The Natural Philosopher wrote this post while blinking in Morse code:

Diversity - when its a good thing - means multiple copies of the same NP>> technology, not multiple different technologies.

On 2025-01-10, Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> wrote:

You prove my thesis with the *variety* of transportation items you present.
Look at all the various charger/connector types for smartphones.

The multiple connector types have been very counterproductive. The
Chinese government brought some standardization by requiring micro-USB connectors, but Apple soon found a way around it and introduced
"Lightning" connectors just to be different. Round two switched everyone
to USB-C (again initiated by China - or was it EU). To my eyes, USB-C is
not "flatter" than Micro-USB, but it does have the advantage of being symmetrical.

Every car has differences, some small, some, like electric vs gas, big.

Under capitalism, everyone is looking for an edge, often found by
adopting a different design.

As in Tesla versus "standard" EV charging connectors.

There is almost nothing that has "evolved" to a single implementation.
Everything is tweaked.

With some remarkable counter-examples. As I understand it, there was a
time when the "big 3" automakers had standardized motor mounts, so that
you could install an aftermarket V8 engine to boost you car's
performance.

Or the way car radios were standardized, so you could buy a new,
high-end AM/FM/CD radio to spice up your 10-year old car.

Those days are over. No more aftermarket car radios, since
entertainment, navigation, climate control and other dashboard
functions became integrated.

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On Fri, 10 Jan 2025 21:17:50 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

The multiple connector types have been very counterproductive. The
Chinese government brought some standardization by requiring micro-USB connectors, but Apple soon found a way around it and introduced
"Lightning" connectors just to be different. Round two switched everyone
to USB-C (again initiated by China - or was it EU). To my eyes, USB-C is
not "flatter" than Micro-USB, but it does have the advantage of being symmetrical.

I've got a wall full of cables to attest to that foolishness. There is the Mini-B for the Garmin GPS and an older Kindle, the Standard B for the
legacy Arduinos, the Micro-B for the phone, newer Kindle, and the Pico
boards, and the USB-C for the Fire tablet, airbrush, and other stuff.

Or the way car radios were standardized, so you could buy a new,
high-end AM/FM/CD radio to spice up your 10-year old car.

That was a relatively brief period when manufacturers mostly used DIN
sizing and dash kits were available. Prior to that a hacksaw and sheet
metal skills helped but at least a radio was just a radio or sometimes an incorporated cassette or CD player.

Since I work on my own vehicles my pet peeve is oil filters. My Toyota has
a Toyota engine; the sedans of the same year were Mazda 2s and have Mazda engines. Physically the filters are the same size but they do not
interchange.

I haven't bought a new bike in years but Shimano was a master at
obsolescence. The tools to remove the bottom bracket or freewheel always
were just enough different, maybe one spline more or less, that they
wouldn't fit.

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On 2025-01-10, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Fri, 10 Jan 2025 21:17:50 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

The multiple connector types have been very counterproductive. The
Chinese government brought some standardization by requiring micro-USB
connectors, but Apple soon found a way around it and introduced
"Lightning" connectors just to be different. Round two switched everyone
to USB-C (again initiated by China - or was it EU). To my eyes, USB-C is
not "flatter" than Micro-USB, but it does have the advantage of being
symmetrical.

I've got a wall full of cables to attest to that foolishness. There is the Mini-B for the Garmin GPS and an older Kindle, the Standard B for the
legacy Arduinos, the Micro-B for the phone, newer Kindle, and the Pico boards, and the USB-C for the Fire tablet, airbrush, and other stuff.

Then there's the almost-mini-B used by Olympus cameras. On our way
to Ireland our carry-on bag fell over and our little bag of chargers,
adapters, etc. fell out and got lost. I managed to find my wife a
third-party charger for her Macbook for a mere $100, but nobody had
one of those oddball Olympus connectors, either at our layover in
Toronto or in any shop I tried in Ireland. No photos for me.
(I did find a couple of the cables in a camera shop when we
got back home, so at least I can still use the camera.)

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

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On Fri, 10 Jan 2025 21:17:50 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:

Those days are over. No more aftermarket car radios, since
entertainment, navigation, climate control and other dashboard
functions became integrated.

The real question then, is: Has the seame thing happened with Linux distributions?

Is it good or bad?




--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

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On 1/10/25 10:23 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:

On Fri, 10 Jan 2025 21:17:50 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:

Those days are over. No more aftermarket car radios, since
entertainment, navigation, climate control and other dashboard
functions became integrated.

The real question then, is: Has the seame thing happened with Linux distributions?

Is it good or bad?

There's not as MUCH 'diversity' as, say, 10 years ago.

Came across a chart somewhere showing which Linux distros
spawned others, and others, over maybe a 25 year span.
MOST didn't make it - lived maybe 5 years. I guess every
developer is sure they have the 'better idea', but ....

However there's still most of the olde-tyme core distros.
The RHEL branch, Debian, Arch, Slack. Those seem to be
holding up. FreeBSD and OpenBSD also and don't forget
GenToo.

TOO much 'diversity' splits efforts and opinions too
much IMHO. Not enough invites the fate of niche species.

Oh, you CAN get aftermarket car radios ... cheap
to outrightly ridiculous. Try Amazon.

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On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:48:20 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

However there's still most of the olde-tyme core distros.
The RHEL branch, Debian, Arch, Slack. Those seem to be holding up.
FreeBSD and OpenBSD also and don't forget GenToo.

And SUSE... I don't remember if any other distros did the same but I have
a box set which included the installation media and a set of printed
manuals. I can't remember if it was Best Buy. They were preceded by a
company that folded. Anyway you could buy the set like any other
software.

It was the last gasp of the traditional software purchase with printed documentation prior to 'download the iso, burn it to a DVD, and good
luck.'

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On 10/01/2025 21:17, Lars Poulsen wrote:

Or the way car radios were standardized, so you could buy a new,
high-end AM/FM/CD radio to spice up your 10-year old car.

Those days are over. No more aftermarket car radios, since
entertainment, navigation, climate control and other dashboard
functions became integrated.

I.e Diversity as in making incompatible shit is what Microsoft Apple and
big vendors try and do. Betamax versus VHS

The people like standardised shit.

Not a hundred different 'diverse' screw threads depending...

...yesterday I took delivery of a panel mount HDMI to micro HDMI
connector for a Pi 4B.
It came without mounting screws.

No screw in my extensive collection fitted. It may have been #4 UNC.

I tried to re-tap it to M3. The metal inserts simply rotated in the
flexible plastic housing

I ended up pushing them out with pliers and pushing in M3 bushes.

Diversity is there to address single points of failure, not to increase
the chances of failure.

Mostly you don't want it. Only when there are extreme crises do people
who are 'different' or technology that is 'different' survive by sheer happenstance. And become the 'new standard'.

Linux succeeds because it is a vendor independent *standard*. Not
because it has a thousand pointless diverse 'distros' that barely differ
one from anther.

Diversity means 100 nuclear power stations so if one goes down 99 are
still running.

Diversity means 100 nuclear power stations built to identical
specifications with open source parts specifications so that anyone can
in principle manufacture the same spares parts, thus providing a diverse
supply channels.

It doesn't mean having a completely unique and non interchangeable and
mutually incompatible collection of 'things that occasionally produce electricity' all built to different standards.

An example of stupid diversity from the early days of the internet. A
pointy head decided that the ISP need 'diverse' routing from London,
which was then the gateway too Europe, and Manchester, which is where a
lot of transatlantic cables came ashore.

So the bought two channels from different vendors.

One day both failed simultaneously. Routing to the USA was going via Scandinavia, which had very limited US capacity.

How come 'diversity' had failed?
Simples. There was one very high capacity multi-fibre link between
London and Manchester used by every vendor of bandwidth.
And a digger had sliced through it....

