09:50 – It was 21.3F (-6C) when when I took Colin out this morning, with light winds. Email overnight from Jane, with the subject line “I copied you again”. She and Tom didn’t have any powdered eggs in their pantry, so she ordered six #10 cans of them, which is about 35 dozen worth.
We had dinner last night again from long-term storage; Keystone beef chunks in barbecue sauce over rolls. Actually, the rolls were store-bought, but we have everything we need in LTS to make them ourselves.
In a prepping fail that turned into a prepping win, it turned out that we didn’t have any bottled barbecue sauce in the pantry. No problem, we just made it up ourselves from an old family recipe that we just made up:
1-1/2 cups white sugar + 1-1/2 Tbsp molasses (or substitute brown sugar)
1-1/2 cups ketchup
1/2 cup prepared mustard (or substitute 2-1/2 Tbsp dry mustard)
1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 cup water
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbsp liquid smoke hickory sauce
2 tsp paprika
2 tsp salt
1-1/2 tsp black pepper
Combine all ingredients in a medium saucepan and heat on medium until it just begins to bubble. Yields about one quart/liter.
We reheated the pound or so of frozen leftover Keystone beef chunks in a smaller pan, poured about a pint of the sauce over them, and then served the beef and sauce over rolls and froze the excess sauce.
I was expecting our sauce to be at least okay, but it turned out better than that. Barbara and I agreed that it was better than all of the name-brand barbecue sauces we’d tried. Yet another advantage to cooking with LTS foods. Homemade tastes better.
* * * * *
10:43 – I just finished getting Barbara’s Dell notebook up and running under Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon. It was harder than it should have been. The first time, I installed from DVD, told it to restart, and removed the DVD. It came up normally, but was missing some drivers, including the one for the Broadcom Wifi chip. I fired up Driver Manager and told it to install from the DVD. When I came back a little while later, it hadn’t installed the WiFi driver, and the DVD drive was just sitting there making seeking noises. I suspect the drive itself rather than the disc, but I’ll check that out.
So, without a DVD drive, presumably, I used USB image writer on my own system to create a bootable flash drive image of Linux Mint 18.1, and installed that on Barbara’s notebook. Everything worked normally, and I now had WiFi connectivity. The next step was to restore Barbara’s Firefox and Mozilla profiles. As I’d done in the past, I simply deleted the default profiles for both and copied over her old profiles from her Windows system backup. But when I tried to fire up Firefox and Thunderbird, both failed with an error message about profile errors.
No problem, I thought. I’ll simply remove Firefox and Thunderbird in Software Manager and then immediately tell it to reinstall them. SM refused to delete either of them. So I went in and manually deleted the .mozilla and .thunderbird directories and then fired up SM again. It thought they were both still installed, and refused to do anything about it. So I fired up apt-get to try uninstalling/reinstalling them from the command line, but with no joy.
At that point, it seemed the easiest course was simply to blow away the contents of the SSD and reinstall. I did that just before dinner yesterday and then bagged it for the day. This morning, I fired up her system, copied the contents of the new default profile directories to backup directories, and then copied the contents of her Windows backup profile directories to the new default directories. When I fired up Firefox and Thunderbird, both came up and worked normally. The only minor issue was that I had to reinstall Adblock Plus on Firefox, but that took only 30 seconds.
Barbara’s system is now fully functional except that I still have to recopy her spreadsheet and other data from the backup flash drive onto her new SSD. And, yes, the notebook is now noticeably faster running from the SSD than it was running from a 5,400 RPM hard drive. I’ll stick the old hard drive in a box and put it on the shelf to cover the remote possibility that I’ll ever want to run Windows on her system again.
There is always a gotcha, no matter what o.s. They all tend to behave differently on all our different hardware and the age thereof.
Just as no battle plan survives the first engagement.
3 degrees here and sunny w/blue skies, gentle breeze. Down to 0 again tonight and then warming up into the week ahead.
