Monthly Archives: March 2025

The Eyes Have It..

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They certainly do. Unfortunately these are not rendered well on this cut-down apology of a blog. Everyone now bow low and salute the mobile phone, which a lot of folks think is a computer, which it certainly is not. Rant over. These pics were the randomly-selected heading photos on a previous blog which no longer exists, except on the wayback machine. Some of the photos are of ‘friends’, and some are not. IMHO all were very beautiful, and if the ‘eyes’ are indeed windows of the ‘soul’, ’nuff said. Although all pics were originally uploaded in 2012, some date back to pics I took much earlier.

Four Days.

Afghan Girl. Not a pic of mine, but staggeringly, hauntingly beautiful.

Angel Eyes. And a little naughty.

Redhead. Ever the appraising look.

February girl. A professional model.

Helen. Was a little older than me, I was 16 when I took this.

I rather think not, naughty boy.

January girl. A beautiful Japanese girl.

Very kindly said ‘No’.

Cure My Loneliness.

Shockingly beautiful, soft and silky red hair.

Russians are lovely folks, unfortunately their country is dominated by a bag of shit dictator, and his ‘hanglers-on.’

Sad Eyes, plus photographer.

This smiling face blow-up of a hi-def pic shows the photographer also.

Keep young and beautiful..

Valda. The eyes tell all.

Vita. Always my favorite.

Arduino IDE v2 Install on Windows 10 ‘Unconfirmed Download’ Problem Solved

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Hi, I wanted to upgrade my old v1.18.9 IDE on Windows 10, and downloaded the V2 IDE from Arduino site.
Got a file name unconfirmed_download_blah.
No help whatsoever from Microsoft community. Une suggestion was ‘select ‘properties’ on file and uncheck the unblock box’
No such animal. I plugged an NTFS drive in my pi400, and downloaded the file, after an initial name of ‘unconfirmed-download_blah’ it morphed into an ‘exe’ file.
Transferred drive onto the Win10 machine and installed IDE no problem.

A digression (somewhat)
I have to admit, the win10 machine (AMD board) still works well (apart from the sloooow speed).
But I can now proceed to try out boards that can’t be developed using raspberry pi, who have abandoned dev of the latest family of Arduino boards altogether.

One pi400 has recently ‘bit the dust’ and the Raspbian OS is now a disaster, also including the 64-bit ‘Wayland’ rubbish.
Two Apples I bought in 2012 still work well, if a little slowly, so my next machine will be a new Apple.

From The Sublime To The Ridiculous – The Raspberry Pi OS

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Update 15th March 2025
It would seem that the ‘last straw’ for me was the dreadful ‘Bookworm 64-bit raspi OS’.
For existing projects, I’ve had to revert back to a so-called ‘legacy’ 32-bit version. At least there are ‘working’ versions of software I can actually use. I am NOT a ‘tinkerer’, I still develop software, and also write. I need something that ‘works’, not ‘might work when we fix it’.
Here’s a link that may interest, or even amuse, on the subject of Wayland. Wayland

Hi, Yes I’ve been here before, with comments regarding the ‘Pi-400’, the truly miserable quality of which was matched by Clive Sinclair’s BOS offerings some considerable time ago.
I have an early raspi board running ‘jessie’ which has given sterling service over many years hosting a local web server (wordpress) and a website interface to it.
Sad to say, every so-called ‘upgrade’ since, on other projects have reflected badly on the quality of the development. Upgrades fixed one problem and ‘broke’ code previously written.
Latterly. Raspberry Pi has become a ‘business’, with the typical mental mindset of ‘shove it out the door as fast as possible’, and ‘the users will find the bugs and fix them.’
The latest BAG OF SHIT ‘Bookworm 64-bit’ is nothing but that. Note I have not used my normal ‘polite’ abbreviation of ‘BOS’.
As the author of the very first language compiler for the BBC Micro, FORTH, and the same compiler on Acorn’s ARM 1, I’ve followed the ‘history’ very closely, and it has been a somewhat dreary ‘progress’ since.
Very recently, I did ‘burn’ a copy of ‘RISC OS’, a bad joke back then, and sat laughing at it. Almost nothing worked, as it had done on the old ‘Archie’.
Maybe Raspi Pi folks included it as a joke in their list of ‘alternatives’.
To be blunt the concept of ‘free’ software is blown out of the water, the cost in time (a very valuable commodity to me), frustration, et al, makes me give up.
I have two oldish Apple Macs, still giving fault-free performance, and will upgrade shortly. For now, Raspberry PI, it’s RIP.