Diversity is an engineering concept taken up, misunderstood., used out
of a valid context, and abused by people who want to sell you shit that doesn't work.

--
I would rather have questions that cannot be answered...
...than to have answers that cannot be questioned

Richard Feynman

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On 11/01/2025 03:23, Steve Hayes wrote:

On Fri, 10 Jan 2025 21:17:50 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:

Those days are over. No more aftermarket car radios, since
entertainment, navigation, climate control and other dashboard
functions became integrated.

The real question then, is: Has the seame thing happened with Linux distributions?

Not really. Packages pretty much work on all linux distros and the
difference is usually in the UI.
Its a standard engine and chassis (frame), but you can get it with
fluffy dice and chrome plated wheels and tailfins, if you want

Is it good or bad?

To what objective standards of excellence?

When talking about electricity generation we know what is good (for
consumers anyway), and that is reliable 24x7 electricity delivered to
your consumer unit at the lowest possible cost to you and the lowest
effect on the environment.

If you go down that rabbit hole with a slide rule the answer comes up as multiple instances of a solid reliable standardised nuclear reactors.

And no fucking wind or solar WHATSOEVER.




--
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such
time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic
and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally
important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for
the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the
truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Joseph Goebbels

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On 1/11/25 2:02 AM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:48:20 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

However there's still most of the olde-tyme core distros.
The RHEL branch, Debian, Arch, Slack. Those seem to be holding up.
FreeBSD and OpenBSD also and don't forget GenToo.

And SUSE... I don't remember if any other distros did the same but I have
a box set which included the installation media and a set of printed
manuals. I can't remember if it was Best Buy. They were preceded by a
company that folded. Anyway you could buy the set like any other
software.

It was the last gasp of the traditional software purchase with printed documentation prior to 'download the iso, burn it to a DVD, and good
luck.'

I bought original SUSE off the shelf also - green
box. I'd messed around with RH and SlackWare before
but they were really crude. SUSE was just NICE.
There was also a low-cost version of Oracle that'd
run with it on the same shelf.

Alas original SUSE went all commercial - appears
under different names too.

OpenSUSE captured the goodness of the original
very well. Used it for desktops, used it for
servers. Of late it's kinda become messed up,
they dropped a lot of older utilities - some
of which I'd writ software around and/or parsed
their output. That's when I got mad at 'em and
went straight Deb. Then Deb got funky, WAY too
much like Ubuntu. IMHO Ubuntu should have shifted
more back towards Deb.

So, for now, Manjaro and some Fedora. No one has yet
made a clean Just Works port of Fedora for the
Pi-5 alas ... something's WEIRD about that unit.
They should drop it and make a "Pi4-Ultra" instead
with a peppier version of that chip.

Tried to make a VM of DragonFly the other day.
Wouldn't boot properly, dunno why yet. The
'live' version would start OK in VBox and
allegedly install, but you couldn't boot the
resultant installation - it remained fixated
on the live ISO being there. I've used it
a little in the past and it ain't bad at all
so I'll try again. My FreeBSD VM works Ok.

Oh ... never found good advice on this ... is
it possible to somehow clone a VBox installation
and jam it in as a HDD install ? VMs are good
for experimentation - but once you get the
experiment RIGHT you don't wanna throw it away.

Anyway, 'diversity' ... good to a POINT, so long
as it doesn't overly-fracture developer teams.

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On 11/01/2025 14:21, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

Well, USA, a lot of power companies have built HUGE
  solar farms. The idea isn't to replace the hardware
  power plants but to add daytime grid capacity when
  the load tends to be highest. No 'storage' needed.
  This way they don't need to build new plants. Solar
  is E-Z add-on too.

The demand is NOT highest during the day, It is highest at the end of
the day when temperatures peak and the sun has gone down

The massive drop off in solar has to be replaced by something else, but
never to the cost of those making money out of solar. Only the consumer
pays more instead.


--
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over
the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that
authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frédéric Bastiat

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On 1/11/25 7:13 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 11/01/2025 03:23, Steve Hayes wrote:

On Fri, 10 Jan 2025 21:17:50 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen
<lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:

Those days are over. No more aftermarket car radios, since
entertainment, navigation, climate control and other dashboard
functions became integrated.

The real question then, is: Has the seame thing happened with Linux
distributions?

Not really. Packages pretty much work on all linux distros and the
difference is usually in the UI.
Its a standard engine and chassis (frame), but you can get it with
fluffy dice and chrome plated wheels and tailfins, if you want

Heh ... was watching "Commando Cody" in "Radar Men From The Moon"
the other day. The moon villains sent a sort of 'tank' to chase
him around ... it had tail-fins :-)

Is it good or bad?

To what objective standards of excellence?

It's more subjective. You can get perfectly good and
reliable performance for most any need from ANY Linux
or BSD installation. However they all have a somewhat
different "look & feel", even beyond just the desktops.
Find one YOU like - that makes it "best".

When talking about electricity generation we know what is good (for
consumers anyway), and that is reliable 24x7 electricity delivered to
your consumer unit at the lowest possible cost to you and the lowest
effect on the environment.

If you go down that rabbit hole with a slide rule the answer comes up as multiple instances of a solid reliable standardised nuclear reactors.

And  no fucking wind or solar WHATSOEVER.

You REALLY hate solar, don't you ?

Well, USA, a lot of power companies have built HUGE
solar farms. The idea isn't to replace the hardware
power plants but to add daytime grid capacity when
the load tends to be highest. No 'storage' needed.
This way they don't need to build new plants. Solar
is E-Z add-on too.

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On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:04:37 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Not a hundred different 'diverse' screw threads depending...

Memories of a misguided youth working on British sports cars...

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On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:04 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

So, for now, Manjaro and some Fedora. No one has yet made a clean
Just Works port of Fedora for the Pi-5 alas ... something's WEIRD
about that unit. They should drop it and make a "Pi4-Ultra" instead
with a peppier version of that chip.

There's a new Pi 5 version with 16GB of RAM. It's not clear what the use
case is. Windows on ARM?

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On Sat, 11 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

OpenSUSE captured the goodness of the original
very well. Used it for desktops, used it for

This is the truth! Part of my christmas holidays were spent upgrading my work laptop, my fathers laptop and my backup server to opensuse 15.6. All went beautiful, quick, and without any problems at all.

servers. Of late it's kinda become messed up,
they dropped a lot of older utilities - some
of which I'd writ software around and/or parsed
their output. That's when I got mad at 'em and

What utilities did they drop? I've use opensuse for a long time and have not experienced this pain. I am very interested, since it might signal where the distribution is going, so that I can change ahead of time.

went straight Deb. Then Deb got funky, WAY too
much like Ubuntu. IMHO Ubuntu should have shifted
more back towards Deb.

So, for now, Manjaro and some Fedora. No one has yet

How is majaro? Is it a contender?

made a clean Just Works port of Fedora for the
Pi-5 alas ... something's WEIRD about that unit.
They should drop it and make a "Pi4-Ultra" instead
with a peppier version of that chip.

Tried to make a VM of DragonFly the other day.
Wouldn't boot properly, dunno why yet. The
'live' version would start OK in VBox and
allegedly install, but you couldn't boot the
resultant installation - it remained fixated
on the live ISO being there. I've used it
a little in the past and it ain't bad at all
so I'll try again. My FreeBSD VM works Ok.

Had no problems with Freebsd in VM:s and native on my asus laptop. Never tried dragonfly.

Oh ... never found good advice on this ... is
it possible to somehow clone a VBox installation
and jam it in as a HDD install ? VMs are good
for experimentation - but once you get the
experiment RIGHT you don't wanna throw it away.

Can't you just save the kickstart file (or what ever the equivalent is called in
suse-language) and use that for a hardware based redeploy? Then you rsync over any customizations.

