Snow scenes past and present

After our Saturday lie-in and pancake breakfast we walked into town as Clare had a clothes purchase she wanted to return to H&M. Then we went to John Lewis' for a soup and sandwich lunch and a browse of the tech bargains for me, and clothes for Clare. Nothing of interest, so we headed for home. The streets were very quiet but the pubs were full of rugby emitting groans of anguish as the Irish team proceeded to thrash Wales in Dublin. Ten - nil as we arrived at the bus stop, twenty nine - nil by the time I switched on the telly when we reached home. Never mind, consolation was at hand in the form of Winter Olympics coverage on a neighbouring channel, showing the most astounding performances in skateboarding, mogul downhill skiing and the ski jump. How these sports have advanced in recent decades! A perfect antidote to a dull, cold windy day in Cardiff.

Recently I learned that most of the snow on which the Winter Olympics takes place is now artificial due to climate change. You could hear it in the sound of skis moving on what is in effect crushed ice. Resorting to this calls into question future Winter Olympics, as snow production is energy consuming with a huge carbon footprint, skiing is that much more unsafe in permanently icy conditions as opposed to neige poudreuse. I fondly recall my time cross country skiing when we lived in Geneva, and for a few years after we settled in Cardiff, on January holiday breaks with Valdo in the Jura. I may never ski again not just because of advancing age, but because of the lack of snow in places we are most likely to return to visit friends. I didn't hear from Valdo at Christmas. I wonder how he is?

Sister June, frustrated with her slow Acer ES1 laptop. She's had it for about six years, and it's now under equipped to run Windows 10 at a normal speed, just like my desktop PC, which is almost as old. So, she has ordered a replacement Acer from Amazon, which should be adequate for her purposes, with a SSD and 8GB of RAM - the new standard specification for useful basic equipment running Windows 10. I think it uses Windows S, which may mean having to pay to install Libre Office, which is what she is used to, rather than subscribe to MS Word, which is far more than she would ever need to use. One of the team at the Boys' Club across the road from her place has promised to help her set it up. I hope this'll work out OK, and not leave her in a position where yet again changes in user interface cause more grief than any 87 year old needs.

I spent the evening scanning a batch of photo negatives of the trip to Umeå Clare made with Owain at Christmas in 1987 (I think). It was one of those experiences of a lifetime, and introduction for the both of them to cross country skiing on rural wooden skis. I stayed home with Kath and Rachel and the three of us did Christmas with the occasional landline call to the Arctic circle. We were living in Chepstow then and I was working for USPG. My ministerial services weren't in strong demand at major festivals so I could take time out with my two teenage girls. The photos aren't great, shot on a pocket camera with films that weren't fast enough. Even so, it's a lovely souvenir of those days, half a lifetime away.

Techy day

A clinic visit Friday morning, then bag packing and loading up the car for our late afternoon drive to Kenilworth for the weekend. In the afternoon, I went about resetting my Windows 10 laptop for use by Rhiannon, as she's not been getting on well with the little HP laptop I gave her a few years ago. This innocuous task proved to be something of a nightmare, taking five hours for a scrupulous date file wipe and re-installation of the operating system. I could have set up four Linux devices from scratch in that amount of time. I hadn't suspected, and was reluctant to abort the process in case this would leave me with an unusable Windows machine. So we left two hours late, much to Clare's exasperation, unfortunately.

The roads were quiet all the way there, but I drove less than half the distance, as I couldn't settle comfortably (and therefore safely) in the driving seat for a sustainable length of time. It happens like this occasionally, and it's difficult to work out the reason for it. Thankfully, Clare is still confident driving on familiar routes. We arrived just as 'The Archers' ended on the radio, and soon sat down to a delicious risotto supper and a couple of superb bottles of 'Easter' wine - a Rioja and a Primitivo. There was lots of catch up on, with Kath, Anto and Rhiannon back from Sta Pola the previous day, with photos to show, and grumbles about the horrid wet and windy weather they had there, in contrast to the hot and sunny weather here in the UK, a reversal of usual conditions this time of year.

