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Category: computing

Sunday, 30 June 2013

09:13 – I spent three hours at Frances’ house yesterday getting the new computer and printer working. Or kind of working. I hate Microsoft, and I particularly hate Windows 8. It’s a terrible product, truly terrible. It sets a new standard for terrible. I am just trying to imagine what it would have been like for someone like Frances–an ordinary civilian–to go down to Costco, bring home a Windows 8 computer, and get it working. She couldn’t have done it. I could barely do it, and what I managed to get done is not acceptable. At least I got Firefox, Thunderbird, and Skype installed and working, and she can now print. I understand that Windows 8.1 is imminent and will be a free upgrade to Windows 8. If it brings back the Start button and the desktop, that’s all I ask. The current version is unusable. I’ll upgrade her to 8.1 as soon as possible.

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Tuesday, 25 June 2013

09:44 – Cops consider eyewitness identifications suspect, and particularly suspect if the man in question has a beard. Here’s a good example of why. When I saw the front page of the newspaper this morning, my first thought was, “Why is there a picture of my friend Paul Jones on the front page?” When I showed it to Barbara, she also thought it was Paul.

It’s not Paul, of course, but it sure looks like him. If I’d seen the picture without having the caption for context, it wouldn’t even have crossed my mind that it wasn’t Paul.

I just shipped a forensic science kit this morning, and realized that I’m down to only two remaining in stock. Urk. I’d been working on chemistry kits, but it’s time to build a batch of 30 more forensic science kits.

15:47 – I’m filling glycerol bottles. Very slowly. They’re 15 mL narrow-mouth bottles, the same ones we use by the thousands for other solutions. But glycerol is very viscous. So much so that it’s almost impossible to fill these bottles manually from a beaker or whatever, because the glycerol tends to form a bubble on the mouth of the bottle and then glop over down the side. The last time I filled glycerol bottles, I used my automatic dispenser pump, figuring things would go a lot faster. They didn’t, because it takes so long to fill and empty the dispenser for each bottle. With normal solutions, a quick upstroke fills the cavity and a quick downstroke pumps the liquid into the bottle. It takes maybe three or fours seconds total for each bottle, including handling. But glycerol is so viscous that the upstroke and downstroke take literally 20 seconds or more each.

So I had a cunning plan. Glycerol viscosity varies with temperature. At about 18C (chilly room temperature), glycerol freezes, so when I’m filling bottles at, say, 24C, the glycerol isn’t far above its freezing temperature and is still quite syrupy. But I had Barbara label 150 15 mL bottles for me anyway because I was convinced I had a solution for the problem. I was going to warm the glycerol up to 50 or 55C (hot tap water temperature), where I expected it to run almost like water. Alas, I must have read the temperature/viscosity chart wrong, because even at 50+C this glycerol is still quite thick. I think I’ll boost the water bath temperature up to maybe 60C and see if that helps. I don’t want to go much higher, both because I’m handling the bottles with bare hands and because I’m afraid that capping warm bottles will cause them to deform as the air within them cools and contracts.

I thought about changing to 30 mL narrow-mouth bottles for the next batch, even though I’d still fill them only to 15 mL. But then I had a better idea. I’m going to use 30 mL wide-mouth pharma packer bottles next time and fill them manually from a beaker. 15 mL of glycerol masses just under 19 g, so I’ll just eyeball the fill level and have Barbara sitting next to me with a scale. Anything at 19 g or more, she’ll just cap. Under 19 g, she’ll give it back to me to add more. That should be about as fast as using the dispenser to fill bottles with normal solutions.

I mentioned last week that I’d ordered a Cyber-Power desktop PC from Costco. It arrived today. I plan to get it set up this weekend for Frances and Al. The problem is, it runs Windows 8, which I’ve never even seen. The PC included a “free” download init key for Kaspersky Internet Security 2013, but I have no idea if I should install this or something else. Doesn’t Microsoft include its own security/AV package? Please, Windows Gurus, tell me what to do. Frances does pretty typical stuff with her PC: email (Thunderbird), web browsing (Firefox), Skype, and so on, so installing apps shouldn’t be a problem. But this is Windows 8 (rather than 8.1), which IIRC has a sucky interface, missing even the Start button. Is there an option to use the Windows 7 interface? What should I do? Help.