Anyway, 'diversity' ... good to a POINT, so long
as it doesn't overly-fracture developer teams.

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On 1/11/25 2:52 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:04:37 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Not a hundred different 'diverse' screw threads depending...

Memories of a misguided youth working on British sports cars...

Still have your Whitworth set ? :-)

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On 1/11/25 2:50 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:04 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

So, for now, Manjaro and some Fedora. No one has yet made a clean
Just Works port of Fedora for the Pi-5 alas ... something's WEIRD
about that unit. They should drop it and make a "Pi4-Ultra" instead
with a peppier version of that chip.

There's a new Pi 5 version with 16GB of RAM. It's not clear what the use
case is. Windows on ARM?

There's clearly something very convoluted about the
way the CPU and maybe some peripherial chips start
up on the Pi5. You could run many Linux distros on
Pi's up thru the Pi4. Then ... the factory Deb deriv
is pretty much IT unless you wanna suffer a lot.

If you've ever watched a Pi update, note ALL the
damned messages about special fix-ups and kernel
hacks - I mean there's LOTS of them. The BCM2712
do NOT boot smooth like earlier versions. I'll
still say the Pi3s were the "most generally useful".

As for the 16gb ... well, if it's not TOO much more
expensive, may as well have it. However 4gb has
always been more than enough for anything I've
wanted to do with a Pi. Even the ancient 250mb
ones worked OK with Linux - though I never tried
OpenSUSE/KDE on a Pi-1.

I did turn one into a muzak system though - 4 hour
loops of 'mall/elevator music' from the 70s that
would switch once a month. Ran for like a dozen
years ... probably still is, unless somebody finally
found where I hid it and smashed the thing with
a hammer :-)

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On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 19:19:56 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

As for the 16gb ... well, if it's not TOO much more expensive, may as
well have it. However 4gb has always been more than enough for
anything I've wanted to do with a Pi. Even the ancient 250mb ones
worked OK with Linux - though I never tried OpenSUSE/KDE on a Pi-1.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/09/the_ultimate_pi_5_arrives/?td=rt-3a

$40 is chump change for me but it wouldn't do anything for me. So far I am using the Pi to work with the Pico although I did get a GPIO extension
board and may do something with the Pi itself. The extension board has the
pins labeled which is a distinct plus. Counting holes in a solderless breadboard is a PITA when you don't have 20 year old eyes.

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On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:44:30 +0100, D wrote:

This is the truth! Part of my christmas holidays were spent upgrading my
work laptop, my fathers laptop and my backup server to opensuse 15.6.
All went beautiful, quick, and without any problems at all.

To give the devil his due I hit the 'download and install' button for 24H2
and went for a hike. When I got home the laptop was up and running. A
quick check showed my Python venvs were functioning.

The Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 upgrade required manual intervention at two
points and would have failed completely unattended. I lost postgres, the Thunderbird snap had to be manually installed and the venvs are hosed.
There was also unexpected crap on the desktop.

Fedora 40 to Fedora 41 ran unintended with no problems and it didn't break
my Python projects.

I'll continue to live with it but Ubuntu and GNOME doesn't impress me.
Several people on the ubuntu subreddit said they always do a fresh install because of the upgrade problems.

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On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 19:21:58 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

On 1/11/25 2:52 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:04:37 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Not a hundred different 'diverse' screw threads depending...

Memories of a misguided youth working on British sports cars...

Still have your Whitworth set ? :-)

I never had Whitworth tools although I did have to buy the fasteners from
a shop that specialized in Brit cars.

It did bite me a couple of times. For installing the distributor drive
pinion the manual was very specific about using a particular length of
screw in the drilled and tapped hole, I'll say 2 1/2". I didn't have one
that long so I used a shorter one. The extra length was so you didn't drop
the whole mess into the sump. I hadn't put oil in the crankcase at that
point but there were a lot of little cap screws holding the sump cover on
to retrieve the pinion.

What I do have are several sets of metric and SAE wrenches. Both the Ford
and the Harley go metric in the strangers places. At least the Suzuki
bikes and the Toyota are 100% metric.

Then there are the Torx drivers, the weird little drivers used in
electronics stuff that are close but no cigar. Damn them all to the fires
of hell, starting with Harley. They use #25 and #27 Torx screws. #25 is
just the right size to strip out a #27 head and a lot of the Torx sets
skip #27.

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On 1/11/25 9:23 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 19:21:58 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

On 1/11/25 2:52 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:04:37 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Not a hundred different 'diverse' screw threads depending...

Memories of a misguided youth working on British sports cars...

Still have your Whitworth set ? :-)

I never had Whitworth tools although I did have to buy the fasteners from
a shop that specialized in Brit cars.

It did bite me a couple of times. For installing the distributor drive
pinion the manual was very specific about using a particular length of
screw in the drilled and tapped hole, I'll say 2 1/2". I didn't have one
that long so I used a shorter one. The extra length was so you didn't drop the whole mess into the sump. I hadn't put oil in the crankcase at that
point but there were a lot of little cap screws holding the sump cover on
to retrieve the pinion.

What I do have are several sets of metric and SAE wrenches. Both the Ford
and the Harley go metric in the strangers places. At least the Suzuki
bikes and the Toyota are 100% metric.

Then there are the Torx drivers, the weird little drivers used in
electronics stuff that are close but no cigar. Damn them all to the fires
of hell, starting with Harley. They use #25 and #27 Torx screws. #25 is
just the right size to strip out a #27 head and a lot of the Torx sets
skip #27.

Heh ... been there, suffered similar.

Even way back in the 80s, US cars started
mixing metric and SAE bolts - sometimes on the
same component like water pumps. Just insane.

Haven't seen any Whitworth in the USA (yet)
except on Brit imports.

And then, as you noted, those weird little 'torx'
and similar have their own threading universe.
Oh, Torx aren't always 'little'. They ARE likely
best for fully-automated assembly though, and
to hell with any humans who have to cope after.
They want you to buy a whole new whatever ...

I don't mind SAE, I don't mind metric ... but just
PICK ONE for yer product line and STICK with it.

Waiting for an 'AI' to design the 'most optimal'
thread spacing/depth/twist - and then we'll have
to buy yet ANOTHER big tool-set.

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On 1/11/25 9:02 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 19:19:56 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

As for the 16gb ... well, if it's not TOO much more expensive, may as
well have it. However 4gb has always been more than enough for
anything I've wanted to do with a Pi. Even the ancient 250mb ones
worked OK with Linux - though I never tried OpenSUSE/KDE on a Pi-1.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/09/the_ultimate_pi_5_arrives/?td=rt-3a

$40 is chump change for me but it wouldn't do anything for me. So far I am using the Pi to work with the Pico although I did get a GPIO extension
board and may do something with the Pi itself. The extension board has the pins labeled which is a distinct plus. Counting holes in a solderless breadboard is a PITA when you don't have 20 year old eyes.

$40 ? Are you buying in the USA ??? Pi's are EXPENSIVE,
check Amazon US. Pi5 + CanaKit box, PS, fan ... you're
talking minimum $135 depending on options.

https://www.amazon.com/CanaKit-Raspberry-Starter-Kit-PRO/dp/B0CRSNCJ6Y?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.W5N9lppf7Ww6euC0QW7LizVaMqsTVa_ZF1ySG95x3DhLGJOeY4hNm7YIsSGkw4Tx-tDwimaCEao30Em8UViHPG4rroRGP7_ye5Z9brI1z3XMJSqxWWzf8C9ARJ0Jxdep_lO1YC7W-
TkaDsZpMENZJ6UqWTflP6edM1bZMZvV1cVXBndhCgqza7SSWW8Moq-CZ-jLWX_oZW4GPuGtHLZX4RSe9A3SFjC8VRazQLOT2vOVhci3uVkf9o1GJybcDY7dCvVN6ta-20km-kNSWPMvJvjehuIAW8aZ_sStiefpr-Zx1H-PWxubnKGvKZ05STIcG_jqTtkPfq0TZ4vi0Xra37TNsvk5hiLMoOVXYdOQ3IM.
MTaGyCwBB8MWoakywVSepd10p5Z8BLUYFwDewCr3vlI&dib_tag=se&keywords=raspberry%2Bpi%2B5&qid=1736650511&refinements=p_123%3A7183&rnid=85457740011&s=electronics&sr=1-1&th=1


UK price is lower but I don't wanna expose my card to
the international environment more than needed and
shipping would eat up some of the 'savings'.

