The latest revision to the Met Office forecast has filled in most of the blanks, and now only 1pm is shown with sunshine or sunny spells. On the other hand, the BBC weather forecast seems to have added more blanks with no sunshine or sunny spells between 10am and 4pm. Both agree the maximum temperature today will only be 7° C, but when you add in wind chill it seems it will feel like 3 or 4° C. A very wintery feel ! Tomorrow will probably be a much greyer day, but the temperature could rise to 8° C. Like last night, tonight will be very cold - possibly cold enough for frost.
 
   Yesterday was one of those days that seemed to be satisfactory even if I didn't do that much. It was another day when I allowed myself to be distracted, and so I didn't start writing until almost 9.30am. I wrote a lot yesterday, and it took nearly two hours before I had written, and corrected the most obvious errors, and finally uploaded the three versions (daily changeable version, complete daily archive, and summary for the monthly page) to my web sever.

   It meant most of the morning was over when I finished. The first thing I did when I finished was to take a rest - rest my eyes, and rest my fingers and wrist. I am getting increasing discomfort in both after a lot of time on my PC, and if I am "surfing the web" I now start feeling repetitive strain injury after an hour or so. It may not actually be Repetitive Strain Injury, or at least not fully. It could also be the effects of the initial stages of arthritis.

  I had what could be described as a three part lunch spread over a couple of hours yesterday. I started with a couple of small packets of crisps. Nearly an hour later I ate two small oranges, and finally, once again maybe an hour later, I had 4 Marmite flavoured rice cakes with cream cheese on them. Apart from the crisps, that I should have resisted, I think the rest was a reasonable safe meal.

  I can't remember what time I started it - mainly because it was a project that started in a very minor way, and then expanded - I ended up spending quite a chunk of the afternoon playing with my existing Dell Latitude laptop. It was the one I bought a year or two ago (maybe more ago - it was in the middle of Covid lockdown, and time seemed to lose all significance during that period).

  I was curious as to how much Ram was fitted in that laptop. It was just 3GB. I decided to swap the ram in it with that in the broken, unrepairable laptop I was given. That boosted the ram in the old laptop to 4GB. That is rather less than recommended for Windows these days, but it runs Linux very smoothly.

  One problem with what is currently my best laptop is that the version of Linux I had put on it was dated, and it has run out of support. It was Linux Mint 17.3, and that was the last version untainted with a nasty thing called Systemd (a very complex system start up controller that penetrates and strangles far more parts of the operating system like some invading vine). There is a modern, and safer Linux that sticks to the old start up system, and it is MX Linux - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX_Linux

  I have been using MX Linux on the PC in the dining room for the last year (?) and it seems quite good. I do have a few niggles with it, but that is mainly because it means a bit of re-learning muscle memory - the ability to do some things without having to think about it. The good thing is that the standard desktop is XFCE, and while others are available, it it is just what I want because it is so easy to skin it to look like Windows XP.

  While writing that last paragraph I got a text message to say my new £89.99 laptop, an identical model to the unrepairable one, will be delivered today between 9.26 and 10.26am. This is lot faster than Amazon's pessimistic prediction. I think I am excited !!

   Having ascertained than the 4GB memory was working OK in the old laptop, I decided to install the latest version of MX Linux, version 21.3 "Wildflower". Installing Linux is really simple, and unlike when installing Windows, only the system partition needs to be changed. All personal date, plus settings and configurations for a lot of stuff, is stored in a home partition, and that can be untouched during installation.

  There is one fault with MX Linux, and the fault is a silly error in the installer. If you go away and leave it installing without giving the mouse an occasional wiggle, the screen shuts down, and effectively lock you out. It is easy to log back in, but so far I haven't found a way to get back to the install program. I fell into this trap (again) when I wasn't patient enough to watch over the process for the 15 minutes it takes. I laid down and starting reading my book. I looked up to find a blank screen. I tried a few things to get back to the installer, but after a few minutes I just did a reboot, and started from the beginning again.

  This time I kept an eye on things, and gave the mouse an occasional wiggle to stop the screensaver from blanking the screen. It only took about 15 minutes form starting the installer to going for the first reboot. The laptop booted up nice and fast, and everything was in place - including a small stash of pictures and icons in the "Pictures" directory. They were the bits I needed to make the desktop look like Windows XP (although not the three icon at the top right of every window - the X (close), Full screen, and minimise buttons). I could, and maybe I will at some convenient time, make the window decorations the same as Windows XP.

