Category: Current Events

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, November 9, 2020)

Once again, here’s the weekly list of events for events for Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds. Every week, on GlobalNerdy.com and on the mailing list, I scour the announcements for events that are interesting to or useful for those of you who are building the future here in “The Other Bay Area, on The Other West Coast”.

This list covers events from Monday, November 9 through Sunday, November 15, 2020.

I’ve opted to list only those events that I can confirm are happening online. I’m not yet listing in-person events, as we’re still in the middle of a pandemic in one of the hardest-hit states (844,000 cases, which is an increase of 41,000 since last week, and 15,916 deaths, which is up 1204 from last week) in one of the hardest-hit countries in the world (10 million cases, which is an increase of 800,000 from last week, and 238,000 deaths, which is up 8,000 from last week).

Events — especially virtual, online ones — can pop up at the last minute. I add them to the list as I find out about them. Come back and check this article from time to time, as you might find a new listing that wasn’t there before!

Monday, November 9

Tuesday, November 10

Wednesday, November 11

Thursday, November 12

Friday, November 13

Saturday, November 14

 

Sunday, November 15

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles.

Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!


Categories
Conferences Current Events Florida

Synapse Converge: Global Entrepreneur Week edition happens Monday, November 16!

Synapse Converge and Global Entrepreneurship Week logos - Monday, November 16 - Thursday, November 19

Hey, Florida techies and entrepreneurs — the online conference Synapse Converge: Global Entrepreneur Week edition happens Monday, November 16 and runs through Thursday, November 19, and it’s FREE to attend!

If you’re a would-be entrepreneur looking for inspiration or an entrepreneur seeking knowledge to help you bring your startup to the next step, this conference is for you.

Synapse Converge: Global Entrepreneur Week edition, as its name implies, is put together by:

  • Synapse Florida logoSynapse Florida, Florida’s innovation hub, whose mission is to connect entrepreneurs, investors, and other stakeholders to accelerate success in Florida’s thriving economies.
  • Global Entrepreneurship Week logoGlobal Entrepreneurship Week, a collection of tens of thousands of events, activities and competitions each November that inspire millions to explore their potential as an entrepreneur while fostering connections and increasing collaboration within their ecosystems.

This conference has two tracks:

  1. Entrepreneur Leadership track:
    • Candid interviews with successful entrepreneurs and leaders.
    • Tangible tools to help late-stage companies and enterprises connect and identify opportunities to partner.
    • Gives investors the opportunity to make their mark by supporting growing Florida companies.
  2. Startup Toolkit track:
    • 12 distinct, sequential sessions taught by leading Florida academics and business leaders, on the entrepreneurial journey.
    • Features sessions ranging from “Is Entrepreneurship for You?” to “Getting to Growth Stage”, and everything in between.

Find out more at the Synapse Converge: Global Entrepreneur Week edition conference at their site.

Categories
Current Events Hardware Programming

Raspberry Pi 400: A lot of computer for as little as $70!

Photo: Raspberry Pi 400, front/top view showing keyboard as seen by the user.
Tap to view at full size.

The Raspberry Pi 400 — a Raspberry Pi 4 board with 4GB RAM built into a compact keyboard — was announced just today, and the base unit (just the computer built into the compact keyboard) retails for $70!

The computer

Photo: Raspberry Pi 400, back/top view showing keyboard and ports.
Tap to view at full size.

The Raspberry Pi 400 is a slightly updated model from last year’s Raspberry Pi 4, and has these specs:

Feature Notes
Processor 1.8 GHz ARM Cortex-A72 CPU
(A little faster than the Raspberry Pi 4’s 1.5 GHz CPU)
RAM 4 GB
Networking
  • 802.11ac wifi
  • Gigabit Ethernet
  • Bluetooth 5.0
Video 2 micro HDMI ports that can each drive 4K/60 Hz video
USB
  • 2 USB 3.0 ports
  • 1 USB 2.0 port (preferably for the mouse)
Power Provided via adapter and USB-C
Additional ports 40-pin GPIO interface

The complete kit

Photo: Raspberry Pi 400 kit, showing the computer, micro HDMI to HDMI cable, The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, mouse, and power supply, as well as the box they came in.
Tap to view at full size.