Anyway, except for using a few Pi3's as security cam
servers (via 'motion') I'm not really doing anything
at the moment that requires all those I/O pins so
I've been buying BeeLink/BMax boxes instead (they
have an N-100 now for about $165)

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On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 23:00:11 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

And then, as you noted, those weird little 'torx'
and similar have their own threading universe. Oh, Torx aren't always
'little'. They ARE likely best for fully-automated assembly though,
and to hell with any humans who have to cope after. They want you to
buy a whole new whatever ...

I think my largest Torx is a #50. I'd rather deal with that than a #4
Phillips although I have one of those for the air cleaner on the
Sportster.

I think my first go around with Torx was replacing a headlight on the '86 F-150. WTF? Again it was better than the crappy little Phillips screws
that had been in use.

I probably could scare up some Robertson drivers too. I used to do some
work in Canada and when you go down to Canadian Tire for some screws
that's what you get.

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On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 22:19:33 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

$40 ? Are you buying in the USA ??? Pi's are EXPENSIVE,
check Amazon US. Pi5 + CanaKit box, PS, fan ... you're talking
minimum $135 depending on options.

$40 more than the 8GB version. That is the Canakit I bought. It wasn't
Black Friday but there was some sort of sale and I paid $136. I had been thinking about getting one but the sale pushed me over the edge.

This Ubuntu box is a Beelink SER4 that I bought in 2022 for $389. It has a Ryzen 7 4700U 8-core processor with 16GB of memory. Beelink has expanded
its offerings since 2022 and I don't recall what they had on the low end.
The SER4 has virtually the same specs as my Acer Swift 3 laptop so I knew
it was capable.

I've been concentrating on the Pico Ws, comparing CircuitPython,
MicroPython, and C but I did hang a DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor on
the Pi to test the GPIO using Python.

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On 11/01/2025 19:50, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:04 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

So, for now, Manjaro and some Fedora. No one has yet made a clean
Just Works port of Fedora for the Pi-5 alas ... something's WEIRD
about that unit. They should drop it and make a "Pi4-Ultra" instead
with a peppier version of that chip.

There's a new Pi 5 version with 16GB of RAM. It's not clear what the use
case is. Windows on ARM?

Might be handy for a massivley multiuser web server

--
Renewable energy: Expensive solutions that don't work to a problem that
doesn't exist instituted by self legalising protection rackets that
don't protect, masquerading as public servants who don't serve the public.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On 11/01/2025 19:52, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:04:37 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Not a hundred different 'diverse' screw threads depending...

Memories of a misguided youth working on British sports cars...

Or American ones.

We had Whitworth BA and BSF, you had UNC and UNF and everyone else had
metric

--
Renewable energy: Expensive solutions that don't work to a problem that
doesn't exist instituted by self legalising protection rackets that
don't protect, masquerading as public servants who don't serve the public.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 12/01/2025 00:21, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

On 1/11/25 2:52 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:04:37 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Not a hundred different 'diverse'  screw threads depending...

Memories of a misguided youth working on British sports cars...

  Still have your Whitworth set ?  :-)

Even I, as the ultimate Brit, don't have a Whitworth set. There might be
the odd Whitworth spanner (wrench) lurking at the bottom of a greasy
toolbox.

The old British nut sizes were imperial AF - across face. They simply
became metric 'near enough' but you can sill get a 5/16" AF spanner.

Etc. https://www.sealey.co.uk/product/5637986191/imperial-combination-spanner-516
--
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the
urge to rule it.”
– H. L. Mencken

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On 12/01/2025 02:23, rbowman wrote:

Then there are the Torx drivers, the weird little drivers used in
electronics stuff that are close but no cigar. Damn them all to the fires
of hell, starting with Harley. They use #25 and #27 Torx screws. #25 is
just the right size to strip out a #27 head and a lot of the Torx sets
skip #27.

Oh those fuckers. Yep they pop up all over the place.

And there are other head styles that are similar

Here is a classic example of 'diversity'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives


--
"If you don’t read the news paper, you are un-informed. If you read the
news paper, you are mis-informed."

Mark Twain

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On Sat, 11 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

On 1/11/25 2:50 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:04 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

So, for now, Manjaro and some Fedora. No one has yet made a clean
Just Works port of Fedora for the Pi-5 alas ... something's WEIRD
about that unit. They should drop it and make a "Pi4-Ultra" instead
with a peppier version of that chip.

There's a new Pi 5 version with 16GB of RAM. It's not clear what the use
case is. Windows on ARM?

There's clearly something very convoluted about the
way the CPU and maybe some peripherial chips start
up on the Pi5. You could run many Linux distros on
Pi's up thru the Pi4. Then ... the factory Deb deriv
is pretty much IT unless you wanna suffer a lot.

If you've ever watched a Pi update, note ALL the
damned messages about special fix-ups and kernel
hacks - I mean there's LOTS of them. The BCM2712
do NOT boot smooth like earlier versions. I'll
still say the Pi3s were the "most generally useful".

As for the 16gb ... well, if it's not TOO much more
expensive, may as well have it. However 4gb has
always been more than enough for anything I've
wanted to do with a Pi. Even the ancient 250mb
ones worked OK with Linux - though I never tried
OpenSUSE/KDE on a Pi-1.

I did turn one into a muzak system though - 4 hour
loops of 'mall/elevator music' from the 70s that
would switch once a month. Ran for like a dozen
years ... probably still is, unless somebody finally
found where I hid it and smashed the thing with
a hammer :-)

I have a raspberry pi 3 still going strong as a TV computer after probably
7-8 years or so. The only problem is that my father forcefully unplugs it
every time he vacuum cleans, so every couple of years the memory card gets corrupted and I have to do a full format/reinstall. But that doesn't take
long, and since it is only every couple of years and not an important
computer, that's ok.

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On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, rbowman wrote:

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:44:30 +0100, D wrote:

This is the truth! Part of my christmas holidays were spent upgrading my
work laptop, my fathers laptop and my backup server to opensuse 15.6.
All went beautiful, quick, and without any problems at all.

To give the devil his due I hit the 'download and install' button for 24H2 and went for a hike. When I got home the laptop was up and running. A
quick check showed my Python venvs were functioning.

The Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 upgrade required manual intervention at two
points and would have failed completely unattended. I lost postgres, the Thunderbird snap had to be manually installed and the venvs are hosed.
There was also unexpected crap on the desktop.

Have you tried alpine for email? It is terminal based, but a very powerful piece of software!

Fedora 40 to Fedora 41 ran unintended with no problems and it didn't break
my Python projects.

I'll continue to live with it but Ubuntu and GNOME doesn't impress me. Several people on the ubuntu subreddit said they always do a fresh install because of the upgrade problems.

This is the truth! I am always afraid that upgrades will give me problems
for some reason, but I have never experienced this. Maybe it is because as
I've gotten older, I tinker and customize less, and perhaps that is why upgrades now run very smooth.

A for gnome, maybe try xfce? I find it a nice balance of batteries
included and light resource use.

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On 12/01/2025 02:10, rbowman wrote:

Several people on the ubuntu subreddit said they always do a fresh install because of the upgrade problems.

