What is (or would be) the "Tsundoku" equivalent for Raspberry Pi?
I started with Pi-Hole a few years back but ended up with a commercial paid DNS resolver. The timeline usually goes like this -- will stumble on another interesting video of Jeff Geerling, then spend the weekend tinkering with the Pi, keeps running, forget about it, found it to be not needed, plugs off and is lying around.
I think it should be "The art of buying single-board computers and never running them once". I think the "once" is needed in the case of computers. They are as machines not directly comparable to books...
A book, like any media, fulfilled its initial purpose after it has been "consumed" - anything else (looks nice, feels nice, smells nice) are physical, subjective qualities attached to it. You might even buy it solely for these physical qualities, but that's besides the point.
A machine has its purpose in its usage, and that usage requires known resources that should not be carelessly wasted. I personally buy them to enable a utility for myself and have fun discovering it. It fulfilled its initial purpose even if it was powered on just once.
Even those single-board computers that were put to "good use", as building blocks for new devices (eg. [0]), are still not in use the whole time.
> I think it should be "The art of buying single-board computers and never running them once". I think the "once" is needed in the case of computers. They are as machines not directly comparable to books...
I have a few orange pi boards in a drawer that would disagree with you.
I have about 10 unused Raspberry Pis, so I collected unused monitors as well, and now run a mini code club in my local school. The school's laptops are all locked down to the point that running Python on them that this was the easiest way to provide a Python dev environment.
In my case at least, it's because Python has a strong ecosystem. Everybody's heard of it - parents, kids, and teachers. There are lots of good kid-friendly education materials.
Of course, that begs the question "how did that ecosystem develop in the first place?", but I can't answer that.
It doesn't require a person to change how they think about programming from their college C or Java classes, but is a lot simpler than those two languages.
Because every machine you use requires maintenance whereas NextDNS [1] costs 2 EUR/month. The time wasted on maintenance alone is worth more, add to that the electricity bill.
Examples: I also use one with OpenWrt (though I'd prefer OPNsense on it), and I use one as PiKVM. I use one with a portable HackRF (3D printed case), batteries included. I use two with Pimoroni Enviro+, and I have a fun Turing Pi 2 homelab/miniNAS with 3 CM4s (one Jetson Orin Nano). I got two RPi4's one at my mother in law, one at my mother, allowing a VPN connection for tech support and also running Jellyfin with old content for them.
Personally, I still enjoy my Pi's (and no not all of them are on and used 24/7) however I also very much enjoy Proxmox and VMs. But the Proxmox machine is a Xeon... (HP MicroServer 10 Gen 10) the fan is loud af and difficult to replace with say a Noctua due to HP ingeniousness.
I think it’s hard to generalize that into a phenomenon.
I have always bought 2 new raspberry pies with every release. I’ve used some and forgotten, unplugged some, given away some, broke some, and now they’re all used in some way.
I bought them because I knew I’ll use them. I didn’t buy any other random toys or mini computing devices (even though they were alluring) because I knew I wouldn’t use them.
There should be a name for the art of making every thing that randomly happens to some people into a phenomenon.
I do recognize GP, though. In college, I was obsessed with Linux. Nowadays I have a Macbook, and like you, have an Intel NUC (running Windows). I really don't need a Raspberry. But boy, do I need to resist the urge to get one.
I hadn’t enough resources to delve into Linux too much back then, and switched to macOS instead. Fast forward 15 years and I’m back to Linux and don’t enjoy my macOS time any longer. Windows, always despised.
I started with Pi-Hole a few years back but ended up with a commercial paid DNS resolver. The timeline usually goes like this -- will stumble on another interesting video of Jeff Geerling, then spend the weekend tinkering with the Pi, keeps running, forget about it, found it to be not needed, plugs off and is lying around.
[Tsundoku](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku) (Japanese: 積ん読) is the art of buying books and never reading them.