Piltch Point (Video)

This week, Avram Piltch talks about some of the best and most unknown aspects of the Raspberry Pi computer. The Raspberry Pi entered the market 8 years ago, but with a different purpose than most might think. It was originally intended for Cambridge University, with a planned production of about 1000 units. Today, the brand has sold 31 million units - far more than the organization ever expected to produce.

In those 8 years, there have been at least 18 models made available, with at least one specially produced model. In those models, the RAM has gone from 256MB on the original 1B to an optional 4GB on the 4B. The processing power has also increased significantly, from a single-core 700MHz processor on the original to the quad-core 1.5GHz processor on the current model.

Somehow, even with all of the processing power enhancements over the years, the Raspberry Pi has technically gotten less expensive. The selling price has remained $35, but when you compare the value of the dollar in 2012 versus 2020, the original model would have sold for almost $40 in today's dollars. That means that we have gotten years worth of hardware enhancements for less relative dollars than the original.

While the Raspberry Pi can be found in tons of applications, from web servers to robotics, there is one truly unique location for one of the computers: space. There are two "Astro Pis," which are specially modified Raspberry Pi B+ models (first generation). The computers had to be modified to deal with the oddities of space and to survive onboard the International Space Station. The European Space Agency runs contests to allow school children to have their code run on these computers.

There's a lot more to know about the Raspberry Pi, which can be found in Avram's article at Tom's Hardware.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

This week, Avram Piltch discusses whether or not it is worth upgrading your video card. Sure, your existing computer might have the ability to take the newest and most exciting video card, but is it worth the upgrade cost?

Tom's Hardware recently released a video card lookup to help you determine what video cards are compatible with your system. However, the most important question to ask yourself when considering a video card upgrade is, "What are your goals with the upgrade?" For example, if your goal is to play games in 4K, you video card might not be your limiting factor.

If your system is a few years old, your system processor might not be able to keep up with the requirements of 4K gaming. It's also possible that your motherboard might not support the latest and greatest cards. Or, your power supply might not have the 8-pin or 8+6-pin setup for the really powerful cards. These other limitations could possibly mean a bigger upgrade might be required to accomplish anything noticeable.

This is not to say that a video card upgrade is not a viable project. With a more modern setup, upgrading your video card could have a profound effect on your system's performance. This is especially true if you're going from an on-board card to a full graphics card. You might be upgrading from an older card that you kept from a previous system to something more modern.

However, it is important to remember that, in most system upgrades, the only part that is easily retained is the case. To get a lot out of your upgrade, it will usually require replacing the processor, motherboard, and RAM, on top of the video card. Plus, if it's a big upgrade, you'll possibly need a new power supply and, for speed, you might even consider an upgraded SSD.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

This week, Avram Piltch discusses a new feature in Microsoft Excel: XLOOKUP. Now, we don't usually show off things like Microsoft Office functions, but this one is truly special. The predecessor to XLOOKUP, which is VLOOKUP, is the third most used function in Excel, and XLOOKUP expands on its capabilities by removing a number of limitations.

Both functions allow you to combine data from different sheets or files by joining on common data. For example, if you have one document with employee IDs and names, and another with employee IDs and addresses and phone numbers, these functions will allow you to join on the common data item, the employee IDs, and show the combined data. However, there are some significant differences between the old and new methods.

The most important change is in how you match data. With VLOOKUP, you could only do exact matches between sheets. With XLOOKUP, however, there are several ways of joining data. You can do the exact match, but you can also have it choose values above and below the closest match, or, most importantly, use wildcards. For example, if you want to return the first employee whose last name starts with S, you can search for "S*" rather than using an entire cell value.

Equally important is the amount of data that can be returned. With the older VLOOKUP, you could only return a single column worth of data per query. This means that if you wanted to return first name, last name, and address from one sheet, you would have to do three separate lookups. That means processing power and additional scripting to return everything you want. With the new XLOOKUP, however, you can return multiple columns in a single query. So, one lookup could return the first, last, and address.