Mrs. OFD doing the dump run today and then driving to Moh-ree-all to swap vehicles with Princess, but I still figure a monkey wrench is in the works. Princess was only supposed to have the car for a couple of days and it’s now become more than a week, SOP up here. Her entertainment and fun always trump anything we need to do.
Wife also on the phone half the morning with MIL; Nouveau Brunswick got slammed with an ice storm a few days ago and there was damage to the electrical connections to their cottage way up there. So that now entails multiple calls and emails with various province and utility company people; maybe they’ll get it fixed in time for MIL’s usual summer stay.
Dave the problem you are having with receiving packages happened many times when I was working for JCPenney. What happens is you receive packages to your house from UPS or FedEx reliably for years and then the shipping method gets changed to postal delivery. The post office doesn’t recognize the address because you pick up your mail at the Post Office and the package ends up in purgatory. Then sometimes the shipper corrects the address to your PO Box # and sends via UPS or FedEx and they do not deliver to PO Boxes.
It is all due to the shipper trying to save a few pennies and horrible software that cannot discern between which address should be used with which shipper. Add in the many 3rd parties Amazon sells for but do not ship and it can be a mess when the post office makes you pick up your mail but will not accept packages from other carriers.
Does anyone know why it takes windows 8.2 a long time, up to a minute or more, to do a simple directory listing? How can I change this behaviour?
n
(using file explorer, when you click on the folder)
Boot Linux Mint 18.1 and tell it to install using your entire hard drive.
Actually, I’m finally at a point where it might make sense, as I’m mostly browsing and emailing. The shipping postage stuff that you had some much trouble with shouldn’t be an issue as I’m shipping thru paypal and ebay for the most part.
I no longer routinely use Visio, or Sketchup. I don’t game on this machine.
Still, familiarity is worth a lot with habits built from win3.1 and dos6 onward.
I do watch a lot of youtube vids and deal with a lot of pdfs, some photo edit stuff with paint.net.
And I use inkscape with the vinyl cutter.
The problem is that I’ve got a bunch of little utilities and stuff that I reach for fairly frequently, that I’d have to find alternatives for. I should at least try dual booting and see if I can live in linux for most stuff. Every time I’ve tried in the past there was a deal breaker.
n
I had that same issue with Windows 8.1; endlessly waiting for file searches and directories via File Explorer or even the Search box in lower left menu choices. Very annoying, and I’d used a variety of methods to speed things up.
I’ve had dual-boot and triple-boot machines in the past with nary a problem, but it’s kind of a pain; right now I have the latest Mint on here and I’m using Crossover for Linux to load Windows apps that Mrs. OFD claims she can’t do without, such as Office Excel, Word and PowerPoint. Plus Adobe Reader XI, EverNote, WinZip, etc. I’m pretty sure Crossover will be able to load various other Winblows apps and there are also probably Linux alternatives for those utilities.
Personally I’d rather use Crossover than run a dual-boot machine.
You could have a bad link to a network drive or folder…
I am typing this on an inexpensive laptop I picked up on Ebay. The machine is dual boot with the latest Linux Mint and Windows 10. I went the dual boot route because I expected to need Windows only occasionally.
I added Linux into the mix because I got tired of dealing with the same WiFi issue Barbara had. Ironically, I’m away from home and using Windows because I couldn’t get WiFi to work here with Linux.
DH, I thought your car was banned from Canukistan. At least when Miss 44DD was driving it… 🙂
I no longer routinely use Visio, or Sketchup. I don’t game on this machine.
Most major distributions have Dia available if you need Visio-like functionality.
If you’re not afraid of text files, graphviz and GnuPlot give really high quality results with a little work.
I’ve been using Visio since before MS bought them. I do electrical ‘single line’ drawings, like schematics or network layouts. I’ve got an extensive collection of stencils for all the gear I normally spec. The auto line layout, and auto routing for ‘stretchy’ lines works well and saves me a metric c-ton of time.
The other thing I really like about Visio is the third party stencils available. Can Dia open visio stencils?
