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.

On 1/11/25 8:21 AM, chrisv wrote:
> -hh wrote:
>
>> (snipped, unread)
>
> Poor -highhorse. If he's not attacking reasonable behavior, he's
> defending unreasonable behavior.
>
> I would love to see him "man up" on the censorship issue.

Sure: it goes back to at least 9 April 2013...

<https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.linux.advocacy/c/1W-mAcPC-B4/m/lsaUt_ozLEwJ>

I had called out COLA's behavior of hypocrisy, where the left side of
their piehole was bragging about freedom of speech while the right side
of their piehole was trying to exploit peer pressure to supress the
voices of posters (yup, censorship) whose messages they disliked.

Naturally, the usual suspects were the ones who were butthurt.

> He could
> admit that leftists in the government disallowed freedom of speech.

Got cite? Let's see the Google Groups URL to this alleged post.

Because there were conversations like this one which revealed how Musk
has been a hypocrite with twitter, just like COLA boys above:

<https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.linux.advocacy/c/KGUPKGKvT-Y/m/El_VEgicAAAJ>

> Government directives resulted in the censorship of those on the
> right. On multiple issues that went against the Biden
> administration's narrative.

Again, got cite? Let's see the Google Groups URL to this alleged post.

> This is relevant to what was being discussed, too. It shows that the
> asshole is ok with our most precious rights being taken away.

The only 'relevance' is that you're boundless in your hypocrisies
and always cry victim when you get called out.

> He will need to change the subject header to indicate his intentions
> to "man up", of course, if I'm to see it.

Well, if that's all it takes to avoid your censorship, and since I'm not
changing my position, I've suitably updated the subjectline to tell you
and every other COLA hypocrite to go fuck off.

-hh

On 12/01/2025 11:00, D wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 11 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>
>> On 1/11/25 9:26 PM, rbowman wrote:
>>> On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:41:53 +0100, D wrote:
>>>
>>>> Nigra? This group is a wonder of education! Something to study deeply
>>>> tonight, as soon as I get off my current, delayed and very, very shitty
>>>> ryanair flight back to eastern europe.
>>>
>>> 'Nigra' is sort of a southern thing in my experience. I think they're
>>> really saying Negro. Or maybe Nigger. It's hard to tell.
>>
>>  Kinda half and half ... term heard most often
>>  in Alabama and Mississippi.
>
> Ahh! I know a thing or two about Alabama. I've seen Forrest Gump! =)

I think that most of my pre-visit experience of the USA was from Mark Twain.

One piece of dialogue really brought southern racism home...

“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

--
"First, find out who are the people you can not criticise. They are your
oppressors."
- George Orwell

-highhorse wrote:

> (idiocy and lies snipped)

You see the garbage that -highhorse will post, to defend the
indefensible, folks? He's been proven to be wrong, and he's been
caught lying to attack, so this is what we get.

He won't concede that government pressure led to censorship on social
media sites, and that that's wrong.

Meainwhile, I'm allegedly a "hypocrite" because I've supposedly
"censored" people on USENET.

Err... No I haven't. I don't have that power. Choosing to not read
or quote something is not censoring it. Obviously.

What a ridiculous liar, -highhorse is. What a snit.

As for the subject about a "change of position" and "YA
unsubstantiated claim", -highhorse is attacking with pure made-up
snittery. He wants to blow-up the argument into an unwieldy mess to
distract from the simple points. This is his usual MO.

It's not "unsubstantiated" that -highhorse defended censorship because
it was private companies doing it, even though, we now know, they were
doing it at the behest of the government.

Every decent, honest American would admit that what happened was
wrong. But -highhorse will not admit that happened was wrong.

It's also not "unsubstantiated" that -highhorse is a ridiculous liar,
for claiming that cola advocates have "censored" anyone and are thus
"hypocrites".

"You're a hypocrite because you complain about tyrants on the left
suppressing our freedoms, but you do it yourself!"

Err... NO, WE DO NOT, YOU RIDICULOUS, LYING ASSHOLE.
-highhorse's snittish response will be deleted, unread.

--
"[chrisv] censored his reply" - lying asshole "-hh", lying
shamelessly

On 1/12/25 8:43 AM, chrisv wrote:
> -highhorse wrote:
>
>> (idiocy and lies snipped)
>
> You see the garbage that -highhorse will post, to defend the
> indefensible, folks? He's been proven to be wrong, and he's been
> caught lying to attack, so this is what we get.

