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.
When you first hold the CuBox-M, you experience a unique kind of pleasure. It feels substantial in your palm, much like a die from a board game, but it’s small enough that you have to constantly check to make sure you’re holding the correct object. Each side is two inches. That’s all. Somehow, a quad-core processor, a neural engine capable of 2.3 trillion operations per second, and sufficient connectivity to run a small office are all located inside. Unbeknownst to most, SolidRun, an Israeli company that has been producing small computers in secret for years, has been in this business…
The CuBox-i4Pro has an almost unyielding quality. It is a tiny, dark cube that is hardly wider than a stack of business cards that sits on a desk like an afterthought, but as soon as you plug it in, you realize it isn’t attempting to be cute. It’s attempting to be helpful. This distinction is more important than it might seem. The Israeli company behind it, SolidRun, has been discreetly shipping these cubes for years, gaining a small but devoted following among security researchers, hobbyists, and those who spend their weekends with a soldering iron. The top model in the…
The Raspberry Pi has an almost endearing quality. Nothing happens when you unpack it, hold the small green board in your hand, and plug in a power cable. When you first use these boards, you might not realize how reliant they are on the tiny plastic square that slides into the back. The Pi is just a paperweight with HDMI ports if it doesn’t have an SD card with an operating system. That’s what most novices overlook. The simple part is the hardware. Even though it’s small, the actual work is done on a laptop somewhere with a card reader…