I always thought of “Briton” in that last sense, while “Brit” has the meaning of anyone living in the UK (almost). But that’s from an outsider’s perspective.

As my English cousin corrected me, though, “I’m English, ‘British’ could be anything!”. She wasn’t, of course, talking about the difference between English and Welsh, or Scots.

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?

In respect to sitting above the API layer and turning DTO’s to/from Domain Object’s, I’d call them “Brokers”.

Grandma’s on the roof and we can’t get her down…???

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.

Yes, $15 CAD/day to “roam like home”. I have an Orange eSIM that I can keep alive if I use it at least once every 6 months - with a local french number that stays mine. It costs me about $40 CAD for a 30 day - 20GB top up. My wife uses Nomad for data only, we both don’t need local numbers, and it generally costs $12 CAD for 5 GB 2 week top-up.

So I figure about $60-70 CAD for 3 weeks travel virtually anywhere in Europe. Calls and SMS included (for one) without long distance charges. Compared to $630 for “roam like home” for two people from a Canadian carrier - doesn’t matter which one as far as I can tell.

We both recently got new phones to be able to use eSIMs.

And the physical SIMs stay active. So my elderly parents can call my Canadian number if there’s an emergency and it will ring through.

In fact, on our last trip to Rome, when we used a credit card at the hotel, it was refused and then seconds later I got a text from the bank asking for confirmation on my Canadian number. I had no choice but to text “Yes” back, and that single text activated roaming for the day and cost me $15.

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.

FORTRAN IV was the first language I learned to program in. Punch cards!!!

I never expected to see a compiler in this list, at least not in 2023.

Back in 1988 I realized how rubbish Microsoft was when I discovered Borland’s Turbo Pascal and Turbo C compilers. I’d previously used the MS compilers and they were multipass, multi-minutes to finish a compile. The Borland ones were single pass and FAST.

Back then, compile times could be huge, and everyone was publishing benchmarks on compiled program performance, which mattered on the hardware of the day. I never even think about that stuff these days.

Well, there are specific hardware configurations that are designed to be servers. They probably don’t have graphics cards but do have multiple CPUs, and are often configured to run many active processes at the same time.

But for the most part, “server” is more related to the OS configuration. No GUI, strip out all the software you don’t need, like browsers, and leave just the software you need to do the job that the server is going to do.

As to updates, this also becomes much simpler since you don’t have a lot of the crap that has vulnerabilities. I helped manage comuter department with about 30 servers, many of which were running Windows (gag!). One of the jobs was to go through the huge list of Microsoft patches every few months. The vast majority of which, “require a user to browse to a certain website” in order to activate. Since we simply didn’t have anyone using browsers on them, we could ignore those patches until we did a big “catch up” patch once a year or so.

Our Unix servers, HP-UX or AIX, simply didn’t have the same kind of patches coming out. Some of them ran for years without a reboot.

Kotlin is a very easy transition, and it sorts out a ton of issues that you find in Java. Certainly easier than moving to Rust.

Kanban is probably way overkill as a model for what you want. The key about Kanban is control of WIP/Queues at various stages and pulling items through the workflow. With a simple ToDo/WIP/Done workflow, you’re probably going to find any Kanban apps are too complicated for what you get out of them.