08:07 BST

  May ended with a bang, and then later with a rainbow. We seem to be going through a time when the BBC weather forecast is often more accurate than the Met Office forecast. The former did predict thunderstorms for mid afternoon, the latter said only light rain ! The Met Office did correctly forecast sunny spells just before sunset. Both forecasters got the afternoon temperature right at between 14 and 15° C. Before I forget, there were sunny spells at the start of the morning.

  

  The Met Office forecast is a bit gloomy, and so let's use the BBC forecast for a change.
  There have been some sunny spells this morning, as per the BBC weather forecast, but they seem to have finished for now. This too is in accordance with the latest revision. It also says there will be light cloud until 4pm when sunny spells start up again.Meanwhile, the Met Office can't seem to get over it's fixation with rain this morning, although the latest revision has reduced it to just a 40% chance at midday, but it retains the dark and heavy clouds for several hours either side of midday. Both agree on a later afternoon temperature of 17° C. Both currently agree that tomorrow will see a mix of sunshine or sunny spells for the whole day, and a top temperature of 19° C.

   Yesterday, the last day of May, could have turned out like the day before, but something in the weather perked me up a bit, or maybe that with rain, or thunderstorms forecast, I didn't feel the slightest guilt about staying in all day. It could be argued, with 100% success, that yesterday morning was actually worse than the day before, but by the afternoon something seemed to be stirring.

  I'm not sure what time it was that I got back to playing with the ancient Toshiba Satelite Pro laptop that has been consuming many hours of my time, and did again yesterday. I am unsure what the trigger was, or indeed if there was anything that could be thought of as a trigger, but I seemed to end up taking many screws out of the laptop, and eventually opening it up enough to see that it was fairly easy to change the CD drive to a DVD (that I had conveniently squirrelled away awaiting such a time that I could use it).

  Having fitted the DVD drive I could then download the full version of Antix-21 Linux, and burn it to a DVD. At first I tried installing it over the top of the faulty/incomplete installation I had done two days before. That just made a bigger mess, and so I deleted everything from the hard disk, and started again. This time it worked smoothly, but also rather slowly. It got marginally faster once I had finished installing many updates.

  I am not sure how useful this laptop is going to be. By the time I had finished playing with it, at gone 11pm (!!!) I had proved several things worked OK, and several things were not working. I had no trouble using a PCMCIA (PC card) wired network adapter, but none of the wireless cards seemed to work, although they did when using the 2013 version of the operating system. The laptop only has one USB port, and I use that for a mouse because I hate trackpads and the like. I confirmed that an SD memory card in an adaptor to make it look like compact flash, and that in turn in an adaptor to plug in to a PCMCIA slot was read OK.

  It may have been yesterday, or perhaps the day before that, that I mentioned one possible use of the laptop was as a spare web page server. I think that is likely how it will end up if I can install the required software. Unlike Google, who get millions of visitors per hour to their web pages, I am lucky if I get two per day, and one of them is me writing these daily pages ! I don't need a very powerful machine to serve these web pages !

  Other stuff happened yesterday, and mostly it was the weather, and eating. I ate far too much yesterday, but it was all stuff that is known to contain low amounts of sugar. My breakfast was just my usual bowl of instant noodles, but that was ineffective to stop me feeling very hungry when a bit bored around lunchtime. I ended up having a big lunch. It was a couple of burger patties cooked in the oven with a lot of brown mushrooms. I served it with some lettuce. The latter was mainly to help use up the lettuce because it was just starting to get a bit droopy.

  My dinner could also have been rather big, but I did feel like I didn't have much room for anything too big. In one respect I probably didn't need to eat, but I did anyway out of habit. I had a couple of "southern fried flavour" chicken breasts. Unlike the Tesco version, these were from Aldi, and known to have a much smaller sugar content. I could have had twice what I did have, and I saved the rest for a meal today.  I used the very last of the bag of mixed lettuce leaves that were starting to wilt with those chicken breasts.