Robert (gurdonark) wrote,
Robert
gurdonark

decline of the daily driver

The warm weather mingled well with the arrival of Friday afternoon. Our weekend prediction sounds like April on the way, a bit early. This will be a relative rarity--a January without snow. I walked after work in Timbers Nature Preserve, a small park in Murphy.

We went out for Subway sandwiches for dinner. I like to get the turkey on wheat, with no cheese, some produce and salt. Tonight I also had the chicken noodle soup which is longer on noodles than on chicken.

My daily driver laptop, which I got on eBay for 53 dollars three years ago, is beginning to have trouble holding a charge. I've changed out the cord and the battery in the past year, but the past few days things have petered out a bit, and tonight the computer will not charge properly. I am still tinkering with it, as I'd like to keep using it. But I have a back-up ready to go if it soon breathes its last. I have done much better with computers since I began tinkering with running Linux on used machines I get for nearly nothing on eBay.

I type this from what will be my next daily driver once my current laptop has run its course. It's a later model, with a first-generation i5 processor and an SSD drive I installed.

I had installed Peppermint 6 on it, but I switched tonight to Q4OS, which I have run with success on other machines. I like that Q4OS, which is a spin-off from Debian but is not a spin-off from Ubuntu, has all sort of one-click codecs and program installers to permit one to get it going and configured out of the box.
I added the WINE program, which runs some Windows programs, so that I could add my favorite two sequencers for making music. I am not yet able to use Jack, the Linux package that makes connecting audio programs to the sound system doable.
I also installed FMS Logo and Pivot Stickfigure Animator using WINE. My choice of Linux programs is not surprising--Audacity to make music, OpenShot to simply edit video, Inkscape and Pinta to make drawings, and Libre Office to do what Word does (only without an annoying Word license).

I still hope I can get the $ 53 laptop to last another couple of years. It's 12", which I prefer, and runs quite well. But we'll see.

Tomorrow I plan a long walk before I ride the train into Dallas to judge another mock trial.
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