Author: Blaze Woodard
Blaze Woodard, an editor at cubox-i.com, is presently working as an intern at a Silicon Valley technology company while majoring in politics at the University of Kansas. Blaze, who identifies as both a policy thinker and a self-described tech geek, offers a viewpoint on hardware and computing coverage that few editors in this field can match: the capacity to relate the workings of a circuit board to the larger political, regulatory, and social forces influencing the technology sector. Even though her academic path led her to political science, her early fascination with technology persisted. She writes about computing, AI, and hardware with the zeal of someone who truly loves the subject, not as someone assigned to cover it. Blaze plays soccer and spends her free time with friends and living her life, which is exactly what a college student should do outside of the office and newsroom.
There’s something about the CuBox-i4Pro that makes you feel calm. A full Linux desktop is running on something that’s only two inches across and weighs 91 grams. It fits in your hand like a bar of soap. A lot of people didn’t know what to think when the Israeli hardware company SolidRun first brought this form factor to the market in 2013. A desktop PC that you might drop between the couch cushions? It sounded like something new. It was something more useful than that in the end. SolidRun has been improving their CuBox-i line of fanless, ARM-based minicomputers for…
ARM developers are very familiar with a certain kind of anger. You fight with a custom board support package, look for kernel patches, and talk to bootloaders that seem set up to be difficult for hours or even days. The hardware might be able to do it. Getting it to do something useful is a whole different story. This was thought of when the SolidRun HoneyComb LX2K was made. The NXP LX2160A is a 16-core ARM Cortex-A72 processor that runs at 2GHz and powers the Mini-ITX board. The DDR4 memory can be up to 64GB and works in two channels.…
The CuBox-i4Pro feels strangely good when you hold it in one hand. The sides are about two inches wide, and the whole thing is matte black and surprisingly light. It looks like a power adapter or a charging brick that you might have lost. Then you connect it to a monitor and put in a microSD card that has Kali Linux on it. Suddenly, you’re looking at a desktop environment that works perfectly on something that is smaller than a coffee mug. The Israeli hardware company SolidRun, which made this device, hasn’t been talking much about consumer tech. It’s not…
The SolidRun CuBox-i seems almost stubborn. On a desk, it sits or almost disappears because it’s only two inches across and weighs less than a coffee mug. But it runs a full desktop Linux environment without any problems. The first time you hold one, you might not give it enough credit. It turns out that instinct is wrong. The first CuBox came out in December 2011 from the Israeli hardware company SolidRun. A few weeks later, it started shipping. At first, it was marketed as an open-source platform for developers working on embedded systems. Not exactly a product that wants…
When you first hold a CuBox-i, it’s almost impossible to keep your balance. The cube is about the size of a large die and weighs about the same as a deck of cards. However, it uses less than three watts of power to run a full Linux desktop, stream 1080p video, and handle Android. Take a moment to think about that last part. Three watts. A regular incandescent bulb has a pull of sixty. SolidRun, the Israeli company that makes the CuBox series, first talked about the first CuBox in December 2011. When it first came out in January 2012,…
Anyone who reads a lot online will understand a certain kind of frustration. You find something important to save, like an article, a research thread, or a long essay, but you have no idea where it went after three days. A folder for bookmarks, maybe. That tab you left open on Tuesday but haven’t used since. The information was there for a short time and then quietly faded away into the background noise. That’s exactly what Cubox for Windows is meant to do, and it does it without making you feel like you’ve taken on a second job. The browser…
There is something quietly amazing about being able to hold a fully functional computer in your hand. It’s not a phone. Not a tablet. A computer. SolidRun, an Israeli tech company that has been making small machines since 2011, recently took that idea even further than most people thought it could go, and they did it at a price that is hard to argue with. The CuBox-i range costs at least $45. People often stop and think about that number for a moment. It worked for me. That price gets you the CuBox-i1, a machine with one core, 512 MB…
Getting your hands on a CuBox PC for the first time is kind of funny. You can hold it in your hand like a sugar cube. It’s two inches across, two inches tall, and only 91 grams heavy. It kind of makes you think of a toy. After plugging it in, Linux starts up. That moment changes the way things look pretty quickly. SolidRun, an Israeli hardware company, first talked about the CuBox in December 2011 as an open-source platform for developers working on embedded systems. It began to be sent out in January 2012. The company said at the…
When you have a browser tab graveyard, you feel a certain kind of guilt. Dozens of articles that were saved with good intentions are piling up on a coffee table like magazines that haven’t been read. This is how most people who spend real time online feel. If the problem was always getting back to what you saved, it may not have been when you were saving. Cubox is a read-it-later app that works on Macs and seems to have been made with that exact problem in mind. Cubox talks about itself as more than just a tool for bookmarking…
When you look at a spreadsheet and think you understand the market, you feel a certain amount of confidence. For many years, automakers planned their production based on past sales data, feedback from dealers, and the gut feelings of executives who had been watching buying cycles for thirty years. It worked for a while, but then it stopped. After the fact, problems with the supply chain, sudden rises in demand for electric vehicles, and changing worries about fuel prices have made the old playbook look weak and even naive. It’s not just the tools that have changed. It’s the idea…