Goodbye Windows 10, welcome Linux Mint 22

Awake and posting today's YouTube Morning Prayer link to Parish WhatsApp just before 'Thought for the Day' in which Paula Gooder spoke about Don Cupitt, controversial philosophical theologian, who has just died aged 90, man who asked questions which certainly rattled the cage of conservative traditionalists who think the have all the answers to questions of faith. He was labelled 'the atheist priest', for exposing the weakness of theism as a way of thinking about as inherited by traditional Christianity. I admit that what he wrote was too much like hard work for me, though the proposition that Christ's disciples should seek the divine above and beyond all accepted concepts of God, wasn't new to me from my own encounters with Eastern Orthodox mystical spirituality, the idea that the divine is unlike anything else in our experience, so we cannot say God is like this or that. We don't know. Unknowing is where we start seeking, desire and ardent longing is all we have. "we go by night, with only our thirst to light the way" as Sta Teresa said.

I went to the Eucharist at St Catherine's. We were ten this morning, including baby Seb, who gives a lot of pleasure to the grandparents who comprise the majority of the congregation. I picked up the veggie bag on the way home, and shared cooking lunch with Clare. I slept for over an hour after lunch, and then went for a circuit of the parks. It was cold, but late afternoon sunshine and clouds coloured by the sun as it reached the horizon were an added pleasure.

After supper, I installed Linux Mint 22.1 on my desktop workstation. It took about a quarter of an hour. Updating took longer. I needed to install Chrome and Audacity as a first step to my normal desktop apps. Transferring Chrome's bookmarks and passwords was more fiddly than I recall, and then my documents, which took somewhat longer. I decided which photo and video editors to use and installed them. As the workstation is fairly powerful, it'll be possible to use apps I've not bothered with before. There are new things to learn ahead, but for most everyday tasks, I'm up and running already. This new version of Mint is quick and good to look at. At last I'm free from Windows nags and forced hardware redundancy. Getting it all shipshape took less than three hours in total. Time for bed now.

Software annoyance

I celebrated the Eucharist at St Catherine's this morning with ten others, observing yesterday's Feast of St Peter and Paul. On the way home, I collected the week's veggy bag from the drop-off place, then cooked lunch, as Clare had a morning meeting in school. I needed a siesta afterwards, before going to Beanfreaks to collect the groceries Clare ordered, while she got on with making and bottling the strawberry jam. She said the strawberries were over-ripe, and the end product was a little more runny than she hope for, but to me it still tasted delicious.

Finally I settled down to record and edit Morning Prayer for tomorrow, but when it came to making it into a video slideshow on my new laptop, the Windows 10 Video Editor would not allow me to use the photos I had edited, and I don't know why. I had to revert to using a different video editor Movie Maker with the same photos and audio on my old slow desktop machine, and this worked as it ever did. The Video Editor app on this machine also worked using the same material when I checked later. I have a feeling that there's a slightly different version of the software, or operating system and it's behaving obstructively. Typical of Windows. If it can screw things up and annoy you to the point of despair it will. At least tomorrow's video is now safely uploaded to YouTube, ready for the morning, even if it did take far longer than I expected to finish the job.

It was nearly nine when I went out to the park to clear my head and complete my walk for the day. Clouds in the sky were beautiful shades of pink and grey. I notice two pairs of policemen walking around the edge of Llandaff Fields in opposite directions - looking for miscreants or homeless people camping I wonder?

Time wasted

After breakfast I knuckled down and made a couple of efforts at a first video service recording. The first was too long and that meant pruning texts I'd prepared yet again to get them the right length. I second try was OK, but with a second or so of irrelevant footage at the end I wanted to trim away. No a problem in a video editing suite on my Windows 10 PC, except that the rendered edited file wouldn't play full screen on a phone and was a tenth of the size it needed to be. It tried every rendering option I could think of, to no avail, and wasted hours trying. 

Just as annoying was the fact the the PC wouldn't recognise my phone. I had to save the edited video file to a SD card, to transfer it to my Linux laptop, which has no trouble at all recognising my phone and its supplementary storage. As a result of losing so much time, my daily walk started mid afternoon and finished in darkness, and it was even colder still today, so tomorrow I'll go out in my ageing ski jacket and wear gloves. Time to give up wearing sandals for the winter too.

I tried every method I could think of to trim the end of that video without success. I have wasted so much time on this today, without success. That imposes even more pressure to record each service in one straight take. I'm dreading it. Only late this evening did the PC finally decide that it could and would recognise my phone, long after I found a workaround and gave up hope. I wonder if it will remember again tomorrow,

State of Alarm - Day fifteen

In addition to domestic tasks and exercising today, I had to focus on writing and recording the bible study commentary for tomorrow. Clare did me proud by recording the scripture passages from Acts chapter eight on her phone and emailing them to me for editing in to the sound file. Her sound files were better quality than mine. Annoyingly, they were in a proprietary .3GP file format which were playable, but wouldn't load into Audacity for editing. 

Windows 10 was, as it is so often, unhelpful in resolving this. As it also was in refusing to connect to my four year old standard Samsung phone. It works a treat with any Linux device and with my ancient Chromebook, which offered a cloud based file conversion facility swiftly and effectively. It just meant transferring converted files by flash drive from Chromebook to Windows 10 which hosts the vital copy of Audacity I edit with. It was just before midnight by the time I emailed a audio file of twenty-one minutes length to Dave, and it was just inside the website's 25mb file upload limit.

Plenty of job satisfaction in hitting my deadline, with all the other daily tasks also completed. I think I shall sleep well tonight. Small signs of the infection rate slowing down in Spain, though the death rate remains high. The UK is gearing up now, preparing massive field hospitals for the flood tide of gravely sick patients which will arrive in the next two weeks. The rate of mass testing which has helped other countries grapple with covd-19 is still far too slow in being rolled out on a large scale. I don't understand why the UK government has been so slow to learn from others. Thinking we are an exception and can always afford to do things our own way could cost Britain dearly. It's yet more brexitis, sad to say.

