The Geeks way of checking what the outside wheather is like
When I bought my house in 2004 I went shopping for a outside thermometer - and ended up with a full weather-station instead (a WS2300). When I unpacked it I found a serial cable inside...
Long story short - I was still in the process of recabling the house (running ethernet to every room) and added a serial cable from the machine room to the WS2300, and then did some pkgsrc work and got misc/open2300 and misc/open2300-mysql. I used those to log the data from the weather-station to a mysql database, and later moved that (via misc/open2300-pgsql) to a postgres database.
Now sometime this year the machine running that database had to be replaced (should have done that earlier, it was power hungry and wasteful). The replacement was an aarch64 SoC (a Pine64 Quartz64 model A) - and it had no real com ports (of course) any more. I had experimented with USB serial adapters and the WS2300 before, but for unclear reasons this time I had no luck and couldn't get it to work. Since some of the outdoor sensors of the old weather-station had started failing, I decided to replace it.