In addition to all of this, the function call is actually shorter for XLOOKUP, making it easier to use. If you're about to learn about joining data in Excel, XLOOKUP is definitely the way to go.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

This week, Avram Piltch discusses the long-awaited launch of Nvidia's cloud gaming service GeForce Now.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

Here's the pitch: A service that allows you to stream videogames to be able to be played on any device you own. This is what everyone had hoped for when Google launched Stadia, though it was not to be. Like other services that came before, the service was very limited. The biggest limitation is that you have to get the game from Google Stadia, whether you already own it or not. It also meant that if Google didn't support the game, you couldn't play it. However, GeForce Now has taken a different approach.

This week, Avram Piltch talks about the Intel NUC and the future direction of the product line. In the past, the company has released a limited array of models and configuration options to correspond with its processor upgrades. While the line has never been incredibly popular, it has been consistently stable.

This year, the company announced a change of direction, but one that is also familiar. The next generation of NUC will no longer be just an Intel-branded product. Instead, it will become a product standard, powered by the Intel NUC Compute Element - a self-contained computing card. These cards will plug into a daughterboard for power and provide the essentials of the computer. The manufacturers, including Razer and Adata, will provide both fully built and bare-bones models that customers can customize.

These systems can be upgraded, unlike previous models. They support discrete graphics cards for the first time. There are also upgradable RAM and SSD. The biggest upgradable component, though, is the Compute Element itself. When you need more power, you can simply replace the Compute Element and the system is upgraded.

If this idea sounds familiar, it's because it is. The concept is very similar to Intel's Compute Card, right down to the name. The Compute Card was designed to power embedded devices, such as smart TVs. The idea was that, rather than replacing the television, you could simply replace the Card. This would, theoretically, avoid the situation where Hulu and Netflix recently stopped supporting older smart TVs.

Like the Computer Card, the NUC Compute Element sounds like it is a solution looking for a problem. The price is higher than a regular PC while being only slightly smaller and being powered by laptop hardware. The video cards may be desktop quality, but the processors are not. Intel is going to have trouble finding an audience for this product.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

This week, Avram Piltch discusses some of the most influential technology of the past decade. While some products produce a short-term change to an industry, others have long-lasting effects. In the past decade, there have been several massive moves that will likely never be reverted.

One of the most influential products of the decade was the AMD Ryzen 1800X processor. The product stood head and shoulders above what Intel was producing and, in grand AMD fashion, was far less expensive than what Intel was offering. The processor offered 8 cores and 16 threads, as opposed to the common 4 core processor being offered by Intel. It also ushered in the architecture that made it possible for AMD to produce the first 7nm chips, something that Intel still has not accomplished.

Another influential product in the 2010s, especially for Avram, has been the Raspberry Pi. This single-board computer has changed the way we think about computing. It also changed the way we think about what a computer can be, and what it is capable of doing. For so long, a computer was thought to be a larger, more powerful system that could do anything. With the Raspberry Pi, we can now think about a computer as a single-purpose device, whether that be to power a robot or a security camera. It also helped evolve the craft community into the maker movement.

For Scott, however, one of the most influential technologies of the decade has been virtualization. Without it, there would be no Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud. There would be no Project xCloud or Google Stadia. More importantly, there would be no blossoming startup community. The ability to create virtual networks in Azure and the like and scale them up and down at will, without having to purchase hardware, lease physical space to store them, provide power and internet, etc. And, none of it is a capital expense. Awesome.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

This week, Avram Piltch talks about technology that he has been interested in for decades: alternate typing tech. Imagine you are at a trade show, waiting in line for a presentation, and you want to get some work done. Sure, you can use your phone and try and type something of consequence, but that's going to be infuriating (we've tried it). You could bring a tablet, but you still might have issues with a content system that requires a desktop. You could bring a laptop, but they're big and unwieldy, especially when you're in tight quarters. Avram has always believed there has to be another way, and there is.

The first option is DecaTxt, a small Bluetooth keyboard with only 10 buttons. By pressing the buttons in various combinations you can type a full keyboard worth of characters. The creator has been tweaking the device for years, always looking for ways to improve on his design. One of the key drawbacks to the concept is the learning curve. It can take some people a long time to wrap your head around the key combinations, making typing slow. For some, however, the typing will be as easy as the old T9 on flip phones.

If learning about a new key structure isn't in your wheelhouse, maybe a virtual keyboard will work. The Tap Strap is an input device that wraps around your fingers and senses movement, translating the movements into inputs. This can be used as standard key entry, but can also be used to replace a mouse, controller, presentation clicker, and more.

