The March mornings have grown warm enough for the cats to sit out, but still cool enough to be the perfect Magic Circle weather. If you’re the parent of small children, your children probably participate in Magic Circles. The children gather around in a small circle with their teacher, and they would listen to stories read by the teacher, or they would just talk and interact. It was a way to build community within the class, along with outside play. Our children, who are now grown and out in the world, participated in Magic Circles from the time they were in kindergarten up through elementary school. It stopped when they graduated on to middle school. If the Magic Circles were especially notable, then we’d get an exciting version of what happened from their young point of view.

With the six cats and Annie, my wife and I imagine they all get together in their own Magic Circle to discuss pet issues and living with humans in the big house. We make up all sorts of little stories about what they discuss, with Annie as the lead of the Magic Circle. That’s what I immediately thought of when I looked outside to our lanai this morning and saw four of the six cats equally spread out on the cushioned seats. They are, from front to back, Nicholas, Danï, Joan, and Beau. All I had with me at the time was my iPhone, and I didn’t want to waste time running back for one of my cameras, so I grabbed the shot with the iPhone camera. This underscores the old saying that the best camera is the one you have with you at the moment you need it.

tl;dr — I’m not spending US$3,600 on a keyboard manufactured by anyone.

It’s not at all unusual to drop four and five figures on computer equipment these days. Consider, as but one example, Apple’s Vision Pro. Released in 2024 for US$3,500, it generated howls of derision and indignation over the cost, especially compared with what was currently available in that product space selling for an order of magnitude less. And yet, drop a $3,600 keyboard into the market, and those self same Vision Pro critics will wet themselves over the idea of owning such a “bespoke” computer keyboard, lovingly hand made with rare materials and constructed to evoke the early days (the mid 1970s to early 1980s) keyboards. Folks, I lived through those early days and got to experience first hand most, if not all, examples of those keyboards. With the notable exception of the original IBM 5150 PC keyboard, they were barely adequate enough to get the job done of typing into the computer. There were only two brands of keyboards worth using for long periods, IBM (which was on the IBM PC and their 3270 family of terminals) and DEC with their VT series of terminals. These were two major computer makers who knew how to build robust keyboards to handle heavy years-long usage without error.

These days I use a Cooler Master MK-770 mechanical keyboard that I purchased during the Christmas season for the princely sum of US$70, because it was on sale from its normal US$110. Even on sale I felt a bit of guilt purchasing it, resisting the urge to go downmarket and pick up a far cheaper keyboard for half that. I purchased the MK-770 because I needed the better physical feedback it provides vs the cheaper models. I’m glad I purchased the MK-770. So far it’s done yeoman duty with my computer, handling all the typing I tend to do these days. No complaints and the noise from the mechanical keyboard is low volume and not at all annoying. It reminds me of those older families of keyboards I wrote about above.

The production run of those $3,600 keyboards has been limited to just 100 examples. I’m sure they’ll sell all 100, probably to those computing individuals who also purchased the Tesla Cyber Truck; same type of mindset, to be sure. I am most definitely not in Norbauer’s target demographic.

Links

Norbauer + Co — https://www.norbauer.co

Apple Vision Pro — https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/

I’ve since deleted my account on Twitter (November 2022, one month after Musk finalized his takeover of Twitter), and Facebook in January 2023. I never signed up for Threads, but I still have a very teeny tiny account on Instagram, in part out of nostalgia and in part because there are a few accounts I still follow. My Instagram account is private; I can’t recall the last time I signed on.

What about LinkedIn? I’ve been on LinkedIn for at least a decade, joining back before it was purchased by Microsoft, back when being on it was a way to stay in touch with your business contacts. I’m still on LinkedIn, again out of nostalgia and little more. I don’t go online with LinkedIn very much anymore, averaging about once/month just to see if anything has happened with former workmates. I hate what Microsoft has done with the service, shoving posts and articles onto my timeline that I have no interest in (and never did). It is for all practical purposes Microsoft’s version of Facebook for business hucksters and snake-oil salesmen. I have debated deleting that account as well, and probably will before the year is out.

What about YouTube? Because it’s a major arm of the tentacled Alphabet Internet monster, there’s no way to totally avoid it. For example, many of the technical web sites I visit will post YouTube videos as part of the story. I click on the YouTube video in the story and YouTube/Alphabet has a bit more personal information about me to add to their infinite information stores in the Googleverse. And I will go to YouTube on my own, but not to view any of the political channels, especially after the political disaster known as the 2024 Presidential Election. I’ve learned to avoid any videos with any kind of click-baity words in the titles. If I see anything like that in the YouTube stream I immediately click “Don’t recommend channel.” Sometimes I’ll get tired and click “Not interested” to keep a whole raft of unwanted videos off my feed. And that’s another aggravation of YouTube: select a video, any video, that catches your attention and play it, and the next time you go onto YouTube your feed is filled with similar videos from other channels. I then have to use a combination of don’t recommend and not interested before I can clear them out. And just to show how sneaky YouTube can be, after a period of time measured in a few months YouTube will pop up some of those booted out videos again, as if to ask if you want to see them again. And then I have to play whack-a-mole and get them off. And before someone writes in the comments about all the other “freer”, and thus “better” video platforms, I’m not interested in a repeat of the Og Vorbis fiasco. The world has settled on YouTube as the primary video platform, which means it pulls folks like me along if I want to view what they produce. I do have tools that YouTube provides, however primitive, to curate and control what is presented to me.

That doesn’t mean I’m completely off of social media. Since leaving X and Facebook I’ve signed up to Bluesky and Mastodon. In both cases I follow a handful of accounts, and have at best a handful of followers. I don’t have the time, nor do I wish to make (a.k.a. waste) the time to doom scroll through the posts. I like Bluesky in particular because Bluesky has no algorithm to force “engagement”; I see posts only from who I elect to follow. Bluesky has sophisticated built-in tools to curate and block if necessary who can comment on your posts, as well as instantly blocking anyone (or anything) on the slightest whim. The Mastodon account has a slightly steeper learning curve and is a little rough around the edges, but nothing I can’t handle personally. I can still stop following or blocking anyone, and right now on Mastodon I’m following exactly 12 accounts, the majority of which are also on Bluesky. What’s interesting about those dual accounts (i.e. an account on both platforms) is that many of them post more on Bluesky than on Mastodon.

How has all of this account deletion and drastic platform control effected me? I’m a lot calmer these days. In just one example, I can point to how all this work has contributed to it lowering my blood pressure (along with diet and exercise and not driving in rush hour traffic every day). My mental state is a lot calmer. I’m spending less time on my phone, although my wife will strongly disagree with me. She feels I need to cut back even more, and I’m sure she’s right. I find phone use a time waster and attention trap. My time and my attention are my most precious treasures. Once used I can never get my time back, having missed more important opportunities to spend that time and attention.

Danï is in a perfect Ginger zen state while resting in my lap. She’s there because I spent Friday and part of today with heat on my left hip and back due to the effort I’d spent the prior week lifting, planting, and re-planting a crepe myrtle plant from the back yard in too much shade out to the front where it will be in a lot more sunlight, as well as quite a bit more gardening and planting. I have a number of other crepe myrtles all around the home that are now beginning to  show considerable growth, but the one in the back, which had been there for quite a few years, was stunted. I’m hoping the move out front into a more open area with a lot more sunlight, along with a lot of tender loving care, will get it growing again with all the others.

