Showing posts with label linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linux. Show all posts

11.7.13

Is it really only Thursday?

So for the new laptop I went with Ubuntu 13.04, because I'm used to Ubuntu, overly pretty or otherwise. I had some fun trying to get it installed though. My mother has my 4gb flash drive in her possession because I'm playing her Doctor Who dealer, and I only have a 1gb one otherwise, and the iso once applied to a flash drive takes 2gb, and I didn't have any writable CDs or DVDs that were compatible with the CD drive in the old laptop. This made my life difficult until I found a 2gb microSD card. So I currently have a card as big as my thumbnail loaded up with Ubuntu, fully bootable. Which seems really bizarre to me, because it's so damn tiny. (I should totally try to boot my phone from it. Then again, maybe not.)
Anyhow, spent some time setting that up, and then got it into my bedroom and hooked it up to the secondary monitor that I bought, and watched Torchwood on the monitor while still having facebook open on the main laptop screen. Damn, new shiny stuff is awesome. Heh. I did find out that the new lappy only has 2gb of RAM, so assuming they're the same type, I'll definitely be boosting that out of the old one.

And yes, I had haggis for dinner last night. Cooked it up with 3 sweet potatoes, sliced up, and half an onion, all in the oven together with some rosemary on top. Hit the spot, it did. And had leftovers for lunch today, and probably enough left for lunch tomorrow too. At $8 for one haggis, that works out to 2-something a meal (not counting the sweet potatoes), which is a pretty good deal. Cheaper than eating out, anyway. And tasty. Nom nom nom. I think I weirded out my boss by appreciating haggis. Oh well, more for me.

Didn't get much cleaning done, because of the computer taking pretty long to set up - nor did I get my hair recoloured. But that's okay. I can get some cleaning done today after work, maybe - and definitely Friday after work too. Thankfully, the hair thing (as I said yesterday) isn't imperative - so that could wait til Monday, or even longer, if I wanted. We'll see how it goes.

At work my boss and I set up a computer with two monitors, which is fairly standard, but we also had to put a second keyboard and mouse on it. Hilarity ensued: I'd go to right-click on the desktop for settings, and he'd click away so my menu disappeared immediately; or he'd go to log in, but I'd already hit Ctr-Alt-Del and so he'd do it again and thus exit from the login screen. At one point he was moving his mouse left/right, and I was moving my mouse up/down, so it went in a really wonky circle. What is it they say about small things and small minds?

The radio at work played Werewolves of London this afternoon. I can't take that song seriously. I crack up every time I hear it. I want to know how in hell he sang that song with a straight face. Also, I'm getting bloody tired of Skagit Valley Casino radio ads. That and whichever credit union has the stupid jingle about being "in your corner".

Can't wait for Friday, it's been a long busy week so far. Can't wait for next Friday, either - metal show to see! Woohoo!

Anyways, signing off for now.
Toodles.

Edit: formatting ...

10.7.13

tl;dr: skunking, mondayism, talk geeky to me, haggis, and reddit.

Well. Stuff happened.

Sunday I had a picnic in the park with all my dear family. It was picnicky - and much too warm. I skunked my uncle and my dad at cribbage - almost didn't cos my dad was one point away from getting across the line, but then I pegged out. Made me feel good, cos I've never skunked anyone before, and they've been playing much longer than I have - but I got a whole string of double-runs one after another, and most of them had fifteens too, so that's why. Plus my uncle had a series of really terrible hands. Sorry, Uncle.

Monday was mondayish; I actually fell asleep on my desk partway through the day and I'm really glad no-one noticed. It was only for a few minutes anyways. But then after work I got to hang out with my good friend Jessi and another friend, Jazzy - I made paleo apple fritters (I keep getting asked for the recipe. One of these days I'll publish it here, all formatted and with pretty pictures to go with it) and Jazzy made Earl Grey Tea and Lavender cookies. OH MY GOSH those were amazing. Then we sat on the floor and did crafty stuff for a while. I got some chain-mail done, as well as part of my "uniform" for the dodgeball team I'm in...
And I laughed at us because for a full half hour none of us said anything to anyone else. Introverts, much?

Yesterday I got to hang out with a friend whom I didn't really know very well beforehand - she's been more my sister's friend up til now - and it was nice to get to know her a bit better.

