The weather forecast, shown in the screenshot above, has been revised a little since this morning. The first change is a prediction for mist at 11am. That seems almost possible - the air does seem to have a soft quality about it. The rain has now been pushed back to 1pm. Most of it will be light rain, but once it starts it will probably rain until 8pm, and maybe later. Some of it may be in the form of passing showers. It already feels mild now, and the temperature should reach 10° C for all the afternoon. Tomorrow should see the return of sunshine, but the temperature may only peak at 7° C.

   I didn't really expect it to be, but yesterday was a fairly productive day. The two most tangible things I did were two lots of laundry. The first was the larger amount - some underwear, a hand towel, and t-shirt. The second lot was an experiment that worked quite well. It was to wash two heavily stained tea towels.

  I reasoned the only way to wash those two tea towels was to get as close as I could to a boil wash. In practice that meant using a small washing up bowl, and pouring on 3 kettles worth of boiling water. I used some bio detergent. That has one fault in that it seems to leave quite a distinctive detergent smell that isn't ideal for something to dry plates and cutlery. I think I gave those tea towels at least 5 rinses, and they don't smell that bad.

  Hopefully most of that detergent smell will fade by the time I come to use them. The results were better than expected. There are still a few prominent curry stains on one tea towel, but I did get the greasy stains out of both of them. I think the difference is that they still look stained, but no longer look disgusting - although I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

  The other job was to continue the job of tidying up the old railway paperwork (leaflets and timetables and stuff). As I mentioned yesterday, I intended to scan some of the papers and then throw them away. I did indeed scan some, and I have more to do, maybe today, but I realised that when I sorted and threw away so much of it the day before yesterday, I had reduced the quantity to where the remainder can be tidily stored in a few A4 file pockets.

  I spent a lot of the evening, until fairly late in the evening, doing something very different. I have Virtual Box installed on my PC, and as the name might suggest, it allows virtual computers to be installed, and run. It is useful for checking out other operating systems, and that was what I was doing last night.
https://www.virtualbox.org/  to download it, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox for more info.
  I must admit it is not much to look at, particularly when shrunk down to show here, but this is the desktop of Devuan Linux. I had a play with it as a virtual machine, and I think I like it. The chief advantage of it over Linux Mint, that I currently use, is that it doesn't use Systemd. Systemd is an abomination that now seems to be the standard way for Linux to control it's start up and shutdown. There are two troubles with it, is that it makes start up and shutdown stupidly slow, and it takes ages to write new configurations to it when updating some software. Not only that, but only 10 people in the whole of the Galaxy have any idea how it works, and how to change anything in it !

  Doing a dress rehearsal for installing a new operating system on a virtual PC is a very useful thing, but Virtual Box can be used for just satisfying curiosity, and having fun. Many, many years ago there was an operating system called BEOS. The wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS, tells the story of it. I recently read that a new beta release was issued for Haiku - an open source operating system designed to be compatible with BEOS software, and it's look and feel. I downloaded it, and gave it a spin on a virtual machine. I didn't do much with it, but I did confirm that it is happy to load my own web pages.

  I had fish for a late breakfast yesterday, and I had more fish for a very late lunch (almost 4pm). When it came to dinner I decided against what I was going to have, pork belly strips with cabbage, and instead had two cans of soup. One was a chunky minted lamb with vegetable. The other can was of pea and ham soup. I didn't really eat much more than that, although all three meals add up to a fair amount, and none was particularly healthy.

  I was playing with Devuan on Virtual Box until quite late last night. It was getting on for midnight, although I didn't realise it when I went to bed. As usual I started reading in bed, and after a while I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. I got to within 2 pages from the end of the book before I just had to give up. That was about half past midnight, I was asleep very quickly after that !

  I slept very well last night. I even think I got up to pee less times than usual. At about 4.30am I woke up from a dream about writing this very page. In fact I think I had written it, and was copying it to the full archive page. I took the opportunity to turn on the heater full blast before falling asleep again. I did want to get up a little early this morning, or if not actually early, on time at 7am would have been good enough. It was actually closer to 8am when I got up.

  It is a very subjective thing, and is also influenced by drinking pints of beer and stuff, which I didn't do last night, but the reason for getting up to pee less, if indeed that was the case, may be because this morning my blood glucose is nice and low. Not as low as a few recent days, but 8.2mmol/l is less than my typical monthly average (which can be taken to be 8.5mmol/l.

  I wanted to get up early for an early morning visit to Poundland. There were a few things I wanted from there, and I got rather more than a few things ! The important thing was washing up liquid. It may be that the last bottle won't run out for several days, maybe even a week, but it will sooner or later, and I have been meaning to buy another bottle for a week or two now, but kept forgetting. This morning I remembered.

  The other thing I particularly wanted was some Twiglets. I was sure I had seen some tubs of Twiglets in Poundland, like the tub I recently munched through, but alas they had none. What I did buy as a sort of substitute was a couple of bags of Mini Cheddars. Unfortunately they didn't have tubs of them like I also recently scoffed through over a couple of days.  It was very quiet in Poundland, and that was what I had hoped if I got there early - even if "early" ended up at 9.30am.

  It might be mild, but the expected rain (any minute now !) wipes out any desire to go to do any exercise. There is an even better reason for not going out. I am expecting an Amazon delivery today. It is part of an order that includes a bit for a new project I want to do. That project is to build a better firewall, or maybe just an alternative firewall. In the past I have used old PCs for my firewalls, but most PCs I have laying around are pretty crappy, and time expired.

  I checked Amazon for a new, but second user, ex-office, PC, and there are still quite a selection to be had very cheaply. The one I ordered was not terribly fast, but more than adequate to surf the internet, play DVDs, and use an "Office" application (Like Libre Office). The price of this little wonder was just £47.99. It is a small and compact Lenovo PC that can be tucked away in corner running the Ipcop firewall 24 hours a day. It will probably arrive early next week, but the extra ethernet port for it should arrive today - probably very late in the day ("before 9pm" !).