Fighting with computers

It has been a while since my last post, but life gets in the way sometimes. The UNO form factor and the claim it was a 5V board made me pay more attention this time to this new board from Arduino. Having an ESP32 for Wi-Fi support was a nice touch, so while I did not make it as a beta tester, I shelled out some cash and got a commercial unit as soon as it was launched.  It is not only the built-in Wi-Fi but lots of other goodies, but you cannot but love the led matrix display <3 My first experience with the board was in an M1 Mac, which was completely trouble-free. The second test was with a Windows 10 machine, and the results were not good: I could not upload code to the board even though it was detected and the port was correctly set. I searched around and discovered this is a known issue . Bummer :-( That error happened using the new 2.1.0 IDE, so I returned to the older version installed on my computer, which was a no-go too. So I think that is all about it with Windows so far.

 After three months of use, I feel more comfortable with the iPhone. I think I only rebooted twice, and it seems pretty stable. I have not performed a thorough battery test, but I bet I could get four days of battery life with my usage. Usually, when I recharge it at night, I am around 80% of battery life; I reckon the most used day it was around 66%. So on that front, it is a strong performer, much better than any of the Samsung Galaxy models I have owned over the years (not sure how good the latest models are though).  Handling is good though it feels larger and heavier than my older Galaxy S10e. It takes excellent pictures, even in low light. For compatibility reasons, I changed the default photo/video format to HPEG and MOV files, though I guess it is optimized using HEIC. I was surprised that fingerprint detection was replaced by Face ID biometrics. That works well most of the time, though it might add a bit of lag and needs you to have your phone looking at you (which may not be