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Wednesday, 15 May 2013

10:57 – Barbara is taking the day off from work. She stayed at her parents’ apartment last night to keep her mom company, and says that Sankie is doing well. She’s taking Sankie to a doctor’s appointment this afternoon and then coming home. Colin will be delighted to see her. It’s very hard on him when she’s gone overnight.

Yesterday afternoon, I had the new system pretty much ready to go. I almost shutdown the old system and pulled it off my desk. I’m glad I didn’t. When I came into my office this morning, the display on the new system was black with a blinking white cursor at the top left corner. The system now refuses to boot. It just comes up to that blinking white cursor. Fortunately, my old system is still connected and working. In fact, the Ethernet problems appear to have resolved themselves, and it’s now working perfectly. I really, really hated Kubuntu 12.04 anyway. I may just re-install everything on Ubuntu 12.04 and suffer from its horrible interface. It can’t be any worse than the horrible Kubuntu 12.04 interface.

Kit sales are on the rise. We’ve shipped four kits so far today, and with the month half gone our MTD sales are already more than twice those of the whole month of May 2012. Given that more than 90% of total May 2012 sales were in the second half of the month, this may turn out to be our biggest month so far in 2013. I’d better get back to work on building more kits. We’re down to less than a hundred in finished goods inventory.

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Tuesday, 14 May 2013

08:41 – Barbara’s mom is at home and seems to be doing as well as could be expected. Frances stayed with her last night and Barbara will stay with her tonight, but after that they may leave her on her own. Dutch is pretty much just maintaining. I suspect the most anyone will be able to do is slow his rate of decline. I’d be very surprised if he’s ever well enough to leave the nursing home, even to move to assisted living. That’s still the goal, of course, but I suspect it’s more ambitious than achievable.

I finally switched back over from air conditioning to heat this morning. Our forecast overnight low was 38F, which would tie our record low for 14 May. Our recording thermometer says it got down to 41.9F, but our actual highs and lows often vary by several degrees from the official numbers. Our indoor thermometer says it’s 66.3F right now. I’m chilly at 70F and cold at 68F, so I set the heat to warm things up a bit in here. This is our last chilly day for a while. The rest of the week we’re expected to have highs in the mid-80’s and lows of 61F, so it’ll be back to using the air conditioning.

I copied all my data from the current system to my new system yesterday. That took a long time. The networking on the old system is failing, so rather than install a new network adapter I just connected a big external USB drive to it, copied all my data and configuration files up to it, and then reconnected it to my new system. Copying the 800 GB of data down to the new system took hours, but it’s all there now.

I managed to get all my old mail transfered over to Kontact/Kmail/Korganizer on the new system, but I haven’t yet tried to import my contacts. I’m pretty optimistic that I’ll be able to do that, but the big problem remaining is that I can’t get the new Kmail installation to send mail. I remember this happening the last time I was migrating systems. I got it worked out then, and I’m sure I’ll manage somehow to get it worked out this time. Meanwhile, I can still send mail from the old system, assuming it’s willing to connect to the Internet. Nothing is ever easy.

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Tuesday, 7 May 2013

08:11 – With Barbara’s mom and dad both in the hospital, she and Frances are even busier than usual. They expect Dutch to be discharged late this week, and are looking at assisted-living facilities to decide which are acceptable to have Dutch transferred to. Their mom is being treated for a lung infection, and they’re not sure at this point how long she’ll be in the hospital or whether she’ll be going home to the apartment or will need to go to an assisted-living facility for at least a while. We’re hoping that Sankie’s outlook will improve sufficiently that she’ll be able to return directly to their apartment.

I’m busy putting together subassemblies for a first batch of thirty LK01 Life Science Kits. At this point, it’s all a matter of assembly except that we’re out of stock on bottles of methyl cellulose. I have two liters of that made up, but none bottled. The second bottle-top dispenser I ordered arrived yesterday, so I just need to get some bottles filled. We announced that the LK01 kits would begin shipping the week of 26 May, but we may in fact have them ready to start shipping as early as next Monday.

11:00 – One thing I didn’t think about when we decided to start building and selling science kits is the amount of physical labor involved, particularly as our sales ramp up. I just hauled four cases of goggles downstairs and stacked them. On the return trips upstairs, I’m hauling up finished kits, five at a time. I have about four dozen kits to haul up and more stuff to haul down. And UPS should show up today with a couple cases of 144 glass beakers and several cases of 100 mL graduated cylinders. If I catch Don as he pulls up, I’ll ask him to roll those crates around back to save me having to carry them downstairs.

