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This page was updated: October 11, 2024
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Whole Cow! Crab Cakes and Chongo! Ug! Huh. STARDATE:2024.03.26:
What a hell. Not the hell, just a hell. The past few month’s days have been intense pain to shear peace. It’s not over, but it is soooooooooo clooooooose!
STARDATE:2024.05.20:
… The world has changed … Things were touch and go for a while. We’ve settled into somewhat of a routine. This story is full of holes and too complicated for me to fill in.
STARDATE:2024.05.20:
As you probably noticed since AC hasn’t posted since 2023 and has not had a Ghost Mystery story posted for that year, something must be up. Yup.
STARDATE:2024.05.20:
Tried to get the AC template from deBerry, but she’s not online. :/ Major bummer. I’m out in the family room on Moriarty in 64 bit Kubuntu editing via the cloud.
I recall, back in 1993, talk of cloud computing. You’d have basically a dumb terminal and everything was on the cloud. I thought how dumb, why would I go back to the old time share/main fraim days? Well, here I am in Google Docs. The Chromebooks with their hardly any local storage are those dumb terminals. Well, we all like smart-tech so as far as these dumb terminals are concerned, they have lots of bells and whistles. ;)
STARDATE:2024.05.20:
I feel like I need to go to someplace that I normally won’t be. The wait is anguish. This is so hard. We are soooooo clooooooose.
STARDATE:2024.06.22:
16:36:30 And counting.
The final hours.
I took the past week off for a much needed vacation. Mia’s knee surgery costs have landed it a stay-cation. I had a plan.
The plan was to put the utility trailer in the drive, all hitched up, a garbage can next to the shop and a recycling bucket, in place and a big sort take place. Quick and dirty. Well, it turned messy and very, very dirty. A few years back we had an “ant” invasion.
We used to do fodder for the cows in the utility room. Water seeped places it shouldn’t go, despite our continual attempts to keep it back. “Ants” found the moisture and came through old tunnels that “ants” had made many, many years prior, when a water heater was spraying out the back unbeknownst to my folks.
Well, the “ants,” moved on and were gone. When I removed boxes on the bottom of a pile, next to the wall, I discovered they had grown the tunnels into the wall and the boxes on the floor. Anything paper, they burrowed into. Paper, cardboard, and oh, particle board. They had destroyed the back corner of a bookcase.
Needless to say, the mess was a very slow and tedious process. My plans were foiled.
STARDATE:2024.06.25:
It’s over!
Ronight we go to the Shakespeare Festival’s presentation of Agatha Christie's “Murder on the Orient Express!” My brother is in town and also attending. It should prove to be a fun and interesting evening.
STARDATE:2024.06.29:
At the church campout. Came up in the evening on Friday, the 28th. Any hoot.
I have plans for the shop.
I have plans for the garage.
I guess I have plans for the studio. ...and the barn.
Shop:
Clear out empty boxes and packing materials saved for eBays. Rearrange the WB. I have a power solution that I will replace the current one with. Right now, there is 3 or 4 3 pin AC outlets. The replacement has 22, plus 4 USB3 ports and 2 type-c ports. Yeah, it's a big thing, but not strung out, it's a bit compact.
Part of the clearing is the finish/do the projects that have been dumped into there for later. Well, I'm thinking later has arrived. I won't hesitate, however, to exercise the trash can option.
Garage.
Clear the WB -- already well underway. This is a bit easier, I'm just chucking stuff I'll never use. Think I need a box, though, for the ReStore. ReStore is a place to buy donated house building items and the like. I have old filing cabinets that need to go bye bye and lots of tubs (both full and empty) that need organizing and moved.
Once the tubs are done, the storage shelf I keep the spare computer monitors etc on can be moved so the Grey Car can have more room.
And when all is said and done -- the bicycles will fit without being in the way.
The Studio.
That's a toughy. There are projects galore. There are things put in the doorway to be put away. There are piles that need sorting.
Barn.
Ok, the barn was done once, but now has filled up with shit. We have a rider mower we no longer use. I'll pull it out, along with the snow blade, the rototiller, the furrower, and everything else that goes with it. I have tons of recycles from the dairy farm days. I have stuff for the Reuseum. I have stuff that needs stored and I have shelving to put out there to accommodate lots of things like camping gear and the like.
The Farm.
Leaky cow water. Electric fence. The steers broke the spigot off and stomped a hole in the watering trough, and broke through the three line electric fence. All in one fell swoop. Well, the big dope of the two has moved on. Making managing things better. I got the waterer fixed, with the exception of the conversion pipe piece. After I get that all in place, I can reassemble the fence around the area.
STARDATE:2024.08.12:
Doing a live edit with a kitty on my arms. She's quietly purring, very insistent that the rectangle one the MacBook (Moriarty running Kubuntu 22.04) is her foot rest.
