Pricey hobby, and can't use Windows

It’s not cheap by today’s standards for modern hardware.

Define “cheap”? I can get a tablet for fifty euro, a “real PC” for a hundred and fifty… And if we want ones that don’t suck, add a zero to the ends of those prices.

Windows prices are all over the place: https://www.amazon.fr/windows-10/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Awindows%2010
Okay, Linux may be a lot more cost effective, but it also requires a lot more work and effort and knowledge. Linux is not suitable for people who want plug & go behaviour.
Office 365 – maybe Microsoft, realising the limitations of software you only sell once, made their product into a subscription model. Keep on paying to use the software. You get the product (that once upon a time you’d buy outright and reasonable duration of bug fixes are part of the deal) and they get your cash, everybody is happy, right?

The Pi is cheap, certainly, and it caused an explosion of low cost ARM boards. But before then, you know what the beginner base ARM board was? The Beagle. With all of its scary “do not” warnings, endless “this is a development board” disclaimers, and a price tag high enough to make you wonder why they cheaped out on hardening the hardware. The Pi at least got rubbed on a cat (by Liz). I’d be scared to do anything like that to a Beagle, it would probably never boot again…

…if anybody wonders what 5kg of rice looks like…
https://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20151231

;-)

I was planning to build a Titanium based computer, and couldn’t get the price below £749!

Worth noting that your total is the ex-VAT cost of the R-Comp “TiMachine”
899 / 1.20 = 749.16666
If you assume that R-Comp make money somewhere then it would seem the profit for them is essentially the discount they achieve on purchasing parts in larger quantity.

It’s built for you¹ Oh, and you get a warranty on the TiMachine, which must have some value.

¹ OK, for some people that isn’t a positive

And if we want ones that don’t suck, add a zero to the ends of those prices.

Not true. You can get a pretty nice spec’d Windows desktop for £500. Any Win comp below £500 is normally junk.

The Pi is cheap, certainly, and it caused an explosion of low cost ARM boards

Which is great, but the IO is slow and rubbish. Not the best platform for desktop computing.

if anybody wonders what 5kg of rice looks like

Used to buy 5kg bags for making sushi.

We buy 20kg bags of rice…but then my wife is of Indian origin, and didn’t leave India until after we were married, when she was 28.

No photo of our bags of rice. Yet.

The Pi is cheap, certainly, and it caused an explosion of low cost ARM boards

Which is great, but the IO is slow and rubbish. Not the best platform for desktop computing.

I dare say it would be absolutely fine for word processing or DTP or spreadsheets, but I do all those things on the Mac. I don’t notice any problems using !Draw or !FontEd or my own little apps to convert the resulting files to foreign formats – the keyboard, mouse and hard disc are all faster than me. I don’t try to use a printer, camera or scanner with the Pi – that’s all done on the Mac. The only hassle I have with the Pi is that the only method I’ve got of sending files back and forth between the Pi and the Mac is emailing them to myself.

The only hassle I have with the Pi is that the only method I’ve got of sending files back and forth between the Pi and the Mac is emailing them to myself.

Surely you could set up an NFS server on macos?

As for IO, Gigabit LAN, decent SATA/SAS and PCIe would be my fancy. Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3 would be nice too.

Surely you could set up an NFS server on macos?

Very likely someone could. Without help, I certainly couldn’t. We’ve got a NAS on our LAN that the Macs and PCs can access, but sadly it’s not visible to the Pi.

USB3 wouldn’t make a huge difference to me – very few of the files I’m using on the Pi are all that big – Drawfiles & SVGs up to a max of 200KB or thereabouts, mostly much smaller.

if anybody wonders what 5kg of rice looks like

Not at all. Usually the smallest I’ll bother with. Rice is good. Not fond of the smell of the rice paddies around sunset. They sure are pretty when the low sun hits them though.
Rice is one of the main crops here. It’s where SunRice comes from.

We buy 20kg bags of rice

Best way to do it.

Gigabit LAN

My OPi PC2 has that, not that it matters. My network is 100MBit. Also while the hardware is pretty okay, they really dropped the ball with software. Armbian works well on it headless at least.
I suppose a good use of it could be a NAS with 1GBit ethernet.

Clive, I mostly solved the incompatibility issues between systems (I don’t have a mac) by using my little OPi Zero NAS to have different file sharing protocols mapped to the same share directories. File permissions can be a headache but it does let me shuffle files more easily. As a bonus it also has a DLNA server running on it so various devices can play music or videos easily from it’s hard drive.

Worth noting that your total is the ex-VAT cost of the R-Comp “TiMachine”

Still looking at an extra £150, and I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty so not really worth it for me.

OK, for some people that isn’t a positive

Spend that much on a machine, I wouldn’t want to have to build it as well… ;-)

Not true. You can get a pretty nice spec’d Windows desktop for £500. Any Win comp below £500 is normally junk.

It’s not a binary choice. Below a certain price is junk, above a certain price is good, in between is imaginative marketing.

Which is great, but the IO is slow and rubbish. Not the best platform for desktop computing.

