My holiday cactus bloomed for Palm Sunday.
Today I felt tired all day and in need of an easy day off. This morning I rose early and
worked on trying to get a piece of software working on my computer. The software is called conky,and it lets one configure a helpful display of battery use, CPU use, and other similar statistics. One might argue that in LXDE Linux one does not need a conky, because one can easily configure that to appear in the lower right corner. I had seen some good looking
conky designs, though, and I wanted to get it going.
After a few hours, I found that since LXDE's file manager PCManFM does not play well with conky. I could make it all work, but I would have to key in a file manager reconfiguration. Then I had a master stroke idea. I pulled up a browser and entered the search term ""alternatives to conky". Soon I figured out that a different bit of software called gkrellm (named after the sci-fi character Krell)provides a stacked display of pertinent statistics. It took no more than a very few minutes installing it. Now I have a great display on the right side of my screen. I uninstalled conky, as well as a pipedream game that I did not understand how to play.
In the late afternoon, I went to a new pho place in McKinney and had pho ga'. I then drove to Towne Lake Park. I started to walk around the lake, but the wind soon drove me back to my car.
I drove to the huge Fry's electronics store, where I could walk a long way in the warmth.
I got some USB drives and the like there--USBs are now as cheap as cheap can be.
My practical work today involved doing my laundry. My wife's work, meanwhile, involved installing a new wireless modem. We had lost a really good modem to a lightning storm last year. Its replacement generated subpar connections to the internet, causing video sites like vimeo to buffer endlessly. My wife, a technical writer, was able to decipher the instruction book and got it all running in good order. Tonight I watched an episode of the Australian
series "Animal Allies" on Hulu.com. I liked the show--positive stories about animals in a reportage format. This was a welcome relief from the animal "reality shows" which have taken over our local animal cable channels.I got an HD vimeo video about Antarctica to run in great order, so my wife's hard work paid off.
I'm enjoying the young adult owl "guardians" book on CD. My Linux computer DVD player and my VLC media player software are not playing well together. I have not figured out if the
DVD drive has bit the dust (it won't stay closed, so I suspect a sensor is out of whack) or
if I need to reconfigure VLC to look for a disk other than .sr0. I will sort it out, but there is lots of on-line video to watch in the meantime.
I saw the program 60 minutes tonight about a young man who lost 10 years of his life to a made-up rape charge. Such miscarriages of justice cause great concern.a
Tonight I successfully installed the Linux program Porteus to a USB drive. This program runs in RAM and is designed to run on USB and not be fully installed on a hard drive. It's based on the traditional distro Slackware. I used unetbootin to install the program on the USB stick. I was really impressed with the way the distro ran. It was very fast, and there was no slow-down as can happen when booting from a USB or a virtual machine. I am going to mail this one to a friend, but soon I will make another to be able to use Linux when I am on the road with my Windows computer.
Tonight we are getting a cold snap for two days. This is very seasonal--with a quite warm March ending in a late March/early April freeze. I am ready to move from cold spell back to wildflower bloom.