YA unsubstantiated claim from luzer-v., which is why he snipped it:
to try to avoid yet another emotional 'meltdown' from losing...again.

> He won't concede that government pressure led to censorship on social
> media sites, and that that's wrong.

Substantiating citation missing. Still.

> Meainwhile, I'm allegedly a "hypocrite" because I've supposedly
> "censored" people on USENET.

Who pointed that out to you that you lacked the power you wanted to use?
Butthurt about that still!

> Err... No I haven't. I don't have that power. Choosing to not read
> or quote something is not censoring it. Obviously.

But that wasn't what was said, as per the part you *just* snipped.

> What a ridiculous liar, -highhorse is. What a snit.
>
> As for the subject about a "change of position" and "YA
> unsubstantiated claim", -highhorse is attacking with pure made-up
> snittery. He wants to blow-up the argument into an unwieldy mess to
> distract from the simple points. This is his usual MO.
>
> It's not "unsubstantiated" that -highhorse defended censorship because
> it was private companies doing it, even though, we now know, they were
> doing it at the behest of the government.

Unfortunately, chrisv still can't actually bring himself to quote the
original text, complete with a GG URL cite, to show readers that he
didn't just make it up.

Is that failure because he knows that he's lying? Or just that
incompetent to use GG to provide a citation?

FWIW, sounds like what chrisv is probably ranting about is that he was
on a 1st Amendment rant, but it was pointed out to him that the 1st
Amendment restricts only the Government, not private corporations.
Wonder how he's going to react to TikToc @ SCOTUS later this month...

> Every decent, honest American would admit that what happened was
> wrong. But -highhorse will not admit that happened was wrong.
>
> It's also not "unsubstantiated" that -highhorse is a ridiculous liar,
> for claiming that cola advocates have "censored" anyone and are thus
> "hypocrites".
>
> "You're a hypocrite because you complain about tyrants on the left
> suppressing our freedoms, but you do it yourself!"
>
> Err... NO, WE DO NOT, YOU RIDICULOUS, LYING ASSHOLE.

chrisv used quote marks without citation: "Err..."?

So who actually made that statement?
When & where, and in what context?

Or is this merely yet another chrisv attempt to lie & deceive, by trying
to imply that that it was said? Cites, please.

> -highhorse's snittish response will be deleted, unread.

Translation: YA chrisv snowflake meltdown in progress. Cry harder.

-hh

On 2025-01-12, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:

> The 8086 would have been better, but the extra wiring
> apparently would have pushed up the price too much
> according to some old interview with an IBM guy.
> They didn't KNOW it would be super-successful, so they
> kinda hedged their bets, split the diff. 640k banks
> were a hell of a lot better than 64k banks.

The 64K barrier was alive and well on the 8086/8.
I wrote a lot of horrible code to deal with large arrays.
Then there were all the memory models: tiny, small, large,
huge... yuck.

> The instructions for the 8088 were "familiar" to
> anyone who did the 8008/8080 and not TOO far
> from Z-80 sensibility - so I think that cinched Intel
> as the maker. WISH they'd used the 68000s. Ever
> see the Sage boxes ... gone alas before I could
> afford one .......

I got into the Amiga and enjoyed the 68000 that way.

--
/~\ 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

On 12/01/2025 12:07, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2025-01-12, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
>
>> The 8086 would have been better, but the extra wiring
>> apparently would have pushed up the price too much
>> according to some old interview with an IBM guy.
>> They didn't KNOW it would be super-successful, so they
>> kinda hedged their bets, split the diff. 640k banks
>> were a hell of a lot better than 64k banks.
>
> The 64K barrier was alive and well on the 8086/8.
> I wrote a lot of horrible code to deal with large arrays.
> Then there were all the memory models: tiny, small, large,
> huge... yuck.

Well most of my code ran in 64k. Ultimately you could use large models
- the compiler took care of all that crap if you did.

IIRC it all vanished as an issue with te 386...

"he ability for a 386 to be set up to act like it had a flat memory
model in protected mode despite the fact that it uses a segmented memory
model in all modes was arguably the most important feature change for
the x86 processor family until AMD released the x86-64 in 2003"

>
>> The instructions for the 8088 were "familiar" to
>> anyone who did the 8008/8080 and not TOO far
>> from Z-80 sensibility - so I think that cinched Intel
>> as the maker. WISH they'd used the 68000s. Ever
>> see the Sage boxes ... gone alas before I could
>> afford one .......
>
> I got into the Amiga and enjoyed the 68000 that way.
>
I coded Z80, 8088 and 6809 in my time. In assembler.
Once the 386 came in it was simply a matter of using 'C' everywhere. and
let thecompiler sort out the mess.