Digging up the crepe myrtle and moving it was a half-day effort. I had trimmed the old growth branches, but even trimmed it was a good foot taller than I am, and I’m still 6 ft 4 inches (nearly 2 meters), and I used a hand truck to move it from where it was to where I transplanted it. I planted it into a large hole with lots of topsoil around the root ball, covered with with plenty of wood mulch, then gave it a good soak. I’ve also planted five azaleas around to begin to build out a flower area. I want as many flowering plants as will grow in the yard to attract butterflies and humming birds.

I’ve been trying to be a lot more physically active in 2025 than in all the prior retirement years combined, and even more than the working years before retirement where I was always too tired to do any decent work in and outside the home. It’s a way for me to keep exercising and keep the left knee in proper shape as well as to help the healing process continue after the operation. It’s been nine months since the left knee replacement, and I suspect that it will be a full year before everything is as close as it can get as far as a healthy joint is concerned. Surprisingly the left knee wasn’t in pain, just the left hip and my lower back. After a day-and-a-half slowdown the pain is much abated and I’m moving and working at the same levels again.

I attribute my quick recovery to the heating pad and the magical ministrations of my lap cat Danï.

I haven’t written an Animal Day Journal entry in a while. It’s been even longer since I’ve written one that’s primarily about Annie. So here we go.

Annie is thriving these days. Weather permitting, we do our two-a-day walks, once early morning and again early evening. Between those two walks Annie and I cover between three and four miles/day. There’s now enough twilight to see well enough, although I still carry a battery lantern as well as having a light attached to her retractable lead. I have both of them lit, not only to help see what’s ahead, but to let others we might come across see us as well. Annie and I still come across the occasional dog and owner combination walking in the dark, depending on the scattered street lamps as well as house lighting. I consider that unsafe both for the animal as well as the human. Annie and I have managed to avoid any number of problematic encounters because we advertise our presence well in advance with our lights.

In addition to all our walks, Annie helps me when I work out in the back yard. I won’t let her out front without her lead, and I refuse to stake her out in the front while I work. It’s still cool enough that Annie can go on car rides in the back when I have to run errands or take my wife to some appointment. If I have to stay and wait on my wife, Annie and I roll down the windows a bit and wait for my wife to return. If the waiting is long enough then Annie and I will get out and do a reconnaissance walk around where we’re parked, which allows Annie plenty of stop-and-sniff moments. When she’s done she will turn and walk us both back to the car, which I find charming. Annie is one bright little girl.

I have heard so many stories concerning cat and dog interactions and how the two species do not get along. I have nearly twenty years of personal experience where my dogs and cats have gotten along with one another just fine. Granted, the dogs in my household have all been Labradors or Lab mixes (Annie is a Labradoodle), so that may have something to do with the calm atmosphere between all the cats and dogs. A good part of this peace I attribute to treating all the animals equally with love and kindness. I never play favorites and give attention to all. When I pay attention to them I talk to my animals, calling them all by their names, and in a normal tone of voice, no baby talk. Every creature is chill.

Going forward I intend to do far more postings like this. They may not be very often, but I want to move away from ain’t-it-awful writing, especially with regards to the current political climate. I’ve dropped off of every major social media service to avoid the effects of algorithmic-driven rage posting. If I do write a negative post, it’ll be based on personal experiences and facts, such as my earlier complaints about Apple products. My house with my wife and the animals has become an oasis of calm and peace, and yes, even love, all around. Those are the true treasures in my life worth protecting and writing about.

I can’t believe that Danï and Zoë have been with us for five years. We adopted them from The Runaways Animal Rescue in Pascoe County, Florida, just north of Tampa. The Runaways has become a sophisticated operation these days, but right before the Rescue moved to its current location, the founder ran the operation out of her home, and that’s where we drove to back in 2020 to pick up little Danï and Zoë.

My wife had read about them in an article on Love Meow, their two additional siblings, and their mom. I suggested my wife send an email to the Rescue inquiring about adopting them both, never thinking we’d be able to. After all this article was out on Apple News+, and I was expecting the article would draw a lot of attention and inquiries, and we’d come up short. Never did I expect we’d adopt those two, but we did. So we drove over, picked them up, and then nestled them in the back seat where they slept all the way back to Orlando.

Since that time we picked up their mom Joan and one more rescued kitten, Nicholas. The clowder has been a sweet group ever since.

Believe me when I say that the two little girls are feline elves, full of sweet mischief and energy and love.

Camera

I pulled out my EM1.2 and attached the 1.8/75mm for these photos. I hadn’t touched the EM1.2 in so long that all the batteries were discharged, so I had to charge one of them up before I could use the camera. I love using the 75mm because of its long reach and the atmospheric photos it helps produce. And the shutter on the EM1.2 is one of the quietest, if not the quietest, I’ve ever heard. As far as I’m concerned the EM1.2 is the penultimate Olympus digital camera. I know more recent models have been released (this camera was announced in 2016), but for me the EM1.2 is imbued with a magical quality all its own. I really need to use this camera more than I currently do.

This is my Apple Watch Series 7. I purchased this fine instrument back in mid-2022 when Amazon was having a mid-year Black Friday style sale, and the Series 7 was being heavily discounted. My watch at that time was a Series 3, and even though it was the stainless steel bodied version with a whopping 16 MiB of internal storage (due to its ability to connect to a wireless network like my iPhone), it was beginning to show its age, and there was the threat that it wouldn’t get another major watchOS update past 2022. So I decided to take the hint and get the Series 7, even though the Series 3 was still perfectly usable.

This, of course, was my undoing in 2022. No sooner had the Series 7 gone on my wrist than Apple announced the Series 8, and some new features that would only be available on the Series 8 and later. I was unhappy, like I’d been unhappy when Apple released a version of iOS that would perform face recognition while wearing a mask with the iPhone 12 and later, but not with my iPhone 11 Pro Max at that time. This is how Apple rolls, and this is how Apple tempts their users of current and perfectly functional devices to drop more cash and stay on the upgrade treadmill. But I digress…

But wait, you ask. Didn’t I write about going back to my Citizen electro-mechanical watch over my Apple Watch? I did, but I’ve been using my Apple Watch to track a number of health metrics after I had my left knee replaced. Metrics such as number of steps/day, heart beat, blood oxygen levels, walking distance, total time exercise, total time spent outside in the sun, balance, etc, etc. All the metrics are good and getting better over time, since I started the measurements mid-July of 2024. I share my metrics with a number of my doctors. I’d rather be doing all of that, than popping some more questionable prescription meds.

I have no idea exactly when my Apple Watch starting to ask for account verification, except it was during a flurry of Apple software updates earlier this year. I’ve been having to deal with this, every morning, since about February or there abouts. Fortunately I had enough presence of mind this morning to grab a photo with my iPhone before I tapped the “Not Now” button to dismiss it. The Apple Watch 7 is still associated with my iPhone and I still get phone calls and haptic pings from my iPhone, as well as having my walking and exercise information being sent to my Health app on my iPhone. And if you think it’s a simple matter to type in a long password on the Apple Watch’s piss-ant tiny keyboard, without any visual feedback (i.e. seeing the password in plain text while you type it in), they you either don’t own one of these, or you’re just out of your pea-pickin’ mind.

This is what drives me crazy about Apple. Decisions Are Acted Upon and Software Changes Are Made and then buried in the release notes, with Dire Consequences for those trying to use these devices. I would have assumed that mere Bluetooth association from the iPhone I own and have to log into would take care of anything requiring security credentials for the devices to securely communicate, but oh no! In any event nothing is broken if I just tap “Not Now” and it only takes a second to tap that dismissal.

