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.

    

Data recovery

Cardiff city centre was busy and full of rugby fans today, so we walked to Leckwith to catch a bus to take us to Penarth. A covering of grey clouds, a slight chill wind and comparative absence of people taking their leisure gave the promenade a wintry feel. We had lunch in the pier restaurant, including an excellent 'home made' broccoli and stilton soup. Then we walked along the cliff top for an hour before heading back up into the town to catch a bus home.

With my Sunday sermon already prepared and printed out, I had time to work on retrieving and then removing data from the dead Dell XPS. A hefty machine with 'old school' modular construction, its key components, memory, CPU, network cards, hard drive are all accessible through different panels underside. I was able to find and remove the hard drive very easily. A decade ago I bought an adaptor interface that enabled a CD/DVD/HDD to connect to a PC via USB. It's come in useful for a variety of reasons over the years, but I'd  only ever had occasion to use the IDE not the SATA adaptor. The drive from the Dell is the first SATA one I've come across, so fitting it correctly was something I had to work out carefully. 

To my great pleasure it worked without incident. The drive, an early type 500GB has a couple of FAT format partitions for Windows and a couple of EXT2 partitions for Linux. Thankfully, I have an old dual boot Windows/Linux desktop machine, same age as the Dell, which is now only used for a handful of legacy programs I need occasionally to use. I fired it up into Linux Mint, which saw the attached drive immediately, and was able to transfer, albeit slowly, all files from the various partitions of the Dell drive to the safety of a new USB3 drive acquired earlier in the year. If it was possible to get an economical repair done on the Dell, I could send it off, knowing it was free of data that should be kept away from prying eyes.

I was disappointed there was no episode of 'Beck' on BBC Four tonight, as I'd expected a longer series run. Instead, another Swedish crime drama series 'Arne Dahl' shown in double episodes, with a diverse expert team assembled to apply themselves to very difficult cases, all interwoven with lots of personal relationship stories and back history stuff. I found it a bit long winded, and I began to get impatient ninety minutes into the two hour show. I preferred the concentration of 'Beck' episodes and the issues exposed. As with many high tech crime dramas these days, much is made of the ability to track cellphone users and pinpoint their locations. Is the technology portrayed in use that quick and slick to deliver results, or is it dramatic license, I wonder.

  

Lost, unsynced by Windows 10

I can't believe that we could have so much hassle as a consequence of the upgrade of the main office admin computer from Windows 7 to Windows 10. We realised last week that the file system wasn't syncing as it was supposed to, and that we seemed to have more than once copy of it on the machine. It took us a while to discover that the OneDrive location where Julie had been saving files since April existed only on her machine, and was not syncing to the web, possibly because it had been set up in a file location that suited us, rather than Microsoft. 

Until April, under Windows 7 it was syncing fine, then stopped without warning. Upgrade produced on this computer another edition of the file system held in the Cloud, up to date until April, with a few additions made by me, directly to the web from other machines, but with none of Julie's work, several hundred files - all there in the filesystem of her choice location but unsynchronised. It's easy enough now she knows for her to save material direct to the web version, but finding and uploading six months of files is no easy matter.

After I'd taken a copy of the file system containing the past six months of work, it was a matter of working out which of several dozen file folders needs updating and doing it manually. Not an easy task. Often resorted to file folders are identifiable quickly, but the myriad of lesser used ones are far more of a problem. We spent several hours together doing this, and I completed as much as I could find at home in the evening before disaster struck. My six year old Linux driven Dell XPS laptop, one of the first purchased by CBS, and redundant for several years, despite being useable and useful, died on me in mid-operation, almost certainly from a motherboard failure. Probably it's beyond economical repair. I was able to complete most of what I'd set out to do on another machine, but now I'm faced with retrieving confidential data from a machine I've never needed to take apart before.

At least there's good news from Ipswich hospital. Eddie's chest infection is responding to treatment, and his rehabilitation course continues.