Rain has kept me indoors for the last few days, so I haVe had a
bit more time to administer a phlogging to my readers.
Continuing on the theme of minimalism and particularly technoid
geek minimalism, I think it might be in order to do a series of
posts.  In today's post, I'll expand a bit on minimalistic
computing. As mentioned previously, I am transitioning
to the Raspberry Pi Zero as my primary machine.  I am sure that
revelation will draw gasps of horror.  How can one possibly get
through life using a box with 512 MB of memory and a 1 Ghz
processor? I assume the reader already has at least some
knowledge about the Pi.  If not, have a look here:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/

To be clear, the Zero is designed primarily for projects, but I
decided to see if I could carry on my day to day activities on a
computer half the size of the bonus toy harmonica from that
childhood box of Crackerjacks.  To my surprise, I am still able
to accomplish quite a bit with this little $5 USD gem.  Still,
expectations have to be set at a reasonable level.  Bleeding edge
video gaming will not happen on this machine, but having
identified my basic needs, I am pretty confident I can it done on
the Pi Zero.  On reflecting on it a bit, I figured if I can still
get most of my work done on a 20 year old Toshiba laptop, the Pi
Zero should easily do the job at a fraction of the power
consumption.  Email?...No problem.  Spreadsheets?...even easier.
Media?...haven't tried it yet, but the Raspian OS does come with
omx-player.  Web Browser?  The Epiphany browser is the default
browser with Raspian which does cough and sputter on some sites
which are heavily laden with fluff and massive balls of compiled
java script.  Falling back to the links2 browser with the gui
option effectively strips out most of the useless s#it.
Youtube?...probably not, but with youtube-dl, the videos can be
downloaded for later viewing with the omxplayer (or omxplayer
might be able to play the stream...might be worth experimenting).

I was able to get the dialup modem working so that task can be
ticked off the list (found some free dialup in my area btw). I
was also able to get the SDR (Software Defined Radio) dongle
working as well on the command line.  All in all, I think I am
getting quite a bit of computing bang for my buck.  It has been a
bit of a learning curve, but that is the fun part.  Is it for
everyone?  Of course not, but in the not too distant future, I
believe difficult decisions are going to have to be made as we
ease into a post oil economy where the tremendous amounts of
energy input required to not only manufacture, but to operate
these devices.  As mentioned previously, our ~ 300 year tryst
with fossil fuels is just about over, and the energy market is
going to drive our purchasing (and usage) habits as well as
government policy.  Some of the catchy phrases we hear bantered
about such as: "reduce, reuse, recycle" or "collapse now and
avoid the rush" are going to be more poignant than ever.

*Update*

Video with the omxplayer seems to work quite well.  I downloaded
a 30 second video snippet from Youtube with youtube-dl and it
played just fine on the Zero although it was a low res video
without sound.  Interestingly, the media player also plays from
the command line without the GUI interface.  This frees up extra
resources for the media player.  Stay tuned.

Changing the subject a bit, there are a couple of articles that
are eye openers with regard to nuclear radiation and so called
"normal" background radiation:

https://tinyurl.com/yc33mau7

And of course this one for the doom porn department:

https://tinyurl.com/y7m2gtcv