Updating Debian 10 to Debian 11 on a Pi Zero W

On a sunny day (Sat, 29 Oct 2022 22:13:03 +0100) it happened mm0fmf snipped-for-privacy@invalid.com wrote in <tjk510$3mmgj$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

The old wisdom was always: "If it works do not fix it" I have a Pi running 24/7 where uname -a says 2013

So say 20 years

Sure there may arise security issues, but that old one is not even connected to the net and does not use WiFi Next you have to put a new engine in your car every year????

And that rathead dhcpcd or whatever should never have existed.

Maybe I just write my own OS and be done with it wrote a multitasker for Z80 long time ago Few lines, world has bloated after that. Bloat sells it seems.

Many if not most things can be done with a 2$ micro chip.

Useful, thanks. But yeah, I do always go with a completely new image on RasPis. I sorta know my customisations by heart now, and just in case I always keep a description of them on every Pi. So I spend that half hour waiting time doing that. An alternative would be automation with e.g. Ansible, but meh.

Be careful!

Linux started because Linus Torvalds had a neat idea for task switching on a 386 - just a few lines of code that grew into a kernel and met GNU looking for a kernel.

There's the rub. I did the customisations on the fly and they evolved over some time and I *didn't* make a note... very poor. I do the same kind of stuff at work on VMs and simulations for customer designs (custom kernels and setups) and there's plenty of such notes in repos, Jira tickets and OneNote pages but I didn't do it at home. It's a classic case of the cobbler's children have the worst shoes!

On a sunny day (Sun, 30 Oct 2022 07:15:22 +0000) it happened Ahem A Rivet's Shot snipped-for-privacy@eircom.net wrote in snipped-for-privacy@eircom.net:

I know, I have one very old distro, SLS Linux, from 1998, on a floppy.. installed it back then and never went back to MS windows... And my other system was a CP/M system compatible (to some point) with a Kaypro 2, as I did not have CP/M back then and wanted to try some software from the CP/M user club, I modified a Sinclair ZX81 and wrote my own CP/M clone:

It is all not so hard, bit of ASM,

I think US now wants to 'prevent' China from having a 7 nm chip factory.. US mafia. Electric cars, nothing will run anymore but for the old diesel after the chip wars..

I managed to get paid for doing both of those things in 1982, my first job out of college.

On a sunny day (Sun, 30 Oct 2022 11:31:41 +0000) it happened Ahem A Rivet's Shot snipped-for-privacy@eircom.net wrote in snipped-for-privacy@eircom.net:

Yea, in the eighties I worked for a company that had close relations with IBM and was designing for example ISA cards that did all sort of things for in the first PCs. I remember we discussed possibly moving to Unix... Designed some sort of sound card too, code in x86 asm.. and a vector processing card.

But that Z80 thing I designed at home was actually faster than the old IBM PC, as mine had a ramdisk :-) You would load the floppy to ramdisk at startup, and everything would work from there no mere seek times... sectors read in a flash. Its all in those circuits, I added the command "floppytord" to the OS it would copy the whole floppy to ramdisk.. All in the evening tinkering..

My first job was 1967 designing things for the army, navy and power stations.. not my thing so in 1968 I went to work for the national TV station, got the job as I already had designed and build my own (vidicon) camera... then 6 month training in broadcast technology (much like the BBC in the UK) worked there many years, then left and went all over the world doing all sort of things then came back and worked at some particle accelerator, then started my own company.. then that PC thing... I am curious by nature... worked in the lab of a big university hospital too, all sorts of cool stuff. hey even did some thing for ESA. Somebody recently told me I should write a book about it all... LOL who knows... Help educate this generation? If a WW3 nuke war happens and a big EMP destroys all smartphones, then knowing how to send an SOS with the simplest means ... (I am a radio ham too) other than with smoke signals... bit of knowhow may help.

getting carried away obviously... :-)

I'm pretty sure I could manage a spark gap transmitter with nothing electronic available (my morse is *very* rusty though) - for a crystal receiver I'd need a good high impedance earpiece which would be trickier.

On a sunny day (Sun, 30 Oct 2022 13:23:15 +0000) it happened Ahem A Rivet's Shot snipped-for-privacy@eircom.net wrote in snipped-for-privacy@eircom.net:

I had one of those crystal earphones once in the late fifties or early sixties, seen those on ebay, Spark transmitter I have tried, worked, used an old car ignition coil :-) local radio ham got very upset..

crystal radios, tune with a ferrite rod shifting in the coil

Now I have a nice Tecsun long wave to short wave range AM SSB plus FM receiver, Will it survive the EMP? Dunno. No tubes left anymore but that could be an option. Once build a 250 Watt linear with a PE/100 tube.

Oh and some digital TV transmit stuff that uses a Raspberry too:

From what I've read the EMP would take out rather more than smartphones.

