Raspberry Pi PCs: Who Asked For This?

Okay, so someone built a Raspberry Pi contraption called FocusFinder that yells at you—figuratively, I guess—when you lose focus. Animated eyes get angry if you dare glance away from your screen. Seriously? Are we that pathetic that we need a glorified Tamagotchi to manage our attention spans?

The Age of the Productivity Police

Let's break this down. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a camera, and an OLED screen are all it takes to create our dystopian future. The camera tracks your eyeballs, and if they stray, BAM! Timer reset, sad faces galore. It's like Pavlov's dog, but instead of drooling for food, we're conditioned to stare blankly at spreadsheets.

I saw Enrique Neyra shared this thing on the Raspberry Pi subreddit. Good for him, I guess. But what does it say about us that this is considered a solution? Are we so addicted to distractions—TikTok, Twitter, the endless void of the internet—that we can't even handle a few minutes of focused work without electronic nagging? This Raspberry Pi productivity gadget will glare at you if you doomscroll on the clock - XDA

And what about the larger implications? Are we just cogs in the machine now, our every action monitored and optimized for maximum output? It's giving me serious "1984" vibes, only instead of Big Brother, it's a tiny computer with cartoon eyes judging my soul.

The code's on GitHub, ofcourse. Knock yourselves out.

Meanwhile, in the Real World...

While we're busy strapping ourselves into productivity prisons, MSI is over here building actual, useful stuff. They dropped the MS-CF16 V3.0, a single-board computer that's basically a Raspberry Pi on steroids. Intel x86 processors, two Ethernet ports, M.2 slots, the whole nine yards. And it's built to withstand temperatures from -40°C to 70°C. Try that with your little eye-tracking toy.

This thing is designed for factory automation, transportation systems, and other industrial applications. You know, real work. Not babysitting adults who can't resist the urge to check their phones every five seconds.

They've got three processor options, from the power-sipping N150 to the more robust Atom X7433RE. So, its got some actual flexibility.

I get it, the FocusFinder is a fun project. But let's be real: it's a symptom of a much larger problem. We're so obsessed with optimizing every aspect of our lives that we've forgotten how to, you know, live. To be human. To daydream, to wander, to get distracted by shiny objects. Is that so bad?

Is This Progress, or Just Sad?

And honestly, I'm not sure which is more depressing: the fact that someone built this thing, or the fact that people might actually use it. Are we really that desperate for external validation that we'll subject ourselves to constant surveillance by a $35 computer?

Then again, maybe I'm just an old cynic yelling at a cloud. Maybe this is the future. Maybe we'll all be wearing brain-computer interfaces that shock us every time we think about something unproductive. And maybe, just maybe, that's exactly what we deserve.

So, What's the Real Problem?

The real problem ain't the tech; it's that we're letting it turn us into joyless automatons.