For an extra $30, you can get the kit, which is the complete “ready to go out of the box” package. It starts with the Raspberry Pi 400 computer-in-a-keyboard unit described above, and it adds:

The kind of computer that hasn’t been seen since the 1980s

Let’s quickly take stock of what you get with just the Raspberry Pi 400, never mind the kit:

  • A fully-equipped computer with a decent processor, decent RAM, wifi/wired/Bluetooth networking with 2 fast USB ports to spare once you’ve plugged a mouse into the slower one.
  • A computer that you can do hardware experiments with, thanks to its GPIO pins, and an abundance of hobbyist-focused expansion kits.
  • A computer that you can plug into your TV.
  • A computer that costs $100.

There hasn’t been a computer like this since the machines pictured below came out…

Photo: ZX Spectrum computer

Photo: Commodore VIC-20.

…and those machines couldn’t hold a candle to the proper desktops of that era.

On the other hand, you’ll find that the Raspberry Pi 400 can easily keep up with the sort of computer that gets issued for standard office work. You could easily use it to do schoolwork or office work, and it’s actually a decent Linux software development machine and retro-style gaming console, too! And with its expansion capabilities, it’s an excellent machine for IoT and sensor projects.

This is the sort of machine that children of the 1980s and early 1990s learned on, many of whom are today’s techies…

…and this machine will probably be the machine that a lot of children of the 2020s will cut their programming teeth on, and who’ll be the techies of the 2040s and 2050s.

Given a choice between a Chromebook and a Raspberry Pi 400, I’d take the Pi, because I can do a lot more with it. In fact, I might be able to do a lot of my new job with it (which is something I might try soon, just to see what happens).

Graphic: “Cobra Pi” logo

By the bye, keep an eye on this blog for a new feature: Cobra Pi, which covers programming on the Raspberry Pi, and whose motto is: “Code hard! Fail fast! No latency!”

It’ll cover all sorts of cool programming tips, tricks, and techniques on the Raspberry Pi, including JavaScript, Python, and even C and ARM assembly language!

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, November 2, 2020)

Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events

Once again, here’s the weekly list of events for events for Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds. Every week, on GlobalNerdy.com and on the mailing list, I scour the announcements for events that are interesting to or useful for those of you who are building the future here in “The Other Bay Area, on The Other West Coast”.

This list covers events from Monday, November 2 through Sunday, November 8, 2020. That’s right, this week has both Election Day and my birthday!

I’ve opted to list only those events that I can confirm are happening online. I’m not yet listing in-person events, as we’re still in the middle of a pandemic in one of the hardest-hit states (803,000 cases, which is an increase of 51,000 since last week, and 15,916 deaths, which is up 844 from last week) in one of the hardest-hit countries in the world (9.2 million cases, which is an increase of over a million from last week, and 230,000 deaths, which is up 11,000 from last week).

Events — especially virtual, online ones — can pop up at the last minute. I add them to the list as I find out about them. Come back and check this article from time to time, as you might find a new listing that wasn’t there before!

Monday, November 2

Tuesday, November 3

Sure, there are events today, but if you’re in the U.S. and eligible to vote and haven’t done so already — GO VOTE!

Wednesday, November 4

Thursday, November 5

🎂 Oh hey, it’s my birthday! 🥳

Friday, November 6

Saturday, November 7

Sunday, November 8

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles.

Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!


Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, October 26, 2020)

Once again, here’s the weekly list of events for events for Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds. Every week, on GlobalNerdy.com and on the mailing list, I scour the announcements for events that are interesting to or useful for those of you who are building the future here in “The Other Bay Area, on The Other West Coast”.

This list covers events from Monday, October 26 through Sunday, November 1, 2020. That’s right, this week has both Halloween and Day of the Dead!

I’ve opted to list only those events that I can confirm are happening online. I’m not yet listing in-person events, as we’re still in the middle of a pandemic in one of the hardest-hit states (752,000 cases, which is an increase of 23,000 since last week, and 15,916 deaths, which is up 700 from last week) in one of the hardest-hit countries in the world (8.14 million cases, which is an increase of 390,000 from last week, and 219,000 deaths, which is up 5,000 from last week).

Events — especially virtual, online ones — can pop up at the last minute. I add them to the list as I find out about them. Come back and check this article from time to time, as you might find a new listing that wasn’t there before!