If Dia can do that, I’ll take another look. But that would be a deal breaker if there were no ‘connector’ line types.
I’ve also been looking at tying the drawing objects to a database, which is supposed to be straightforward, but I never had time and money to get it up and running.
I used to run a couple of proprietary schematic (cable drawing) packages, Rack Tools, and another one that was a $1500 license. I don’t do much of that anymore though.
and while I’m messing with all these various security cams, they only support windows for their discovery and management tools.
lots of reasons to switch, but more than a few reasons to stay too.
nick
I added Linux into the mix because I got tired of dealing with the same WiFi issue Barbara had. Ironically, I’m away from home and using Windows because I couldn’t get WiFi to work here with Linux.
I’ve also experienced WiFi issues with Mint. As a result, on my Linux laptop, I triple boot Fedora 25, Mint 18, and CentOS 6 (i386). All three share a common /home partition, and I create separate user names for each with the same userid number (1000).
While I prefer to work in Mint/MATE, generally, Fedora 25 will connect to WiFi in places where Mint 18 will not thanks to a newer kernel version. Plus, the GUI seems a little snappier thanks to Wayland, but they have a long ways to go before it will truly be an adequate replacement for X.
@Nick – regarding your file listing being slow in Win10:
https://www.howtogeek.com/246087/how-to-speed-up-a-windows-folder-that-loads-very-slowly/
Might help….
I’ll probably keep an older rehabbed desktop unit on Winblows 7 for just the security cam stuff and the Ghost Gunner if I go that route.
Otherwise everything here is either Linux or Apple, and I’m not sure if I wanna dump the Apple stuff yet. We kinda got used to the iPhones but I’m willing to try Droids if there is a dahn good reason.
I didn’t have any trouble getting my Mint testbed laptop to use FF & T-bird data. I deleted everything under .mozilla or .thunderbird , and then copied {profilename} and profiles.ini from the current backup to the respective directory.
Otherwise everything here is either Linux or Apple, and I’m not sure if I wanna dump the Apple stuff yet. We kinda got used to the iPhones but I’m willing to try Droids if there is a dahn good reason.
Apple will force the issue. iPhones generally go three years after the last one of a given model rolls off the assembly line. Laptops are currently at seven years and out, but I have my doubts about the battery tech in the newer sealed units.
I ran Android until Cyanogenmod went Tango Uniform. If LineageOS manages to get their act together, I’ll buy a new mid-range Moto G, root it, and swap out the OS. Otherwise, I’m on my wife’s old iPhone 5 … until it is obsoleted at WWDC this year.
@rick, thanks that did the trick on the downloads folder and I’ll hit the others as they come up. I guess I should leave my DCIM optimized for photos, but it takes forever even if only one or two pix change.
n
Whenever I have a Windows problem, How-To-Geek (https://www.howtogeek.com/) is the first place I search. It also has a place in my RSS Reader.
I’ve got an iPad that must be 5-7 years old, and still running. Anyone know how to check how long it’s been running, date-of-birth like?
I’ve got an iPad that must be 5-7 years old, and still running. Anyone know how to check how long it’s been running, date-of-birth like?
Get the model number. Settings -> General -> About. Scroll down to “Model”.
Google the model number. The format should look something like:
MKHV2LL/A – My iPod Touch
I still use most of my “obsolete” Apple products, but only around the house. If I’m at a hotel or other public WiFi, I’m on a fully supported iOS device, recent Android build or current Linux distro.
@Greg,
Thanks for the information. I tried a couple of times to enter the passphrase and finally got it working. There are only two or three more places I routinely use WiFi, so hopefully I’ll get those working and then I won’t have any more problems.
It’s been a while since I seriously tried Linux as a laptop/desktop OS, and I must say aside from my WiFi connection issues today, it has gone very smoothly. I have been pleasantly surprised with all the packages that the package manager knows about after the install. I found it already knows about LibreCad, Chirp and Dia among others.