Home and dry, nevertheless

After the torrential rain and flooded roads a few days ago, and prospect of more rain to come, we were left feeling uncertain about travelling home on Tuesday morning. As there were no extreme weather warnings for today, we decided to leave today instead, and packed after breakfast. Then the sun came out, so we walked on the beach and through the dunes for a couple of hours before lunch and then headed for home. There were only a few light showers all day! 

Clare was happy to return early as she has extra preparations to make for school this week. I did the shopping, then uploaded to Google Photos 290-odd pictures from our Oxwich stay, and edited them on-line. In the absence of a wi-fi connection, there was no point squandering mobile phone data allowance, especially given the flaky signal we had there. I tried old-school editing on the Linux laptop I took with me, but although the software is good, the poor resolution display on a machine nearly ten years old delivered misleading colour rendering, especially with large high quality photos.

I indulged myself by taking four cameras with me and using them in different situations, just for interest, as taking them by car wasn't a burden. With a poor display screen, comparing them was unsatisfactory, so I transferred the entire folder of these photos to the SD card on my Blackberry, for viewing purposes. As this is a modern sharp high resolution screen on a powerful device, the viewing experience was impressive, despite being small. It revealed mistakes I had made in trying to adjust photos using a screen not really fit for purpose, and that convinced me to leave editing until I could do so at home using a better screen. 

The laptop is OK for writing but not for editing photos. I still regret losing to a beer spillage while working a similarly aged Dell XPS a few years ago, which had a high res screen and ran Windows and Linux well. In most ways a Chromebook fits the bill. It's designed for 'always online' use, and can be used off-line, although differences between modes of use are a limitation, especially when it comes to saving a copy of work on a USB device for transfer. It's do-able, but calls for vigilance. 

Although 'always online' is the new normal with Windows, files created by use of the device's own apps are saved first to the device, easy to copy for transfer, and then  sync'd if/when it's on-line. For Chromebooks, it's the opposite way around. Normally this does not matter, but this difference becomes a noticeable irritant if working offline is inevitable.

Still, it's back to digital normal again now. It was noticeable that after powering up the router and signal booster on arriving home, that we were attached to the internet again within minutes, while the EE signal booster, which runs via the router, and normally runs very well, took several hours to settle down and deliver the usual service. Again, it's one of these things you don't notice, if you neither send nor receive mobile phone calls or texts in the house while the network sorts itself out and re-attaches the device. 

It's confusing if you find you cannot make a mobile call, and confusion is compounded nowadays as we can make WhatsApp or Skype calls via wi-fi as well as direct mobile phone calls. It's easy enough to forget or confuse what medium you're using, when not looking at the phone. That's if you've bothered to register the difference between the two services anyway.

I managed to get another couple of hours writing my latest story, which continues to grow in a way which keeps me interested and motivated. I had no idea when I started where this would take me. It's a story about a traveller, and while I have ideas about how it will end, I'm still not sure how long it will take or how to close the circle. What an adventure!

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.

The risk of over depending on the Cloud

It rained all day today, so I couldn't get out for a walk and didn't much feel like it anyway, as my affliction was more painful and energy sapping than usual. I spent some time writing, and backing up data from my newer Windows 10 laptop, to prepare for a Linux Mint installation and making it into a dual booting device. I am so fed up with the the length of time it takes to reach a browser or a word processor page I want to work on, often between three and five minutes. In spite of keeping it fully updated, this continues to be the case. 

The laptop's UEFI firmware makes Linux installation a bit tricky. If this fails, I have the option to get rid of Windows 10 altogether. I have a Windows 10 desktop PC, for guests to use, or if I need to run a one of the few proprietary Windows only programs I use occasionally. For the most part, apps I need are part of Linux and accessible so much quicker. Also Linux on a PC isn't at all reliant on Cloud data storage, unless you want it to be. Sure you can set up a Windows 10 account which doesn't rely on OneDrive storage, but device registration and essential information from it are still extracted and stored on line, and not always used in ways that are easy to determine or control. 

Whilst the Cloud is a useful resource, this is the price to be paid for having your data accessible on all kinds of devices. It risks taking too exclusive a hold on my information and workflow, Windows 10 relies on a decent internet connection to work as designed, and this slows things down, to my mind. Ever since local data storage became affordable, I've kept backups to hand. It was insurance against unreliable PCs in the old days. The more reliable Cloud storage is however, the more risk there is of losing the discipline to back things up. Then, if the worst happens - total loss of internet, Cloud storage access catastrophe, ransomware etc., you lose out, especially on recent stuff you've been working on, often things you most need.

Chromebooks are even more dependent on internet access, leaving you quite limited in what can be done off-line. It is however far quicker and less insecure than any Windows set up. I'll be better off with Linux, as I can control where and how I store the data I use, and maintaining backup habits that don't rely on the Cloud. It's a matter of getting around to tackling the installation procedure I've been rehearsing and putting off for some time. 

Linux to the rescue

It's been an uneventful and quiet few days, cool and overcast weather giving no incentive to venture far, except for re-painting the front railings and taking exercise. I walked to St Luke's to celebrate the Friday evening Mass, and was surprised that nobody arrived. What I hadn't realised was that I'd put the incorrect time in my diary, arriving half an hour after disappointed worshippers had went away. As I was painting the fence, Fr Mark arrived with the keys, but neither of us thought to check the time of the service with each other. I was quite upset with myself, as I'd finished painting, cleaned up in good time and could easily have left and arrived in good time.