Yesterday I also got a new laptop and a monitor, YAY! And just in time, too - my old lappy was becoming more and more decrepit. For the last few weeks, if it ever tried to do anything, it had to access the harddrive fifty bajillion times first, during, AND after. I thought maybe it was using the swap space too much - which says bad RAM to me - but dad thinks maybe it's just retries because it has bad sectors on the harddrive as it is, so maybe the harddrive is finally giving up the ghost. I'm hoping for the latter; as long as the RAM is still good, I'm happy, cos my old one has 3 gigs (a stick of 1, and a stick of 2), so if the new one also comes with 3 (cos I haven't checked yet - I'll do that tonight probably), I'll swap out the 1 for the old one's 2, making 4 in the new one. Mmmm hardware. And the RAM should be compatible - they're both Lenovos, one's the T61 and the other's the T61p - so I see no reason why it shouldn't work. *Crosses fingers*
Which brings me to the question of what OS I should put on it. I was considering Linux Mint for a while, cos Ubuntu's pissing me off, just a little; but I may just bite the bullet and give it Ubuntu 13.04 Raring. I stuck with 11.04 (Natty) for quite a long time, and now they've "stopped supporting it", of course - but on the other hand, 12 and up are Steam-compatible. I mean... I'm not interested in starting gaming... at all... no... um. All I know for sure is that I refuse to have Windows anywhere near it.

Anyways, my plan for today is to go to the butcher's and buy a haggis (because I want haggis for no apparent reason, and I know it's not paleo, but I refuse to make an excuse for this; haggis is its own excuse, in my opinion) and have that for dinner while cleaning my house and possibly putting some OS or other (meaning probably Ubuntu Raring) on my new laptop... and I may even make this Goth-Upkeep Day and recolour my hair. Maybe. I could probably last a couple weeks more if I wanted to, so it's not imperative that I recolour it this week, I just feel like it's almost that time again.

Final thoughts: you know you're on Reddit too much when you find that people ask the same questions and make the same comments over and over - and you know you've been on Reddit too long when people start nostalgically referencing stuff that you saw when it was first posted. Yeah.

So. Back to work.
Toodles, all.

23.5.13

In which a lot of stuff happened.

Well. Yesterday was an interesting day.

Last night on my way home from work, my phone decided that the SD card I had had in it for several months was "damaged". When I tried to plug it into my computer, I got a "could not read Superblock" error. Tried all kinds of things, and I think I ended up borking my computer somehow - because gnome now won't load, suddenly. But before I got to that point, I figured I may as well format the SD card, because I wasn't getting that back any time soon - losing me every photo I ever took (luckily all the important ones were on Instagram...) and all the music, so I had to load that back on after, and now I have all my music back. Doesn't save my photos, but that's life...
So back to my poor computer.
Lucky me, a year and a half ago, I decided to make a bootable USB of Ubuntu 12-something, or possibly 11.10, I'm not quite sure which, but it doesn't matter really, the point being that I got my computer to boot off the flash drive - and it happily loads up the hard drive as an external drive, so I can still get to all my files, yay!
BUT, unluckily, the password for the wifi at my house is stored under my regular profile, and I can't access it from the external boot, nor can I get it out of the wifi settings on my phone, it's all hidden and stuff.
BUT, luckily again, I rooted my phone. So I googled (from my phone) on how to access the wifi password file, opened a terminal window on my phone (because I have one of those - finally it comes in handy!) and did this:
$ su
# cat /system/etc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf
and scrolled through to find the one I wanted. So now I have the wifi password, so I can access the internet from my poor borked laptop.

Fortunately, without the external boot, I can still log into the command line (it's just gnome that's not working), so I suspect the next thing I will have to do is figure out how to log into the wifi from the command line (shouldn't be too difficult, right?) and run a proper update (did I mention I'm still running Ubuntu 11.04?) on my computer, so it should then overwrite the borked files and still keep all my data. Hopefully.

So all that happened, and then I check facebook from my phone and find that my dear parents got in an accident while they were across the border for their 25th anniversary, and while they're fine, the car is totalled. *sadface*

And then on top of all that, UFV got my first cheque. Because I'm working a co-op, it's technically a 6-credit course, meaning I have to pay for it. I got paid for 7 or so days of work (first cheque, it's always the way of it), so I got 690-something deposited into the bank yesterday morning. All well and good. 40 went straight to my cellphone bill (because I haven't paid that in ... well ... a little while - I just haven't had the money) leaving me with 650-odd. Fine. I went to UFV after work yesterday to register and pay, and found that the cost of the co-op is 629.76. Fuck.
I wish they had some kind of deal such that the employer would take a portion out of each of my paycheques and just send it straight to UFV, thus spreading that 630 over the course of four months, rather than a lump sum directly after the end of the last semester when my money's running thin anyways. Thank God my landlords are gracious and will wait til my next cheque to take rent out, and thank God I have a wonderful friend who's buying me groceries today - but not everyone has that. It's stupid, in my opinion, that they don't have such an arrangement.

Yeah. Life has been interesting.

Also, a quick note pursuant to yesterday's warning of long and different blog posts coming:
apparently 1 & 2 Tim and Titus are very possibly (indeed, very probably) not Pauline epistles. This blew my mind, and makes my argument even stronger. See: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/goodspeed/ch21.html.
Yes, I will be blogging about the Bible and Stuff and Things... I warned you it would be different.

So that's it for today.
Toodles.