So I guess my iPhone 5 will be done this year; I’ll start looking at Droids, or the LineageOS, or yet another “ultra-secure” phone o.s. I’ve been looking at.
This week Fred, who often has interesting things to say, but has some HUGE blindspots, and is willing to assume knowledge in areas outside his competence, is stepping on his dick.
http://fredoneverything.org/what-to-do-with-latinos-get-used-to-them/
Among his many problems is conflating immigrants with illegal aliens, and focusing on the idea that the anti-illegal immigrant feeling is primary among racists, and that being racists, we’re worried about intermarriage and assimilation.
FUCK THAT. this is the second or third essay of his where he swings and misses. I’ll leave aside his obvious love for the hispanic, since he lives in Mexico. He makes the same chauvinistic mistake of assuming all the illegals are mexican. Most of them aren’t any more, and certainly the most recent come from farther south.
Most of the illegals coming in are young men, looking for work or criminal activities. They live 10 to an apartment, and send most of their money out of the USA. They aren’t looking to assimilate, they’re looking to get something and get out. While they’re here, they drive drunk, throw beer cans in the street, and run in gangs, robbing raping and doping. they provide customers for the slavers bringing kids into the country for sex slavery. In other words, they are criminal scumbags and can’t be gotten rid of quickly enough.
Gah.
n
Fred’s wife and daughter are Mexican and he has been singing hosannas to the country ever since he decided to bail out and go down there and stay there. On most other matters I find we are in agreement. But yeah, Mr. Nick is correct; he’s got a major blind spot there.
On the LineageOS; can’t connect to their main web site; I don’t even get any error mss; it just won’t go there. Downloads page comes up, though, so I guess that’s what we want for whichever device. And development seems to be continuing:
“As of February 22, 2017 LineageOS supports 132 devices with official nightly builds.[22][23] Along with experimental builds intended to ease migration from CyanogenMod without data loss.[24][25”
I have not even tried to use Windows for my own PCs since W98, I think.
I messed with a friend’s virus protection(?) and Windows updates, quite a while ago, and I Googled a fix for a corrupted Windows file for another friend (changing filenames with Linux CD boot).
I’m a little behind with Mint 17.3 on Celeron (4 cores) and about the same on a laptop I don’t use much. Neither of these ever ran Windows, which was blown off immediately.
I don’t do anything very much like work (“Work” — Maynard G. Krebs). I just do basic web stuff.
Famous last words, but I cannot recall when I last had any problem…
Why would anybody try to keep Windows working for somebody who just surfs and emails when they won’t know the difference with Linux Mint?
True, dat, Mr. Spook; wife here has been using this Mint box now for months, since I dumped Winblows 8.1 from it. Crossover lets her use her precious Microslop Orifice apps and Adobe Reader XI and otherwise it’s just email and innernet stuff.
I have multiple online courses running on it plus calendars always up for my local meatspace capers; next week is Selectboard, Town Meeting Day, gun club, and Development Committee, plus I have an appointment with my primary care doc at the VA down in Burlap.
Lots of emails back and forth tonight with my next older brother, who is as fed up with everything as we are and stuck in a bad spot thanks to wife’s employment and daughters in school and/or jobs there.
We need to turn off all welfare to illegals. I don’t know if a national ID card is the solution or not.
Cut the money spigot and they’ll self-deport. Of course that’s when they and the MSM will light up the bandwidth with pics and vids of starving kids and babies dying in the desert. While Jebster keeps talking about love. (wow, seems like ages since he was actually considered the Heir Apparent…)
And then we have the growing circus down in Mordor:
http://www.thediplomad.com/2017/03/sabotage-is-all-they-have-left-on-left.html
“” Crossover lets her use her precious Microslop Orifice apps and Adobe Reader XI and otherwise “”
I guess being accustomed to Orifice might beat LibreOffice (even if the files all work both ways) but what is wrong with the built-in .PDF reader in Linux?
