Many, many years ago I used to have two Wyse50 terminals, running split screens each with two parts. I did a lot of support on remote systems (via modem!) and I would have a session on a customer system, source code and running on our test system and internal stuff. I didn’t have space for a third terminal.

At another job I had an office with a “U” shaped desk. I would spread printouts across half the “U” and swivel around between the computer and the printouts.

My first experience with this food was in Halifax decades ago. The Halifax Donair is a unique thing.

And it’s definitely Donair, not Doner.

Technically, he would have three drives and only two drives of data. So he could move 1/3 of the data off each of the two drives onto the third and then start off with RAID 5 across the remaining 1/3 of each drive.

I really like that water molecule analogy. Personally, I have always viewed it as so feature of the topography of our universe in a higher dimension. Think about two two dimensional people living in a spherical plane. The furthest actual distance they could get from each other would be the diameter of the sphere. Yet they wouldn’t even know of the spherical nature of their universe.

I’m not sure that they saw it as a “placeholder” at the time. It wasn’t until Mickelson and Morley demonstrated that the fixed frame of reference demanded by aether wasn’t there, paving the way for Relativity, that it was abandoned.

I don’t see people treating Dark Matter an a placeholder right now either.

But, like I said, I’m not qualified to comment.

I’m totally unqualified to comment on this, but something has always itched in my brain about dark matter. It smacks, to me, to be the aether of the 21st century.

Deal with the ethernet port issue by purchasing a 5 port ethernet switch. Maybe the rest of your issues go away?

For me Bazzera Magica and Baratza Vario grinder some time back. Better coffee than most cafes.

I looked and Python has the library support for the GPIO and to do background threading to poll pins. My preference would be to go with a JVM language like Kotlin, but then I’m a programmer. Python, from the little that I’ve mucked about with it is really just one step in complexity from scripting. Maybe even easier, because some things in shell scripts are super difficult to do.

Maybe then you need to move one stop up from scripting into something closer to actually programming. I’d be surprised if Python doesn’t have the library support on a Pi for dealing with both serial and GPIO I/O.

the end stop in external to the serial communication

Does this mean that you have some kind of other signals or pin-outs? If so, this is starting to sound like a great project for a Raspberry Pi, because the GPIO pin array can handle that.

Keep in mind that it has been decades since I last used Kermit, but I’m pretty sure the use case it was originally designed for was…

Connect to a serial port, which had a modem attached. Talk to the modem and get it to dial a number. Presumably, the remote end answered and the port attached to its modem would issue a login prompt. Negotiate the login and then issue a bunch of commands to change directories and then launch Kermit on the remote system. After that Kermit to Kermit communications took over until you terminated the session. Finally, log off the remote system and hang up the modem.

All of this stuff could be done via scripts. I seem to remember that it would actually wait for a response, and then parse the response in the script. I don’t remember ever doing polling loops.

If you’re on a *nix box of some type, it’s totally possible to open up a serial port for manual I/O even in something like a bash script. Even if you have to reverse telnet to a terminal server.

Kermit on top of FTP can work really well. Kermit has its own communication and transfer protocol, IIRC, but updates in the 1990’s allowed it to be used with TCP/IP and FTP. So you can write a script to log into a remote system, run some commands and then initiate a file transfer. The scripting allows you to wait for responses and act on them.

As a boomer (at the tail end, admittedly), I too have lived through all of these things. Plus the other thirty years of shit that happened before it.

The world threat that was the USSR and Mutually Assured Destruction. The Vietnam War, two Gulf Wars, and 9/11.

The “Troubles” in Ireland and IRA bombings in London. The Munich Olympics Massacre. The rise of global terrorism. The FLQ crisis. Kent State. Watergate.

Acid rain. Leaded gas and smog.

15%+ mortgage rates. The oil crisis. Wage and price controls. Multiple recessions. The Dot Com bubble.

Police raids on gay clubs. Racial slurs in everyday language. Massive gender inequality.

24" black and white TVs. It took a week to find out how your photos came out. Watching f@#$ing “Tiny Talent Time” on a Sunday afternoon because there wasn’t any else better on the other 5 channels (if that doesn’t traumatize you, nothing will).

You had to go to a library if you wanted to look something up in an encyclopedia.

Cars without seatbelts, crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, traction control or airbags.

F*CK me. “No experience”. Maybe just enough to know how much better things generally are today.

Kids always think that they know more than their parents…until they don’t.

So write it properly from the get-go. You can get 90% of the way by naming things properly and following the Single Responsibility Principle.

That used to be really true when I was a kid in the 79’s, but not so much today. Back then, a quality guitar cost way more than the cheap stuff and the cheap stuff was rubbish.

Nowadays, with CNC machines everywhere, there are lots of modestly priced guitars that are very playable. The junk that we used to have to settle with back in the day only exists in the realm of “toy” instruments that almost aren’t intended to be played.

Seriously, $300 can get you a very playable instrument, especially in electric guitars.

The workplace should have a zero tolerance policy about abuse of the staff. If the particular location is one where there is a significantly non-zero chance of such incidents happening, then there should be a big red button on the wall that sounds and alarm, and summons security and possibly triggers a police response.

Employees should be trained to hit the button at the first hint of abuse. The employer should support them.

Give credit to George Carlin for that one.

William Morris

In this case you could view a swap partition as a safety net. Put 20-30GB in a swap partition in case something goes wrong. You won’t miss the disk space.