Yes, it doesn't always work on Mint either which is Ubuntu with lipstick...
I am scared to change my desktop too much because the diver for my
negative scanner took some time to get working and I am reluctant to
change it


--
“Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of
other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance"

- John K Galbraith

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On 11/01/2025 23:44, D wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

 You REALLY hate solar, don't you ?

I personally am a huge fan of solar for my offgrid fortress of solitude during
8-9 months of the year.

That is fine. If youtr usage is low and there is plenty of sun - My
sister oin Cape Town relies on it to keep the house going during the
planed powercuts that characterise an ANC destroyed power grid.

Bit it doesnt work very well in wintertime, and the batteries are expsenive

For the rest of the time, I wonder if small 2-3 meter wind turbines
might be a
thing?

Absolutely not. You might get a few hundred watts at best If you build
it talle ebough

For heating I would use a wood stove or a pellets burner.

How not very green of you!

Last time I was trying to calculate the cost of battery storage for a
100% solar
it came out at 600k USD or so, that is... madness.

Now multiply it by the whole of california...



--
“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established
authorities are wrong.”

― Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV

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On 12/01/2025 02:02, rbowman wrote:

The extension board has the
pins labeled which is a distinct plus. Counting holes in a solderless breadboard is a PITA when you don't have 20 year old eyes.

That's why I get my own PCBS made up!

I can count pins at a huge scale on the CAD drawings!


--
No Apple devices were knowingly used in the preparation of this post.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On 12/01/2025 06:51, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 22:19:33 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

$40 ? Are you buying in the USA ??? Pi's are EXPENSIVE,
check Amazon US. Pi5 + CanaKit box, PS, fan ... you're talking
minimum $135 depending on options.

Pi5 16GB

£114.90 incl. VAT
Stock: In stock

At my local Pi-man.

No case or anything. I make my own cases anyway.

$40 more than the 8GB version. That is the Canakit I bought. It wasn't
Black Friday but there was some sort of sale and I paid $136. I had been thinking about getting one but the sale pushed me over the edge.

This Ubuntu box is a Beelink SER4 that I bought in 2022 for $389. It has a Ryzen 7 4700U 8-core processor with 16GB of memory. Beelink has expanded
its offerings since 2022 and I don't recall what they had on the low end.
The SER4 has virtually the same specs as my Acer Swift 3 laptop so I knew
it was capable.

This Mint box is a HP elite desk 800 that cost me about £230 IIRC

Plus another £20 for another 16GB RAM

I've been concentrating on the Pico Ws, comparing CircuitPython,
MicroPython, and C but I did hang a DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor on
the Pi to test the GPIO using Python.

GPIO on a PI under linux is a breeze.

Picos are not bad either.

The Pico is an adventure to get anything going without using the ghastly python, which is slow and limited



--
No Apple devices were knowingly used in the preparation of this post.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

D wrote:

I have a raspberry pi 3 still going strong as a TV computer after probably >7-8 years or so. The only problem is that my father forcefully unplugs it >every time he vacuum cleans, so every couple of years the memory card gets >corrupted and I have to do a full format/reinstall. But that doesn't take >long, and since it is only every couple of years and not an important >computer, that's ok.

I use one for the same purpose, running LibreElec. The nice thins about
is, you can backup all setting from iirc Addons - Configuration to a USB
stick, which I do regularly, and then, if something goes wrong with the
SD card just load a new LE image onto the card and restore all settings
from the file on USB. One reboot later and everthing is as it was
before.

-jw-
--
And now for something completely different...

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On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 21:57:29 -0000 (UTC), Rich wrote:

Other reasons that have been reported are:

1) IBM required any "outside IBM" chips to be second sourced. Intel
already had AMD as an official licenced second source for the 8088 chip,
Motorola did not (yet) have any second source for the 68000.

2) Intel had the chip on the market, and could supply the production
volume (or so they claimed to IBM) IBM wanted. Motorola had
"pre-production" versions of the 68000 available for 'breadboarding'
but it had not yet entered full production at the time IBM was selecting
a CPU to use (and IIRC, was not planned to enter full production until
after IBM had planned to release their new "PC").

On 2025-01-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

Both are believable. Even for the older microcontrollers Motorola had a
bad reputation for hanging you out to dry if they reverted to their roots
and got an order for millions of pieces from the automotive industry.

I think it was 1981 that Motorola announced the LANCE chip, which made
Ethernet practical. Lots of companies designed products around it, but
in the end it was 2 years late to ship production quantities.

I was at ACC (Associated Computer Consultants, later Advanced Computer Communications). Larry Green, their top designer, left to start CMC (Communications Machinery Corporation) to build Ethernet cards to
real-time systems, primarily VersaBus. Since they could not get
even evaluation quantities of actual LANCE chips, they designed a LANCE emulator board (something like 30 x 50 centimeter size) to plug into the
boards they were designing to test the boards and the software drivers
for the boards. While they were building an inventory of pruduct boards
with an empty socket where the LANCE would go, the only thing they had to
sell was the EMULATOR, which they then sold at at good price to the
other vendors of products for mostly different buses.

This must have fresh in the minds of whoever would be choosing
arhitectures for new computers.

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On 2025-01-11, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

This is the truth. I have never seen the maintenance cost for sea-based wind, or
mega solar farms in deserts. I have never seen the cost of security to protect
the mega solar farms in deserts. Fun fact... when Ericsson built out cell phone
networks in africa, they quickly discovered that every base station needed guards. If not, as soon as they were built, and the crew left, some local tribes
dismantled it and sold it as junk.

This was why they needed wireless telephones to begin with: Telephone
wires were stolen within days, only to reappear in the market as scrap
copper wire. Wireless networks greatly reduced the attack surface.

Wife and I just watched a Danish documentary movie about a restaurant
group that moved a Michelin starred restaurant from Torshavn (Faroes) to
a village in on the edge of the Disko Ice Fjord in West Greenland. The challenges of building a larger kitchen were immense. Without full-time
on-site supervision, nothing happened for months. The kitchen equipment
sat in boxes on the dock for weeks, waiting for the kitchen building to
be built. The crew quarters had no indoor plumbing. There was no
electricity supply for the kitchen building, the electrical panel had
not been selected/ordered by the time the cooks arrived 4 weeks before
opening night. 5 days before opening, in the middle of wall framing for
the kitchen building, the carpenters failed to show up: A whale had been
killed (two allowed per year) and everyone in the village was down on
the beach cutting up the carcass.

My company does a fair amount of engineering support work for the CTBTO
(the Preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
Organization) which maintains dozens of infrasound monitoring stations
in remote parts of the world. My business partner/boss likes to come
along on a site visit once in a while. Easter Island, Robinson Crusoe
Island, Alice Springs, Warramunga. (Not so keen on going to Djibouti,
Tristan da Cunha.) These maintenance/field upgrade visits are planned
years ahead of time. We supply radios for communications within a
station between sensor arrays. Towers are designed, tower sections
ordered and staged, cables are spec-ed to exact lengths. We do
predictions of radio signal strengths using Google Earth to review line-of-sight issues. And field installation crews have carefully
planned spare parts, cable splice kits, power banks etc. There is no
BestBuy or Home Depot in the villages of Nunavut!

It is a fun part of our project portfolio. The CTBTO is a UN agency headquartered in Vienna. The contractors are a diverse bunch, that get
rotated a bit. We have worked with groups from France, Ireland,
California and Alaska. We got in on this, because our radios are the
most reliable they could find. I don't know what they will do when we
retire in a couple of years, but I am sure they are working on it.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text,
while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools.

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 11/01/2025 23:44, D wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

 You REALLY hate solar, don't you ?

I personally am a huge fan of solar for my offgrid fortress of solitude
during
8-9 months of the year.

