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.

Historically, the name came from Dave Nichol, who was president of the company for decades. He actually had a very strong hand in the selection of products that were included in the product line.

Apparently all kinds of people would pitch product ideas at him, and would taste test them and pick only ones he liked. The idea of “President’s Choice” wasn’t to be cheapo no name products, but unique and distinctive stuff personally picked by the company’s president.

And Dave wasn’t just some guy in the corner office. In his prime he was a Canadian personality, and you saw him in TV commercials. Once he left Loblaws in the '90s the President’s Choice stuff lost its panache and meaning.

Thank God somebody got it.

“Intercourse!”

Many, many years ago I used to have two Wyse50 terminals, running split screens each with two parts. I did a lot of support on remote systems (via modem!) and I would have a session on a customer system, source code and running on our test system and internal stuff. I didn’t have space for a third terminal.

At another job I had an office with a “U” shaped desk. I would spread printouts across half the “U” and swivel around between the computer and the printouts.

My first experience with this food was in Halifax decades ago. The Halifax Donair is a unique thing.

And it’s definitely Donair, not Doner.

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

For me Bazzera Magica and Baratza Vario grinder some time back. Better coffee than most cafes.

Except this is Canada, and $7.50/hr is about as relevant as comparing it to child labour in a t-shirt factory in Bangladesh.

Paywalled

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.

That used to be really true when I was a kid in the 79’s, but not so much today. Back then, a quality guitar cost way more than the cheap stuff and the cheap stuff was rubbish.

Nowadays, with CNC machines everywhere, there are lots of modestly priced guitars that are very playable. The junk that we used to have to settle with back in the day only exists in the realm of “toy” instruments that almost aren’t intended to be played.

Seriously, $300 can get you a very playable instrument, especially in electric guitars.

The workplace should have a zero tolerance policy about abuse of the staff. If the particular location is one where there is a significantly non-zero chance of such incidents happening, then there should be a big red button on the wall that sounds and alarm, and summons security and possibly triggers a police response.

Employees should be trained to hit the button at the first hint of abuse. The employer should support them.