Which brings me up to password management in general. With the latest release of software, Apple split out password management from System Settings into its own Password app. Why is this a problem? Because there is no good way to update passwords within the app. I updated my Amazon password to something a lot stronger than what I had been using through the web interface. Unfortunately I use Vivaldi, and even though Vivaldi picked up the password update, Apple’s Password app did not. When I tried to update a password directly in Password, it wants to send me back to the website to change my password yet again, even though I’ve already changed it. What I was expecting was a simple dialog to appear and I would type in or copy the new password and then save that. Something simple.

Like I said Vivaldi knows, and fortunately for me I also maintain on my computer a file with up-to-date login information that I reference when I need to log in yet again, such as when for whatever reason the login credentials expire. As time goes along I wind up slowly changing a password here or there, and Passwords doesn’t pick up the changes, going further and further out of date as more passwords are changed. For managing something so critical as passwords, Apple’s Password app, and general password management, are worthless.

I installed LibreWolf on my Linux Mint system after reading about it on a fellow blogger’s site (see link below). It installed easily, appeared highly performant, and even took the tab fix I’d written about for Firefox nearly two years ago (again, see link below). I wanted to try this alternative to Firefox because of all the recent drama about how Firefox will now handle personal data; it didn’t go down well at all with a lot of users, myself included. But long before all this happened, I frankly got tired of all the limitations I kept running into using Firefox, so I switched to Vivaldi and haven’t looked back. But hope springs eternal, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for Firefox when it was young and pure of heart. So I decided to install LibreWolf and see if it could rekindle a bit of the old Firefox magic.

After following the clear installation instructions for installing LibreWolf on my Linux Mint system, I tried to use LibreWolf to log into my GitHub account using my Yubico security key. That’s when I got the web page at the top of this post. My Yubico key works just fine with Vivaldi, Google Chrome, and original Firefox on my Linux Mint system. Why LibreWolf, which bills itself as a more secure rebuild of Firefox won’t support my Yubico key is beyond me. That lack of full support is a hard failure as far as I’m concerned. I won’t get rid of LibreWolf as I have more than enough disk space to let it sit on the “shelf” while it matures a bit more. I’ll check out any new versions that drop and see if this problem gets fixed. But if you’re like me and use Firefox with a hardware passkey to log into sites that support it, then I’d give a long hard thought about replacing Firefox with LibreWolf, no matter how you might feel about Firefox at the moment. You will not be happy with that decision, I assure you.

Links

Goodbye Firefox, hello Librewolf

LibreWolf — https://librewolf.net

what browser should i use on linux?

Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic — https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-promise-to-never-sell-personal-data-asks-users-not-to-panic/

Yubico — https://www.yubico.com

I have had a need for a simple computer system monitoring tool that would only monitor the system attributes I cared about. I also wanted that monitoring tool to save its measurements to a log file over time, so that I could mine the logs for any trends. I looked at a number of the top utilities (top, atop, btop++, htop) and pretty much marked them off my list, primarily because they measured too much to suite me. I looked at fastfetch and other such tools and dropped them for the same reason, even though you can tailor them with a config file and/or command line switches to only print what I wanted.

I also had a need to bring my Go programming skills back up to some reasonable level of competency and sophistication. I’ve been coding in Go since I first came across it ten years ago, but I never stuck consistently with it. My involvement varied over time. I felt I needed to brush up on the latest version of Go (which as of this writing is at version 1.24.1) and then begin to write software that would motivate me to learn the breadth and depth of the language and all it had to offer. If nothing else I needed a break from my growing frustrations with Rust.

And so I wrote the utility pistat in Go.

The application is simple enough. It gathers the statistics that matter to me, formats them into an easy-to-read format, and then displays them on the terminal as well as writes them to a log file. Along the way I learned how to read and process certain Linux kernel statics as well as write colored text to the terminal (that was interesting) and to navigate my way into creating and using a log file. Every time pistats is run it appends those statistics to its log file in your home directory.

I originally wrote this for my Raspberry Pis, naively thinking that it would be applicable everywhere. Was I ever wrong about that. There are some “cheats” to get it to work with the AMD (Intel) chip-based system I use as my daily driver, specifically for the hardware platform and the core type. I’m not interested in supporting nearly every hardware platform out there, just the two I care about here at home.

I run it inside a terminal window with a single line of fish script: while true; clear && pistats; sleep 60; end. Then I shrink the terminal down to just large enough to hold the text without wrapping, then put it up in the upper right corner of my desktop and go on about my business.

Although the code is in a single nearly 400-line source file, it isn’t monolithic. Each statistic has a subroutine function that’s called to get the statistics. The report is generated in one function, and then separate functions are called to display in the terminal as well as write to the log file. Every function has a comment block explaining what it does, and there is further commenting as needed internal to each function. It may not be pure idiomatic Go code, but I’m a lot more comfortable with Go (again), and that’s a big win for me.

