Hello, friends and enemies. Things are cuckoo bananas here, but let’s start with something fun. I mentioned last month that I had been working on documenting processes for the Lavender Library’s collections committee. I guess everyone likes what I’m doing because I am the volunteer of the month! Technically, this just means I get a little shout out in the email newsletter but I am still proud.
As for the cuckoo bananas of it all: We are currently taking care of my father-in-law’s dogs (my dogs in law?) because my father in law is dealing with some medical stuff. These two dogs are kind of nutty and are a breed known for being insane (they’re schipperkes) but I think they mostly just want attention (as with all of us). The main things I do not appreciate about them are that they have terrible bathroom etiquette and have peed and pooped on my floor at various times. We have to take them outside nearly on the hour to prevent incidents, and even that isn’t always enough. On top of this, Fritz is scared of the dogs. He’s been camping out in the bedroom and we have a gate set up in the hallway to prevent the dogs from bothering him. I’ve been trying to spend as much time with him as I can, but I also needed to be on dog duty while Kirk was helping his dad and now because Kirk has covid. I’ve been joking that I’m suddenly a single mom who works two jobs.
So, you might be wondering if I have covid too. No(t yet?). We are trying hard to keep me from getting it. Kirk and I are mostly staying on opposite sides of the house, he’s masking all the time and I’m masking when we’re on the same side of the house. We’re also running our air filter nonstop and Kirk is sleeping in the guest bedroom. As of Saturday, I’m testing negative and not having symptoms so we will see. If I escape covid again, I may become convinced that I simply cannot get it, which is probably not good since I already have unreasonable levels of confidence about many things, but still that is better than getting it and breaking my five-year streak of no covid.
Fuck it. Linux.
I have been getting really tired of Microsoft’s shit and, last weekend, finally did the damn thing and switched my PC to Linux. Microsoft is deprecating Windows 10 and pushing users to migrate to Windows 11 and, it sounds like, trying to con everyone into paying for OneDrive in the process. Windows 11 is also stuffing unnecessary and unwanted AI into everything and has a a feature that will take a screenshot of whatever the user is doing every few seconds, which is intrusive as fuck (yes, it can be disabled, but why the hell is that even a feature, let alone a default?). On top of that, I have Microsoft Word 2016, and Microsoft is going to stop supporting that too. They want me to “upgrade” to Office 365, which is a subscription and costs at least $100 per year. For the last time: none of this should be a subscription! I should be able to pay for the software and own it. I yearn for the early days of personal computing.
There are a lot of versions of Linux because people can do whatever they want with the code and make their own versions. I installed Linux Mint, which is designed to resemble Windows and make the transition from Windows to Linux a little easier. The website has detailed installation instructions, which was good because I sure as hell did not know what I was doing. The process itself was actually fairly straightforward and the main problem I had was one of my own making. I have two hard drives in my computer and I thought I would be able to install Linux on one drive then simply access the other drive with all my data and files. However, I learned the hard way that Linux and Windows use different file systems, and you can’t “mount” a drive without formatting it first (that is, deleting everything on the drive). I had to perform computer surgery to liberate my data. Kirk recently got a new computer so I took my second drive out and connected it to Kirk’s old machine, then transferred the files onto an external hard drive so I could reformat the drive for linux. This worked but I am not great at hardware and couldn’t get my hard drive out of the tray so I removed the whole cage and plugged it into Kirk’s computer, leaving the case open. I do not recommend this method, especially since this issue is easily avoided by backing everything up first. Hubris.
I have not been able to use the newly linuxed computer a whole lot because it’s on the side of the house where Kirk is and we are avoiding each other for plague reasons. Still, I like it so far. I have a lot of exploring ahead of me, but I’m able to do all my regular computer stuff without any trouble. Something I really like about Linux so far is that you download software through a program that’s a bit like an app store. All the software is free and open source and works on Linux. This makes it easy and fun to just try stuff!
Here are answers to a few things I had to look up both so I remember and in case anyone else is looking for them, and then some programs that I like:
- Signal messenger requires a special installation for Linux that you have to do through the terminal (Linux’s version of the command line).
- How to enable different languages’ keyboard layouts (important for me because I type in Icelandic and Spanish a lot).
- To rearrange desktop icons to your liking, you have to turn off “Auto-Arrange.“
- Anki is my flashcard app of choice (at least it has been since converting back to it after using Memrise, which I wrote about here) and my flashcards are very important to me. It turns out there’s an error with the version of Anki available in the Software Manager, but there are instructions for downloading and installing it manually.
- Freeshot is a screenshot tool. I take a lot of screenshots because I write instructions often. This has some very useful features.
- Freetube is a little app for watching youtube videos without any ads. Genius.
- I had been using KeePass to save all my passwords in Windows and I found out that there is a Linux equivalent, KeePassXC. It was able to read my password database file!
Books and Other Words
Given the state of everything, this is a rare post where I have no books to talk about. I’m in the middle of a few things, but have not finished anything in the last fortnight. I’m sure I’ll have something to talk about next time.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning via The Nation. I’m not going to get too deep into this subject, but I do want to note that it’s okay not to be sad when a terrible person dies. Not being sad is not equivalent to supporting violence. I don’t think it’s controversial to not mourn someone who thought the Civil Rights Act was a “mistake.” From the article:
When asked about mass shootings he said, “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.” Perhaps Kirk did not believe that his own life would be cut short by gun violence, but, like the rest of us, he has witnessed countless school shootings. When he said “some gun deaths” are acceptable, he surely knew he lived in a country where the deaths he deemed acceptable included those of children, some of whom were the age of his own. There is no inherent virtue in caring about your own children; that is the bare minimum requirement for effective parenting. Virtue lies in caring about the safety and well-being of children you don’t know.
- Google Won’t Have to Sell Chrome Browser After All (But There’s a Catch) via Gizmodo. This is bad news for all of us on the internet. After Google lost its antitrust case, some people speculated that Google would need to sell off the Chrome browser. The courts have instead required Google to do what will be the worst thing for everyone, which is “share ‘search index and user-interaction data, though not ads data,’ with ‘qualified competitors.'” The answer to Google being a monopoly is it has to share browsing data with other companies. Why? Why would you do this? Consider this a good time to stop using Chrome browser and try Firefox instead, if you’re not already.
- Wikipedia Is Resilient Because It Is Boring via The Verge. I like seeing Wikipedia getting good press and I appreciated this quotation from the article, “Wikipedia is one of the few platforms online where tremendous computing power isn’t being deployed in the service of telling you exactly what you want to hear.”
Kitchen Witchery
This week’s featured recipes include some chocolate chip and M&M cookies because I was seized by a desire for exactly that. I also tried another version of zucchini gratin. I thought this recipe was really good, I liked it a lot better than the version I made a month or so again. We had that with vegetarian tamale pie and I thought that was a good addition.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat dog photos for your nerves.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to post cat photos. Here’s Fritz.
