09:19 – Amazon updated my Kindle Fire, and presumably Barbara’s, to the new version of their OS overnight. The changes are significant, and many of them appear gratuitous, but we’ll see how they work. I normally work in landscape mode, and they’ve moved the home and back arrow keys from the side to the bottom of the display and changed the icons. That’ll take some getting used to.
My new desktop system from Costco arrived yesterday, but I haven’t had time to unbox it. It has three times the memory and about 10 times the processor of the notebook I’ve been using, so it should be a lot better for my typical work habits. On the downside, it runs Windows 10, which I have to leave on it because I need Windows to run the stamps.com software. All my time over the next couple days is allocated to government-mandated administrative crap, but I’ll get moved over to the new system on Monday.
Other than general relocation/moving-in type tasks, I didn’t get much done this week on the prepping front. Here’s what I managed to do:
- I read a bunch of PA novels, most of which weren’t very good. One exception is the one I started last night, Matthew Mather’s CyberStorm, which I borrowed with Kindle Unlimited and got through about a quarter of last night. Unlike most of the new breed of PA novelists, Mather can actually write. He’s also prolific and likes to do series, so I expect there’ll soon be a sequel or sequel to this book.
- I did more research on small solar power setups. I don’t yet understand all the issues well enough to start buying panels and so on, but I’m getting there. My goal is to have sufficient solar capacity to be able to run our well pump and provide sufficient power for basic lighting, comms, and so on. I do know that I’ll focus first on acquiring the high-tech components–panels, charge controllers, inverters, and so on–and worry later about storage batteries. We could, if necessary, use ordinary automobile batteries, although they’re not ideal.
So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.