I had a message from Sheila's son John to tell me she had died early this morning in Holme Tower. The funeral is proposed for 9th May. I wrote and told Laura, feeling sad for her that her dear friend didn't live to see her one last time, and that she will have to return to Romania before Sheila can be last to rest. They'd known each other for fourteen years, since Laura met her during a specialist placement in geriatric medicine at Llandough Hospital. They became firm friends, despite the age difference between them, and had been part of the reason for her annual return trips to Cardiff.

I spent a good deal of Saturday setting up Rhiannon's account on her new computer, and trying to figure out what the problem was with her previous one. I found that her OneDrive account was full, mostly with videos she'd taken, so there was no room for scores of folders containing photos she'd taken in recent years, over sixty gigabytes in fact. These were only on the laptop drive. I decanted all these, plus documents on to a portable storage drive and transferred them to the new device. 

Then there was another little Acer laptop to update and reclaim, which I loaned Kath last year when her own laptop keyboard started malfunctioning. She doesn't need it any longer, as she's converted all her work flow entirely to Mac, with a desktop Mac Mini and a Macbook Air. Good luck to her. I was tempted to buy a classic second hand Macbook a couple of weeks ago, but relented. For me it's not worth the expense, with so little written work coming my way these days, and little else that needs more than a Chromebook to get done. I maintain Windows and Linux devices to keep my skill set alive, for when I get asked for techy type help.

In the evening, I watched 'Follow the Money' using the tidies and updated little HP laptop, as others wanted to watch something different on telly.

Legacy filing kit

I had a last minute request from Emma to stand in for her and celebrate the Eucharist at St John's this morning, which I was happy to do, as I'd intended going anyway. Afterwards I had a wound dressing appointment, and arrived home to find Clare was already back from school and had cooked lunch. She had another school meeting later in the afternoon, so I went out and walked for another hour until she returned for supper.

Her work on the baby book revision is gathering pace, now that she's working with the translator of the original English version from the German. Certain sections of the original text don't need to be revised as the case studies are still relevant. Clare needed to recover text files of these to include in the body of the revision, but our book archive only contained .pdf files and original Publisher 2000 .pub files created in 2012. What could be done to recover editable texts with minimum expenditure of effort? She worried.

Fortunately, I have retained the 2009 Acer Aspire Windows Vista desktop mini-tower machine, with Office 2000 and the version of Publisher on it which I used to create the original publishable texts. But would it still work? Well, it did, even though its CMOS battery is dead, and an assortment of its software is well out of date and flashes up security warnings. Even so, the original .pub file loaded with no complaint and generated a .RTF document which could then be run in Libre Office and used to produce a docx file for modern convenience. Sure there will be minor formatting issues, but much of the required pieces of text can be transferred by cut and paste. I was well pleased with this, as it took so little time. So glad I didn't consign this device to the scrapheap. I could do with a decent old Windows 7 laptop to install legacy software on, to retain such easy access to an assortment of other legacy files accumulated since the start of the new millennium and before. There'll be one out there somewhere for a song, no doubt.

Farewell Dell XPS

Unusually this morning, I mistimed my departure and needed to drive down to St John's to celebrate the Eucharist in order to avoid being late. It's something I don't like doing and try to avoid, as I try to walk as much as I can around the parish to balance the times I need to drive across town to St German's, currently four times a week. There were a dozen people in the congregation, wondering what's happening about the episcopal election, worried about brexit. 

Afterwards I drew money from the bank and did a small amount of shopping before returning home for lunch. There was a call from the Touro Tec computer shop about the broken Dell which I took in there for assessment a couple of months ago, so when I'd eaten, I walked there get the report. As I suspected it would need a new motherboard, making it a BER device, as we'd say in RadioNet-speak. This is - beyond economical repair'. I asked the guy in charge if he could recycle or make use of the machine for spares and just let me have the 500mb hard drive to re-purpose myself. I already had a plan in mind if it was in good working order.