In addition to typing, these devices could be a brilliant addition to a virtual or augmented reality setup. And, as VR and AR hardware get closer to daily use technology, the more important innovations like the DecaTxt and Tap Strap will become.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

This week, Avram Piltch discusses the ups and downs between buying a pre-made PC from a vendor or building your own from components. It's the age-old question in computing - do you save the time and buy a PC, or save the money and build it yourself? As it turns out, the price differential between a pre-made and a custom-made PC is not as great today as it once was. In fact, in Avram's research, there is only about $100 between the two options.

However, there is more to consider than just the price. On the side of buying a PC, there is definitely the time savings. Under a lot of circumstances, you have the ability to customize some of the components of your PC, without having to physically touch the machine. That can save a lot of time and effort in the process, not to mention frustration. But, you do not usually get the ability to choose every option, such as the brand and model of RAM or storage. Those components can make a huge difference to performance, but they are usually out of your hands.

On the other hand, building your own PC comes with the ability to handpick everything, from the make and model of components to the specific batch number, if you feel so inclined. This level of customization comes with the ability to fine-tune your machine to the exact specification you want, but it also means a lot of time investment, both in researching the components and the actual build process.

So, since cost is not the factor that it used to be, the real differentiator is your purpose. If you are looking for a PC for standard usage, buying a standard PC is probably the right way to go. However, if you are a creative, a gamer, or in another field that requires tuned hardware, building might be the way to do.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

This week, Avram Piltch shows off the newest STEAM toy from Sphero, the RVR (pronounced Rover). This new vehicle separates itself from the already crowded programmable vehicle kits in a variety of ways. First, and most obvious, is that the vehicle is designed for all terrains. That means that it isn't limited to being used inside, but can be used outside, and even in the grass.

This isn't the only aspect of the RVR that makes it versatile. As is, the RVR can be controlled through the Sphero app. You can also use the app to program it, using the block-based programming system. This can be a great learning system for kids and adults to get familiar with the included aspects of the RVR. However, this vehicle is almost infinitely expandable because you can add external control boards to the top.

Whether you want to explore the capabilities of the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, or Micro:bit controllers, you can use any of them with the RVR. By adding one of these boards, you can introduce a whole host of sensors, controllers, and external resources. This expansion can allow the RVR to go from a STEAM toy to a sophisticated robot. platform. You can use it as a roving security camera, an environmental scanner, and so much more.

In addition to the additional sensors, you also get expanded connectivity options. Let the RVR stream live video to YouTube, or report sensor readings to Microsoft Azure. You can also combine external resources, like weather data, with local readings, to make decisions. All of these features can be used either as a learning experience for new hardware developers or as a pre-built robotics platform for more complex projects.

The Sphero RVR is available now. As of the time of this video, it is on sale on Amazon for $199 (regularly $249).

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

This week, Avram Piltch discusses the important things to look out for when purchasing a new computer. There are two ways to buy a new PC: pre-configured or self-configured. For the most part, pre-configured models are far less expensive than their custom configuration counterparts. For example, if you head to a manufacturer's website and look at their laptops, several of them offer the ability to customize the parts. If you go with the base model, you might have only 128GB of storage. However, you can upgrade that to 1TB for almost $600. However, if you were to purchase that same SSD yourself, it might only cost $100, meaning that you would be paying a $500 markup to have the drive pre-installed, and you don't get to keep the original 128GB drive.

A simple way to avoid the upcharge is by purchasing a pre-configured computer. Of course, this does mean that you might have to sacrifice something off of your ideal setup. Maybe you can't get the 1TB drive, but you can get a 512GB drive instead. Maybe you can't get 32GB of RAM, but you can get 16GB. For some, the compromise is okay, but for others, it would not be possible.

Another way to avoid the immense upcharge is by performing the upgrade yourself. In some cases, this is as easy as removing 2 screws. In other cases, it would require prying the body apart and repairing it with glue. For those models, it's generally not worth trying. But, there are tools to determine the upgradability of your model. You can use the Kingston Memory Configurator or the Corsair Memory Finder, both of which will tell you what can and can't be done with your computer.

No matter which way you decide to go, it is always important to know all of your options ahead of time.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.