Depends upon your desktop. RISC OS isn’t saddled with virtual memory or the need to load dozens of libraries just to open an error prompt, so it’s pretty quick. Okay, building the ROM could be quicker, but when you really get down to it, for the most part of my actual use, the machine is going to be sitting there waiting for me. It’ll be running Zap or Ovation(Pro) or the like. And probably playing Eagle (radio station). 500MHz processor, 2GHz processor, end result: identical.
When I’m not using the machine, it is running the web server and a custom program to pull the current weather data from my weather station. The server gets light use, the data retrieval does it’s stuff every five minutes. Processor speed? Irrelevant.

Certainly there are some use cases where the machine struggles – playing pretty much any video, games with a lot of things moving in HD resolutions, getting Otter to run… ;-)

But, however much the Pi might suck, the machine itself is dirt cheap and the Zero incarnation cost the price of a Happy Meal. Come on, dinky RISC OS machine, or a lukewarm burger? It’s not a hard choice really.

We buy 20kg bags of rice…

Whoo, serious rice eating!

Is there much use made of wheat in India? I dimly recall a programme on NHK World where a Japanese girl in America was getting freaked out that absolutely everything was made of wheat. She managed to get her rice fix at an Indian restaurant, but cried over the fact that all it seemed to be to westerners was something to put curry on. I know Japanese eat a lot of rice as is, with maybe a bit of seaweed (onigiri), or pounded into paste and cooked (dango, moshi – often stuffed).
Do real Indians¹ eat rice like that as well? Is rice important, or is wheat important also?

¹ Indian restaurant near Guildford. Family business. Got lost looking for the toilet, ended up in the living room! People there introduced me to something they called “chow pot” (might have been an Indian word but that’s what it sounded like) and they were quite amused at my surprise that they weren’t eating like the stuff in their menu. They said normal people just don’t. I was invited to try some of their food. It’s a miracle I survived, Mexican jalapeños ain’t got nothing on that meal…I felt like I was actually steaming from the ears, like a cartoon character!

I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty so not really worth it for me.

The footnote was written with you in mind :)

It’s a miracle I survived, Mexican jalapeños ain’t got nothing on that meal…I

Jalapeños? nice tasty but pretty mild. The other end of the scale being things like the ghost chilli peppers => lots of heat and no real taste, I have to say I don’t see the point.

The footnote was written with you in mind :)

Ah, but I void warranties.

I think that’s where we are lucky in Australia. Restaurants are more likely to serve “proper” food rather than just the standard fare that people expect when walking into restaurant X.
I also enjoy cooking dishes from around the world. We have a large array of books, plus there’s the internet to draw from. Still, I think decent cookbooks are the best source of good recipes.
Even more off topic, I have wrecked a few meals too. Mostly by not realising that I’m trying to use a U.S. recipe. Most of the time I pick it straight off because of strange names for things, geography specific ingredients or it just seems unpleasant. (Sorry! Some U.S. recipes on the Internet are atrocious!)

Ah, but I void warranties.

Warranties are usually a waste of perfectly good paper and a cause of much anger and frustration. It’s better to just engineer out factory inadequacies from the outset and have something that keeps working, rather than something that needs disposal because the gauntlet that needs to be run for the slim chance they won’t worm their way out of the warranty. Or such is my experience with every warranty claim attempt ever.

rather than something that needs disposal because the gauntlet that needs to be run for the slim chance they won’t worm their way out of the warranty.

Hmmm, current RO vendors… not exactly the first people that come to mind when avoiding warranty claims.
Big tendency to go beyond the requirements though. Maybe it’s that “RO family” thing.

Big tendency to go beyond the requirements though

Pretty small community. If you avoided responsibility, I imagine your reputation would plummet fast.

Do real Indians1 eat rice like that as well? Is rice important, or is wheat important also?

Depends where in India, and what your social background is. My wife’s area is mainly a rice area, other areas are mainly chapatis and the like (wheat), most areas have both in different proportions. The most noticeable difference between the cooking in my wife’s tribe and the typical Indian restaurant in the UK is the amount of ghee or other oil in the food – Grace uses very, very little. This is my parents-in-law (RIP) and one of my brothers-in-law pressing oil on their farm: http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Photos.html?India%2FPattni – you can imagine why they traditionally don’t use much!

the typical Indian restaurant in the UK is the amount of ghee or other oil in the food – Grace uses very, very little

I’m glad it’s not just me. I’ve always preferred less ghee than what most restaurants slosh in.

If you avoided responsibility, I imagine your reputation would plummet fast.

One can only repeat the old nickname of one vendor “WatFraud”.
They didn’t restrict their “talents” to the Acorn community though. It was alleged that their final absence caused a sigh of relief in the tax office.

Talents, or Talons?

WatFraud

Would this be Watford Electronics?

Any resemblance, Mi’lord, to any company living or dead is purely coincidental!

Any resemblance, Mi’lord, to any company living or dead is purely coincidental!

Well if it isn’t, their reputation doesn’t seem much better.

If one were to say that the Jessa family don’t have the best of business reputations¹ and that as you noted Watford Electronics was one of their trading names² would that suffice?

¹ I don’t doubt some portion of the family may have a better reputation, after all nothing in such matters is ever absolute.
² Exactly how many have appeared and then disappeared is a counting exercise for the reader.

Joys of English libel law.