The Bluetooth is not functioning on this MacBook (2008 Unibody). There are no errors, until connection time. I've manually turned BT off and restarted, still notta. Thought it was a software update issue -- got and update, didn't work, but when the next update hit -- it still didn't work. This computer is a dual boot, Kubuntu 32 bit and Kubuntu 64 bit. Neither OS can get the BT to connect. So, it looks to be a hardware issue. :/
Audacity 3.6.1!
I saw the posting announcing Audacity 3.6's release, so I went to check it out. Hm, Linux version appears to only be available as an AppImage. I hate AppImages, almost as much as I hate Snaps.
Well, OK, I DL make it executable and launch it. Hmmmm. All letters are replaced by squares. Ya gotta be kidding me.
On Lamarr (Chromebook running Kubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Kali) it was the same. Actually I DLed and initially launched it in Kubuntu, then tried the exact same file in OpenSUSE. Squares in Kubuntu, but all's well in OpenSUSE. What was different? I had my suspicions.
I looked everywhere, starting with forums on Audacity's site. No info. Lots of those asked questions from long ago that were never answered. Finally the question of the included fonts came up over at the AppImage site and it turns out that in an AppImage, there are (usually, as in also all cases) no included fonts.
My hypothesis -- it's a permissions issue.
I SUDOed Thunar and opened the AppImage and there, be for me was running the latest version of Audacity in all it's fonts/glory!
Now I just need a fix. Infamous last words....
STARDATE:2024.09.15:
The MacBook has the 32 and 64 bit Kubuntu OSes on it. 18 and 22, I think. I’m in 22.04 at present and unless I really need he heavy guns, it’s where I’m at most of the time. The Upgrade nag is here and has been for a while. I hate the upgrades Kubuntu does, from the godawful screen backgrounds to losing support for my favorite programs. I actually want to use the programs I installed, not some POS someone decided was better. I get that support goes away, but it still works; just leave my stuff alone.
STARDATE:2024.09.15:
Lately I’ve been messing around in MacOS Catalina on a MacBook Pro from way back – 2012. The machine is an experiment. SDcard slot, 16 gig RAM and 500 gig SSD. Awesome for running all my photo and film apps on. I have most: GIMP, Audacity, Kdenlive, and a few others.
I’m thinking maybe I’d experiment with Bootcamp to install Kubuntu 24.04 on the machine. I’m thinking, but not feeling too enthusiastic about it.
I am feeling motivated to clear the garage and barn. I have the last few hundreds of boxes of old computers and I’m sending them off to The Reuseum, in Garden City. I have cleared most of the garage out and it’s close to holding 3 cars again. There are some things here and there, and I’ve been pretty wiped out after work and not done much. I think the smoke has taken it’s toll on me. Yeah the planet is on fire, that time of year. Sigh.
Strange
I suddenly awoke.
No, that’s not it. I wasn’t asleep. I think it … … well, unconscious? No, I was –
Dead. I was definitely dead. I had been a gardener, or some such. I recall tending the grounds of a large estate. I was in a, a shed or, some sort of structure, a gazebo, perhaps.
There was a spray-can, rather large, the kind that has a green handled pump on top. It had, something to spray the roses. Oh those beautiful roses. It must have been for aphids.
It’s all coming back to me now. I was spraying – oh my. I had inadvertently placed the –
It was rat poison that had spilled. I should have realized, but the concentrate wasn’t mixed and it just smells different somehow.
It got into my spray-can.
The breeze picked up. I got a blast in the face as I took in my breath, I remember chocking and coughing.
Oh my God, it was the rat poison!
I’ve been poisoned.
Wait, that’s me. Down there, but then what? That’s my body. I’m still at the gazebo. I’m just going to go over here to the roses.
The End
By
Brian Lynn Crosthwaite
STARDATE:2024.10.11:
I’ve been doing an experiment to leave the PDA (Frodo) at home. I had looked into Teamviewer, but it needed to have a version that won't run on the machines in question.
I have RealVNC on the iPhone 11 (Maleficent) as well as the MacBook Pro (Hela). I looked into what they offer. They have a free 2 week trial for their iNet remote (“Access your computer from anywhere in the world”). So, I’m giving that a try.
It is a bit slow. You need to have RealVNC Server running on any computer you wish to access via the internet. Once you get the configuration figured out, it works.
To pull it off I used RealVNC on the phone to access the MacBook Pro. The Macbook Pro has RealVNC running already accessing the IBM A21p ()Dampier) that has TightVNC running on it, with the Franklin Covey Planner software running on it. I have access to my list in the shape of the phone’s screen. I can look things up, check things off as well as add or edit entries as I normally would. Meanwhile the PDA is home on the charger.
I think, if I went this route, in the end it might be as low as $10 a month, or $120 a year. But I will most likely abandon this idea, since when I access the list via Frodo, there are no distractions. And that's important.
