No broken is broken.
If you want to replace one that is all well and good.
I have found that the the old phone makes a handy media
player. With Chromecast and youtube, netflix or whatever a
little phone can be happy serving up music or streaming video
via WiFi.

But broken is broken... not good for anything worth doing.

Oh and BTW this second life is the biggest reason all my
phones must have a replaceable battery. AND on the sad
day that a phone goes swimming or a run through the laundry
a short visit to the phone store I can activate the old one. I
can get a prepaid SIM for travel where roaming plans or message
rates go nuts. Because it is a novel number I get little or
no "hey good buddy" expensive ill timed calls from many time zones
away.

Not an interesting project.
the MC68000 has no way to restart an instruction and no MMU.
Both of these are critical to running a Linux kernel today!
You could emulate a 68000 on a Beaglebone Black and have
it run faster.

*nix like OS have been built and run on a 68000 Idris is one
historic port of Unix. Little or no protection to keep processes
from running over memory and I/O and doing bad things but a
worthy *nix all in all for its day.

Step up a little to the MC68010 add an external TLB/MMU built
from modest size fast static RAM and Bob's yer Uncle... A
68010 does have the ability to restart instructions so you can recover
from a page fault. An external TLB/MMU is easy and designs
abound in 25+ year old paper documents.

When you are done a Raspberry-Pi or Beaglebone Black will still
run circles around it.

If you want to have fun build yourself a machine like the "magic 1"
and you will learn what all the buzz be about.

Perception dominated the knee jerk reaction.

In my experience modern computers and operating systems
are beyond any one person knowing all the answers.

I recall working with an astoundingly clever and smart network type
that was tasked with tuning the lowest nasty bits of the network
stack. However he had no experience in setting a machine up
and installing a base system and adding initial users so he could
test what he was doing.

Same is true for a lady hardware designer. A true wizard at termination
of very high speed transmission lines and world class in coding VHDL
to eliminate random TTL logic on a board... Again the random decisions
made for setting up a user could not be deduced from raw logic....

The toy company should have had an ethnic and gender mixed help desk.
But that does not give the foolish critics a free ride.

Solar charger, battery, Raspberry-Pi side loaded with compilers
extra boot memory cards..... Hunt the new RasPi with microSD slot
and improved USB power. HTML5 is new enough to study.

Haskell is high on my list as is a good lisp. Never ignore Python.

X years... and product/ language only out for Y...
So true...
In 1996 I saw a job description mandating ten years of experience with Java.

I can see the global angst now as a current US president sits down
in front of a fireplace with a handful of trusted but silent aids to reassure
the nation and the world that "gay" is not contagious if you wear
head to toe protective....

Then in less than a week he or she imports a word like tzar from Russia
to explain it all.....

Burqas for boys... seems to be the next step....

I was hoping this was a new Android wrist watch.
Sadly it was not when I looked at the original article.

Sill it is cool as heck.... Recall the palmdale bulge that might have
been a 10cm uplift of the bed rock. This could measure this...

An array of these clocks in well chosen places might tell us a lot
about this little blue ball we live on.

Since this is the first week after some of the globe flipped off Daylight Savings Time
it is obvious to me that the old WWV radio controlled clocks are so last year.
I would like to see some NTP-WiFi + WWV + GPS clock designs. Perhaps with
better displays than the current pile of fixed 7 segment type display.

Cool as heck... but I doubt I can afford one today.

Climbing Everest has become so last year that a new
expression of "stuff" is needed.

So up up and away....

BTW: Everest is lethal too.

If he wants to be forgotten then "forget him".

Invoking the right to be forgotten should not be selective.
Flush it all and let us not visit this again.

Moving back to Arizona I am...

There are a couple dirtbags here.
First the math:
Three dirtbags does not equal a scumbag.

The initial dirtbag would be the clowns that made parts that reported that
they were a different part but not also acted differently but were a lame
subset of the original. Fraud on the data sheet or marking on the part
is worthy of prosecution.

The second dirtbag is FTDI that can effectively disable a vastly more extensive and
expensive device and deny the purchaser that did nothing wrong and has no possibility
of auditing the content of the device they purchased.

The third dirtbag is the vendor that knowingly uses a less costly part or the distributor
that delivers a less costly part knowing or turning a blind eye to the fact that the
alternate part is a sad knockoff.

Counterfeiters are a real problem and in the modern age of 3D printing
are likely to find another media to abuse.

I dislike the strategy taken by FTDI it attacks the end user and risks others -- furthest from the fraud
and least likely to know or be able to know anything about the abuse of the trespassing on FTDI's
design intellectual property.

Do not forget that the EPA shut the incinerators off in these hospitals.

As for the dozen or so high isolation beds in the US that FoX and others wants
all patients to be sent to... Oh wait there are many in isolation and only
13 beds... 1,2,3, many... none can count high enough for sure.

The way to think about these 13 beds is that they are 13 lab rat cages.
Not designed for anything beyond experimental access to astoundingly
ill individuals.

The CDC is a bureaucratic machine.
It has a US centric view... it does not have a global charter.
It does watch for things outside the US but depends on others.

They seem to be almost flat footed on this. Had the folk in
Texas not stumbled they would look good. The folk in Texas did
step on it and now are trying to catch up.

If they had done their job and the politicians done their day job
we would have seen Governors, Mayors, President Obama formally
introduce experts then sit down and listen. However they wanted
camera time, they wanted to be in charge and here we go.

Early on I had a question about Ebola and because I could I submitted
a question that took a day to frame (unlike this 40 second /.). A week
later I got a reply... that was in effect "good question, we do not have
an answer today, we will and here is where you need to look.
Very responsible, very organized but navigates like three oil tankers
and two aircraft carriers tied together with half a million rolls of duct
tape. Slow ponderous relentless... comes to mind. Something about
five captains and a couple dozen tug boat captains applies too.

I went looking for my favorite kitchen rubber gloves today at my
favorite big box shop.... None. Like bottled water after the Napa
quake they have apparently been shipped to high demand locations like Texas
and I hope Africa. There were still gloves that work fine but not
my favorite type in the large economy box. Lots of them at the
local flu shot clinic today so the medical community here is golden.

I should give the important SUMMARY:
My meatloaf smushing and habanero slicing is still safe.