I was doubly careful to arrive in good time to celebrate the Saturday morning Mass, for which four people turned up. Mary, our neighbour from opposite asked if I could take a look at her desktop PC, which was malfunctioning. It's an ancient Windows XP box, at least ten years old. An inspection revealed that the hardware is malfunctioning. It boots, and then reboots before reaching a full desktop making a tiny click sound which indicates a motherboard trip switch being triggered, probably due to the thermal sensor malfunctioning, or doing its proper job, or reacting to a motherboard voltage irregularity.

On odd occasions in the past, I've recovered a computer from this kind of failure by taking the back off and sucking out the accumulated dust, especially from the CPU and PSU fans. As the machine is so old, and given that Windows XP is no longer supported with security patches, it hardly seemed worth the effort. Reliability and stability is a crucial issue for older users. I hear enough complaints about Windows 10, because of the way frequent updates make for variability in time elapsed from stitch on to, say for example, starting work on an actual document in a word processor. Then there are all those notifications, nags and warnings which worry people who are unsure what the can and cannot ignore. It's daunting when you just want to do familiar things, and find all those so called 'helpful' digital admonitions are distracting enough to make you forget what you intended to do.

Mary is a light computer user, doing a little surfing, on-line flight booking and emailing, nothing more. A couple of years ago I gave her Kath's old Acer laptop, of a similar age to her desktop Dell. I set it up to run a lightweight version of Linux Mint as a backup device. It hasn't seen much use until now as it involved her getting used to a different kind of keyboard. No fun for a touch typist I guess. We set it up on her workstation, attached the Epson Stylus printer and powered it all up. It booted to the desktop and started Libre Office in less time that a Windows 10 machine with ten times the amount processing power. Moreover, the operating system made light work of finding the relevant printer driver and completing a test print successfully. About five minutes from switch on altogether. 

On a Windows 10 machine this initial process might take half an hour, but not just due to boot time. The rapid expansion of the market for high street digital print-shops in recent years is an indication that occasional printing need is a deterrent to owning and managing a printer for many consumers of digital media. If you have a printer less than two or three years old, Windows 10 will find and download and install drivers automatically. For older devices, the process breaks down, search for the right download site has to be made by the user. The involves identifying the precise version and region of the world the hardware is destined to operate in. There can be thousands of options, so there's no simple straightforward solution to getting 'legacy' devices to work. 

Some older devices never get driver upgrades and have to be scrapped. The cost of all this wastage, not to mention the toxic waste generated by computer redundancy, both to the economy and the environment, is unimaginable. New improved feature sets are always touted as beneficial, but for the majority of basic users, reliability and usability are what's most needed. These essentials have certainly improved over the past thirty years, but so has their complexity, making users ever more dependent on after-sales services provided by manufacturers.

Anyway, Mary is now set up properly with a computer and printer that's quite quick and reliable, doesn't suffer from viruses, or need unending updates to sabotage her workflow. Best of all, it cost both of us nothing to acquire, and me just a few hours of set up time, some years ago. I'm starting to think my remaining laptop running Windows 10 could benefit from the same treatment. The trouble is migrating data from two separate user areas, and learning how to do a clean install from a UEFI motherboard 64 bit device. I don't spend as much time as I used, to messing about with computers these days, let alone using them. For most purposes these days I use a tablet or a Chromebook, and just need transfer files to one Windows 10 device to print with my trusty HP  lazer printer, which I know works with Linux as well. Is it worth the effort?

Back at the workstation

Yesterday, I celebrated the eight o'clock Eucharist at St Catherine's, and for the rest of the day we didn't do anything special, apart from a walk in the park, as the weather wasn't wonderful for most of the day. It did however start designing a poster to advertise Rachel's gig at The Apothecary on the first weekend of July when she comes over from Arizona to visit us. This involved consultations on information and photo content, back and forth on WhatsApp followed by trial and error. At first I used Libre Office, but had to give up in frustration, as there was a single feature to do with overlay and transparency I couldn't find, either because it doesn't exist or because the instruction manual is not as clear as it needs to be.

I started up my old Windows Vista workstation, which worked without hesitation. As Microsoft no longer supports this operating system, browser use is plagued by security warning bells and whistles, but nevertheless it works. I was surprised by the speed at which MS Word and Publisher started up and continued to operate. Publisher 2000 isn't as sophisticated and complex as successive versions, but I'm familiar with it, and it just works for my limited purposes. Far too many modern software packages impose on users more than they ask for, and make things more complicated than necessary. Likewise hardware. My ten year old Acer, starts and runs faster than any Windows 10 system on modern hardware, because it's not as dependent on constant interaction with internet servers and that unending procession of updates patching a fundamentally flawed system.

Admittedly the system did crash a couple of times initially and needed a hard reset, but I suspect it wouldn't have been necessary if I'd run CCleaner before starting work. Although I haven't entirely forgotten how Publisher works, it did take some concentration and recourse to help files to get what I had failed to find in Libre Office. By the end of the evening, I'd composed trial draft version and emailed it to Rachel in Phoenix for comments. The devil will certainly be in the detail.

   

Print user sabotage

I spent the morning preparing an order of service for Monday's funeral and finishing my Sunday sermon. In the afternoon I received an email with photos of a hand-written eulogy for transcription and editing. In the meanwhile I found time to go to Lidl's for weekend shopping, and take a walk.

When I got around to printing everything off, the church office printer, a recent HP Envy wireless model, started announcing now and then that the print cartridge could not be authenticated as the correct one. By stopping and starting it, and rebooting the computer, I was able to print off what I needed to. Properly installed HP devices announce when printer ink is low and remind you to order new cartridges, but the message in question was on the small LED screen on the printer itself. 

This same printer was in use here this time last year, with no problems. I'm not even sure if it's had enough use to see a change of cartridges during the past twelve months. About six months ago, I read of this happening as a result of a software modification slipped in by HP when updating their devices to work with Windows 10 changes. Each 'authentic' ink cartridge carries a unique digital i/d to distinguish it from cloned bargain copies made in the far East. 

