Pancakes for breakfast after a lie-in this morning. I invented a new pancake fillerto add to the usual masked banana, chocolate sauce and soy cream - grated apple, mixed with cinnamon and coconut yogourt. Delicious!
Clare's computer has started overheating and switching off while streaming a complex Zoom session or playing a hefty video file downloaded on to the desktop. It happened while we were watching the WNO's 75th anniversary web-cast on Thursday, and again yesterday when playing this week's piano lesson video notes, a file of over one gigabyte. It's not surprising.
A ten year old Linux laptop with a SSD is quick and works well for all purposes except large sized video. There's not enough RAM and the processor heats up perilously while it heaves chunks of digital data from SSD to RAM and video card for display. The larger the file the more significant the drop in frame rate and the whole thing stutters to a halt.
It's recently got worse, and I figured it may be that the cooling fan needs clearing of accumulated dust. I was unsuccessful in opening up the laptop case to get at the fan, to I used Clare's powerful new vacuum cleaner to suck as much crud as could be moved out of the ventilation grille adjacent to the fan. It doesn't get quite so hot now, but truth to tell, she's going to need a new laptop with more RAM. I propose to buy one and replace Windows with Linux Mint and set it up in exactly the same way as her present device so that there's no learning curve to contend with. Who needs it at our age? Or at any age for that matter.
I went for a walk before cooking a pasta lunch, and then after a siesta, showed Clare how to upload videos of her piano lessons to YouTube, so that she can then stream a lesson to any device she wants to use. Her laptop got a bit hot while doing this, but fortunately didn't seize up. We then walked around Bute Park and back for an hour before supper.
My nephew Jules sent me his collection of family photos today via the 'We Transfer' file sharing service. I've not come across this one before. It's simple to use, and delivered a massive 600mb zip file without any hassles, with over 800 photos in it. I spent an interesting evening going through them, deleting duplicates. Some of them I already have copies of from compiling a photo tribute last summer for my sister Pauline's funeral, but many more, of her children and grandchildren growing up I've never seen before. That's only natural.
For fifty of the past seventy years the album covers we didn't have digital file-sharing. The film cameras used over that period were of varying degrees of sophistication. In the past twenty years, digital scanning and editing has improved considerably the quality of the end result. As my family life was tied to the Parish I served, and Pauline family lived out in Surrey or Somerset, we might go a year or so without meeting, with only the occasional letter or phone call keeping us in touch in between visits. The photos fill in some of the blanks of that long period, and enrich existing memories.
I've had the same experience with my sister June over the period since I retired, as I have scanned hundreds of negatives and slides from many of her trips abroad to Italy, Greece and Spain. There are lots more too, as she was an enthusiast for foreign holidays in the early sixties when package holidays first developed. I get to see the passing world through their eyes, looking at their photo collections. It's a rare pleasure.
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