The AOC 16T2 is a portable touchscreen monitor that I bought as a secondary laptop monitor, and as a touchscreen monitor for Raspberry Pi development. It has shown to be a great addition to a Raspberry Pi 400, and for experimenting with a Zero.

The AOC 16T2 offers an USB-C input and HDMI input, it has a built-in 8,000mAh  battery, so it can charge your devices as well. As a bonus it also worked great with my Samsung S20 Android phone, turning the monitor into something like a 15.6inch Android tablet. Samsung Dex software was working above expectation, although Dex doesn’t offer a portrait mode, which is a pity.

Both my laptop and Samsung phone can drive the monitor with just an USB C cable, which is a nice, clean and simple setup. The phone at the same time then is also charged by the battery pack in the monitor.

For connecting the monitor to a Raspberry Pi an HDMI cable is needed, and to get the touchscreen working you need to connect another USB A to C cable.

There is a tiny switch on the right, which is not mentioned in the manual, but a black sticker on the box states:

Please turn on the charging switch for the first time

At first I did miss that notice and then the monitor doesn’t output anything. The switch should be down for charging.

I guess the switch is there to limit charging the battery all the time. It should help your battery to live longer. At least that is what I think the switch is for. It is not mentioned in the manual.

Sound is OK, there is magnetic cover that can be used as a stand. It doesn’t really has a portrait mode, ti doesn’t stick but with some care it can be used vertically.

You can also use it with a VESA mounting bracket.

A downside is the OSD for changing the settings, that’s a bit clumsy, adjusting the volume takes some clicks and waiting, it cycles through all options sow for lowering the volume you have to max it first. That is awful.

Having a portable touchscreen is a nice addition. I also use it connect to my Samsung Phone to read books on a 15.6 inch screen instead of a 6.5 inch.

Since Apple added webp support in Safari on both desktop and mobile devices, it’s worth serving images in webp to significantly reduce the size of your images while preserving their quality.  As a guess, you can save 50-66% bandwidth on your images!

Yes, mother earth will like that!

Webp is nowadays supported by 95% of all devices

You can check webp support here, in general you will will be covered for about 95% of all users. A small 5% is using older (out-of-date) software, that probably shouldn’t be used anymore. Now they have a reason to stop using it.

https://caniuse.com/webp

Creating next-gen webp images

Converting jpg to webp isn’t difficult on a modern Linux computer:

convert -quality 50 image.jpg  image.webp

I guess no explanation is needed here.

For a directory of images you could do something like :

mogrify -quality 50 -format webp *.jpg

Creating next-gen webp images the smart way on multi-core machines

On a multi-core machine, start using those cores by running tasks parallel:

parallel "convert -quality 50 -auto-orient {} {.}.webp" ::: *.jpg

This will use all cores and threads and speed up generating next-gen images considerably, 800%  on a modern quad-core machine.

Advantages of webp images

• webp supports transparency
• webp supports animation
• webp supports 24bit RGB color-support
• smaller size

For PNG images you can save 90% bandwidth, when the main reason to use PNG is transparency.

What about image quality?

Image quality is a subjective matter. I find it acceptable to use a 50% quality by default. Compared to jpg: 60% size reduction, and less artifacts but a bit smoother. That’s OK for me.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation pushed an update to fix the forced addition of the not-so-opensource Visual Studio Code editor from Microsoft to the Raspberry OS repositories.

That means that no longer pings are automatically send to the servers from Microsoft every time a user is checking on his Pi for updates. That is great.

What is exactly done:

Unpacking raspberrypi-sys-mods (20210310) over (20210208) ...
Setting up raspberrypi-sys-mods (20210310) ...
Blocking vscode repo...
Removing obsolete conffile /etc/apt/preferences.d/3rd_parties.pref ...

So this file has been  /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list has been emptied:

### Disabled by raspberrypi-sys-mods ###

In an earlier post we already advised to edit that file to disable the automatic checking.

We’re glad the Raspberry Pi Foundation followed our advise 😉 .

Furthermore this file has been removed: /etc/apt/preferences.d/3rd_parties.pref

cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/3rd_parties.pref
Package: code code-exploration code-insiders
Pin: release o=code stable
Pin-Priority: 400

Package: *
Pin: release o=code stable
Pin-Priority: -1

Package: *
Pin: origin "packages.microsoft.com"
Pin-Priority: 400
~

Still the big question, Microsoft is touting about open source and coding for everybody. Why their open source code editor is not released with an open source license is still unanswered. Proprietary telemetry is too important apparently. Disappointing.

Let’s end by citing Jim Bennet, a Microsoft evangelist.

As a young child it was mind-blowing when my Dad brought home a work PC so he could write reports and I could use it to write up my school work – I was using what Dad used at work, making me feel important. I see this with my seven-year-old daughter, seeing her excitement that I use Microsoft Teams for work, the same as she uses for her virtual schooling (she’s even offered to teach me how to use it if I get stuck). To be able to bring that unadulterated joy of using ‘grown-up tools’ to our young learners is priceless.

Arghh, what more to say, a free sample, a marketing trick, priceless for Microsoft. Another reason why schools and kids should use only open source software.

Share knowledge, don’t exploit it.