Category: Life
Cold Enough to Freeze the…
Thanksgiving and Christmas 2024 and New Year and Valentines Day 2025 have come and gone. We’ve been sick here in Kansas since a week or two into January. Not just the old rhinovirus (bad cold) but that godawful Norovirus and then type A flu although I avoided the flu so far but suspect rhinovirus has taken hold. I’m hitting it with lots of echinacea and zinc and we’ll see how it goes. I have a physical therapy session scheduled for Friday. It was prescribed ostensibly for lower back pain, but it’s actually bursitis in the right hip/leg. And then there’s the weather. We had a blizzard a couple weeks ago with near zero temps, and this week it’s snow again but less of it, but colder, not just near zero but below zero. As I’m writing this the device on my wrist says the temp is -2 with “feels like” of -13. Just going out to check the mailbox (empty!) was enough to numb my fingers, wearing gloves. Supposed to be colder tomorrow and Friday. Which reminds me… In answer to the question, “How cold was it?” our friends at GasKan explain the source of the answer, “It was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey!” I’m afraid I have no pictures of brass monkeys, but may have some depicting examples of our new year so far. If I have the time and/or the energy, I’ll add a couple of them here, but I don’t have at the moment. For now, g’night, and watch out for them brass monkeys!
Indy 500
What an incredible Indy 500 today! It was rain delayed a few hours but they got it done before deadline and along the way it was one of the most intense nail-biting races I’ve seen in years. Maybe it wasn’t really any better than previous races and my impression was just the result of a culmination of unrelated things in my life (or lack thereof). I think it was the race, though. The announcers were hootin’ and hollerin’, especially during the last 20 laps. Also, I think it’s the first time I ever saw a second-place driver so emotionally crushed that he actually broke down in tears, for quite a spell, on camera. I could understand. It was intense for me, too, and I only spent the race settin’ in my armchair watchin’ it on the TV, not jockeying at 215 m.p.h. at close quarters with a dozen other racers hell-bent on beating me.
I have more important and meaningful things to write about, including some pictures, but I don’t have enough time. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to post something, and a blurb about Indy is the only thing I can squeeze out of the little block of time available at the moment. Hopefully, before it gets to be several more months of nothing, I’ll get something more important and meaningful posted, including pictures.
Here I Am On Linux
August 18, 2025
General, Life, News, Wisdom
No Comments
John Chappell
For many years I’ve entertained a notion to try Linux. For most of those years, it was all I could do to keep up my career and such competency on Windows as was necessary. Then came cell phones with their operating systems and apps, mostly Android. Last week, having supposedly retired from my career, I felt I could spare some time to get into Linux. So far, I’ve played around with Ubuntu Mint and Debian Plasma on bootable USB drives.
It was pretty easy to get both Linux systems booted up and running with internet access via wifi. I couldn’t get Debian Plasma going on my old Acer laptop, because of choices I made about UEFI and MBR/GTK when burning the .iso file to the USB drive. But Mint is working okay on it, and Plasma runs on the less old Lenovo laptop. With both, I’ve run into “insufficient space” errors while installing programs. I didn’t notice anything about this problem in all the articles and forum postings I read about “How to Install Linux”. Possibly, it’s fixable by resizing the partition Rufus set up when burning the .iso file to the USB drive. I tried some different Rufus settings in the hope of curing the problem, without success. The only thing I accomplished was to make the Plasma USB unbootable on the old Acer. That’s okay for now. It was my impression that most of the authors of the articles and posts I read considered the bootable USB approach to be for trying out different Linux repos before picking one to install on the computer’s hard drive or SSD. Quite a few, nevertheless, just used the USB approach, and quite a few others went with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) approach. I used WSL myself, which worked fine and had some advantages, particularly in being able to quickly switch to either Windows or Linux, and to run Linux programs right from the Windows Start menu. I still ran into the “insufficient space” problem while installing Linux programs.
What I haven’t done yet is find the best way to run a working “localhost” in order to test web pages I may be working on. You see, Linux is often touted as “the choice of developers”. I think this notion is mostly intended to encompass programmers writing code in Python and C++ and other languages to develop programs and games. But I think “developer” reasonably extends to those who create (develop) websites with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and associated frameworks. For a couple of decades (well, it seems that long) I’ve used either Xampp or Wamp to get a Localhost Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) server running on my PC as a “sandbox” in which to test (develop) websites and their pages and other parts before uploading them for public access on my web hosting provider. So far, I haven’t found the Linux version of either Xampp or Wamp; and it seems like it’s always during the attempt to install Wine that I incur the “Insufficient space” error. Wine supposedly enables one to run native Windows programs on Linux.
I’m sure I’ll figure it all out before it makes me any crazier than I already am. Meanwhile, I thought it might be fun to fire up Firefox on Linux and do something else I haven’t done in a long while — post something on one of my blogs. And so, here we are! One of the nice things about this particular blog is that nobody but me and searchbots, spambots, scambots, and other non-human webcrawlers visits it more’n once in a blue moon, if that. Consequently, I needn’t concern myself with the quality, craftsmanship, or literacy of what I write here, nor whether it offers anything that’s newsworthy or otherwise of interest, much less compelling interest, to anyone, even myself. Hmm, it just now occurs to me that this blog could be like a memoir or personal journal (a/k/a diary) that one or two people might find and look at after I die. I’ll have to think about this; but, not until after I solve “insufficient space” (probably by actually installing Linux on the HD/SSD) and get a LAMP running on Linux.
Verdict on Linux so far: I discern no difference between blog posting with Firefox on Linux and blog posting with Firefox on Windows. This is no surprise, of course. As for website work, none of the widely acclaimed text editors for developers (IDEs) that I’ve found and installed so far seem likely gain my favor over what I use on Windows. Probably, professional web developers would attribute this to my “tyro” skillset.
That’s all for now. There might be updates about this. Or, maybe I’ll think of something that would actually be of interest, or merit inclusion in a memoir.
linuxwindows