That is fine. If youtr usage is low and there is plenty of sun - My sister oin Cape Town relies on it to keep the house going during the planed powercuts that characterise an ANC destroyed power grid.

That country is very messed up. I think they need more peace, love and understanding, and spiritual dialogue between whites and negros. Only then
will peace reign supreme! ;)

Bit it doesnt work very well in wintertime, and the batteries are expsenive

This is the truth! Impossible at a realistic cost in northern europe.

For the rest of the time, I wonder if small 2-3 meter wind turbines might
be a
thing?

Absolutely not. You might get a few hundred watts at best If you build it talle ebough

For heating I would use a wood stove or a pellets burner.

How not very green of you!

I wipe my ass with green toilet paper! ;)

Last time I was trying to calculate the cost of battery storage for a 100% >> solar
it came out at 600k USD or so, that is... madness.

Now multiply it by the whole of california...

This is the woke dream of paradise. Until we make massive gains in energy storage technology, it will remain a dream.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, Joerg Walther wrote:

D wrote:

I have a raspberry pi 3 still going strong as a TV computer after probably >> 7-8 years or so. The only problem is that my father forcefully unplugs it
every time he vacuum cleans, so every couple of years the memory card gets >> corrupted and I have to do a full format/reinstall. But that doesn't take
long, and since it is only every couple of years and not an important
computer, that's ok.

I use one for the same purpose, running LibreElec. The nice thins about
is, you can backup all setting from iirc Addons - Configuration to a USB stick, which I do regularly, and then, if something goes wrong with the
SD card just load a new LE image onto the card and restore all settings
from the file on USB. One reboot later and everthing is as it was
before.

-jw-

Yes, I realized when I wrote the message, that I should really backup the
.kodi directory, so that I can do exactly that next time it happens. Well,
now I'm back in eastern europe, so that will have to wait until april.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 2025-01-11, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

This is the truth. I have never seen the maintenance cost for sea-based wind, or
mega solar farms in deserts. I have never seen the cost of security to protect
the mega solar farms in deserts. Fun fact... when Ericsson built out cell phone
networks in africa, they quickly discovered that every base station needed >> guards. If not, as soon as they were built, and the crew left, some local tribes
dismantled it and sold it as junk.

This was why they needed wireless telephones to begin with: Telephone
wires were stolen within days, only to reappear in the market as scrap
copper wire. Wireless networks greatly reduced the attack surface.

Wife and I just watched a Danish documentary movie about a restaurant
group that moved a Michelin starred restaurant from Torshavn (Faroes) to
a village in on the edge of the Disko Ice Fjord in West Greenland. The

Why would they do that? Sounds like bad business to me. On the other hand,
I'm not running a restaurant. =)

Does your wife speak danish or did you AI-translate the subtitles?
Sometimes I can rip documentaries including swedish subtitles from
svtplay.se and then automatically translate the subtitles so that it works
for my wife as well.

My company does a fair amount of engineering support work for the CTBTO
(the Preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization) which maintains dozens of infrasound monitoring stations
in remote parts of the world. My business partner/boss likes to come
along on a site visit once in a while. Easter Island, Robinson Crusoe
Island, Alice Springs, Warramunga. (Not so keen on going to Djibouti,
Tristan da Cunha.) These maintenance/field upgrade visits are planned

Wow! What ever they are paying you to go to those places, I am certain it
is not enough. You would have to pay me several 100s of thousands of
dollars before I would voluntarily travel there.

years ahead of time. We supply radios for communications within a
station between sensor arrays. Towers are designed, tower sections
ordered and staged, cables are spec-ed to exact lengths. We do
predictions of radio signal strengths using Google Earth to review line-of-sight issues. And field installation crews have carefully
planned spare parts, cable splice kits, power banks etc. There is no
BestBuy or Home Depot in the villages of Nunavut!

My father visited Nunavut once I think. Don't remember the circumstances.
He worked almost all his life for the same airline, so it was probably
some very minor test of a potential new destination or a marketing stunt.

It is a fun part of our project portfolio. The CTBTO is a UN agency headquartered in Vienna. The contractors are a diverse bunch, that get rotated a bit. We have worked with groups from France, Ireland,
California and Alaska. We got in on this, because our radios are the
most reliable they could find. I don't know what they will do when we
retire in a couple of years, but I am sure they are working on it.

This is worrying. Does it not worry you that you have the world government
as your customer? How do you deal with the ethical dilemmas that implies?
=/

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 11:09:56 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

GPIO on a PI under linux is a breeze.

I was surprised. It has limits compared to a Pico since the machine does
have other tasks to perform rather than being dedicated.

Picos are not bad either.

The Pico is an adventure to get anything going without using the ghastly python, which is slow and limited

It depends on the application. For many things Python is perfectly fine.
You need the ability to determine when it isn't and act accordingly. MicroPython or CircuitPython abstracts away much of the low level cruft.
otoh working with the C SDK is like building a wall a brick at a time.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On 12/01/2025 18:36, D wrote:

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 11/01/2025 23:44, D wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

 You REALLY hate solar, don't you ?

I personally am a huge fan of solar for my offgrid fortress of
solitude during
8-9 months of the year.

That is fine. If youtr usage is low and there is plenty of sun - My
sister oin Cape Town relies on it to keep the house going during the
planed powercuts that characterise an ANC destroyed power grid.

That country is very messed up. I think they need more peace, love and understanding, and spiritual dialogue between whites and negros. Only
then will peace reign supreme! ;)

What is happening is that the populist communist corrupt ANC are being
called out by the rising affluent black middle class.
And of course, the Indians who run EVERYTHING.

Bit it doesnt work very well in wintertime, and the batteries are
expsenive

This is the truth! Impossible at a realistic cost in northern europe.

For the rest of the time, I wonder if small 2-3 meter wind turbines
might be a
thing?

Absolutely not.  You might get a few hundred watts at best If you
build it talle ebough

For heating I would use a wood stove or a pellets burner.

How not very green of you!

I wipe my ass with green toilet paper! ;)

Well that's a start. I am wearing a green fleece

Last time I was trying to calculate the cost of battery storage for a
100% solar
it came out at 600k USD or so, that is... madness.

Now multiply it by the whole of california...

This is the woke dream of paradise. Until we make massive gains in
energy storage technology, it will remain a dream.

And we simply do not know how to make those gains. The green fantasy is
that like Tinkerbelle, if we believe in Green solutions, they will
magically appear.

35 years later, we are still waiting...

--
"Nature does not give up the winter because people dislike the cold."

― Confucius

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On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 11:53:46 +0100, D wrote:

A for gnome, maybe try xfce? I find it a nice balance of batteries
included and light resource use.

My Debian box is Xfce. Years ago I installed Ubuntu, decided I really
didn't like gnome, and added a KDE DE. I ran it for several years but it
was fragile with unexpected interactions. That soured me on switching DEs
after the install.

For this box my first attempt was Kubuntu. It had problems with the installation and I wound up hosing the original Win 11 and not having a
working Linux. I had a Ubuntu iso that installed so I went with it.

The stuff I normally use is on whatever passes for the taskbar on that particular OS so they're really all the same for most purposes.

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On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 10:46:55 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 12/01/2025 02:23, rbowman wrote:

Then there are the Torx drivers, the weird little drivers used in
electronics stuff that are close but no cigar. Damn them all to the
fires of hell, starting with Harley. They use #25 and #27 Torx screws.
#25 is just the right size to strip out a #27 head and a lot of the
Torx sets skip #27.

Oh those fuckers. Yep they pop up all over the place.

And there are other head styles that are similar

Here is a classic example of 'diversity'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives

I find the cruciform types particular annoying. They're all so similar you
can get by with a standard Phillips unless they're tight. With some of the cheap Chinese screws I'm convinced no driver in the world is really a good
fit.

