I used KDE Connect on Ubuntu with Gnome. No issues.

Old school Unix guy here…vi,awk and sed are all that you need.

The travel eSIMs are a bit different. My Orange plan covers Turkey and the UK, which I specifically wanted, and probably Switzerland as well. For my wife, I needed to get a “world” plan that covered Turkey, otherwise the Europe plan would have covered the UK.

But that’s an important point. The travel plans are NOT the same as regular plans in some ways.

I would have a couple years ago. In a flash. We replaced our phones a while back specifically to have eSIMs. It truth, considering the cost of Canadian roaming plans the phones have already paid for themselves.

Both of our old phones were single SIM, so using a local SIM would mean disconnecting our Canadian numbers which would put us out of touch with people back home. Which means that this card wouldn’t have work for us either.

I was at the point of looking at buying a portable WiFi hot-spot, when I found out about eSIMs. So we went that route.

I have an Orange eSIM with a France number that I have kept alive by reactivating it at least once every 6 months. It’s good for all Europe, without roaming charges, so that’s easy to do. Having the same number all the time is convenient, but more importantly I have gone through the hassle of providing passport info to Orange, which is a government requirement if you want a number for more than a couple of weeks. I think that’s an EU thing.

The local number is good for calling hotels and for making restaurant reservations. Just having that is a game changer.

For my wife’s we don’t need a number, so I just use Nomad for her data only eSIM, and get a new one each time. The cost is about $12-15, and you get whatever carrier you get, but the service has been good so far no I keep using Nomad.

We can text each other using WhatsApp, and you can even use WhatsApp for voice calls. The sound quality is acceptable.

We bought phones that support eSIM because we do a lot of travelling. Canadian mobile companies charge usurious rates for roaming: $15/day! Times two phones. I can get 2 weeks of data only for Europe for about $11 total on an eSIM. With voice it goes up to about $25. Total.

It has changed our lives when we travel.

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.

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

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.

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.

If I remember correctly, Objects were introduced in Turbo Pascal 5.5, not version 7.

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.

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.

Nothing formal. Pull, pull, legs and a rest day. I stick to fundamental exercises like bench press, chin ups, squats, leg presses, cable rows, lat pull downs, preacher curls, lat raises and Arnold presses.

I start off with about half my normal weight and comfort 20 to 25 reps as a warm up for most exercises. I aim for 8 to 12 reps, of the same weight for 3 sets of the same number of reps in each set.

I use the free version of an app called, “Strong”. It lets you keep three different active workout routines, which is just enough for pull,push,legs. It makes it easy to keep track of progressive overload. Personally, I aim for 1 more rep each day until I get to 12+ reps. Then add more weight. Rinse and repeat.

I went from doing all my sets “to failure”, to first set 8RPE (rate of perceived exertion). So three sets, all the same number of reps and weight.

I work it backwards. The third set should be very close to 10RPE if I get 8RPE right on the first set. If it’s under then I do extra reps to get there. The next time I do that exercise I can see the extra reps and adjust accordingly.

This is SO much better on my aging body, and I’m still able to keep up progressive overload at the same rate as I was with “to failure”.

For those who don’t know RPE is a self assessed evaluation about how hard a set was to complete. It’s a scale from 1 to 10. 10 means there’s nothing left, complete fatigue at the end and no hope of any more reps. 8 generally means that you have about 2 reps left in the tank.