package mainimport ("bufio""errors""fmt""container/list""log""math""net""os""strconv""strings""syscall""time""github.com/logrusorgru/aurora/v4")// osRelease reads the file /etc/os-release and// filters out the PRETTY_NAME of the OS. It also// trims off any spaces and the double quotes around// the pretty OS name.// It returns the result as a string.func osRelease() string {osrelease, error := os.Open("/etc/os-release")if error != nil {log.Fatal(error)}defer osrelease.Close()scanner := bufio.NewScanner(osrelease)var osname = ""for scanner.Scan() {line := scanner.Text()if strings.Contains(line, "PRETTY_NAME=") {osname = strings.Split(line, "=")[1]osname = strings.Trim(osname, " \"")}}return osname}// kernelVersion reads the file /proc/version and// parses out the kernel version. It also trims// off any spaces.// It returns the result as a string.func kernelVersion() string {procversion, error := os.Open("/proc/version")if error != nil {log.Fatal(error)}defer procversion.Close()scanner := bufio.NewScanner(procversion)var version = ""for scanner.Scan() {version = scanner.Text()version = strings.Split(version, " ")[2]version = strings.TrimSpace(version)}return version}// diskUsage reads the full filesystem size and// the free amount of disk space on the filesystem.// It returns the full filesystem size and free filesystem// size as unsigned 64-bit integers.func diskUsage(path string) (uint64, uint64) {fileSystem := syscall.Statfs_t{}error := syscall.Statfs(path, &fileSystem)if error != nil {log.Fatal(error)}all := fileSystem.Blocks * uint64(fileSystem.Bsize)free := fileSystem.Bfree * uint64(fileSystem.Bsize)return all, free}// uptime reads the system up time at /proc/uptime.// It returns the up time as a formated string.// If the uptime is less than 24 hours, it returns just// the uptime in hours.// If the uptime is greater than or equal to 24 hours,// it returns both days and hours.func uptime() string {procUptime, error := os.Open("/proc/uptime")if error != nil {log.Fatal(error)}defer procUptime.Close()scanner := bufio.NewScanner(procUptime)var line = ""for scanner.Scan() {line = scanner.Text()}var secondsUptimeStr = strings.Split(line, " ")[0]secondsUptimeStr = strings.TrimSpace(secondsUptimeStr)var secondsUptime, _ = strconv.ParseFloat(secondsUptimeStr, 32)const SECONDS_IN_A_DAY float64 = 86400.0const SECONDS_IN_AN_HOUR float64 = 3600.0var daysUptime = math.Floor(secondsUptime / SECONDS_IN_A_DAY)secondsUptime -= daysUptime * SECONDS_IN_A_DAYvar hoursUptime = math.Round(secondsUptime / SECONDS_IN_AN_HOUR)if daysUptime > 0.0 {if daysUptime == 1.0 {return fmt.Sprintf("1 day, %.0f hours", hoursUptime)} else {return fmt.Sprintf("%.0f days, %.0f hours",daysUptime, hoursUptime)}} else {return fmt.Sprintf("%.0f hours", hoursUptime)}}// translateMeminfo translates the string parsed from a meminfo// value to an unsigned 64-bit integer.// Because the values in meminfo are already divided by 1024, or 1KiB,// the value returned is in thousands of bytes, not single bytes.func translateMeminfo(line string) uint64 {var meminfoValue = strings.Split(line, ":")[1]meminfoValue = strings.TrimSpace(meminfoValue)var memoryValue = strings.Split(meminfoValue, " ")[0]memoryValue = strings.TrimSpace(memoryValue)var value, _ = strconv.ParseUint(memoryValue, 10, 64)return value}// memInfo parses out MemTotal, MemAvailable, SwapTotal, and SwapFree// from /proc/meminfo.// Because the values in meminfo are already divided by 1024, or 1KiB,// the values returned are in thousands of bytes, not single bytes.func memInfo() (uint64, uint64, uint64, uint64) {meminfo, error := os.Open("/proc/meminfo")if error != nil {log.Fatal(error)}defer meminfo.Close()scanner := bufio.NewScanner(meminfo)var memoryTotal uint64 = 0var memoryFree uint64 = 0var swapTotal uint64 = 0var swapFree uint64 = 0for scanner.Scan() {line := scanner.Text()if strings.Contains(line, "MemTotal:") {memoryTotal = translateMeminfo(line)}if strings.Contains(line, "MemAvailable:") {memoryFree = translateMeminfo(line)}if strings.Contains(line, "SwapTotal:") {swapTotal = translateMeminfo(line)}if strings.Contains(line, "SwapFree:") {swapFree = translateMeminfo(line)}}return memoryTotal, memoryFree, swapTotal, swapFree}// decodeCorePartNumber decodes the CPU part number found in /proc/cpuinfo// and converts it into the human readable ARM core name.// Note this only works with a Raspberry Pi or equivalent.func decodeCorePartNumber(line string) string {var partNumber = strings.Split(line, ":")[1]partNumber = strings.TrimSpace(partNumber)partNumber = strings.ToUpper(partNumber)switch partNumber {case "0XD01":return "Cortex-A32"case "0XD02":return "Cortex-A34"case "0XD03":return "Cortex-A53"case "0XD04":return "Cortex-A35"case "0XD05":return "Cortex-A55"case "0XD06":return "Cortex-A65"case "0XD07":return "Cortex-A57"case "0XD08":return "Cortex-A72"case "0XD09":return "Cortex-A73"case "0XD0A":return "Cortex-A75"case "0XD0B":return "Cortex-A76"case "0XD0D":return "Cortex-A77"case "0XD0E":return "Cortex-A76AE"default:return "NO MATCH"}}// cpuInfo finds the hardware platform name, core type, and core count// from /proc/cpuinfo.//// The kernel file path /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/... is tested to see if// it exists, and if it does, then set the hardware platform name to// the string contents of /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/product_name.//// This is a personal test for running this application on an AMD-based// MinisForum tiny computer I own.// Return values are the hardware platform name as a string,// the core type as a string, and core count as an integer.func cpuInfo() (string, string, int) {var platform = ""productname, error :=os.ReadFile("/sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/product_name")if !errors.Is(error, os.ErrNotExist) {platform = strings.TrimSpace(string(productname))}var coreType = ""var coreCount = 0cpuinfo, error := os.Open("/proc/cpuinfo")if error != nil {log.Fatal(error)}defer cpuinfo.Close()scanner := bufio.NewScanner(cpuinfo)for scanner.Scan() {line := scanner.Text()if strings.Contains(line, "Model") && len(platform) == 0 {platform = strings.Split(line, ":")[1]platform = strings.TrimSpace(platform)}if strings.Contains(line, "model name") && len(coreType) == 0 {coreType = strings.Split(line, ":")[1]coreType = strings.Split(coreType,"w/")[0]coreType = strings.TrimSpace(coreType)}if strings.Contains(line, "CPU part") && len(coreType) == 0 {coreType = decodeCorePartNumber(line)}if strings.Contains(line, "processor") {coreCount++}}if error := scanner.Err(); error != nil {log.Fatal(error)}return platform, coreType, coreCount}// hostIP4 returns the host's IP4 dotted address as a string.func hostIP4() string {connection, error := net.Dial("udp", "8.8.8.8:80")if error != nil {log.Fatal(error)}defer connection.Close()address := connection.LocalAddr().(*net.UDPAddr).String()// The address is a UDP address with a port on the end.// Trim that off along with the ':' character.return strings.Split(address,":")[0]}// generateReport generates a list of all the information we wish to// capture in text format.// Returns a list of text strings.func generateReport() *list.List {currentTime := time.Now()formattedTime := currentTime.Format(time.RFC1123)var hostname, error = os.Hostname()if error != nil {hostname = "UNKNOWN"}var platform, cType, cCount = cpuInfo()var memoryTotalK, memoryFreeK, swapTotalK, swapFreeK = memInfo()const GiBK float64 = 1024.0 * 1024.0var diskTotal, diskFree = diskUsage("/")const GiB float64 = 1024.0 * 1024.0 * 1024.0var rep = list.New()rep.PushBack(fmt.Sprintf("%+22s= %s\n", "Current time", formattedTime))rep.PushBack(fmt.Sprintf("%+22s= %s\n", "Host name", hostname))rep.PushBack(fmt.Sprintf("%+22s= %s\n", "Hardware platform", platform))rep.PushBack(fmt.Sprintf("%+22s= %s / %d\n", "Core type / count", cType, cCount))rep.PushBack(fmt.Sprintf("%+22s= %s\n", "Operating system", osRelease()))rep.PushBack(fmt.Sprintf("%+22s= %s\n", "Kernel version", kernelVersion()))rep.PushBack(fmt.Sprintf("%+22s= %.1f GiB / %.1f GiB\n","Memory total / free",float64(memoryTotalK)/GiBK, float64(memoryFreeK)/GiBK))rep.PushBack(fmt.Sprintf("%+22s= %.1f GiB / %.1f GiB\n","Swap total / free",float64(swapTotalK)/GiBK, float64(swapFreeK)/GiBK))rep.PushBack(fmt.Sprintf("%+22s= %.2f GiB\n","Filesystem capacity", float64(diskTotal)/GiB))rep.PushBack(fmt.Sprintf("%+22s= %.2f GiB\n","Filesystem available", float64(diskFree)/GiB))rep.PushBack(fmt.Sprintf("%+22s= %s\n", "Uptime", uptime()))rep.PushBack(fmt.Sprintf("%+22s= %s\n", "IP Address", hostIP4()))return rep}// displayReport takes a list of strings representing the report generated by// generateReport and reformats them into a format suitable for the terminal// screen, including the incorporation of color.func displayReport(report *list.List) {for line := report.Front(); line != nil; line = line.Next() {if str, ok := line.Value.(string); ok {parts := strings.Split(str, "=")fmt.Printf("%s%s", aurora.Red(parts[0]+":").Bold(), parts[1])}}}// logReport takes a list of strings representing the report generated by// generate report and appends them, unmodified and in the order create by// generateReport, at the end of the log file located in// $HOME/.local/share/pistats/pistats.logfunc logReport(report *list.List) {// We want to know our home directory so we can log our report.// Abort the application if we can't get our home directory.// If we can't get our home directory, then we've got Very Big Problems.userHomeDir, err0 := os.UserHomeDir()if err0 != nil {log.Fatal(err0)}// Check to see if we can create a log file for this application by checking// for $HOME/.local/share/pistat at a minimum. If there is a problem then// silently fail and return.logpath := userHomeDir + "/.local/share/pistat/"_, err1 := os.Stat(logpath)if err1 != nil && os.IsNotExist(err1) {if err2 := os.MkdirAll(logpath, 0770); err2 != nil {return}}// Now try to open the log file. The first time this application is run it// will not exist. If we fail to open the log file, then silently fail and// return.fullpath := logpath + "pistats.log"logfile, err3 :=os.OpenFile(fullpath, os.O_APPEND | os.O_WRONLY | os.O_CREATE, 0644)if err3 != nil {return}defer logfile.Close()// The full log file and path exist and it's open. Append the current report// to the log file. Write a blank line to the end to separate reports.for line := report.Front(); line != nil; line = line.Next() {//fmt.Print(line.Value)logfile.WriteString(line.Value.(string))}logfile.WriteString("\n")}func main() {report := generateReport()displayReport(report)logReport(report)}

