the typical action scenes and sci-fi world building from the show. It seems to have a mystery-thriller slant to it that you could find appealing even if you’re not a Star Wars fan but love that particular genre — and now Disney+ has released its official trailer to give you an idea of what you can expect. Star Wars: The Acolyte’s story is set at the end of the High Republic era, around a century before the events of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
It revolves around a former padawan played by Amandla Stenberg (Everything, Everything and The Hate U Give) who reunites with her old Jedi Master (Lee Jung-jae from Squid Game) to investigate a series of crimes. They, of course, unearth more and more clues as they look into the crime spree, which Disney says will lead them "down a dark path where sinister forces reveal all is not what it seems…" As a big fan of mystery and detective stories, it sounds promising, and I’d love it if Disney can nail the execution to give us a satisfying (and unpredictable) ending, as well.
Star Wars: The Acolyte will be available for streaming on Disney+ starting on June 4.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/watch-disneys-official-trailer-for-star-wars-the-acolyte-150246523.html?src=rssEngadget
The data storage journey is as old as computing, tracing a path from the earliest days of room-sized machines to today’s cloud-based ecosystems. Large-scale data storage has evolved dramatically to meet the ever-increasing demands of information technology. Understanding this evolution is not just about acknowledging past innovations but appreciating the complexities and challenges that have… Read More »The evolution of large scale data storage solutions
If youâre curious about web development, then youâve likely encountered the abbreviation MVC, which stands for Model-View-Controller. You may know that itâs a common design pattern thatâs fundamental to many Python web frameworks and even desktop applications.
But what exactly does it mean? If youâve had a hard time wrapping your head around the concept, then keep on reading.
In this tutorial, youâll:
Approach understanding the MVC pattern through a Lego-based analogy
Learn what models, views, and controllers are conceptually
Tie your conceptual understanding back to concrete web development examples
Investigate Flask code snippets to drive the point home
Maybe you built things with Lego as a kid, or maybe youâre still a Lego-aficionado today. But even if youâve never pieced two Lego blocks together, keep on reading because the analogy might still be a good building block for your understanding.
Take the Quiz: Test your knowledge with our interactive âModel-View-Controller (MVC) in Python Web Apps: Explained With Legoâ quiz. Upon completion you will receive a score so you can track your learning progress over time:
Explaining the Model-View-Controller Pattern With Lego
Imagine that youâre ten years old and sitting on your family room floor. In front of you is a big bucket of Lego, or similar modular building blocks. There are blocks of all different shapes and sizes:
ð¦ð¦ð¦ Some are blue, tall, and long.
ð¥ Some are red and cube-shaped.
ð¨ð¨ Some are yellow, big, and wide.
With all of these different Lego pieces, thereâs no telling what you could build!
Just as your mind is filling with the endless possibilities, you hear something coming from the direction of the couch. Itâs your older brother, voicing a specific request. Heâs saying, âHey! Build me a spaceship!â
âAlright,â you think, âthat could actually be pretty cool.â A spaceship it is!
So you get to work. You start pulling out the Lego blocks that you think youâre going to need. Some big, some small. Different colors for the outside of the spaceship, different colors for the engines.
Now that you have all of your building blocks in place, itâs time to assemble the spaceship. And after a few hours of hard work, you now have in front of youâa spaceship:
[ Improve Your Python With ð Python Tricks ð â Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]
