T w e n t y S i d e d

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