Friday Feedback

Jan 31, 2025

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Banana Pi, Stay Away

The board I purchased was a BPI-M2U or M2 Ultra. Nice little Pi-3 or pi-4 clone. It has BT, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, 2 USB ports, onboard eMMC flash, microSD, SATA, audio, two power modes, serial header, HDMI (full size). Just a nice little board.

After a week, I finally managed to get ONE of a dozen images to boot. Raspbian doesn’t work. The best general version is Armbian. Regardless, only one would boot.

That one is running Ubuntu 16.04. I’m still trying to upgrade it to 18.04.

The board is unstable. It will run fine for a while, then power itself off. Or it will randomly reboot.

Unless you are willing to face significant headaches, buy the real thing.

Serial GPS NTP

I have one of my serial GPS’s hooked to the BPI-M2U. The PPS is getting to the GPIO. The serial data is arriving on UART 2. All wonderful.

Nice and stable. The jitter is way down.

But because it is a banana and not a raspberry, I can’t get the PPS driver installed. I’m still hoping.

Plane Crash and Trump 1.0

It appears that Trump stuck his foot in his mouth during a press conference about the crash over the Potomac.

It appears that he claimed that some air traffic controllers are DEI hires that are mentally challenged.

For a president who is attacked every day for being a liar and for being stupid, it is not a good look when he says things like this.

I listened to the ATC audio. My opinion is that the ATC messed up. He did not abort the landing clearance for the passenger jet. This is a no big issue event, if he had told the plane to go around.

SCOTUS

I am frustrated with SCOTUS. I’m afraid that we are going to get a denial of cert. We just have to keep waiting.

Question of the Week

What has been your favorite confirmation hearing moment?

Comments

3 responses to “Friday Feedback”

Birdog357

2025-01-31

Trump is right. There are a lot of stupid DEI hires at ATC. I’ve been listening to audio of them for a couple of years.

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Birdog357

2025-01-31

Read the comments here, it proves Trump was right https://instapundit.com/699546/

Reply
Archer

2025-01-31

What has been your favorite confirmation hearing moment?

So far, it was Rand Paul during RFKJr’s hearings. He didn’t even ask a question, he just pointed out — for the record — that the “vaxx/anti-vaxx” debate has been oversimplified and dumbed down to the point of uselessness. We’re talking past each other and assigning dichotomous labels to each other, when the real issue is much more nuanced and multi-faceted, and at the end of the day nobody is having a real conversation or discussion about any of it.

And his real point was shockingly simple: We need to have these discussions, and it’s counter-productive to vilify someone for asking the questions. Asking questions is how science is done, and the science is never “settled”. A lot of the current vaccine “schedules” DON’T make logical sense (HepB, for example: the virus spreads via drugs and sex, so does the vaccine really need to be given at one day old?), and there’s no way to tell if, in 10 or 20 years, all the “science-backed” advice we’re getting now will be conclusively shown to be crap … but somehow the simple act of asking these questions makes someone “anti-vaxx”.

Anyway, great 5-minute speech from Dr. Rand Paul.

1st runner-up: Pam Bondi (whose nomination reportedly carries its own issues, especially for gun owners) telling whatever Senator it was, that she didn’t appear before Congress to do his homework for him.

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