I have been able to edit PDFs, too, with Xournal in Linux, nice for Social Security forms and maybe others that don’t allow editing on their own.
I try to be polite and just let people do what works for them, but it’s a lot like when I could produce ready to mail bureaucratic letters and reports with WordPerfect for DOS… in a pathetic (early) Windows office.
Currently in SA. Nice wedding yesterday. Supposed to be outdoors but it rained. I was able to get some decent pictures indoors in a very limited venue. All my plans for the outdoor settings and pictures got blown to dust. So be it.
I am staying at a hotel in SA just outside of 1604 and next to 281. Apparently there were a couple of major groups booked for a weekend stay. Place is crowded. One such groups were choral groups that are performing in a competition. Lot of high school aged kids, well behaved and generally polite.
There are also some groups for a cheerleader competition. Many of them from Dallas high schools. The kids, along with their parents, were rude, obnoxious and loud. Particularly in the free breakfast area. Kids shoving their way in front of people, walking around in bare feet, dressed in what looks like their pajamas, people where you got the impression this was their first time in a hotel. I think they wanted to turn the place into something that resembles the projects they live in. I leave it to the reader to determine the color of their skin.
Red, I would hope, after they were repeatedly stabbed with forks by the people they cut in front of.
Something seems odd about that construction, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…
Well, someone has to be the first to make an old family recipe.
On the LineageOS; can’t connect to their main web site; I don’t even get any error mss; it just won’t go there. Downloads page comes up, though, so I guess that’s what we want for whichever device. And development seems to be continuing:
They have a lot of growing pains. What happened in December with Cyanogen Inc. was quite a shock to the open source Android community.
Right now, my issue with LineageOS is that upgrades are hit or miss, sometimes requiring a complete reinstall of the OS from a Linux PC. Also, on my old Moto E, I cannot set root permission for apps. Minor nits, but I would want to see them addressed before going to the platform full time.
If LineageOS looks promising in the near future, I’m eyeing the Moto G4s which have been collecting dust at the local Sam’s club since Thanksgiving. At some point, Sam’s will blow those out cheap, probably before Summer. Lenovo/Motorola already showed G5s at Mobile World Congress.
Apple is driving towards having all supported devices using CPUs with default 64 bit integers this year. If I had to guess, they’re working on a new binary format that involves distributing apps as LLVM bytecode, optimizing for the specific platform upon delivery. Neat trick if they can make it work, but they lost Chris Lattner to Tesla.
Also, if you decide to try LineageOS, *DON’T* buy an “unlocked” Android phone with a carrier logo present in the GUI or stamped on the case. Carrier unlocked does not mean firmware unlocked. I just spent two months fighting with Newegg on this point.
Old unbranded Motorola or Google Nexus devices work best.
Apple is driving towards having all supported devices using CPUs
I’m reading Apple is set to release their new file system on iOS and macOS. I’m not an expert, but a disaster could be in the works. iOS will be out first. Followed by macOS.
Any experts here have details?
I started reading the micro-aggressions in Mr. Ray’s post above and quite frankly, lost count. He is a deeply disturbed individual. I recommend re-education at DNC HQ ASAP.
Or any university humanities department.
I continued to laugh at the Redumblican Party eating it’s own. I guess they are mainly RINOs. Even a little effort to back President tRump would probably finish the Dumbocrats. Then it would be a free for all against Libturdians in general. I think we would win. A lot of blood loss on their side.
The Redumblicans should enact the “nuclear” option in the Senate and get it over with. That would kick the can so far down the street I would be dust by the time it stops.
There is no real difference between the supposed parties; it’s just all one big War Party and they’ve declared war on the middle class and working classes here for a long time, and are more than ready, eager, in fact, to declare war against the country du jour that looks like a good bet for jingo jangle on the MSM.
Any former Repubs out there who’ve seen how their “party” operated during the National Administrator “campaign” over the past couple of years should have gotten at least a few good hits from the clue bat by now.
