T w e n t y S i d e d

I spent a lot of time last summer talking about how everything was breaking. The last few days I’ve spent on car repairs. Nothing serious, but time consuming. In fact the days I set aside to plan and write this particular post have been spent on blow-outs and blinkers. I’m about to go get one more thing working and then take a shower and maybe even go to bed after. I don’t normally drink what are most-commonly-known as soft drinks or carbonated beverages, but it was hot enough today to take a Coke Zero break, and then have another later.

So, my apologies for not having anything substantive ready for this week. The ease with which I replaced the Manjaro installation on my desktop with Mint has me itching to try other distributions again, using what I know now. I was planning on trying a Bazzite install (without the nVidia drivers) until the child that is running Bazzite mentioned that since an update early this week Bazzite started asking them to log in to the wifi network every now and then. They aren’t *disconnected* from the network…everything is still working. The system has just started asking them to log in again. They finally clicked on the prompt and it opened a webpage having to do with Fedora. But we have no idea what is prompting this behavior. It did NOT start out doing this; it happened as part of an update.

Troubling.

Anyway, that’s it for now; see you next week!

Paige Francis He/him

We had our first verifiable over-100 degree (F) day this week. The house we live in had a new A/C compressor and blower installed around 2010, so the part-owners we share ownership with still think of it as “new.” The system it replaced was installed when the house was first put up back in the mid-to-late 1970’s, so since that A/C lasted 30 years the one that’s 15-years-old is, obviously; new. Here’s the trick: when the “new” A/C was installed the empty-nester family didn’t use half of the house regularly. So they got a SMALLER compressor. It’s rated for just about 1/2 the square footage of our house. As a result we have installed supplementary window units in 2 bedrooms. It would be in all 3 bedrooms, but the window was removed in the third bedroom around 2010 as well when the bathroom next to two of the bedrooms was remodeled to have a giant bathtub. The owners then installed too-small of a water heater to fill the tub, so it never got used. That’s the bathroom that I recently renovated, by the way. I talked about it last summer. Keeping two bedrooms closed off from the central A/C system helps the small A/C compressor, but it is showing its age and honestly we need a third window-unit or mini-split for the living room. Every modern window unit we’ve installed has resulted in a DECREASED electric bill as we cut down on the demands on the central A/C. Kind of shows how far technology has come in the last few decades.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I HATE the Summer”

Paige Francis He/him

I was on vacation all week; more on that later. But more importantly I came home to a broken PC. Well, it was fine when I got home. Here’s the process. Last Monday, after a day of travel and arriving at the destination I got my laptop up and running. My laptop has Manjaro Linux installed just like my PC. Manjaro updates regularly, but I was a bit surprised there was a large suite of upgrades available when I booted up the computer. I put them off at first because I didn’t want to stress the internet connection where we were staying, but it became clear after a few days this vacation house likely had better and faster internet than I do at home. Knowing that, I applied all the updates without incident and went on about my week. Under my current schedule I usually first access my computer in the late afternoon and I mostly kept to that practice while away. After arriving home, of course; my PC showed the same updates available. I’m sure there were some differences in software but I wasn’t expecting a problem. However, the updates wouldn’t run on the PC. I kept getting an error message that updating a library would break a dependency and a recommendation that I remove a particular listing and try again. Except removing that entry would break *another* dependency, and so on and so forth. I tried doing updates one listing a time, which worked right up until it didn’t. I would occasionally get a prompt to restart the system (normally I get one prompt to restart after all updates are complete) but after one of these…nothing *I was used to using* would work. Most things wouldn’t launch. Efforts attempted through the terminal would result in an error message reporting broken dependencies. I had managed to break the fundamental links in the system to a couple of important libraries. Checking online I came across mostly some things I had read before: that the frequent update process on Manjaro is essentially its biggest weakness. I won’t get into all the reasons why, and I have no idea (only a suspicion) why something that worked a few days ago on my laptop *did not* work on my PC…this is actually a problem I’ve had before but was able to deal with. Instead, because of how I have everything installed, I decided to just do a new install of something different.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Replacing a Linux Installation After My Vacation”

Paige Francis He/him