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On 12/01/2025 20:46, rbowman wrote:

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 11:09:56 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

GPIO on a PI under linux is a breeze.

I was surprised. It has limits compared to a Pico since the machine does
have other tasks to perform rather than being dedicated.

Picos are not bad either.

The Pico is an adventure to get anything going without using the ghastly
python, which is slow and limited

It depends on the application. For many things Python is perfectly fine.
You need the ability to determine when it isn't and act accordingly. MicroPython or CircuitPython abstracts away much of the low level cruft.
otoh working with the C SDK is like building a wall a brick at a time.

I wanted my picos to show up in my routers DHCP tables as something
other than whatever is the default. Python could not do it. C could.

static void set_hostname(char * hostname)
{
struct netif *n;
// set hostname
cyw43_arch_lwip_begin();
n = &cyw43_state.netif[CYW43_ITF_STA];
netif_set_hostname(n, hostname);
netif_set_up(n);
cyw43_arch_lwip_end();
// end set hostname
}
--
Canada is all right really, though not for the whole weekend.

"Saki"

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On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 14:40:46 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

I think it was 1981 that Motorola announced the LANCE chip, which made Ethernet practical. Lots of companies designed products around it, but
in the end it was 2 years late to ship production quantities.

The early '80s were insane. Companies were quoting delivery dates out a
year or more. If you could dangle a high volume order you might get better treatment but the company I was with didn't operate on that scale. The
8751 would have been a better choice but we could get 8749s.

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On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 20:48:41 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

I wanted my picos to show up in my routers DHCP tables as something
other than whatever is the default. Python could not do it. C could.

https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/library/network.html

I believe network.hostname() has been available for more than a year.

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On 1/12/25 1:36 PM, D wrote:

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 11/01/2025 23:44, D wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

 You REALLY hate solar, don't you ?

I personally am a huge fan of solar for my offgrid fortress of
solitude during
8-9 months of the year.

That is fine. If youtr usage is low and there is plenty of sun - My
sister oin Cape Town relies on it to keep the house going during the
planed powercuts that characterise an ANC destroyed power grid.

That country is very messed up. I think they need more peace, love and understanding, and spiritual dialogue between whites and negros. Only
then will peace reign supreme! ;)

Bit it doesnt work very well in wintertime, and the batteries are
expsenive

This is the truth! Impossible at a realistic cost in northern europe.

For the rest of the time, I wonder if small 2-3 meter wind turbines
might be a
thing?

Absolutely not.  You might get a few hundred watts at best If you
build it talle ebough

For heating I would use a wood stove or a pellets burner.

How not very green of you!

I wipe my ass with green toilet paper! ;)

Last time I was trying to calculate the cost of battery storage for a
100% solar
it came out at 600k USD or so, that is... madness.

Now multiply it by the whole of california...

This is the woke dream of paradise. Until we make massive gains in
energy storage technology, it will remain a dream.

Speaking of "dreams" .........

Sorry, SA is going down the proverbial toilet and
it's not JUST a 'black'/'white' issue per-se.

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On 1/12/25 7:19 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 14:40:46 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

I think it was 1981 that Motorola announced the LANCE chip, which made
Ethernet practical. Lots of companies designed products around it, but
in the end it was 2 years late to ship production quantities.

The early '80s were insane. Companies were quoting delivery dates out a
year or more. If you could dangle a high volume order you might get better treatment but the company I was with didn't operate on that scale. The
8751 would have been a better choice but we could get 8749s.

Motorola made GOOD chips for a span.

The 6809/68000s were GREAT.

A lot of their peripherial chips were GREAT too.

They were a real player.

But SOMETHING went wrong ... price/volume/quality
as time went on.

NOT such an unusual story alas.

SO many chip lines FAILED ... and not always
for lack of merit.

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This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text,
while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools.

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 12/01/2025 18:36, D wrote:

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 11/01/2025 23:44, D wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

 You REALLY hate solar, don't you ?

I personally am a huge fan of solar for my offgrid fortress of solitude >>>> during
8-9 months of the year.

That is fine. If youtr usage is low and there is plenty of sun - My sister >>> oin Cape Town relies on it to keep the house going during the planed
powercuts that characterise an ANC destroyed power grid.

That country is very messed up. I think they need more peace, love and
understanding, and spiritual dialogue between whites and negros. Only then >> will peace reign supreme! ;)

What is happening is that the populist communist corrupt ANC are being called out by the rising affluent black middle class.
And of course, the Indians who run EVERYTHING.

Interesting. Corrupt and leftist parties start to crack at the seams, once
the middle class gets too big and comfortable. Then, it doesn't work to
only spread hate, there needs to be content, and realistic plans, and that
is what ANC has to learn if they want to continue to strangle the country.

Bit it doesnt work very well in wintertime, and the batteries are
expsenive

This is the truth! Impossible at a realistic cost in northern europe.

For the rest of the time, I wonder if small 2-3 meter wind turbines might >>>> be a
thing?

Absolutely not.  You might get a few hundred watts at best If you build it >>> talle ebough

For heating I would use a wood stove or a pellets burner.

How not very green of you!

I wipe my ass with green toilet paper! ;)

Well that's a start. I am wearing a green fleece

Ahh... reminds me of the old environmental tale of Jason and the green
fleece!

Last time I was trying to calculate the cost of battery storage for a
100% solar
it came out at 600k USD or so, that is... madness.

Now multiply it by the whole of california...

This is the woke dream of paradise. Until we make massive gains in energy
storage technology, it will remain a dream.

And we simply do not know how to make those gains. The green fantasy is that like Tinkerbelle, if we believe in Green solutions, they will magically appear.

35 years later, we are still waiting...

It's only 10 years away!! Btw, a new fusion hype cycle has started. I've
seen on the news lately that it is only 10 years away!

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Fusion - ALWAYS "10 years away" :-)

Sorry, AIN'T gonna happen ANYtime soon, at least
not in any practical way.

Have you LOOKED at those fusion facilities -
gigantic warehouses PACKED with gigantic
lasers and such ? It's THAT difficult. NOT
anything coming to your neighborhood soon.

Sorry, no "Mr. Fusion".

We will have to make due with variations
on the Old Methods for at least 25-50
years. That's the Truth.

Exploit What We've Got to the max. And
yes that INCLUDES solar/wind.

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On 13/01/2025 04:42, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

Sorry, SA is going down the proverbial toilet and
  it's not JUST a 'black'/'white' issue per-se.

It never was. When I lived there in the apartheid days is was exactly to 'worker versus capitalists and rich landowners and merchants' type
scenario that led to the rise of labour style unions and so on in the
19th century in the UK.
It so happened that the yokels were black, but that wasn't their
defining feature. It was lack of education and opportunity, and changing politics didn't fix that.



--
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all
private property.

Karl Marx

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On 13/01/2025 09:32, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

Sorry, no "Mr. Fusion".

We will have to make due with variations
on the Old Methods for at least 25-50
years. That's the Truth.

Totally agree.


--
Labour - a bunch of rich people convincing poor people to vote for rich
people by telling poor people that "other" rich people are the reason
they are poor.

Peter Thompson

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On 13/01/2025 04:42, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

Sorry, SA is going down the proverbial toilet and
  it's not JUST a 'black'/'white' issue per-se.

On 2025-01-13, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

It never was. When I lived there in the apartheid days is was exactly to 'worker versus capitalists and rich landowners and merchants' type
scenario that led to the rise of labour style unions and so on in the
19th century in the UK.
It so happened that the yokels were black, but that wasn't their
defining feature. It was lack of education and opportunity, and changing politics didn't fix that.

And that is true in the USA as well. The focus on skin color instead of income/wealth/class problems has/is/will distract the country from
actually working on mitigating the social stresses.