This is a story about the old vs the new. In my case, it was about an Amazon Echo Dot generation 2 vs an iPhone 16 Pro Max. Let me explain…

I’ve been going around and cleaning out old items around my home, especially unmarked boxes that for whatever reason got stuffed into various corners, where they remained for many a year. When I say many, I’m talking about going back to when I was still fully employed. One day while going through one of those mystery boxes I found an Amazon Echo Dot generation 2 unopened in its box. I have no idea when I purchased it, although it had to be after October 2016 when this model was released. I do have an idea how it was placed into the box I found it in. Back then I was traveling a bit and and was very busy in my job, so we reached out to a cleaning company to get someone into our house to help my wife keep the place clean. One of the cleaning people had a bad habit of “temporarily” placing items into boxes in order to clear an area to clean. That cleaning person had a very bad habit of not telling us she’d done that, and it was but one reason she was eventually sent on her way. I thought I’d found everything she’d stashed away, but I was wrong with this particular item in that box.

We already have a number of Alexa/Amazon items in the house, although we barely use them except to play the occasional tune or to verbally ask Alexa to turn off the lights in one room of our house. We have three advanced models that can display the time, so I have those scattered around as heavily over-engineered digital clocks (and we’ll occasionally set a wakeup alarm with them). I decided to plug in this old/new stock Echo Dot and get it integrated our home network. That’s when my problems stated.

I have the latest Alexa app installed on my iPhone, and have had it on all my iPhones going back at least to Christmas 2016, which is when I believe I purchased this one. I use the Alexa app to bring these Echo devices up and integrated into our home network. Usually when I get a new Echo Dot it gets almost immediately powered on and set up, but apparently not this time. Now I was faced with using the latest iPhone with the latest Alexa app trying to integrate an Echo Dot from late 2016, nearly nine long years ago. A lot of technical advancement happens in a nine year period. And that might have been my problem.

With Alexa up and running on my iPhone and this Echo Dot up and waiting for integration, I found I couldn’t add it to my Alexa network using my iPhone 16, no matter how many times I tried. The iPhone with Alexa would not detect this Echo Dot. I wasted a week of evenings trying one solution after another, discovering yet again during this process that the Internet is full of useless advice. I gave up with the iPhone and was seriously considering tearing the Echo Dot open just to see if I could repurpose the electronics.

And then I reached into my collection of old Pixel Android phones and pulled out a Pixel 4a. I purchased a Pixel 2, a Pixel 3x, and two Pixel 4as back in 2020 for a project because they’d been heavily discounted by Amazon of all places. I’m talking half price or less. I picked the 4a because I like its small compact design. It was running Android 13, which is where Google stopped updating the device (which I can thank my luck stars). I could still install from Google Play so I installed the same version of Alexa on the Pixel 4a as I had on my iPhone 16. I then sat down and tried to bring the Echo Dot up using that Pixel 4a. Low and behold it worked the first time. That Echo Dot is now fully integrated in with the rest of my Amazon Echo devices.

So here’s the question. How is that that an “obsolete” Pixel 4a running Android 13 but the same version of Alexa that my latest and greatest iPhone 16 Pro Max, running the latest and greatest iOS version, and with the same version of Alexa as found on Google Play, can properly communicate with the Echo Dot generation 2 when my iPhone 16 can’t?

I have never regretted an Apple device purchase until now. I still wish I had my old iPhone 11 Pro Max, and I would still have it except the 11’s mobile radio was beginning to fail with dropped calls and an inability to be cleared unless the handset was power cycled. I couldn’t have that. The 16’s mobile radio is reliable (so far), so I should be thankful for that. But there have been enough aggravating quirks while operating the 16 that I wish I could trade it in for something completely different. But then I read the horror stories of Android handset problems, especially after an Android software update, and I just have to shake my head. I think it’s all been enshitified now. I need to start looking for much older Pixel handsets, such as perhaps the Pixel 5, or maybe the Pixel 6. Something old but reliable, like the 4as.

Today’s handsets and mobile operating systems are a classic Hobson’s choice.

I came across a post on Jeff Geerling’s blog about how to install Windows 11 as a VM on a Raspberry Pi. Being retired and with plenty of “leisure” time on my hands, I decided to follow along and see what it was like, so I set out to install the same tools using the same essential process he did. I got it to work (barely), but I wasn’t impressed with the results. It took me an entire day to get it all installed and running, only to eventually fail. In the end I deleted everything.

Installation and Setup

Before I get started, let me document my Raspberry Pi 5 setup, because it’s a little different than stock.

• Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.0 with up-to-date firmware
• 8 GiB memory
• Raspberry Pi official active cooling fan
• Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+
• Timetec 512GB M.2 2242 NVMe PCIe Gen3x4 SSD
• Ubuntu 24.04.2 for Raspberry Pi booting off the SSD

The Geerling post links to the creator and developer of the system for installing the ARM version of Windows 11, Botspot Virtual Machine, or BVM, on GitHub. While the directions for installing this is on GitHub, Geerling’s post links to a YouTube video he produced of him installing the software and getting Windows 11 running. I think that video is a bit deceptive concerning how much time it takes to get everything installed. In my case, just getting the ISO downloaded took over seven hours. Here’s a screenshot showing my desktop with System Monitor and a terminal with BVM doing its thing.

The amount of time to download Windows 11 ARM64 can be seen in the middle of the terminal, in the text section beneath “Downloading Windows 11…” There are four consecutive lines of text, with the time it took each operation timed on the far right. Totaled up, it took over seven hours to download the ISO. The download speeds are in the low hundreds of kilobytes. I’ve never seen anything that slow before, even on an old Raspberry Pi 2 or 3. Downloading the virtio drivers took another two hours. And then there was the step installing Windows 11 itself.