I built a broadcast AM crystal set when I was about 11 - hand-wound coil on a cardboard tube former, but mine had a multi-blage rotary capacitor for tuning and a glass-encapsulated germanium diode.

I forget where the earphones came from but they were certainly high impedance. IIRC the sound quality was surprisingly good and, of course, no battery needed. This was a year or two before portable transistor radios first appeared -and before individually packaged unijunction germanium transistors appeared (think OC-72 single junction devices in metal of glass packaging).

No suitable headphones? Easily replaced by an 80mm speaker plus a small amp (LM358 + 470m pot + 4.7M feedback resistor or some equivalent IC amp) and a battery or small solar panel for power.

Never tried that, but did enjoy playing with WS48 sets while at secondary school: mt school had a compulsory cadet corps but joining the Signals Platoon got some of us out of a lot of square bashing.

The WS48 was a battery-operated WW2 infantry backpack radio:

The first time you upgrade, you discover all the mistakes that you made in your first notes. The second time you upgrade, you discover all the mistakes that you made fixing the mistakes in your first notes. The third time you upgrade, the software has changed and it doesn't work that way anymore.

I had one of those crystal earphones too. I could plug it directl into the preamp output of my tape recorder. A regular earphone plugged into the speaker output switched to the opposite channel where the crystal earphone gave me stereo sound.

That's the same as the set I built. I used an old telephone handset to listen to it. That worked for the local AM station. Then the next-closest station upgraded to 50 kilowatts, which came in loud and clear over half the dial (my selectivity wasn't that great).

I later added a tube to it, then added another coil to make it regenerative (and prone to oscillation if you turned the gain up too high).

I once saw (but never built) a schematic for a set with a transistor amplifier which was powered by a second tuner which you'd set to the strongest local station - no batteries or external power required.

On a sunny day (Sun, 30 Oct 2022 17:49:32 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Martin Gregorie snipped-for-privacy@mydomain.invalid wrote in <tjmdfc$2oess$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Yes, especially high altitude nukes would take out satellites I have read the 'telstar' satellite was killed by a US high altitude nuke test, But lots of other thing will go, cellphone towers, airplane electronics (helis could crash), what not. No more electrickety! all those power lines and the related control electronics out.

Ah yes, 500 pF tuning caps, I still have one:

I used the OA79 Ge diode worked with battery powered tubes (1.5 V heater voltage) DL92? One day transistors came on the market, OC13 was my first transistor.

Long before integrated audio amps I build things with AC127 I think it was singend ended pushpull amps, later with 3055 for more power! But before that I build an amplifiwr for the school band (guitar) with tubes..

I once bought a '31 set' in the army surplus:

I did design some equipment that had some programmable part, my first experiments with a programmable machine, was part of a bigger project, But .. my first computer was a Sinclair ZX80 Then I bought the book "Microprocessor interfacing techniques' by Rodnay Zaks and things took of from there interfacing that ZX80...

Seems that, according to Wikipedia anyway, it took two high altitude nukes (one US, one Soviet) plus a burst of solar radiation to kill Telstar 1.

After the Elliott and graduation I joined ICL and learnt first 1900 assembler and then COBOL, followed by various OSen up to and including George3, multi-user, multitasking OS with a hierarchical directory structure on a 32K 1903 (24 bit words) in 1970.

My first personal system was 6809-based (32KB RAM, 2 x 5.25" disks, 16 x

On a sunny day (Mon, 31 Oct 2022 13:56:17 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Martin Gregorie snipped-for-privacy@mydomain.invalid wrote in <tjok61$gl9g$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Yes, after the ZX80 I bought a ZX81 and a 64 kB memory extention module and then first thing I build was an EPROM programmer,, and used it for a graphics card:

Ah the memories - the ZX81 was the originally intended product, the ZX80 was essentially the prototype but (like everyone at the time) Sinclair was having trouble getting the Ferranti ULAs to do what they said they would - so just like Grundy with the Newbrain he shipped the prototype, but unlike Grundy he followed it up with the real thing.

The connection is that both started life as the same government backed project that wound up producing the BBC micro which inspired the Pi.

I had one of those Radio Shack 150-project electronics kits back in the day. One of the projects within was a spark-gap transmitter, in which a relay was wired up with the normally-closed contacts set to cut power to the coil when energized. I don't know how long it would've lasted before the relay contacts were shot, but it succeeded at making detectable noise over most of the AM band (though not to the extent that it interfered with broadcasters).

On a sunny day (Mon, 31 Oct 2022 17:20:27 GMT) it happened snipped-for-privacy@alfter.diespammersdie.us wrote in <vtT7L.649243$ snipped-for-privacy@fx14.iad:

Ha, these days most wallwarts wil do that!

The cheap ones, anyway. I have one of those USB charging adaptors that plugs into a car cigarette lighter that wipes out a weak FM station.