The Thirsty Robot

 Here's some of what you missed at The Thirsty Robot: Technical Musings Technology Topic - Robust mobile phones Photo by  Ashkan Forouzani  on  Unsplash The world is a dangerous and challenging place for technology. Not only do batteries run out of power, but places to recharge them are not always easy to find (or afford!). Gravity has a nasty habit of taking technological devices and smashing them into zillions of little pieces - or worse, just wrecking one essential component so that the usefulness (or the pose value) is forever tainted (screens on mobile phones, for example.) Water and other liquids used to be a major problem for portable electronics, with caffeinated fizzy drinks, coffee, and anything else bad being seemingly inexorably attracted to keyboards regardless of the presence of gravity or not.  Advances in sealing phones now give us the dubious luxury of phones which can survive momentary immersion in water, or contact with water, but unlike the a...

Here's some of what you missed at The Thirsty Robot: Technical Musings Technology Topic - Alternative Operating Systems Not what you might be expecting... There was no mention of Windows or macOS in this discussion. Instead the chat circled around alternative Linuxes, and particularly Kali - the specialised 'security-oriented' community-project offering from Offensive Security .  If you aren't familiar with the extreme customisation that security people prefer in their operating systems, then the words 'specialised' and 'security' are the most important keywords here. Kali is not intended to be used as a general purpose operating system by ordinary people - for that you should use something designed to be as easy to install and maintain as possible:  Mint Linux being just one example of a popular 'distro' that fulfills those 'straight-forward' and 'easy to use' criteria. A lot of people use Mint Linux as an alternative to the W ...