Android Leftovers

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• Android 10+ Gestures Explained: How to Navigate Your Android Device

• Three new Motorola Wear OS watches could arrive this year

• The 4 Best Procreate Alternatives for Android

• Mi Talk: Xiaomi launches its Clubhouse for Android and iPhone

• Google Jetpack Compose Android UI toolkit now in beta - Reseller News

• You can use your iPhone or Android phone as a webcam. Here's how - CNET

Linux 5.12-rc1

So two weeks have passed since the 5.11 release, and so - like
clockwork - the merge window for 5.12 has closed, and 5.12-rc1 is out
there for your perusal.

That said, we have now have two unusual merge windows in a row: first
we had the holiday season, and this time around the Portland area had
over a quarter million people without electricity because we had a
winter ice storm that took down thousands of trees, and lots of
electricity lines.

So I was actually without electricity for six days of the merge
window, and was seriously considering just extending the merge window
to get everything done.

As you can tell, I didn't do that. To a large part because people were
actually very good about sending in their pull requests, so by the
time I finally got power back, everything was nicely lined up and I
got things merged up ok.

But partly this is also because 5.12 is a smaller release than some
previous ones - and that wasn't due to the lack of electricity, that
showed independently in the statistics in the linux-next tree. Of
course, "smaller" is all relative, but instead of the 12-13+k commits
we've had the last few releases, linux-next this time only had 10+k
commits lined up. So that helped things a bit.

That said, if my delayed merging caused issues for anybody, please
holler and explain to me, and I'll be flexible during the rc2 week.
But that's _not_ a blanket "I'll take late pulls", that's very much a
"if my delayed merge caused problems for some tree, explain why, and
I'll work with you".

Anyway, on to the actual changes. Even if it was a slightly smaller
merge window than previous ones, it's still big enough that appended
is just my usual merge log, not the full list of the 10982 non-merge
commits by 1500+ people. So it's  more of a flavor of the kinds of
things that have happened rather than a deep dive.

The one thing that perhaps stands out is that this release actually
did a fair amount of historical cleanup. Yes, overall we still have
more new lines than we have removed lines, but we did have some spring
cleaning, removing the legacy OPROFILE support (the user tools have
been using the "perf" interface for years), and removing several
legacy SoC platforms and various drivers that no longer make any
sense.

So even if we more than made up for that with all the _new_ drivers
and code we added, that kind of cleanup is always nice to see.

    Linus

Arduino Intro and Homebrew Hakko 907

• What Are the Differences Between Raspberry Pi and Arduino?

  Arduino hails from Italy, and it’s said that it was named after a bar where the developers usually meet to discuss the board. The first Arduino was developed in 2005 and aimed to provide students at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy with an inexpensive microcontroller board. Its cost and simplicity also piqued the interests of hobbyists and professionals; it wasn’t long until it reached a wider community of makers. Many other varieties of Arduino boards have been created since then. In 2013, around 700,000 Arduino boards were already sold [1]. Raspberry Pi was born seven years after Arduino when Eben Upton invented a low-cost, modular, the single-board computer that will help improve the programming skills of his students. Like Arduino, it soon reached a wider audience due to its cost and versatility. The first Raspberry Pi board cost only $35, far less expensive than the existing computer boards that usually cost five times higher. The small board got even smaller and cheaper after the Raspberry Pi Foundation created the Raspberry Pi Zero, the smallest Raspberry Pi board to date, which costs only $5. Raspberry Pi progressed rapidly that millions of boards were already created from the initial target of just 10,000 boards years after its first release.

• Arduino Blog » Homebrew Hakko 907 digital soldering station

  If you want to upgrade your soldering setup without spending a lot of money, then be sure to check out Angelo AKA TechBuilder’s DIY Hakko 907 station. This low-cost device features an Arduino Nano to read the iron temperature via an LM358 op-amp, and regulates power to the handle and tip under PWM control using an IRFZ44N MOSFET. A potentiometer is implemented as a variable temperature knob, with the actual and preset temperature displayed on a 16×2 LCD screen, while an LED indicates whether the heating element is active.