This has been so for some time for certain newer models, but the roll-out of the software modification that makes identification of the true from the fake has taken somewhat longer it seems. It's a printer ink equivalent to digital rights management for music and photos. Except. Except, that it doesn't work perfectly, universally, and I can imagine why this shouldn't be the case, number one reason being world wide inconsistency in connecting to the Big Data systems which harbour such tiny morsels of information, and handle billions of related enquiries daily.

I have no doubt that the office printer cartridge is authentic, and probably comes from the supplier which sold the printer. It's not even as if it's a new cartridge, but one in normal use, until a Windows update sequence a couple of weeks ago. If my memory serves me correctly, it's possible to roll back the most recent HP update to see off that error message preventing the machine from working. This takes time to figure out however. I am increasingly short of time, care and patience when it comes to Windows 10, and clever stunts like this pulled by giant money making corporations to protect their interests by placing their clients at a disadvantage. 

Past operating system updates have forced redundancy on older hardware, still working well. Great for profits, but it helps generate an ever bigger mountain of waste electronic hardware, much of which is not properly re-cycled. You think you own a system you bought, and are then informed you're no more than a leaseholder with limited rights over the software to drive your device Thank heavens for open source software alternatives, and the beginnings of open source hardware, both of which leave the owner in control of their assets.

Anyway, with a little messing around funeral texts and Sunday sermon got printed off. Then I began to wonder if I'd be able to get this sorted before I needed to print again, for next weekend. So, I set to, and produced a Remembrance Sunday sermon a week in advance, and printed it off despite the warning messages, just in case. Forewarned is forearmed!

Getting ready to travel again

There's been a lot to do this past couple of days, as well as pack my bags ready for my next tour of locum duty in Mojácar. I started yesterday with a hypertension review at the GP surgery, then with a haircut from Stavros my favourite joke telling hairdresser. After lunch, I visited our Osteomyologist Kay, for a back treatment. It was necessary, despite a fair reduction in discomfort these past few days. It's the unseen impact a fall can inflict on bone structure you have to consider, without the necessary corrective measures it can leave you vulnerable, and less flexible than is desirable. I then walked into town to do some banking, and made a visit to the CBS RadioNet office for a catch up session with Ashley and Julie, as CBS set about recruiting a new business crime reduction manager. Needless to say, I was late home for supper.

Today I had another visit to the School of Optometry to collect my new driving glasses, delivered in record time, since my appointment last Friday. It's a pleasure to go there as the team are so pleasant to deal with and superbly organised. Dealing with eyesight issues is a delicate and sensitive affair requiring a great deal of close contact with clients, and much reassurance. This certainly is a centre of excellence Cardiff can be proud of.

It's surprising how many small things escape attention when packing to go away for any length of time. I locked and strapped up my case three times during the evening, as I kept on thinking of things I needed to take with me. This time around I have to take a Windows laptop with me, as there isn't a machine available in the Chaplain's residence. I never go anywhere without my Chromebook, but I'm reluctant to rely on its wireless only network printing routine, it case I have problems with it. Apart from annoying issues with legacy printer drivers, devices running Windows 10 generally hook up to a printer easily and quickly. I took a Windows laptop last year, and will take it again this time around. For the sake of keeping my cabin bag weight down, however, I decided not to take my DSLR camera kit, which is a pity.

I bought a small light Acer Windows 10 device last year, to take with me on occasions like this, but had to give it to Kath to take with her to the USA, as Rhiannon's laptop was not fit for purpose when she brought it to me at the weekend. It's running fine now after a Windows re-install, so Clare can return it for Rhiannon to use when she goes up to Kenilworth to Kath's for the start of their Arizona trip next week. Altogether my case and hand baggage weigh twenty kilos, well within the allowance, and as much as I want to manage, while my back gently recovers for yesterday's vital therapy.

Microsoft mess

Ann and I went to St Catherine's for the Sunday Eucharist today, Clare stayed in bed. Rhiannon and Kath left for Kenilworth just after we left for church. Fr HUw Rhydderch, retired Rector of Dinas Powis took the service, speaking about Harvest and about St Francis' celebration of creation. I think this is the first Sunday this year when I haven't had a service to take. It was a welcome break.

When they arrived last night, I was presented with the laptop I gave to Rhiannon last year to repair. It's suffering from incredible slowness and a tendency to shut down on the job every 15 minutes. The key issue is to establish if this is a hardware or software fault, and the Windows 10 software plays hard to get. There's no doubt the machine has been abused in practice, put into sleep mode, or hibernating due to lack of battery power, either/both occurring while Windows 10 updates the security library, or does a system update. It was 94 days since the device had last successfully installed its anti-virus database, and the list of failed system updates reached back beyond that. 

With so many stop-starts, no wonder the system is always catching up and failing to complete, especially if power settings, arbitrarily tweaked, force it to shut down again mid-stream, even when it's on mains power or has a full battery. This represents a strategic failure in design, refusing to take into account real world use by teenage girls, let alone busy mobile using executives. What a contrast to Google's Chromebook speedy and seamless way of working, regardless of its limitations on file transfer and printer connectivity.

Microsoft has the de facto standard user interface with Windows. It makes everything harder to use for everyday non-technical users than Android, Apple Mac, Chrome or Android user interfaces, and its technical weaknesses make it easier to not use properly day to day, causing system failures, not to mention outright abuse of systemic weaknesses by malware. 

A computer should be as simple and as safe to operate for everyday communications purposes as a phone, a fridge or a washing machine. We're now entering the era of 'smart' domestic devices, and by nature of their computer operating systems, Windows or otherwise, the contain similar vulnerabilities. How amazing our willingness to put up with all these fundamental weaknesses in an effort to keep up with consumer fashion! When will we ever learn?

