Tony is a Geek

Yep, I ordered it back in January 2024, it finally arrived...just before December 2024.  Apparently the 10-month delay wasn't a joke, it really does take that long.  Was it worth the wait? Yeah, I reckon so. The 32Gb SDCard that came with the device, I just stuck it into the device - it was Debian 11 Bullseye for Raspberry Pi 4.  It worked okay, for a day or so. I installed [node-red], it worked well, I downloaded [world-map] and got some markers appearing, it seemed to perform well.  I then started to think how I want to set this device up to use it.  I wanted [Arduino] too. That 4G adaptor - how do you get it to work? (using the Debian Bullseye install) Well, after putting in a SIM card, the instructions in this article worked a treat: https://github-wiki-see.page/m/clockworkpi/uConsole/wiki/How-to-use-the-4G-extension To summarise: $ uconsole--4g-cm4 enable This outputs that it is detecting the adaptor and then it says something like "success". Then what? Wel...

I'm about to have ( yet another ) week off... I'm allowed, I literally was recorded as being utilised 100.1% last year, that's AFTER deductions of holiday days, etc...etc... ( most people struggle to get 50-60% ) and well, then being treated like sh!t by my employer by not recognising my efforts, but happy to take their rewards ( [no surprise] I pi$$ed off a higher up a few years back & they just won't let their d!ck swinging ego, move on... ho! hum! ), so, I've now got to take off one week per month, until April otherwise I lose the holiday days.  Fine by me.  But, oh, what to do? Well.....you may recall that a while back, maybe mid-last year, I wrote an ARTICLE HERE about using an SDR (Software Defined Radio) USB dongle for listening to the radio waves around us... and then I purchased a Flightaware USB stick and antenna.  I had a little play around with it.  I proved it could capture commercial flight data in a 100-or so mile radius from the antenna, save tha...

Okay...so I've been using Docker Containers since the 32-bit version on really old hardware, I'll see if I can take a photo of the old faithful "indestructible" Panasonic laptop (it's on the shelf behind me) which has got to be quite some time ago.... I believe I was using it to install nodeJS apps into so that I could run many different versions of nodeJS and not screw up my proper OS as believe it or not, sometimes there are breaking changes that occur when you are forced to upgrade external libraries... and y'know, you might not be in a position to have the bandwidth to refactor for those changes... I'm pretty sure that I last used that Panasonic back in 2018, maybe dipping into 2019 - just.  Anyway, it was more of an amusing "prop" than anything else, it was always fun on a GWER train to have the little wifi aerial springing about out the top as I would run a scan of all the mobile phone / devices that had wifi or bluetooth enabled insecurely...

I was doing an inventory of the small computer devices that I have knocking around - I am attempting to get them all in a line and figure out what they are; what they have on them; what I originally bought them for and then list out what I can actually now use them for.  There are a lot. :-) This also raised the point to me that I have 2 x RPi 4 devices; purchased before the "great shortage".  I have one powering my Arcade cabinet, which is fair usage, it does need a fair amount of grunt to do what it needs to do (although I prob. don't need the 256GB SD-card in it, as I'm streaming the game files from my 4TB NAS drive over the network....) and then other one is being a huge overkill sitting inside a 4WD Freenove robot car... I should really swap that out for an RPi 3.  anyway, I was online yesterday just wondering if / when RPi 4's will become available again at £35...or £55 that I paid, they seem to have gone up to £65 - even though not available (oh, I'm re...