Even BVM warned “This will take several hours,” and it wasn’t wrong. It took several hours.

Operation

After a period of nearly 12 hours, from early in the morning until late in the evening, I managed to bring up a small Windows 11 640 x 480 window on the desktop.

I briefly tried to expand that resolution to something more useful, but this version of Windows wouldn’t allow me to change the screen resolution. You’ll note from System Monitor that I nearly exhausted swap. I closed the Windows VM at this point and increased local swap from 1 GiB to 4 GiB. One other notable difference, on Ubuntu at least you need to run bvm boot-gtk instead of bvm boot.

I did follow the BVM README and restarted the Windows 11 VM as headless in one terminal, then ran bvm connect in a second terminal. This produced the screen you see above. Desktop performance was greatly improved and the screen is a little bigger, but I don’t know what the resolution is. Unfortunately I can neither resize nor move it. That window is right smack in the middle of the desktop. I should note once again on System Monitor that swap usage is now at 1.4 GiB. It might be best to run this on a Raspberry Pi with 16 GB. I should also note that even with active cooling running (and the fan did kick in) the CPU temperatures hovered between 60° and 65° C.

Summary

I’m glad I gave this a try. But after these experiences I’m not so certain I’ll keep it on my Raspberry Pi.

Update

I let Windows 11 finish downloading its updates (see the last screenshot above), then I rebooted the Windows 11 VM. After that, headless operation no longer worked. Even bvm boot-gtk no longer worked. So the whole conglomeration was deleted from my Raspberry Pi and all used disk space (in the tens of gigabytes) was recovered. My advice: If you need to get Real Work done, instead of just “bragging rights,” then go shopping on Amazon and pick up one of the current micro PCs with Windows 11 Pro installed for around $300 and use that for your Windows 11 needs.

Links

Windows 11 Arm VMs on a Raspberry Pi, with BVM — https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/windows-11-arm-vms-on-raspberry-pi-bvm

Botspot Virtual Machine – Windows 11 QEMU KVM on ARM Linux — https://github.com/Botspot/bvm

migrating to an nvme drive on a raspberry pi 5 — part 2

Just as I did in the last post for my Raspberry Pi 3, I installed the legacy version of Raspberry Pi OS, or Raspian, onto the Raspberry Pi 2. I did spend about an hour installing the recommended 32-bit version of Debian 12 based Raspberry Pi OS, but determined that while it would boot, its operation was choppy at best. I then dropped back to the Debian 11 based Raspian and discovered that operation was a lot smoother and faster all around. This was surprising because it has a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU and 1 GiB of DRAM. This is significant because, with Debian 11 Raspian installed, I found little performance difference between it and the Raspberry Pi 3 I was working with earlier. This is a good thing, actually.

Once again I tweaked swap to set it at 2 GiB instead of the default 100 MiB. Other than that, everything else is stock out-of-the-box. What was interesting is how the CPU clock was being managed to drop below 900 MHz. The btop view above shows it idling at 600 MHz. I’d forgotten that early Raspberry Pis used to do this. Just for documentation sake, here’s a raw dump of /proc/cpuinfo.

Some words of warning if you’re going to use the Raspbian legacy image. While you can configure the image in advance for the host name, user, user password, and WiFi SSID and its password, it appears that some settings for the US (where I live) were incomplete. I learned on the RPi 3, and on this RPi 2, to go into the configuration utility and set localization to US, and to pick UTF-8 as the encoding standard. The default is some Latin standard that creates a mess when displaying fancy ASCII text on the terminal screen.

If you think that the Raspberry Pi 2 model B is obsolete, Raspberry Pi Foundation states on its web page that it will remain in production until January 2026. It’s not dead yet, and neither is the RPi 3 B (January 2028) and the RPi 3 B+ (January 2030). Tremendous untapped capabilities in all those “old” boards.

Links

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B — https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-2-model-b/

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B — https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-b/

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ — https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-b-plus/

Once all that was done and the RPi 3 was booted, I did a bit of housekeeping to tweak things to my personal tastes. I was quite happy with the much snappier performance of the RPi 3 under the 32-bit bullseye-based version. I tried to install fastfetch, but it wasn’t in the legacy repo, so I fired up chromium and downloaded a version compiled for the arm7l architecture which the RPi 3 was running as.

I always create a bin directory in my home folder to hold tools I will only run when I’m logged in. I add that local bin to my path as well. That’s where I unpacked fastfetch to. You’ll note that we are indeed running under Raspbian based on Debian bullseye. This is far more advanced than the version on the board when I put it away years ago; Raspbian based on Debian stretch. You’ll also note I bumped the swap space from the default 100 MiB to 2 GiB. Here’s an image of why that’s so important.

With the system booted and running, with three open terminals of which one was running htop, and Chromium up with only one tab pointed at the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT documentation, swap had already hit 139 MiB. Exhausting swap is a guarantee to crashed applications and a system that is so sluggish as to be for all practical purposes locked up. I’ve already documented how to fix this in the first attempt to resurrect this board, link at the bottom. I decided to only expand swap to 2 GiB instead of 4, just to see if I actually needed to. Turns out I didn’t need 4 GiB, and I probably could have even defined even less, such as 1 GiB.

Once the RPi 3 was up and stable I added a few things to the environment to make it more to my liking. I added the Nerd Hack fonts, and set the shell to use them, then I installed the Rust compiler and tool chain. From there I used cargo to install eza, a more sophisticated ls, and bat, a much better cat alternative. The shell above shows the results of using the Nerd Font and eza via an alias for ls. I show this because one of the first major tasks was to get the Sense HAT operational, and for that I installed the sense-hat package.

I point this out because if you follow the instructions for the Sense HAT documentation, the instructions have you install the sense-hat package, then Octave, then go through the steps of calibrating the sense hat. This left me with the erroneous assumption that the calibration software was a part of Octave, which it is not. You do not have to install Octave to work with the Sense HAT. The instructional also state that the result of the calibration, the file RTIMULib.ini, is in two locations, one of which is under ~/.config/sense_hat. There is no ~/.config/sense_hat folder created.

The RPi 3 is now operational enough I can begin to seriously think about using it for headless and unattended operation somewhere around the house. I’ve yet to determine a specific task, but it’s ready for the next step. I intend to install Cockpit on it, as I have with several other Raspberry Pis in my household. If you want to see Cockpit in action, just a teensy bit, here’s two screen captures of it in operation using Chromium on my Raspberry Pi 5 to look at the remote Raspberry Pi 4.

I have a Raspberry Pi 4, 2 GiB, running unattended and headless running Pi-hole. Rather than have to ssh into the system, I installed Cockpit with its much better web-based interface. Most of the time I live in the console.

Right now I have disabled Pi-hole because an update came down the pipes and caused all sorts of screwy issues. That was sometime last year, and I haven’t felt the need to go in and sort it out, including (possibly) a complete re-installation of Pi-hole itself. Of note is the low memory footprint of bookworm, which is what you can get when you’re not running the graphical desktop. That is basically what I’ll do with the RPi 3, which is disable the graphical desktop and install Cockpit on it to manage it remotely.

The final question that needs to be asked is why? Because I have all this incredibly capable computing resources that are literally sitting in a corner doing nothing. I turned 71 last December, and I need to add as much automation to my household as I possibly can to help me and my wife live independent quality lives. I want a household automation system that I control and doesn’t depend on the “cloud.” I don’t want to wake up one day and read that my home devices will no longer work because the company that sold me those devices is going out of business and bricking all my expensive devices. I just won’t put up with that.