--
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the
urge to rule it.”
– H. L. Mencken

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...

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.
On 1/11/25 2:50 PM, rbowman wrote:
>> There's a new Pi 5 version with 16GB of RAM. It's not clear what the use
>> case is. Windows on ARM?

I am glad I did not get a Pi-5. I have had enough problems getting
the GUI to start up at boot time with my Pi-4B that I decided to just
run it in headless server mode.

The one thing I was missing on Pi-4 was a second ethernet port so I
could use it as a firewall/edge router with room for all the monitoring
capabilities I could dream up to implement with PCAP.

Dongle-attached extra ethernet ports are a bit unstable in my
experience. Often have spotty Linux driver support, often get
redesigned with a different ethernet chip with no visible/noticeable
change in product name or packaging. Being on an ARM system makes the
problems stemming from this several steps worse.

On 2025-01-12, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
> 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.

Indeed, this sounds like a long-term support nightmare.
Why did Broadcom do that? Or did SONY screw up in their specifications?

On 12/01/2025 13:46, Lars Poulsen 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.
>
> On 1/11/25 2:50 PM, rbowman wrote:
>>> There's a new Pi 5 version with 16GB of RAM. It's not clear what the use
>>> case is. Windows on ARM?
>
> I am glad I did not get a Pi-5. I have had enough problems getting
> the GUI to start up at boot time with my Pi-4B that I decided to just
> run it in headless server mode.
>
> The one thing I was missing on Pi-4 was a second ethernet port so I
> could use it as a firewall/edge router with room for all the monitoring
> capabilities I could dream up to implement with PCAP.
>
> Dongle-attached extra ethernet ports are a bit unstable in my
> experience. Often have spotty Linux driver support, often get
> redesigned with a different ethernet chip with no visible/noticeable
> change in product name or packaging. Being on an ARM system makes the
> problems stemming from this several steps worse.
>
Plenty of Pi ethernet hats available...

--
The biggest threat to humanity comes from socialism, which has utterly
diverted our attention away from what really matters to our existential
survival, to indulging in navel gazing and faux moral investigations
into what the world ought to be, whilst we fail utterly to deal with
what it actually is.

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.

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.

On 12/01/2025 13:46, Lars Poulsen wrote:
>> The one thing I was missing on Pi-4 was a second ethernet port so I
>> could use it as a firewall/edge router with room for all the monitoring
>> capabilities I could dream up to implement with PCAP.
>>
>> Dongle-attached extra ethernet ports are a bit unstable in my
>> experience. Often have spotty Linux driver support, often get
>> redesigned with a different ethernet chip with no visible/noticeable
>> change in product name or packaging. Being on an ARM system makes the
>> problems stemming from this several steps worse.

On 2025-01-12, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> Plenty of Pi ethernet hats available...

Yes, but then I'd have to find or make an enclosure that fits the board
SET.

Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:
>
> I am glad I did not get a Pi-5. I have had enough problems getting
> the GUI to start up at boot time with my Pi-4B that I decided to just
> run it in headless server mode.
>

I can't understand your problems. I have two Pi4B and a Pi5 running
24/7. It is convenient that they all take the same version of
Raspian.
All three worked right up on the first boot. You do, however,
have to make sure you have a good power unit.

Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:
>
> Yes, but then I'd have to find or make an enclosure that fits the board
> SET.

An enclosure is purely cosmetic. I attached my Pi5 to a piece of
cardboard with zip-ties and hung it down the back of my desk.

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

> On 11/01/2025 23:41, D wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Musk got that one right with Starlink. Kinda hard to pillage a satellite 60
> miles overhead..

You just wait! I am certain shortly they will construct state of the art
crossbows and shoot them down. ;)

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.