Kath had intended to borrow Rhiannon's small laptop for travel to USA with Clare to see Rachel in two weeks time. As it's currently not fit for purposes, she asked if I could lend her a small laptop instead. I readily agreed, although I'd intended to take my small Acer with me to Spain next week. It was, however, more of a problem to set up a user area on this machine for Kath to work with, than I had imagined, as Microsoft steadfastly refused to co-operate and implement a suitable file system on the machine with which to sync her existing OneDrive file system. I had to let Kath take the device home with her, and figure out how to complete the process, in order to get it to work, as it should, to her benefit.

There'd be far fewer problems using Linux, but proprietary software is hard to use on a Linux base apart from the amazing wonderful Libre Office, which can match anything MS Office produces. 

Software - built-in redundancy frustrations

There were ten of us again for the Eucharist at St John's Canton this morning. I had a phone call from the GP surgery late yesterday afternoon telling me my prescription was ready, so I walked there to collect it and have it made up at the pharmacy opposite before going home. 

After lunch, I went into town and met with Ashley to catch up on CBS affairs. Then we went hunting for a copy of MS Publisher, to make ready for the autumn newsletter publication, but we couldn't find a Microsoft Office bundle which includes it. 

It's ages since we last needed to change software. For the most part we use Free Open Source material. I've worked with an old copy of MS Publisher 2000 for the past fifteen years and never needed anything else. I doubt if it can be installed on a Windows 10 machine, if I could lay hands on the original disk, as 64 bit computer hardware running Windows 10 can make it impossible to run older software. It's not often I need to use Publisher, but it's inconvenient having to spend time learning to use an alternative program that's unlikely to be compatible with MS Office generated files. I need to do some research to find a sustainable solution.

Early to bed tonight, faced with an early walk to Sophia Gardens bus station for a 07.15 coach to London to see my sister June.

    

  

Tech talk with Kath

We all slept in and breakfasted late this morning, then went into town on a shopping expedition - well, it was so for Kath, Anto and Rhiannon, as their usual busy work schedule rarely permits such an outing into nearby Coventry, Leamington, or Birmingham. So, bank holiday Monday shopping is on the to-do list, even if there's no urgency to purchase. It's leisure for those who often shop on-line.

While the others took the bus, Kath and I walked in together through the park, taking the opportunity to talk about future Wiggledance plans. They are putting together a project in which they'll work with a research scientist investigating the nature of touch. Dance is an activity which involves a great deal of physical contact between participants, and touch is such an important element in healthy bonding between parents and children. Wriggledance specialises in working with young children in dance, so all sorts of possibilities will emerge as the project develops.

She also told me about her recent experience of becoming an Apple Mac user with her co-director Lucy, as a result of their 'Colours of Me' show. This made use of video projectors driven by software written only for the Mac, requiring the company to procure Mac Minis, which both of them can now use for administrative purposes, in between times. As a small scale arts enterprise they've acquired free Microsoft Office 365 software for the Mac, as this gives them the scale of on-line storage they need for their work. She's delighted with how it all works, now she's got used to the Apple keyboard layout.

The downside of the Mac is that her physical PC back-up drives aren't compatible with the Mac without paying for additional software patches. She still has to rely upon her Windows 10 Acer laptop when she's out and about, and can back up to that from OneDrive cloud storage. You can't be too careful, when there's so much at stake. Despite being reasonably equipped, Windows 10 on the Acer is still a source of frustration to her, because of the latency of some of its file system read and write operations. This had been my experience too. I'm not surprised so many business users don't want to upgrade from Windows 7. It was quicker.

We met up for coffee and a light lunch at the Queen Street Costa Coffe shop, then went to the clothes shops. I took myself off to hunt for a sun-hat to take to Spain with me, as I left the one I usually wear in the Winzerkeller we visited in Rüdesheim last week. I found a suitable white cotton cap of a design I feel at ease in wearing in TK Maxx, after fruitless visits to several other stores. By this time it was drizzling, so I took a 61 bus home, which arrived conveniently, given the diminished holiday service only minutes after reaching the stop.

The others arrived home a short while after me, then Kath, Anto and Rhiannon left for Kenilworth, leaving us to ponder on a happy family weekend, and start thinking about our next travels. I have some flights to book for locum assignments in Montreux and Mojacar, for later in the year.

The shadow of terrorist violence falls again

Yesterday was uneventful, unmemorable, a day of rain showers mixed with sunshine. I went for a walk in Pontcanna Fields during a bright spell in the afternoon, but got soaked in a sudden shower on my way home. Unusually, I didn't spot anything to pick up from the streets on the way there, but along the river path collected thirteen items, half pulled from briars in the undergrowth.

Before this morning's 'class Mass' at St German's, I took the car to N.G. Motors for its MOT test. After the service, I went to check on the church hall office PC, which we'd left running on Sunday to address the update backlog problem. It was running, but had stalled, in need of permission to continue. Once rebooted, it completed a lengthy update process, lasting twenty minutes, then declared that another batch was available to download. So, it was a matter of setting it off and leaving it again. 

The internet link is stable enough, but very slow, which may mean the Powerline network set-up is not being as efficient as usual in sending a receiving data. Is a workaround possible, apart from relocating the machine elsewhere in the building nearer the router, at least for the purposes of updating? The church hall ring-main is extensive. At present the distance is forty metres, so who knows what electrical interference may be affecting transmission?

By the time I decided to give up on machine minding for the day, Clare had received a text and sent one to met, to say the car was ready for collection. This was most fortunate as it meant that I didn't need to go home and return at the end of the day, or possibly next day if any repairs were needed, to collect the car. So delighted my venerable auto is still roadworthy! It meant I could call into the Lidl's on the way back from retrieving the car, and stock up with additional food items for the coming days, during which Clare will be with sister-in-law Ann over in East Anglia from tomorrow. 

