Bargain hunted

I woke up as Thought for the Day was about to start, on an overcast grey day. The eight o'clock news was all about the Gaza cease-fire and Trump's presidential inauguration. Heaven help us, on both accounts.

Clare had a flute lesson after breakfast, so housework had to be postponed until later. I killed time by watching the final episode of 'Blackwater', not something I'd normally do after saying Morning Prayer. 

I didn't think the story could get any more complex than it did in the last episode. All in all, an interesting portrayal of life in the seventies and nineties with hippy communes and eco-idealism before green politics. In terms of the unsolved crime around which the story is told, it turns out that several individuals have a hand in perverting the course of justice. It's noteworthy that a rural GP rather than distrusted police who solves a mystery in which several tragedies are compounded. A bit like a Greek drama. 

I was struck by the social divisions exposed between rural poor Lapps, Sami and Swedes. not to mention the Finnish speaking minority in Sweden. I was already aware of social and cultural differences between Norwegians and Swedes, but this gave me another insight into the complexity of Scandinavian rural identity back in a time when life wasn't as homogenised by the internet, urbanisation and industrialisation.

The dramatic role in the story played by peregrine falcons in the wilderness or 'peregrims' as one character calls them, as harbingers of doom, was potent but a little confusing given that wild bird egg theft leads to  murder. But perhaps that would be clearer to a Swede than an urban foreigner. I think the story could have been told more succintly. Flashbacks across 20 years were adequately labelled, but adjusting to the change in appearance of ageing characters required effort. At the end of the last episode a promotion for the next showing of 'Astrid - Murders in Paris' revealed that it's a repeat of series three, nothing new.

Once the housework done, we shared in making lunch. Then I went out for a walk in Pontcanna Fields, but ended up walking into Canton and visiting Tourotec to see if there were any tech bargains to be had. Indeed there was one. I had promised Owain that I would keep an eye out for a Dell Optiplex All in One Desktop computer, which he wants for a media centre - serving as a telly or music and video streaming platform and as a home computer if needs be. I called him to confirm I had the right model, then bought it for him. The hard bit was carrying it home, as it was quite heavy. Then I went for a circuit of Thompsons Park at sunset to complete my step quota.

With Windows 10 coming to the end of its support life later this year, older hardware makes upgrading to Windows 11 impossible. This affects 450 million devices, a nightmare for those who can't afford new kit, and for electronic waste disposal for companies that can and must afford it. So irresponsible. I have decided at last that it's time to replace Windows 10 with Linux Mint's latest version on my desktop workstation. To this end I downloaded Mint 22, and made a bootable flash drive of the ISO to test on the workstation. It took me a while to recall the routine, but the tryout version worked well and looks very good indeed. 

I spent the evening backing up all the data ready to do the installation. It took a crazy amount of time, although the data is on the machine, Windows insists on forcibly synchronising data with OneDrive before copying it to an external hard drive, and with 20,000 files, that's a slow process. 

While I waited for the process to finish, I watched both parts of this week's episode of 'Silent Witness' and theen went to bed.