It was pleasing to drive to St German's in daylight for Stations of the Cross at seven. There were just half a dozen of us, but I feel it's worthwhile doing with other people. rather than as a personal devotion at home or in church. I wonder if we pay enough attention to telling, retelling and reflecting on the passion story these days. In my youth I was influenced by Franciscan spirituality and devotion to Christ crucified. I still find that things I learned then have value today, and can speak with freshness, even if i haven't used them often during the long years preoccupied with creative liturgical innovation in telling the story of faith. I have changed, and how I interpret the tradition has changed in the light of experience. 

When I got home, I booted up the Acer Aspire portable given to me by Kath from someone at her gym last year. I had Linux Mint running on it, but not satisfactorily, as it kept failing to boot to the graphic desktop, through what seemed to be a read error which persisted regardless of which desktop interface I used. I started it up using the Linux Mint 18.1 live DVD I acquired last week, and using a special USB dock, was able to get the old Dell hard drive running and proving its health, on this machine. So, I wiped and reformatted the spare hard drive and used it to replace the existing dodgy one. Installing Linux Mint 18.1 on it worked after one false start, and has restored to me a stable functional Linux portable machine for occasional use. 

Although this has a pre-UEFI BIOS Core i3 processor which can run a 64 bit version of Linux, with due regard for its age (six years), I installed the 32 bit version. Perhaps I should have done that originally, as it runs quicker and so far error free than it did the first time around. All in all a satisfactory experience, making up for losing the Dell XPS, a real classic top of range machine nine years ago.

    

Tribute to the Linux collective

It's a long while since I last had a good rant about the virtues of Linux. Windows has meanwhile seen many improvements in its development, but can still often be frustrating to use in comparison.

All that computer tinkering yesterday got me to bed later than I needed, so I slept late this morning, and eventually returned to the task of getting the Acer to work again by installing Linux Mint properly. It's  half to three quarters of an hour from boot to a fully working system. Better than Windows. You're then advised to update, but can do so at your leisure. Update runs for half an hour, bringing the latest version of the operating system and software. It does so without preventing you from carrying on with work, and usually without asking you to reboot. Utterly brilliant if you're busy. 

All you need available for productive working is there. If you have additional software needs it's easy to top up with your favourites to complete the job. All made possible by the core design of Linux at the outset. It's one of the greatest collaborative social enterprises of our era. Fortunes are made by companies offering Linux software services, yet it's available for free within a global community of volunteers and professionals, for anyone to adopt - especially when Windows dies on them. It's still hard to find Linux driven computers readily available in the consumer marketplace.

I discovered Linux working in Geneva twenty years ago, learned to use it and become intrigued by it on hardware that wasn't really powerful enough to do it justice. I have watched it evolve and diversify into an ecosystem of related products that can get the best out of all kinds of equipment, especially in the scientific community. Now it's being introduced to systems running on the international space station. In some regions it's used to run whole departments of government and for the trading engines of the economy. 

MS Windows and Apple Mac have had their hold on consumer markets for decades, but the innovation of Android on smartphones and tablets has changed habits of digital consumption radically irreversibly. The Android operating system is derived from Linux. It has not only risen to meet expectations, but also helped shape expectations of what is possible to do with a powerful pocket computer. Admittedly this vision of the possible was generated by Apple with its iPhone and apps, and the challenge taken on by Android, but Apple operating systems developed, from origins in the BSD operating system with many of the same characteristics and philosophy as Linux.

These days, I don't do much more than enjoy using Linux, where once I enjoyed tinkering, learning how to use its own command scripts. It was always hard work, paying attention to that kind of detail, and nowadays easily configurable user interfaces remove the need to tinker unless desperate. The modest amount that has stuck in my brain, however, makes life easier when it comes to diagnosing and troubleshooting problems. 