As I was relaxing after lunch, a brief but urgent phone call came from my sister June to switch on the telly, as a major incident had been declared in London. That's how I learned about the terrorist incident outside the House of Commons. Given the gravity of the 7/7 bombing, I feared the worst as I switched on. With four deaths reported, including a policeman, it was an appalling incident, but I was grateful that it wasn't worse involving a truck bomb or lethal toxic attack. Paramedics were on the scene very quickly and police had the area under security lock-down very quickly after the initial incident had concluded. The assailant's car, used as a simple lethal weapon was travelling on public roads, with possibly the best video surveillance and policing in Britain. It's impossible to scan minds for deadly ill-will, however. The stories of all those involved will dominate the media for days to come. 

This week, some airlines working on Middle Eastern routes are starting to ban electronic devices larger than a phone from cabin baggage, due to reports of terrorist techies disguising explosives to resemble batteries used in laptops. Placing them in the aircraft's hold in robust containers would limit damage from any undetected device. Working out exactly how to manage this, so that no passenger has their electronic baggage stolen in transit to or from the flight will be challenging. I don't suppose it'll be too long before this becomes ubiquitous on the majority of flights, even though the risk of an attack on an airport terminal is regarded as far more likely than successfully detonating a bomb on a 'plane, in the light of rigorous security  measures already in place. It's a strange 'new normal' we've had to get used to in over the fifteen years since 9/11. 

What a hostile world we've created for our descendents, despite all our best idealist intentions!

  

Future travel prospects

Another wet morning. I was collected at ten for a funeral service in Pidgeon's chapel, and this was followed by burial at Western Cemetery. Light rain persisted throughout. I felt sorry for the small band of mourners at the graveside, huddled under umbrellas on waterlogged clay terrain. The water table on this site is a couple of meters below ground, but in wet weather, open graves frequently flood giving undertakers problems and mourners additional distress. It's not always possible to pump all the water out of a grave beforehand, and water can seep in again within fifteen to twenty minutes.

I was home and dry again by noon. After lunch I paid the balance over the phone on our Rhine cruise in May. I couldn't get the web payment facility on the website accept a card transaction, but a lady on the end of the Riviera Travel enquiry line was able to put it through, and it didn't take any longer. We're both looking forward to this greatly.

Then I did some more long drawn out Windows 10 computer updates, as each of mine at different times comes to the top of its particular queue. I also updated Libre Office on all my machines, the least onerous of tasks. Each new update brings improvements, some of them take a while to discover if you don't look at the published change-log. Improvements in speed however, are immediately noticeable and welcome every time. It's rarer and rarer that I ever have to use MS Word these days. 

This weekend I bought a copy of Linux Format magazine fro the first time in several years, as it had an up to date Linux Mint 18.1 distribution disk with it. These days I find that less and less of the technical content of the magazine is material I can understand. There's much about web computing and content management I have not kept abreast with, and have become less interested in how to do new things than I am in issues like user friendliness, or the social and cultural impact of media on life today. I still can and do troubleshoot computer problems for ordinary users, but that's now the limit of my expertise.

I whiled away a little time trying to run the live Mint distribution CD on a laptop with UEFI boot software, but without success. I am so nervous of making an irreversible change, which requires me to find and pay a real expert to put right. Progress, if it is progress, is leaving me behind, I admit.

By late afternoon the rain stopped and the sun shone, so I went for a walk to Pontcanna Fields before cooking supper, collecting a dozen pieces of litter on my way. So far, rough mental calculation still indicates that I pick up an average of half a dozen for each kilometre I walk. There's more than this on the ground for sure, but sometimes after rain, it's difficult to retrieve.

Just as I was getting ready for bed, I had an email from a churchwarden at St John's Montreux asking if I was available at the end of the summer. That's when I next have free time so I emailed my availability to her, and found myself quite excited at the prospect of an all new assignment, as I attempted to relax into sleep. I can hardly believe that it's nearly five years since we last visited Switzerland. My focus has been mainly on Spain since then, so the prospect of returning to a familiar and much loved part of Europe as a locum, and bringing my French back into use is going to be another challenge.
   

Publication challenge

I went to St German's this morning and celebrated Mass quietly in the side chapel for a change, as the school is on holiday and no class was in attendance today. The OT reading for the day from the Book Ecclesiasticus extolled the practical dimensions of wisdom. It struck me that it applied to both electors and potential episcopal candidates. I wondered if the electoral college would be listening to the same readings in the Cathedral in their morning worship.

In the church hall after Mass, day centre manager Marisa appeared, all freshly suntanned after a holiday in Montego Bay. I found myself thinking about my study tour there back in 1982. She spoke about the sand being sharp, not just hot, and that sprung a memory from deep down. Some of those gold-to-white sandy beaches have, I believe, a high gypsum content. Its powdered crystals are more abrasive than common silica, and this you can feel, if your feet aren't hardened to it. 

The only time I felt this was when I walked barefoot on a beach in Jamaica on a fishing trip, helping to launch a large balsa wood longboat from the shore, in the company of a nephew of Charlie Smith my Jamaican curate in St Paul's Bristol. The island has undergone huge development due to the holiday industry since then, yet still widespread chronic poverty is never far away, as Marisa observed on her dream holiday, I'm pleased to say.

I came home with a little job to do. Peter wanted to create a template using an existing design of which he had a paper copy, as a frame for editable text for a publication he hoped to email out. He could cut and paste a copy to scan into a pdf by cut and paste, but the file was too big and refused to send. I started by telling him how to change the scan resolution settings, and end by taking the job home to see if I could produce what he wanted, and find out the easiest way to teach him how to achieve this for himself. Fortunately familiarity with a variety of tools for editing scanned images and using OCR made this not too hard a task. 

