There has already been a significant change to the forecast. Light rain is now shown for 10am, and 11am is now shown as heavy rain. It may still dry to 8pm when more heavy rain is forecast. Today should be less cold than the last couple of today's, and 8° C in the afternoon is the best we can hope for. It seems there may be no hope for even a glimpse of the sun today....oh well, it could be worse, like in the BBC forecast that shows light rain or drizzle for every hour of the day ! Both forecasters show tomorrow as being a very wet day, and a maximum temperature of 6 or 7° C.

   Yesterday was a more productive day than I imagined, and it had a few minor triumphs, plus one sad failure. Yesterday I said it seemed unlikely I would go out into the freezing air to anywhere, and maybe not even to put stuff in the wheelie bins outside my front door, but I did ! Not to put stuff in the wheelie bins, but to go shopping.

  In an ideal world I would have had a full shower, and washed my hair, but that would only have been important if I was going to a gig. I was semi reluctant to spend more time in the freezing bathroom, but I did have a shower, and once under the hot water everything felt fine, although I still didn't go as far as washing my hair. At the end of my shower I started a bit of laundry. I hadn't realised I had quite a backlog of underpants to wash.

  One little thing I did before going shopping was to dig out a three bar halogen heater I once bought. With a total of 1.2kW of power it doesn't kick out enough heat to warm a room up quickly, but it can get a small room, such as my dining room, warmish given enough time. Of course it works better with the door closed - one thing I can't do in my bedroom because of the amount of t-shirts hanging on it that have nowhere else to go. On the other hand, some of the heat loss does help take the worst chill off the bathroom.

  Before I went out the postman dropped a small padded bag through my letterbox. It was the two SODIMM memory sticks I had ordered. They got here faster by Royal Mail than Amazon delivering the other two parts of my order - they should come today. It was very useful to let the halogen heater warm the dining room up so I would be comfortable later when I installed those memory chips in the iMac that looks so posh on the dining room table.....sort of.

  My original intention was to go to Savers to buy some nice smelling toilet cleaner. Of course I bought a lot more than that, but not a great deal more. Mostly it was some shower gels, and a couple of smelly candles. It felt like not much, and so I crossed the way to have a wander around Poundstretcher. I bought an assortment of stuff, and solved a little mystery. I found where I had picked up a very nice webcam that was very heavily discounted. As I thought I had remembered, the shelf tag said £4.50, but I had been charged £5 for the one I bought. Closer inspection showed I had bought the delux model with built in LED lighting. The one without the lights was 50p cheaper.

  Being out in the cold didn't affect me the way it had the previous day when I went to Aldi. Maybe not carrying so much shopping helped, and maybe wearing a looser, although still very warm, coat helped. I was still very aware of how cold it was, and seeing as it was lunchtime, I made up two bowls of instant noodles to warm me up a bit. They were low but wide tubs of chicken flavour noodles I had bought from Poundstretcher. They look big, but I thing they are only 80gm or something.

  After my lunch I lay on my bed and read for a while. After that things become a bit hazy - I know I did did two things, but I am not 100% sure of the order I did them. I think I did the laundry first, and once washed I hung it on the small clothes horse in the dining room with the halogen heater turned to point at it from a few feet away. It was starting to feel quite comfortable in the dining room, and so it is logical that the next thing I did was to fit the new RAM into the iMac.

  The new RAM was 2 x 2GB chips giving a total of 4GB. That would not be much for Windows 10 or 11, but it is sufficient for most Linux uses. It should have been much better than the 2GB that was in there before. Sadly it did not cure the one problem I was getting - the program, and on one occasion the whole computer crashing, when trying to play a large, high definition video file. Also when trying to watch TV using a USB TV receiver dongle.

  I tried starting Kaffeine, the application I use to watch DVB-T TV, from the command line. I got half a second of TV before it crashed. It was because I had started it from the command line that I could now see the basic cause of the crash. It was a segmentation fault. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33047452/definitive-list-of-common-reasons-for-segmentation-faults has this to say about segmentation faults:  "In short, a segmentation fault is caused when the code attempts to access memory that it doesn't have permission to access. Every program is given a piece of memory (RAM) to work with, and for security reasons, it is only allowed to access memory in that chunk.".

   It seems probable that my first diagnosis of not enough memory was possibly right, but maybe not in the way I thought. Two possibilities come to mind. The first is that I am using the wrong type of memory, although apart from size, it is the same specification of what was originally in the iMac. Another possibility is that it is something weird in the Imac architecture that means Linux is not in full control of memory allocations. Either could be tricky, and potentially expensive to fix.

  After playing with the iMac for a while I gave up on it for now, and reverted to lazy mode, otherwise described as laying on my bed reading. I couldn't waste too much time reading because I had to get my dinner ready. Dinner, when I had it an hour or two later, was stewed lamb with sprouts. it was not as good as last time, although it was healthier. Last time I made it I didn't really add enough water, and the sprouts ended up being almost, but not quite, or at least fully, fried in all the fat that comes off cooked lamb. At the end of the meal I ended up with quite a bit of gravy, with fat floating on it, in the casserole dish. The last time I ended up eating a lot of that fat.

  Being a Saturday night there was not a lot on TV. Even Sky Arts, which usually has some interesting music stuff on it didn't have anything to my taste. After some channel hopping I ended up watching QI on Dave. Fortunately it was one of the better repeats. That finished around 9pm if I recall correctly. I went to bed, where I read for maybe half an hour before going to sleep.

  I seemed to sleep quite well last night. I remember having several dreams, and I even remember thinking I had had an interesting dream, and that it was worth remembering, but it was one of those nights where I can't seem to recall anything about my dreams since waking up. I seemed to wake up earlier than I would have wanted at about 6.10am. I don't know how I knew, but I knew it would be pointless trying for more sleep.

  Having got up, and gone for a tiny poo - the first in 48 hours (I think) - I didn't bother to weigh myself because I knew it would be disappointing. I still did my usual blood glucose measurements. They were rather pleasing. The Bayer Contour meter read 7.6mmol/l. The Nexus GlucoRX meter read an even better 7.0mmol/l. Finally, the Sino Care meter gave, as it often does, the highest reading, but it was still only 7.9mmol/l, and at any other time that would be very good, but with two others that were better.....

  The main event today should be a beer tasting session with Jodie this afternoon. I may spend a while playing with the iMac. I am wondering if a different Linux distro might be better behaved on it. That is one of the good things about Linux - it is free, and if one version (make) doesn't work, it is worth trying another. While the dining room is warm I may make a start on writing out some Xmas cards.