Links

Cockpit Project — https://cockpit-project.org/

Pi-hole — https://pi-hole.net/

Rust — https://www.rust-lang.org/

eza — https://github.com/eza-community/eza/

bat — https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/

attempting to restore an old raspberry pi

Here are the necessary steps:

1. sudo apt install flatpak
2. sudo apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak
3. flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
4. sudo reboot

Note in step 3 that flatpak will ask for your password in order to perform the equivalent of a sudo operation. Also note that if you don’t add the remote address to FlatHub that you won’t be able to install anything. After the system reboots flatpak will install applications from FlatHub.

There are some quirks with running flatpak on Ubuntu. First of all, you have to install from the command line. Ubuntu’s App Center will not show FlatPak app equivalents like Linux Mint’s Software Manager. So you have to query FlatHub directly, and filter the results. In this example we’ll install GNU Octave. First, we query/filter for the flatpak package.

$ flatpak remote-ls | grep -i octaveGNU Octaveorg.octave.Octave9.2.0stableaarch64

The full package we want to install is org.octave.Octave. Then we install the package.

flatpak install flathub org.octave.Octave

This will trigger a response showing not just the Octave package (or any package, really) to be installed, but a series of runtime and environment files that will also be installed. You have an opportunity to either accept them or not. If you do not accept their installation then the full installation will be aborted.

In the case of Ubuntu the new application is installed in the apps screen (Show Apps) complete with its icon. While this is welcome, it’s a bit frustrating that Canonical/Ubuntu refuse to fully support FlatHub the way they unequivocally support Snaps. Such is life. If you don’t have an easy icon to click on, you can start the application from the command line, like so:

flatpak run org.octave.Octave # command line only# orflatpak run org.octave.Octave --gui # for the desktop GUI

And finally, if you’re curious where everything gets stashed, it’s under /var/lib/flatpak.

Links

FlatPak — https://flatpak.org/

FlatHub — https://flathub.org/

GNU Octave — https://octave.org/

This particular Raspberry Pi is unique in that it’s also the one I first installed Arch Linux on, and then Raspian (well before it was renamed Raspberry Pi OS). It still had Raspian installed, and when I powered it up it still booted and ran. But I wanted to install the current Raspberry Pi OS on it and try to get everything working on top of an up-to-date software platform. And so I did, and that was an interesting “learning experience” that got me wrapped around the axle a bit, to the point I still haven’t done anything with the Sense HAT.

Note that this is the current release of Raspberry Pi OS at the time this post was written. Also note that this Raspberry Pi was limited to 907 MiB, a little less than the 1 GiB of memory soldered to the board. The reason for the memory haircut down to 907 MiB is because it’s being used as the graphics buffer for the video display.

I managed to get btop installed and to get it running so I could keep an eye on how the RPi 3 was behaving. You should now note that I have defined 4 GiB of swap space on the board (look in the disks box). When Raspberry Pi OS is installed “out of the box,” it’s configured with only 512 MiB of swap space total. It didn’t take much work with the default swap space to have applications crash out due to memory and swap exhaustion. Once again I had to edit /etc/dphs-swapfile to get my 4 MiB of swap.

# /etc/dphys-swapfile - user settings for dphys-swapfile package# author Neil Franklin, last modification 2010.05.05# copyright ETH Zuerich Physics Departement#   use under either modified/non-advertising BSD or GPL license# this file is sourced with . so full normal sh syntax applies# the default settings are added as commented out CONF_*=* lines# where we want the swapfile to be, this is the default#CONF_SWAPFILE=/var/swap# set size to absolute value, leaving empty (default) then uses computed value#   you most likely don't want this, unless you have an special disk situationCONF_SWAPSIZE=4096# set size to computed value, this times RAM size, dynamically adapts,#   guarantees that there is enough swap without wasting disk space on excessCONF_SWAPFACTOR=2# restrict size (computed and absolute!) to maximally this limit#   can be set to empty for no limit, but beware of filled partitions!#   this is/was a (outdated?) 32bit kernel limit (in MBytes), do not overrun it#   but is also sensible on 64bit to prevent filling /var or even / partitionCONF_MAXSWAP=4096

Lines 16, 20, and 26 are the lines I modified. So with those modifications I managed to keep more applications up and running, although not very many. As you can see in the btop capture, I’d already reached 658 MiB of swap used, and that was with a web browser (Chromium in this instance) and several terminal windows.

Speaking of web browsers, I tried three on that combination of hardware and software; Firefox, Chromium, and Gnome Web, a.k.a. Epiphany. Of the three I discovered that Gnome Web was the worst, consuming the largest amount of swap, and that it crashed far more than Firefox or Chromium. All I wanted was a web browser to be able to search for and read documentation for certain problems I was encountering while working with this setup. Gnome Web was the least helpful in this regard.

I also had to change from using Wayland to using X11 as the desktop engine. The primary reason for the change is that there are no working screen capture tools under Wayland, but more than a few for X11. After switching to X11 I installed gnome-screenshot (bit of irony there considering how bad Gnome Web was), which allowed me to capture specific application windows for documentation purposes.

After spending far more time than I should have tweaking the constrained environment, I tried to install GNU Octave, because that’s what the Raspberry Pi Sense Hat documentation calls for. There’s a tool in the installation for calibrating the various sensors on the Sense HAT. What I discovered is that the version of GNU Octave is still at 7.3.0, while the version you can get off the Octave website is 9.3.0. I managed to install a more up to date version of Octave via flathub, version 9.2.0;

I opened the application and discovered that it’s quite fast in that environment, amazingly so compared to either Chromium or Firefox. Since this is from the flatpak, I need to investigate how to get the calibration tools out of the flatpak. I have the Octave flatpak installed on my Linux Mint system so I’ll investigate there rather than on the Raspberry Pi 3.

And that’s about it for the moment. I am wondering if I should install the light weight 32-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS onto the Raspberry Pi 3. After all, Raspbian was 32-bit on RPi 3. Or maybe I should put the Sense HAT on a 1 GiB Raspberry Pi 4 I found in my collection and install 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS on that. Decisions, decisions…

Links

Raspberry Pi Sense Hat Documentation — https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/accessories/sense-hat.html

GNU Octave — https://octave.org/

I’ve been running Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB for some time now. All things considered it’s probably the best Linux distribution I’ve run on this little board. I find it to be a well balanced and good looking work environment. I’ve been waiting for the distribution to automatically update to the latest release, 24.04.2. Sure enough it has, but I can’t say with certainty when that happened. What I can say with some surprise is that the kernel for this version on this Raspberry Pi is still at version 6.8.0. I say surprise because all the articles have been trumpeting that kernel version 6.11 would be the new kernel for this point release. But apparently not for Ubuntu 24.04.2 on the Raspberry Pi.

Or at least, not automatically, not right now. To be honest I’m not so sure that I want the current working kernel swapped out for the newer version. Earlier versions of this kernel had problems with the GPIO subsystem, but over time all of that was sorted and now everything works as expected. I’m not interested in performing an upgrade only to discover that working with external GPIO devices is broken again. As the old saying goes, be careful what you ask for, especially with Linux kernel upgrades.