Nowadays I rarely use anything other than Libre Office, but realised I needed to produce an editable file to load into MS Word and not ruin the layout. I used MS Word on-line for testing as the computer I was using didn't have Word installed. But Microsoft's ODF file format isn't wholly compatible with the internationally recognised Open Source ODF format, and neither is their DOCX file format, so loading them obliges you to re-format work to be of any use. It's particularly onerous when working with text and graphics. Eventually, I switched to a machine which has MS Word installed, plus Libre Office, and confirmed the findings. Then I had an idea, and saved the Libre Office product as an old fashioned bog standard DOC file. To my delight, this loaded perfectly into MS Word. Libre Office has been able to create and to some extent edit PDFs for years. This has only appeared in recent version of MS Word. Previously an extra PDF plug-in was required for MS Word to match up to Libre Office, which is still evolving, getting slicker, more capable with each update thanks to collaboration within the global Open Source software programming community.

Several years ago the government administration of Munich converted to Linux desktop software and use of Libre Office. The majority of networks linking computers run Linux anyway, but this was a major step forward, destined to save tens of millions of euros. Since Microsoft decided to move one of its regional headquarters to Munich, the government has been debating the abandonment of this policy and is proposing to revert to MS Windows 10, at least optionally, no doubt supplied at a bargain discount. 

Major challenges to Microsoft's near monopoly of money making desktop software are bound to be met with moves of this kind. The competitive option, however, is to create free software which works at least as well as the paid version, and meets the actual needs of users rather trying to manipulate users into acquiring new needs, or even worse, forcing redundancy on to perfectly serviceable hardware by refusing to update drivers that are compatible with Windows upgrades. If it wasn't for open source software engineers writing or customising hardware drives Microsoft can't be bothered with any more, a lot more devices would fail to work, and the mound of electronic detritus would be even bigger. 

   

Blogger's nightmare

While I was writing my Sunday sermon yesterday morning I had a phone call from a worried Owain. He'd got back late last night from a week off in Berlin, and had just got around to checking his music and media blog for the first time in a week, only to discover that the homepage wasn't delivering any content. All his content is hosted on a web server we've been sharing for the past ten years. He needed to check the access details before logging into the server, and it was quicker to ask me than rummage through his paper document hoard. I was soon able to verify the information, and left him to investigate.

Later in the day he came to Cardiff to have supper with friends and called in to leave his overnight bag as he was stopping over to watch the Wales v England rugby match, and have a drink with us first. He was still waiting to hear from his mate who designed and built his website, and set it up for him using WordPress on our shared server. He suspected a broken link to the SQL database, but didn't know how to fix it. I couldn't help him as I never had occasion to learn how to use the software, having used Blogger exclusively since I started in November 2005, so it was a matter of just waiting. I enquired about site  back-ups, and he admitted he didn't really know much about what happened where his own site was concerned, a thought which gave me the horrors.

Owain writes and edits copy for a living, daily uploading stuff to an assortment of sites with  more experience than me of different content management systems. I hired server space for us to share not long after I started blogging, and he's used it more than I have, both of us using the excellent CuteFTP browser based app for server file management. I thought he was better acquainted with back end stuff than I am, but apparently not. 

At the time we got started with the web server, I hadn't checked he knew about backups or made this part of his discipline when it came to managing his own web based publications. So, I feel as if I am partly responsible if this glitch turns into a catastrophic failure, and Owain loses the past three years of blogging output.

Part of my evolution as a computer user meant that twelve years ago, all my data was kept on hardware which lived with me, some of which, if needed on-line, would be 'backed up' to the web server. My, how things have changed with the advent of Cloud based computing in the past five years. I still keep hardware backups of everything, and that's a bit of an effort when Windows 10 with OneDrive is the ever so handy default. I'm still reluctant to entrust my entire digital life to web storage. If things can go wrong they may well do, sooner or later. And there's also the threat of getting hacked, and ransomware attacks out there to insure against as well.

I'm crossing my fingers this'll be easily resolved. It's taught me another lesson about being those who seek my help and advice about computing matters both understand and are properly informed. There are some good aspects of this troublesome situation, however. It's the first time anything has gone wrong for Owain with his blog since he got started. This shows how reliable, easy and user friendly it has become to make and run a custom website. Also, he now has the motivation and need to know more about troubleshooting and tackling server issues when his helpful techie friends are un-contactable. But it's not over until it's over!

    

Late night success

Failure to recover those Garrucha photos was still bugging me, after midnight, when I should have gone to bed, but I would have only dreamed about the annoyance anyway, and wondered what I did wrong. So I googled and found a free 'try before you buy' Windows 10 file recovery program

I'd not seen before (it depends of the key words you enter into Google search), then to my delight, it delivered the lost photos within seconds of downloading and running it. It's called EaseUS data recovery program. Well done, those who designed and provided it.

Needless to say, I edited the pictures and uploaded them to Google Photos, as I'd intended to do this afternoon. Such a relief, to find this, regardless of the sleep I may lose catching up. One of the benefits of retirement is, what happens on Monday mornings doesn't often really matter now.

Looking through recovered photos, including more of the industrial site, I got some key information from John, a retired engineer, at this morning's service, which finally made sense of the place. Firstly the narrow gague railway track didn't use an engine to bring the ore trucks (or 'drams', as they were known in South Wales pit parlance) from the inland mines, but were towed by cable partly powered by the weight of empty trucks returning. Just like the transport systems my father worked on for thirty years of his life underground, and became an acclaimed expert in running, to the point where he wrote and published a book on the subject called 'Colliery Haulage and Rope Splicing. I still have his handwritten original draft at home.

