I reckon it was at least a degree or two cooler than the 9° C shown in the screenshot above. The latest revision now shows a few hours of sunshine this morning, and this does seem to describe reality at this time. In a few hours time it will probably cloud over, but it may be light cloud, and the day will stay fairly bright. Some rain is forecast for later, but it may not amount to much. The afternoon temperature may reach 13° C for a couple of hours. Tomorrow may only see some sunny spells, and the rest of the time will be lightly overcast. It should be a dry day with the temperature once again peaking at about 13° C.
 
   Yesterday was another day when nothing dramatic happened. It was a day when I seemed quite busy, but had little to show for it. The most significant thing I did, if judged by physical energy used, was to wash a medium bath towel, and some underwear. It was handy that I wanted to do some work downstairs because that was the perfect excuse to put a heater on to warm the room, and to dry that towel. I shall be using that freshly washed towel when I have a shower after writing this.

  I gave my new PC a very good test yesterday. I loaded a 53 minute video into Kdenlive, the video editor I use, and it didn't complain at all. The video was ripped from a DVD that Michael lent me. It was of his Son's band playing in The Railway in Bromley 10 or 15 years ago. Like most gig video shot in a pub, it was rather dark and gloomy, although the focus was quite good a lot of the time (but not all the time). I have not yet tried to edit it into separate songs, but I did use some tools to make the picture much brighter.

  I was quite pleased with how far I could push it, and to be honest I might have overdone it, but it will be easy to correct. I was also very pleased at how fast I could render and save the video after making these adjustments. I think it took little more than 16 minutes. On my old PC it would have probably taken well over an hour, maybe 2, and that is assuming the program hadn't crashed before I got that far. My only disappointment is that the updated version of Kdenlive has reduced the options for saving a file. The "2 pass" option seems to be greyed out. That options allows the rendering/saving a trial go to note where it needs to work harder, and where it can relax a bit. It generally makes smaller, and smoother videos, but I must admit the saved video looked pretty good when I played it back.

  I spent a fair bit of yesterday in my dining room where I was using the table to play with an old PC. I am not sure why I was doing what I did to it - installing a new operating system - because the old operating system did everything I wanted it to - which was almost nothing ! This old PC is a very small PC that can run from 12V from, for instance, a car battery. I fished it out of a skip back when I was at work, and as far as I can recall it was actually working, but running an old version of Windows. I opted to put Linux on it.

  The version of Linux I used was no longer supported, and out of curiosity I tried out the latest, "Long Term Support" (to 2025) version of Linux mint. It seemed to work OK, but predictably slowly, when booted from a live CD, and so I decided to wipe the old installation, and install the new. Along the way I discovered that it has a dual core processor in it. In theory that should make it a little faster, but it will always be relatively slow because it is a low power "Atom" processor.

  The installation went well, and it soon became time to boot it up from it's own hard disk. It failed. It was then I remembered the trouble I had before. This PC does not use a BIOS to load the operating system, but the new thing - UEFI - Unified Extensive Firmware Interface. It may have helped if I had read the Wikipedia page about UEFI at this stage, but fortunately the live CD does have a "repair boot" option, and I used that to eventually get the PC the boot from it's own hard disk.

  I went down a few blind alleys to get to the correct spell to set the boot loader up correctly, and much time was consumed when booting from the live CD - it is a slow process ! That PC is now in (I hope) a stable state, and now needs the customisation I typically do to my PCs. That included adding some of my favourite programs. I also hope that I can put in a bigger stick or RAM. I think I have a bigger one in my dusty pile of spares. I didn't have time to do any of the latter jobs because it was dinner time when I first got it to boot off it's own hard disk.

  Dinner was part 2 of my Indian Takeaway from the previous day. It was a Tandoori mixed grill, and a Bombay aloo followed by a very thin vegetable curry as a sort of pretend dessert. I don't know if it was because it wasn't freshly cooked, and had been zapped in my microwave to heat it up again, but I didn't think much of the mixed grill. The chicken seemed a bit dry, and the lamb seemed a bit tough. It was still mostly enjoyable though. I definitely have enough of that takeaway order for another meal tonight, and there could still be enough left over to form the basis of another meal the day after - even if it is just beans on cheese on naan bread.

  After dinner (and during) I watched some TV, but I found I wanted to use my new PC a bit more before going to bed. In particular I wanted to check out the latest version of The Gimp - The Gnu Image Manipulation Program - a free version of Photoshop. The day before yesterday I had noted that changing some preferences in The Gimp had appeared to cause it to lock up. Last night it worked as smooth as silk, although the menus have changed a bit in the latest version, and some potentially useful new tools have appeared.

  Last night was one of those all too frequent nights when it is hard to say if I slept well or not. I can't recall any long periods of time when I was awake in the night, but I did have to go to the toilet for more than a wee at about 1am. It often felt like I spent half the night dreaming. Those dreams didn't really seem to have a plot line that I can describe, but with so many of them it seems I must have been sleeping very lightly, and maybe waking up for a few moments every now and then.

  This morning I don't feel too bad. My blood pressure is down a bit after being up to almost "normal" for a few days - that is "normal" for most people, or higher than usual for me while taking all my blood pressure drugs. My blood glucose, which was in the danger area yesterday morning is back down to a more sane, but still a bit high, 8.8mmol/l. My weight is unknown in exact terms, but I am guessing that it is probably very close to yesterday.

  The trouble is there is a confounding problem this morning. It seems that the "curry" I have eaten recently has acted like a laxative. That is welcome after some previous days of feeling a bit bunged up. It was activated at about 1am this morning, and maybe was a bit too lively after getting up. I am not sure it is finished even now. While things are astir it is hard to say exactly what my weight actually is this morning. If I had been able to resist eating or drinking anything since getting up I could probably take a fairly accurate reading now, but I have drunk some drink, and I have had a small quantity of dry roasted peanuts. With more curry tonight I may wait another day or two before I even bother trying to weigh myself.

  Today will be a semi busy day. Jodie has asked if she can bring forward the Thursday Club boozing session to today, and I have said yes. Unfortunately Michael can't make it today, and so I will have a drink with him on Thursday as usual. Today I need to clear my computer stuff off the dining room table, and clean the table and room. That should not take long, and I should have a free hour or two this morning to do something else, but that won't be a nice healthy walk. I don't know when I will be out walking again, but last night I was going through some photos I took in 2010, and did so much walking, much of it to exotic places, that year. Some of those walks were very long walks. Birchington to Herne Bay was 9 miles, and Epping to Ongar was 10.35 miles !!! I was so glad there was a bus to take me back to Epping station !