I fell, at night, heading to bed. I fell because I turned off all the lights and then tripped over one of the cat’s scratch pads. When I fell I hit a wall at our hallway entrance. My wife heard the crash and then the cursing and immediately came out to lend assistance. After about ten minutes of further cursing and slowly wriggling around on the floor to try and stand, I was back up on my feet, with bruises on my left knee, left elbow, and shoulder. And especially my ego. Yes, the same left knee that was fully replaced last July is the one that hit the floor.

While I was on the floor, little Danï came out to see what was happening. Rather than running and hiding, she came up and snuggled next to me, purring the whole time. She was concerned. After I got back up off the floor and finally went to bed with ice packs and a selection of anti-inflammatory medications to handle any swelling, Danï came up and snuggled next to me. During the day she continued in her “charge nurse” role, coming in during the day to lie in my lap and purr at me. Say what you will about “dumb animals,” I have absolutely no doubt that Danï realized I was hurt and wanted to comfort me. The other cats scattered for cover over the noise, but they eventually came by to offer comfort by being near me. But it was Danï that was first, and the fastest to “render aid and comfort” to her person.

As for my knee, and the whole left side of my body, I continue to carefully pay attention to how I physically feel. But it would appear I’ve managed to get through this relatively unscathed. I believe I can attribute this to all the physical exercise I’ve been doing since the knee replacement, as well as, yes, the nurturing power of a little Ginger cat and her purrs.

This is OM System’s latest camera, the OM-3. It’s a USD$2,000 body only digital camera that, in spite of its features, is too expensive for me to purchase. It’s too expensive in terms of just the cost, and too expensive in photo taking capability.

Personal History

I started using Four Thirds cameras in 2006 with the purchase of the Olympus E-300 kit system (which included a Zuiko 14-45mm kit zoom and Zuiko 40-150mm kit zoom). It was half-price at NewEgg, of all places. I purchased the E-300 because the body had a range finder form factor, a lot like the Pen F I would eventually purchase. Over the years I purchased and used the E-1 (used), E-3, E-P2, original E-M5, OM-D E-M1.2, Pen F, and Panasonic’s G9 and G9.2. Every camera save the E-P2 was purchased at a discount, at times a considerable discount. Because these purchases stretched out over a near-20-year time span during which I was employed, I could justify all those purchases. I bought them, learned how to effectively use them, enjoyed using them, and enjoyed the photographs they produced. If there were any limitations it was due to my limited skills and experience, not the hardware.

I’ve kept up with what has been happening to Olympus over the decades, going back to their OM film days. My father started using Olympus with the OM-1, while I would get into the Olympus film system with the OM-4. For a time I got away from Olympus, having purchased a Nikon N90 for my family, especially as my girls were growing up. When I crossed over to digital photography in 2006 I chose Olympus, and except for a single Sony N5 I picked up for a song, I’ve owned and used Olympus pretty much ever since.

Why did I stick with Olympus? Because of the Zuiko glass. Zuiko lenses are some of the best, if not the best, lenses in the world. For example, here’s one photo I took with my now-gone E-3 and the Zuiko 50-200mm Four Thirds zoom lens.
I used to commute from my home to where I worked, a trip which took me past an executive air port in downtown Orlando. In 2010, when this photo was taken, all the major businesses would pay blimps to come to Orlando and fly overhead, advertising an event or a place to the public below. When they blimps weren’t flying they were parked at that airport, and I would stop by on my way home and take photos of them. This photo was taken with the “ancient” E-3, with its 10MP sensor; by 2010 Olympus had released the E-P2 (which I’d also purchased) with its 12MP sensor and advanced processing engine compared to the E-3. And yet, I continued to use the E-3 because of the selection of zooms I’d purchased to use with the E-3, specifically the 12-60mm and 50-200mm. When I go back and re-visit those old photos, I’m still appreciative of the high quality I could achieve with that combination, most of the time without even trying it seemed.

I lost those jewels when when my car was broken into and they were stolen, in my drive way of all places…

Current Status

I continue to use my Olympus equipment. I tend to gravitate towards using the Pen F with a few different lenses, such as the 17mm f/1.8, the 45mm f/1.8, and the 12-40mm f/2 PRO. However, my last purchased camera wasn’t from Olympus, it was from Panasonic, the Lumix G9.2. B&H Photo and Video had a deal with Panasonic to knock $500 off the regular MSRP, and they would also take another camera in as tradein on top of the sale price. I thus traded in my Panasonic GH4 which had been sitting in a bag for a while, a camera that had seen its MSRP price cut by 2/3rds when the GH5 was introduced and they wanted to clear out all GH4 inventory. The trade-in value of the GH4 didn’t make up for the low price I paid, but it was still fair enough for a camera that wasn’t being used.

When I think about why I purchased the Panasonic Lumix G9.2, two important features stand out: the 24MP resolution of the sensor combined with on-sensor PDAF (phase detect auto focus), instead of CDAF (contrast detect auto focus). The only Olympus camera with PDAF were the E-M1 series. There’s quite a few more important features in the body I like and use, but I’m not going to do a point-by-point comparison; that particular horse has been truly beaten. Suffice to say that the G9.2 can hold its own. The G9.2 is meant to be a direct competitor to the OM Systems OM-1.2, from which the OM-3 supposedly derives its internal electronics, as well as the sensor. Which leads me to my final point.

At the time of this post you can purchase the OM Systems OM-1.2, a true flagship pro camera, for the same price as the OM-3. If I were in the market, I would purchase the OM-1.2 over the OM-3 in a cold New Your minute. And if the OM-1.2 weren’t available, I’d seriously consider the extremely capable Panasonic Lumix G9.2 which B&H is currently selling for USD $1,500, or go all out and get the equally capable Panasonic Lumix GH7 video and stills body, which is USD $2,000, again from B&H. Even the older Panasonic GH5.2 is a ‘mere’ USD $1,200, from which the original G9 was derived.

But as I said at the top, it’s way outside my budget these days.

Here’s one last thought to consider. Keep in mind that OM Systems is Olympus’ camera division spun out as a separate company. A lot of folks want the “new” OM Systems to succeed. I don’t know if OM Systems will succeed or not, but I’m not betting on its long term success in the marketplace, especially by spending my money on any of its products. If you’re invested in Four Thirds like I am and just like the overall system, then consider buying Panasonic. Or, if you’re looking to move on to a larger sensor system, consider Panasonic’s S5.2 and S5.2 X full-frame cameras, which are USD $1,500 and $1,800 body only, respectively. Add a Panasonic Lumix 20-60mm zoom as the “kit” lens to the S5.2, and for the same price you’d pay for the OM-3 body only, you can have an extremely capable Panasonic hybrid system with a far stronger future than OM Systems. Again, however, all prices well outside my budget.

Links

OM System OM-3 — My First Impressions — https://robinwong.blogspot.com/2025/02/om-system-om-3-my-first-impressions.html

The Future

My writing and posting are slowing down these days towards an average of one posting/week, instead of driving towards one/day as I’ve tried to in the past. My reasons for this are varied, not the least of which is that my personal time is becoming more precious to me, and I need that personal time for other tasks I consider more important. Another way to look at my posting is that will become more erratic. There were already long periods of inactivity between posts, with a burst of back-to-back posts, followed by another long period of inactivity. It’s the bursty parts that will grow less bursty, if that makes any sense.

Annie turned 10 on the twelfth of February. We celebrate Annie’s birthday on the following weekend, as it tends to be close to Valentines Day, which we informally refer to as Annie’s Day. After all, Annie was born with a white heart-shaped marking on her brisket, making her the perfect Valentines Dog.