John also pointed out that the strange structure, subject of my conjecture, wasn't buried remains of furnaces, but a level ramp where the the trucks ended their journey and unloaded ore, possibly to a long chute for the last hundred metres journey to a ship's hold. This makes sense of its careful solid construction. It means there's no trace visible of smelting furnaces that might have been on the site, but I daresay soil on cleared and tidied up ground tells its own story when analysed. 

Aberfan remembered

While eating breakfast this morning, I listened to BBC Radio 4 on the Nexus tablet, first the news and then Sunday Worship, as it was from Wales, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster. The Reverend Roy Jenkins presented it, a Baptist Minister who trained in Cardiff Baptist colleague at the same time as I was at St Mike's. We've known each other since then. He's worked for BBC Wales as their religious affairs guy for decades, and continues in retirement to present programmes. 

When I was at St John's, he involved me in a broadcast round table discussion programme, and every now and then we bump into each other at the opera, or on the street in the city centre. Coincidentally, earlier this week, I received an email from him, after a weekend visit to Malaga, where he'd gone to the Harvest Festival Eucharist at St George's. He'd seen a mention of me on their website, and was curious that someone else was there instead, so I replied, telling him that I'd been redeployed since.

This morning's broadcast was a real tour de force, with hymns and readings which were important at the time of that tragedy, which occurred in a village in the neighbouring mining valley to the west of where I was born and grew up. There were also interviews with several ministers and lay people from the community, some of whom had lost children attending the school inundated by slurry from that unstable coal tip. I was especially impressed by a lay woman and a minister who spoke of how it was prayer that kept them going and enabled them to survive the aftermath of this disaster, and do more with their lives.

I left for the Mojacar Sunday Eucharist thinking about this, and resolved to introduce my sermon on the theme of persistence  to getin prayer, by speaking first about what I'd heard. It made the sermon a bit longer, but as most of  the congregation were my age, if not older, their memory of this event, and its repercussions all over Britain and the world, drew looks of recognition from many in the fifty strong congregation.

I succeeded in leaving home without any reading glasses, but was able to borrow a pair from Fr Alan to get me through, even though they were not my prescription. My driving glasses would not have been up to the task. It's a long time since I last left home without reading glasses. Perhaps I was still preoccupied with what I'd been listening to on the radio.

My personal memories of the Aberfan disaster are twofold. Firstly, in the week after, there were people out in the streets of Bristol city centre, where I was working in a Shell-BP office at the time, collecting for the Aberfan appeal, a sign of the national sympathy that emerged. Secondly, it was, I think, the first Friday of my first University half term weekend, so Clare and I, married two and a half months went over for the weekend to my parents in Ystrad Mynach, ten miles from Aberfan. Little else was on our minds apart from what had happened that morning.

Late the same evening, Archbishop Glyn Simon, who ordained me three years later, appeared on the family black and white telly to give a late night epilogue attempting to interpret the disaster, since he spoke about where God was in the midst of this unfolding tragedy. Afterwards, I remember my father, who'd worked in mining most of his life, who kept faith with reservations about the church, and was skeptical about many things, commented approvingly on what the Archbishop said. As an aspiring ordinand, this was a relief, given how skeptical Dad was at that time about me being ordained!

After the service half a dozen of us stopped at a popular Heladeria on their way home to have a drink and chat together. This is a regular occurrence here throughout the year, and the proprietor expresses his appreciation by sending us tapas - not just olives and crunchy nibbles, but also salchichon, cake and ice cream. Amazing generosity.

After a late lunch, I settled down to transferring photos of yesterday's visit to Garruch from the camera SD card to my laptop for editing and uploading. Disaster struck when I sent to delete several poor quality images, and ended up deleting fifty, because Windows Explorer, with its little tick box options for every file, doesn't behave the way I'm used to. I tells you how many you are about to delete, but in small print it's easy no to read in the middle of a routine file management operation. 

I downloaded one of the Windows recommended file u-delete program, installed and ran it. Deleted files were identified for recovery after a time consuming scan, but the program wouldn't allow me recover them without first paying for a subscription. OK, except that the download failed to mention it wasn't free. I did another search, found a free Open Source software package which downloaded and worked fine. This revealed that just four of the fifty three photos lost were recoverable, for no explicable reason, as I'd done nothing with the SD card since deleting the photos. I can only conclude the file damage was a consequence of the Windows 10 file deletion routine.

Hateful little tick boxes against every file managed by Windows Explorer by default work in such a way that you can leave boxes ticked, navigate beyond view of them in the files window, and forget that you have more ticked than you can see. Where you're copying them somewhere else or deleting, this is a recipe for havoc. It's totally untrustworthy, as a file management tool in this context. You can reconfigure to dismiss the hateful boxes, but why on earth this dangerous facility should be enabled by default is a mystery to me. One more thing which designers and programmers of user interfaces think is helpful when it isn't.

Thankfully, the batch of photos are all of Garrucha, taken yesterday. I can return, walk the same route and reproduce them, for my own interest, if nobody else's. Strange to say, but after I'd realised there was no option but to re-take the photos, I remembered another occasion when I had to do this. It was during a study visit to Jamaica in 1982, with a couple of film cameras - a Practica SLR and a Ricoh pocket half frame camera. I still have the former, but don't recall what happened to the latter. 

The high humidity level caused the SLR's shutter to malfunction. I developed  photos while I was there. When I found I'd lost a lot of valuable photos of my journey across the island, I was able to re-trace my steps and take another batch with the Ricoh. Thankfully I had time and a hire car, having saved money from my travel grant by having local contacts offering me hospitality. All those photos are digitized from the original slides and reside somewhere in my archives.

This evening I went to the beach nearby to watch the full moon rise and take photos. Unfortunately there was too much cloud and too little to capture anything of any interest. Very disappointing, but a pleasant hour on the sea shore, listening to the waves on a mild evening, waiting to see the moon, nevertheless. Maybe tomorrow.