08:25 BST

  Yesterday started off nice and bright, but towards the end of the morning a lot more clouds appeared in the sky, and reducing the sunshine to just sunny spells. The sunny spells got shorter and shorter, and there were longer gaps between them, but the good thing is that they continued well after the forecast said they should have stopped. There was enough wind to dry clothes when the sun wasn't shining, but that did make the afternoon high of just 18° C feel a bit cool.

  

  The weather forecast has now extended the sunshine to 9am in the latest revision, but it has also added light rain for 3 and 4pm. The worst thing is that it is going to be a cold day. Clear skies in the night made for a cool night, and morning, and the best we can hope for this afternoon is just 14° C. That is going to make that light rain feel very cold. Most of today will be cloudy, and to one extent or another, overcast. At the moment the forecast for tomorrow looks a lot like today, but the afternoon temperature could be a degree higher at 15° C.

   Yesterday was quite an odd sort of day. I did very little that was actually useful, but I spent a lot of time doing stuff that was interesting, but has no practical value beyond satisfying some curiosities. The main event was the delivering on my latest beer order. Based on the hour slot estimated by the tracking app I guess the delivery would take place at midday, but it was actually at 11.45am !

  While waiting for the delivery I did some laundry. I cleared the backlog, caused by too many dull and sometimes rainy days, and got three t-shirts, and some underwear, on the washing line to dry. They didn't get much sunshine, but the breeze was enough to jiggle them on the line, and by about 4pm I brought them all in perfectly dry.

  I think I said I had ordered 32 bottles/cans of beer, but in fact it was 31. The 32nd item was a glass. That would be fine if it was an interesting glass, with, for instance, the name of some exotic brewery on it, but it just had the Beerwulf logo on it, and Beerwulf is the name of the company I ordered the beers from. The good thing is that after sending a couple of pictures to Jodie she replied that there are many beers that she has never tried before.

  I spent the rest of the day, not drinking, as you might think I did, but playing with old laptops. I had recently been reading about a distribution of Linux that had a very low hardware requirement. I used to have an old (ancient) Dell laptop that I thought it might be interesting to try it on, but after looking high and low for it I remembered I had thrown it away. I did come across another two laptops while looking.

  One of those laptops is more than ancient. It is prehistoric ! It is made by NEC, and I inherited it from a friend of a friend who had died. It's specification is so low that I think it would probably have had Windows For Workgroups 3.11 originally. I installed Windows 98SE on it, and it ran well enough to use as a music player in my bedroom for a couple of years. After that it was consigned to the back of a dusty cupboard.

  I would not be surprised if 15 years have passed since I last looked at it. I plugged in the power, hit the power switch, and it slowly booted up like it did all those years ago. The only fault, if you can call it a fault, was that the clock was wrong by about 25 minutes. After setting the clock I plugged in a PCMCIA network card, and connected to the internet. Surfing "the net" with Internet Explorer 5 is not a happy experience ! It did display my own very simple web pages, but didn't seem to leave any transparent areas transparent. For instance the "Day Before" start shaped link at the bottom of the page had a sort of orange background.

 I probably spent nearly an hour playing with that old laptop, but in the end it was back to the dusty cupboard with it, and time to play with the second old laptop. This second one is very old, but it is based on a Pentium III processor, and even has a single USB1 port on it. It is a Toshiba Satelite Pro 4320, and in it's day it was probably a very decent laptop. Once upon a time I had installed Windows 2000 on it's very small 10Gb hard drive.

  Now the problem with Windows 2000 is that if you plug in a different PCMCIA network card it panics, and tries to install drivers it has already installed. In doing this it keeps asking for the Windows 2000 installation disk - which I didn't have handy. I did get it on line using a wireless card, and I was able to see if any web browser still worked. Google got very upset about the ancient version of Firefox I was using, and didn't think much of what I think was Internet Explorer 5 (the same as on the prehistoric NEC laptop).

  One problem is that many website want to pour on so many scripts and stuff that they could completely fill the 196MB of memory the laptop has. It all felt too much like hard work, and so I changed tack, and experimented with how much memory could be fitted. The official spec said 320MB, but I could only manage to get 256MB working. By today's standards that is not a lot of memory. I think I read that Windows 11 demands something like 32GB of memory ! My main desktop PC runs Linux Mint very happily with just 8GB of memory, and it is very rare to use more than half that.

  My researches suggested that Antix-core linux could run using just 256MB of memory, but that is the bare minimum. I took out the 10GB hard drive from that Toshiba laptop, and installed an old 80GB hard drive that I partitioned and formatted for Antix Linux. The first thing was to see if Antix would boot from a live CD, and it did. It was very slow, but I spent some time playing with it before hitting the install button.

  It was a slow process, but no worse than installing Windows. The important thing is that a fairly complete selection of software, including the whole Libre Office office suite, is installed, plus all the drivers for almost any hardware.  At the end I rebooted, and I was rewarded with a perfect installation, and because it was now running from the hard disk, it was reasonably fast. The only fault is that the software repository address didn't work, but this morning I have checked another on my desktop PC, and it seems a valid working address.

  I think it was around 9pm before I gave up on that laptop. That was a rather long session, but it was broken up by a bit of TV watching, and also eating dinner. I still have some work to do on that laptop. I need to correct the software repository address, and than I can check for updates. I also need to install a few bits of software. Mostly that software is to do with it being a laptop. A battery monitor would be a very good thing. I also need to see how long the battery last for. I know it stores enough charge for a few minutes, and maybe it can last a lot longer, but I will be surprised if it can last a full hour. Once I have done these final things I will put it away in the dusty cupboard because while it is interesting see what it can do, it has no practical use.

  I don't really know what time I went to bed, but I don't think it was much later than 10pm. One thing I do know was that after none too warm day, the night was going to be cooler than of late - so much so that I turned the heater on low before I got into bed. At that point it seemed just about comfortable enough to get to sleep partly uncovered. I think it was 2am when I first woke up again. I went for a pee, and with the bathroom window open it felt quite chilly in there. When I got back to bed I was feeling cold enough to sleep fully under the duvet, and I slept like that all night.

  One curious dream was obviously inspired by the book I have just started reading It is " The World Of Ptavvs" by Larry Niven. It is about an alien race who breed simple creatures as slaves, and control them telepathically. The plot, as far as I can remember it from the last time I read the book, is basically about the conflict between one alien who has been marooned on Earth, and comes up against human who won't be controlled. In my dream it was telepathic blue tits who were secretly controlling us !

  I had a shock this morning when my fist blood glucose check gave a stupidly high reading. I thought it must be wrong, and because my fist finger prick had produced far too small bead of blood for the machine. On my second attempt I got a better reading of 8.8mmol/l. That is still higher than I was expecting, or at least hoping for, but my diet was a bit weird yesterday. My dinner was fish fingers for the first course, and calamari for the second. I didn't even check the ingredients or nutritional information of that calamari. I just saw it ready prepared, and frozen, with a soy and lime dressing in bags in Aldi, and got curious. Last night was to be the night I tried it. It was sort of nice in a weird way. I wouldn't be surprised if the dressing wasn't applied as a sort of sugary syrup, but maybe I'll never know.

  Three things should happen today. The first is to do what I neglected to do yesterday - have a god scrub under the shower. The next thing is to go to Tesco for some food - both for me and the starving birds ! The final thing will be a beer tasting session with Jodie. I think we will be trying a few of the beers that arrived yesterday, but there are still quite a few beers from previous deliveries to drink as well.