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

> On 12/01/2025 11:00, D wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Sat, 11 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>
>>> On 1/11/25 9:26 PM, rbowman wrote:
>>>> On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:41:53 +0100, D wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Nigra? This group is a wonder of education! Something to study deeply
>>>>> tonight, as soon as I get off my current, delayed and very, very shitty
>>>>> ryanair flight back to eastern europe.
>>>>
>>>> 'Nigra' is sort of a southern thing in my experience. I think they're
>>>> really saying Negro. Or maybe Nigger. It's hard to tell.
>>>
>>>  Kinda half and half ... term heard most often
>>>  in Alabama and Mississippi.
>>
>> Ahh! I know a thing or two about Alabama. I've seen Forrest Gump! =)
>
> I think that most of my pre-visit experience of the USA was from Mark Twain.
>
> One piece of dialogue really brought southern racism home...
>
> “Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”
> “No’m. Killed a nigger.”
> “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

Reminds me of my business partner practicing golf in south africa.

He: "I can't hit the ball."
Instructor: "Why?"
H: "It's a man out there on the green, he might get hurt."
I: "Ohh, I see... now, its just a negro."
H: "Yes, but he can get a golf ball in his head and get hurt."
I: "Ohhhh, I get it! Don't you worry, he has a helmet!"

This was in early 200X I think.

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.

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, root wrote:

> Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:
>>
>> Yes, but then I'd have to find or make an enclosure that fits the board
>> SET.
>
> An enclosure is purely cosmetic. I attached my Pi5 to a piece of
> cardboard with zip-ties and hung it down the back of my desk.
>

My other TV computer, a radxa zero, dangles off the hdmi cable, and I've
attached it to the back of the OLED tv with some tape. It's lived happily
there for a year or so at the moment.

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?
=/

At Sun, 12 Jan 2025 17:06:16 -0000 (UTC) root <NoEMail@home.org> wrote:

>
> Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:
> >
> > I am glad I did not get a Pi-5. I have had enough problems getting
> > the GUI to start up at boot time with my Pi-4B that I decided to just
> > run it in headless server mode.
> >
>
> I can't understand your problems. I have two Pi4B and a Pi5 running
> 24/7. It is convenient that they all take the same version of
> Raspian.
All three worked right up on the first boot. You do, however,
> have to make sure you have a good power unit.
>

Good quality uSD cards are also good. SanDisk cards are very good.

>

--
Robert Heller -- Cell: 413-658-7953 GV: 978-633-5364
Deepwoods Software -- Custom Software Services
http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Linux Administration Services
heller@deepsoft.com -- Webhosting Services

At Sun, 12 Jan 2025 17:09:10 -0000 (UTC) root <NoEMail@home.org> wrote:

>
> Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:
> >
> > Yes, but then I'd have to find or make an enclosure that fits the board
> > SET.
>
> An enclosure is purely cosmetic. I attached my Pi5 to a piece of
> cardboard with zip-ties and hung it down the back of my desk.
>

Mine is mounted on a VESA mount on the back of my TV (which is also my
monitor).

>

--
Robert Heller -- Cell: 413-658-7953 GV: 978-633-5364
Deepwoods Software -- Custom Software Services
http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Linux Administration Services
heller@deepsoft.com -- Webhosting Services

On 12/01/2025 14:52, Lars Poulsen wrote:
> On 12/01/2025 13:46, Lars Poulsen wrote:
>>> The one thing I was missing on Pi-4 was a second ethernet port so I
>>> could use it as a firewall/edge router with room for all the monitoring
>>> capabilities I could dream up to implement with PCAP.
>>>
>>> Dongle-attached extra ethernet ports are a bit unstable in my
>>> experience. Often have spotty Linux driver support, often get
>>> redesigned with a different ethernet chip with no visible/noticeable
>>> change in product name or packaging. Being on an ARM system makes the
>>> problems stemming from this several steps worse.
>
> On 2025-01-12, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> Plenty of Pi ethernet hats available...
>
> Yes, but then I'd have to find or make an enclosure that fits the board
> SET.
That's what 3D printers are for...:-)

--
There’s a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons
that sound good.

Burton Hillis (William Vaughn, American columnist)

On 12/01/2025 17:06, root wrote:
> Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:
>>
>> I am glad I did not get a Pi-5. I have had enough problems getting
>> the GUI to start up at boot time with my Pi-4B that I decided to just
>> run it in headless server mode.
>>
>
> I can't understand your problems. I have two Pi4B and a Pi5 running
> 24/7. It is convenient that they all take the same version of
> Raspian.
All three worked right up on the first boot. You do, however,
> have to make sure you have a good power unit.
My friend who has just left here, says that he too had a pi 5 that
wouldn't start up. Startx took him into the wrong GUI. ldm failed.
He reinstalled the lot and it now works...
--
"Nature does not give up the winter because people dislike the cold."

― Confucius