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On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:

Wife and I just watched a Danish documentary movie about a restaurant
group that moved a Michelin starred restaurant from Torshavn (Faroes) to LP>> a village in on the edge of the Disko Ice Fjord in West Greenland. The

On 2025-01-12, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

Why would they do that? Sounds like bad business to me. On the other hand, I'm not running a restaurant. =)

Does your wife speak danish or did you AI-translate the subtitles?
Sometimes I can rip documentaries including swedish subtitles from svtplay.se and then automatically translate the subtitles so that it works for my wife as well.

My wife is EN (US) only. The movie in question had no subtitles. The
sound track was a mish-mash of English, Danish, Faroese, Greenlandish
and unintelligible. I think they had intended to pdut English subtitles
on it, but ran out of money in postproduction. Nevertheless, I could
explain to her what was happening most of the time.

Amazon Prime video gave us an interesting selection when we search for
"Danish movie" from the home screen, almost all of them with English
subtitles; one of them even had a dubbed-in English soundtrack.

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:

My company does a fair amount of engineering support work for the CTBTO LP>> (the Preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
Organization) which maintains dozens of infrasound monitoring stations LP>> in remote parts of the world. My business partner/boss likes to come
along on a site visit once in a while. Easter Island, Robinson Crusoe
Island, Alice Springs, Warramunga. (Not so keen on going to Djibouti,
Tristan da Cunha.) These maintenance/field upgrade visits are planned

On 2025-01-12, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

Wow! What ever they are paying you to go to those places, I am certain it
is not enough. You would have to pay me several 100s of thousands of
dollars before I would voluntarily travel there.

A lot of people have Easter Island on their bucket list, so a paid trip
there is not too bad. Robinson Crusoe is less well known, and the
airstrip is on the opposite side of the island from the village where
the hostel is located, so it is a boat ride. In both cases, the visits
to the instrumentation sites was only a two-hour hike with a pack donkey
to carry the tools and equipment. My partner is 5 years younger than me
and surfs and snowboards. He did have to get an OSHA tower climbing certification to be useful for the equipment installation.

If I thought I could be useful, I would have offered to go on the
upgrade visit to Qaanaaq (a.k.a. Ultima Thule). Alas, my wife will not
allow me to climb towers.

We declined traveling to Djibouti and Tristan da Cunha, doing remote
support for the installers instead. TdC is very hard to get to. No
airstrip; access is a 7-day boat ride on a fishing boat from Capetown,
you spend 7 days on the island, and then you ride the boat back or wait
for the next boat a month or two later. And the schedule yields to
weather conditions. I think they have 3 round trips in the summer only.

years ahead of time. We supply radios for communications within a
station between sensor arrays. Towers are designed, tower sections
ordered and staged, cables are spec-ed to exact lengths. We do
predictions of radio signal strengths using Google Earth to review
line-of-sight issues. And field installation crews have carefully
planned spare parts, cable splice kits, power banks etc. There is no
BestBuy or Home Depot in the villages of Nunavut!

My father visited Nunavut once I think. Don't remember the circumstances.
He worked almost all his life for the same airline, so it was probably
some very minor test of a potential new destination or a marketing stunt.

It is a fun part of our project portfolio. The CTBTO is a UN agency
headquartered in Vienna. The contractors are a diverse bunch, that get LP>> rotated a bit. We have worked with groups from France, Ireland,
California and Alaska. We got in on this, because our radios are the
most reliable they could find. I don't know what they will do when we
retire in a couple of years, but I am sure they are working on it.

This is worrying. Does it not worry you that you have the world government as your customer? How do you deal with the ethical dilemmas that implies?

World government my ass. A government with no army? It is a debating
society. But even so, it does useful things. The global data collection
of the CTBTO has found many applications in all sorts of research.

(PS: I'd be interested in hearing about you life in the South Baltic
area, but that seems too far from the topics here. Maybe email me
- my info in the headers is true and functional.)

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On Mon, 13 Jan 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:

Wife and I just watched a Danish documentary movie about a restaurant LP>> group that moved a Michelin starred restaurant from Torshavn (Faroes) to LP>> a village in on the edge of the Disko Ice Fjord in West Greenland. The

On 2025-01-12, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

Why would they do that? Sounds like bad business to me. On the other hand, I'm not running a restaurant. =)

Does your wife speak danish or did you AI-translate the subtitles? Sometimes I can rip documentaries including swedish subtitles from svtplay.se and then automatically translate the subtitles so that it works for my wife as well.

My wife is EN (US) only. The movie in question had no subtitles. The
sound track was a mish-mash of English, Danish, Faroese, Greenlandish
and unintelligible. I think they had intended to pdut English subtitles
on it, but ran out of money in postproduction. Nevertheless, I could
explain to her what was happening most of the time.

Amazon Prime video gave us an interesting selection when we search for "Danish movie" from the home screen, almost all of them with English subtitles; one of them even had a dubbed-in English soundtrack.

There are only two danish shows that any man needs to live a happy and fulfilled life...

Riget and Klovn!

Danish humour is the best politically incorrect humor on the planet! My
father enjoys Badehotellet, so that might become necessary too once you
retire. ;)

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:

My company does a fair amount of engineering support work for the CTBTO LP>> (the Preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
Organization) which maintains dozens of infrasound monitoring stations LP>> in remote parts of the world. My business partner/boss likes to come LP>> along on a site visit once in a while. Easter Island, Robinson Crusoe LP>> Island, Alice Springs, Warramunga. (Not so keen on going to Djibouti, LP>> Tristan da Cunha.) These maintenance/field upgrade visits are planned

On 2025-01-12, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

Wow! What ever they are paying you to go to those places, I am certain it is not enough. You would have to pay me several 100s of thousands of dollars before I would voluntarily travel there.

A lot of people have Easter Island on their bucket list, so a paid trip
there is not too bad. Robinson Crusoe is less well known, and the

...

for the next boat a month or two later. And the schedule yields to
weather conditions. I think they have 3 round trips in the summer only.

Shudder. I really do not like travel. I've been forced, by business and
overly travel happy parents, to visit too many countries in a life time.
My greatest wish is to be still, in one place.

This is worrying. Does it not worry you that you have the world government as your customer? How do you deal with the ethical dilemmas that implies?

World government my ass. A government with no army? It is a debating
society. But even so, it does useful things. The global data collection

Haha, well, this is the truth!

of the CTBTO has found many applications in all sorts of research.

(PS: I'd be interested in hearing about you life in the South Baltic
area, but that seems too far from the topics here. Maybe email me
- my info in the headers is true and functional.)

Interested? Well, I'll shoot you an email. Please feel free to ask away.
=)

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On Mon, 13 Jan 2025 03:56:38 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

On 1/12/25 7:19 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 14:40:46 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

I think it was 1981 that Motorola announced the LANCE chip, which made
Ethernet practical. Lots of companies designed products around it, but
in the end it was 2 years late to ship production quantities.

The early '80s were insane. Companies were quoting delivery dates out a
year or more. If you could dangle a high volume order you might get
better treatment but the company I was with didn't operate on that
scale. The 8751 would have been a better choice but we could get 8749s.

Motorola made GOOD chips for a span.

The 6809/68000s were GREAT.

A lot of their peripherial chips were GREAT too.

They were a real player.

But SOMETHING went wrong ... price/volume/quality as time went on.

NOT such an unusual story alas.

SO many chip lines FAILED ... and not always for lack of merit.

There are a lot of twists in Motorola's story. When FreeScale was spun off
it went back to the roots in the automotive industry. Palm used the
DragonBall but that dried up.The FreeScale got bought.

Somehow they blew phones and other consumer products. What became Motorola Solutions still is the 500 pound gorilla in the public safety sector, at
least as far as hardware. There are several challengers for the computer
aided dispatch software.

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