Before I consigned the broken Windows 7 to Microsoft Hell, I figured out that essential files were missing, deleted either from the boot partition which performed essential start up functions, including linkage to a main partition where most Windows 7 software is installed. This killed access to the recovery partition, making impossible a factory re-set or an independent re-install. There was nothing to suggest hard disk damage by a surge. Files had been irretrievably deleted without which not even a minimal operating system could fire up and facilitate a repair. Whether by accident or sabotage, this shouldn't be possible, but it happens. The world of work is less efficient, less secure as long as vulnerabilities due to poor design remain.

Sure, over the years I may have wasted a lot of time trying to learn things for which I may well be temperamentally and intellectually unsuited, perhaps a bit like my shoddy efforts to learn how to sight read music or speak other languages fluently over the years. Yet, I do feel enriched by these minor efforts to understand what changes are going on in our era and how they work.

For what it's worth, such a waste of time has been lots of fun in a perverse sort of way. I remember when I first got an early version of SUSE Linux to boot to the command line, during our Swiss sojourn, seeing a message displayed when reaching the command line saying something like:

' You are now running Linux. Have lots of fun ! '

Thanks to all those who have contributed to making it so.

Laptop rescue saga

As the school is on holiday this week, the midweek Eucharist at St German's was a quiet affair in the Lady chapel, a welcome change after the intensity of last week. I went straight home afterwards and did some necessary food shopping, banking and parcel posting before lunch. Then I settled down to see if I could fix the broken Acer Aspire Core i3 laptop which Kath acquired from a fellow gym member and passed on to me to play with.

Normal booting caused it to crash and reboot, so I tried booting into 'Safe Mode' but without success. It got so far and then hung after a file check, displaying a desktop wallpaper but nothing else. Eventually the hard disk light went off, indicating there was no activity. I then modified the boot settings and tried a live version of Linux Mint on a USB flash drive. I was astonished at the speed with which it started, took full control of the hardware and gave me a fully functional machine. 

Linux showed the Windows file system was in place, seemingly uncorrupted. The name of the last user was evident, but data file folders had been emptied or never filled. I was able to email Kath with a status report, but nothing more than this. At least the hardware works.

Today, I took the funeral in St Paul's Grangetown of a well known local lady who'd lived in the same house for sixty years. The church was packed, and there was standing room only. St Paul's is a big church, impossible to heat properly. It was cold indoors, despite the sunshine streaming in. One of the granddaughters gave a moving and funny tribute, much of which was devoted to extracts from Gran's regular letters to her when she was in university. There were more smiles than tears. 

Among mourners were two relatives of the deceased whom I knew - one was Brian, Martin's father in law, the other was Tony Bishop who was city centre Police Inspector when Vicar of St John's. He retired around the same time as I did, and it's the first time we've met in five years. The Committal was in the South Glamorgan Crematorium, closer to Grangetown than Thornhill. We sang 'Amazing Grace' which in the crem hymn book had an extra verse that didn't appear in the service hymn sheet, a verse I don't recall singing before. Not everyone had brought their service sheets with them, so there was a little confusion which left people bemused, if smiling.

After a late lunch I went into the office with a few small jobs to complete, and then brought home with me the office copy of Windows 7 installation disks, to see if I could effect a system repair on the Acer. No luck. The DVD/CD drive certainly worked with other disks, but would not boot from the Windows installation disks, for reasons which I couldn't fathom. I was able to use one to create an ISO file and copy it to a flash drive, having had success with booting Linux from flash. This was a tricky process of trial and error to get right using only the resources of the Linux live flash version. No luck again. There seems to be enough of Windows operating system to block the use of anything other than a Windows backup taken from the Acer itself. Or else the CD firmware is rigged to prevent this. 

In the end, there's no alternative to getting rid of the offending operating system, and install Linux Mint. That little pleasure will have to wait until tomorrow.