In their defense, every civilization in history has had to come up with a way to dispose of excess young men. War is the traditional choice, but modern wars just don’t have the numbers of deaths needed. Ghetto violence helps, particularly since instead of killing the best and brightest it tends to kill the worst and stupidest, but it’s not nearly enough. That’s why I’m surprised that we don’t have seriously violent sports. As in several players killed in every game.
We’re being prepped for that now.
witness all the snuff videos on the front page of the Daily Mail. Used to be you’d get a warning and have to actively click to see the video of the guy getting killed by a bus. Now it autoplays.
n
And to be truly fair, millions of young men have been disposed of before they were able to exit the womb. Of course that goes for millions of young women, too. Really young.
Really really young. We could solve this by only aborting the males, of course. I bet all those dizzy pink-hat-wearing fembats would go for that in a big way.
And the other associated problem with modern war is that the stupid bastids who dint git kilt come back all fucked up and then we gotta deal with ’em somehow.
That’s actually an idea worth considering. The problem is, given the choice, many more future parents choose to abort girls than boys.
And you’re right about the effects of war on the survivors. But just about anything is easier to deal with than excess males. Look at what happened/happens in societies where young males are in great excess, which usually happens in societies with plural marriage. The Mormons back when plural marriage was the norm. The islamics now.
But even in this country, where the rule is one-man-one-woman, it can be argued that men are in excess because men nowadays don’t have anything to do. And a bored young man is a fearsome thing. Like a bored Border Collie, he’ll figure out something to do, and you probably won’t like it.
Exactly. Bored young men are dangerous. Well-known probably since Zinjanthropus. I keep using him as an example because when I was a kid the National Geographic had his mug shot on its cover in living? color. Gave me the heebie-jeebies, it did. The story was on Dr. and Mrs. Leakey’s recent discoveries in Olduvai Gorge. Anyway, yeah; in this country and the West in general, it’s exacerbated by all the women who’ve left their homes and marriages and procreation to do the same jobs men used to do. It can be argued six ways from Sunday whether that’s a good thing or not but the results are plain to see, one of them being that lotsa young males are just layin’ around doin’ nuttin’ much. Exacerbated again here and in the Sandbox countries by there being no jobs for them anymore, other than as cannon fodder.
A further bit of fallout is that the ones that don’t git kilt? That come back fucked up one way or another? They’ve had some training. And some experience. We trained them. And we sent them out to get that experience.
As an aside, note all the guys who come back and gravitate to the cops and fire departments. Or in recent years, offer training themselves to other young men.
If you consider the world overpopulated, as I do, then encouraging the abortion of female fetuses is a great idea. Sure, it leads to an excess male population, but that’s easily dealt with by encouraging young men to explore homosexuality as a valid lifestyle choice. Some of this encouragement can be in the form of having them eat lots of soy product, as it tends to feminize boys, and to avoid meat, as that tends to bring out more stereotypically masculine behavior.
Er, hold on a moment. That sounds an awful lot like what libtards have been pushing for decades. When I find myself pushing the same things as libtards, it’s time for me to step back and reconsider a few things.
When I find myself pushing the same things as libtards, it’s time for me to step back and reconsider a few things.
Oh no, no, no, comrade; this is good news indeed! It shows you’ve grown!
At least that’s what the libtards used to say when a supposedly “conservative” politician or celeb suddenly got more sensitive and tuned in to their bandwidth.
Probably from eating lots of soy products.
1-1/2 cups white sugar + 1-1/2 Tbsp molasses (or substitute brown sugar)
1-1/2 cups ketchup
1/2 cup prepared mustard (or substitute 2-1/2 Tbsp dry mustard)
1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 cup water
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbsp liquid smoke hickory sauce
2 tsp paprika
2 tsp salt
1-1/2 tsp black pepper
Where is the Louisiana hot sauce ? If you ain’t sweating, it ain’t good.
Feel free to add/subtract whatever you wish.
Frank’s Hot Sauce.
Mrs. OFD dumps it on everything. Even ice cream.