  Thanks to storing those icons and pictures in the home directory, it was a simple matter to use them where they were, or in one case copy the skin for Audacious, a simple music player, to the correct place to make it look and act like the venerable Winamp. One that was done it took another 15 minutes or so to install the suggested 86 updates, and then maybe another 15 minutes to install some of my personal choices of extra software from the equivalent of the software store - all free and open source.

  I still have some software to add to the laptop, but from about 5pm I started thinking about dinner. At that point I hadn't prepared any dinner, and I began to think about a takeaway - a fatal thought. Once my mind started off in that direction I gave in and ordered an Indian takeaway at 5.50pm, and that arrived just over half an hour later. I ate it while watching more episodes of Futurama. I ended up finishing all of series 7, and as far as I can recall, I had not seen a single episode of series 7 before. I still have all of series 8 to watch, and I don't think I will have seen any of those before. It could be exciting....except maybe it was good the series ended because it was obvious the writers were getting a bit stale.

  I did watch one programme on broadcast TV, and it was Guy Harvey's "From The Vaults" on Sky Arts. Last night he was showing video from 1982, and on the whole it was a reminder of how much terrible music there was on radio and TV in 1982 ! I ended up paying no attention to the TV for the last 15 minutes of the programme, but I think, based on the introduction to the programme, it would have ended on a taste of the uprising of The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Maybe he will show some good stuff next week.

  I can't seem to remember what time I went to bed last night, but my guess is that I went to sleep sometime after 10pm. I took the precaution of taking a couple of antacid tablets before I laid down. My Indian takeaway was delicious, but fairly rich, and I was still burping curry taste not that long before I went to bed. Maybe those antacid tables w9orked as desired because I seemed to sleep OK, apart from the now traditional short breaks to go to the toilet for pee a few times in the night.

  Towards the end of the night I had dream that was quite inventive. It seemed to start when I got out of a car driven by a woman whose name I didn't know, but she seemed a bit like a girlfriend. We had parked by a railway line, but walked away from it to a nearby terraced house. After going in she went upstairs to put something away, and then announced we would go an meet others downstairs.

  We walked down a hall and entered a stadium sized room....well maybe not stadium sized, but the size of a theatre. She went to say hello to what I assume was her parents while I sat down at the back of the room. As I waited many people came in and out. Most headed for a back room that I later found to be a pirate radio studio. I knew, or at least recognized many of the faces. It was reminiscent, only on a far grander scale, of one or two places I visited in the mid to late 1970s that were hubs of pirate radio activity. I don't really remember interacting with anybody in particular, but it was fascinating viewing.

 

 I finally woke up, and got up with some trepidation about my blood glucose reading. The last time I gave in and had an Indian I got a very high reading the next day - over the red line, but I was also ill at the time. This morning, much to my relief, it was a very ordinary 8.6mmol/l. I would always wish it were lower than that, but it is a figure I am not going to bother to do anything special about. On the subject of the restaurant, The Himalaya Tandoori Restaurant, I took a screenshot of part of their menu. I can't believe they don't know what Magic Mushroom means to most people !



  Another picture I almost forgot to show. This is a screen grab from my garden CCTV camera. The significant thing is that it was 11:40am when I took it, and it shows bright sunshine (which looks a bit muted in this picture) on the back fence. A tiny little bit of sunshine is falling on the back flower bed. As we move nearer summer the sunshine, assuming we get any, will creep back towards the camera as the sun climbs higher in the sky. For a few weeks in mid summer most of the garden is bathed in sunshine.

  My new laptop was delivered about 30 minute ago as I write this. I am currently letting it warm up because it has been stored in a very cold van overnight. As it warms up any condensation should evaporate. One interesting thing is it is not the laptop I ordered. What I ordered was a Latitude E6500. What I got was a Latitude E6510. The big difference, if the label near the keyboard is correct, is that this model has a faster i7 processor. Of course it is possible that bits of the case have been swapped to make a good one out of several bad ones. The truth will be revealed when I install Linux on it - which could be the main job today.

  There is already some nice sunshine, and there should be more to come. It could be good light for photography if I went out, but I don't think I care for 7° C, or 3° C with wind chill today. I shall stay in the warm trying not to eat too much because I have part two of my Indian takeaway to eat for dinner tonight.  Incidently, I have just seen the latest revision to the Met Office weather forecast. It now says the sun will fail at midday, and won't be seen again until 4pm. It sounds like staying in is now an even better idea !