Monday, October 26

Tuesday, October 27

Wednesday, October 28

Thursday, October 29

Friday, October 30

Saturday, October 31

Sunday, November 1

There aren’t any scheduled online tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay…yet!

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles.

Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!


Categories
Current Events

Whoever bought “ZoomDickIncident.com” is wasting their limited-time opportunity

Photo: An unhappy-looking Jeffrey Toobin, captioned with “ZoomDickIncident.com”.
He’s an author of several books, writing at the New Yorker since 1993 and a senior legal analyst at CNN since 2002, but guess what we’ll remember him for.

One of the things I learned at Tucows — you may still think of them as a shareware company, but they’re really the second-largest domain registrar in the world — is that there are all sorts of ways to make money from keyword-rich domain names, such as the possibly-lucrative ZoomDickIncident.com.

The classic way to cash in on a domain name is to buy one with the right keywords before the demand for it makes it valuable, and then sell it at a huge markup. irishwhiskey.com is a classic example — back in the early 2000s, it was up for sale at an auction for $300,000.

There are other, smaller-scale ways to make quick money with a domain name. One of them is to buy a domain name with keywords reflecting some big trend or news story, set up an inexpensive site or page with a little content and a lot of ads, and point the name there. For an hour or two of work, you can make a few hundred or thousand bucks this way. I’ve done this myself.

When the story about CNN reporter and New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin exposed himself on a Zoom call (something I’ve managed to not do, despite having spent the summer and fall teaching programming courses over Zoom in four-hour sessions a few days a week), I thought I might have a little lucrative fun. A page with a quick summary of Toobin’s up-till-now-impressive career, some Zoom tips, including etiquette, and of course, ads.

I went to my ride-or-die registrar, Hover (which is part of Tucows — I like giving my old workplace my business) and tried to get my hands on the “zoom dick incident” prize name: ZoomDickIncident.com. Unfortunately, domainers are always looking for opportunities like this and act quickly:

According to WHOIS records, it got snapped up on Monday, shortly after the story broke:

Domain Name: ZOOMDICKINCIDENT.COM
Registry Domain ID: 2566933359_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.domain.com
Registrar URL: http://www.domain.com
Updated Date: 2020-10-19T19:06:04Z
Creation Date: 2020-10-19T18:49:07Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2022-10-19T18:49:07Z
Registrar: Domain.com, LLC
Registrar IANA ID: 886
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: compliance@domain-inc.net
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: 602-226-2389
Domain Status: ok https://icann.org/epp#ok
Name Server: NS1.DOMAIN.COM
Name Server: NS2.DOMAIN.COM
DNSSEC: unsigned
URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://www.icann.org/wicf/
>>> Last update of whois database: 2020-10-21T13:38:07Z <<<

Although the zoomdickincident.com buyer acted quickly, they’re failing on the follow-through. The domain points to a parking page at the time of writing:

What a waste of an opportunity! In a couple of weeks, searches for related keywords will dwindle to nothing, especially with the upcoming US elections, which will eat up the news cycles.

In the meantime, if you’re shopping around for a good name for your adult site, zoomdickincident is still available for many adult TLDs:

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, October 19, 2020)

Once again, here’s the weekly list of events for events for Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds. Every week, on GlobalNerdy.com and on the mailing list, I scour the announcements for events that are interesting to or useful for those of you who are building the future here in “The Other Bay Area, on The Other West Coast”.

This list covers events from Monday, October 19 through Sunday, October 25, 2020.

I’ve opted to list only those events that I can confirm are happening online. I’m not yet listing in-person events, as we’re still in the middle of a pandemic in one of the hardest-hit states (752,000 cases, which is an increase of 23,000 since last week, and 15,916 deaths, which is up 700 from last week) in one of the hardest-hit countries in the world (8.14 million cases, which is an increase of 390,000 from last week, and 219,000 deaths, which is up 5,000 from last week).

Events — especially virtual, online ones — can pop up at the last minute. I add them to the list as I find out about them. Come back and check this article from time to time, as you might find a new listing that wasn’t there before!

Monday, October 19

Tuesday, October 20

Wednesday, October 21

Thursday, October 22

Friday, October 23

Saturday, October 24

Sunday, October 25

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles.

Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!