I tend to think of components as small, light items, which is true individually. How much can a stainless-steel spatula or a glass stirring rod weigh, after all? But put a case of 700 of each of them in a large box along with similar quantities of two or three other “small, light” items, and the mass adds up quickly. At 30, I wouldn’t have thought twice about any of this stuff; at nearly 60, it becomes an aerobic workout. Between hauling components and kits up and down the stairs and walking Colin, I probably get more exercise than most guys my age.

14:56 – Urk. Now that’s embarrassing. I’m starting to clean off my main desk to make room for the new system. I’m going to run it side-by-side with the current system until I’m sure everything I need is migrated over. So, as I was moving piles of stuff off my desk, what did I notice but a stack of five hard drives in those clear plastic form-fitted cases. I looked at the first one: “Oh, well, it’s only 160 GB, not big enough to worry about.” At the second: “Oh, well, it’s only 500 GB.” At the third: “Oh, well, it’s only 1.5 TB.” At the fourth: “Oh, well, it’s only, uh, 2 TB.” At the fifth: “Oh, shit. Another 2 TB drive.” Both 2 TB drives, as best I remember, have never been used other than briefly to test a RAID system. Oh, well. One can never have too many hard drives. I’d completely forgotten I had these. I’ll probably just stick them in an external eSATA drive carrier and use them for portable backup.

16:20 – With Europe already turning into a smoking pile of rubble, I sometimes wonder if Comrade Barroso has been inhaling too much of that smoke: Federal Europe will be ‘a reality in a few years’, says Jose Manuel Barroso

Federated, hell. They’ll be lucky if the EU still exists. The euro certainly won’t, unless it’s a Southern-tier euro, with the protestant Northern tier returning to their own currencies, or perhaps, if they haven’t learned their lesson from this catastrophe, a shared Deutsche Mark under whatever name. I’ve known for years that Barroso, that “former” Marxist, is delusional, but he keeps coming up with even more impressive castles in the sky. Barroso, who defines the term True Believer, no doubt actually believes that not just the eurozone but the EU 27 will fall in with his ridiculous plans. Even now, the UK is teetering on the edge of withdrawing from the EU, and with prominent defections among even his own Tories, Cameron may not be able to hold things together for another year, let alone until the proposed referendum on EU membership four years from now. And what are the chances that Germany, Finland, and Holland will agree to pay not just the Southern tier’s outstanding debts but to continue to subsidize them forever and without limit? I’d say the probability is slightly more than zero. Maybe 0.000001.

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Sunday, 5 May 2013

07:55 – Barbara left yesterday morning to run some errands and then head over to her parents’ apartment to pick up a few items for her dad before visiting him in the hospital. While she was gone, I got a call from a young woman at the hospital, whom I assumed to be one of the nurses caring for Dutch. She was calling to give Barbara an update on her dad’s condition, so I gave her Barbara’s cell phone number. She said I wasn’t on Dutch’s HIPAA list, so she wasn’t allowed to tell me anything, but asked since she already had me on the phone if I’d mind her asking a few questions about Dutch. I answered as best I could based on what Barbara has been telling me. She thanked me before she hung up. It wasn’t until I talked to Barbara later that I found out she wasn’t a nurse. She was one of Dutch’s doctors. At first, I wondered if I’d been unconsciously sexist/agist, but that wasn’t it at all. I assumed that she was a nurse because she wasn’t at all hurried or arrogant. She took her time and didn’t seem to be at all in a hurry to finish the conversation and move on to the next item on her to-do list. She talked to me as though I were an intelligent person who might have useful information rather than just someone she had to talk to to complete a checklist. I suspect that Dutch is lucky to be her patient.

The replacement hard drive for my new system arrived several days ago, but I hadn’t had a spare moment to do anything with it. While Barbara was away yesterday afternoon, I took the time to install the drive and get Linux Mint 13 LTS up and running. The system is still sitting on the kitchen table, but it’ll shortly move into my office, where it will sit, along with its new monitor, keyboard, and mouse, alongside my current system. I’ll run them side-by-side until I’m satisfied that everything I care about on the current system–apps and data and configurations–has been migrated successfully to the new system. Then and only then I’ll do a cut-over.

I’d originally planned to install the system to the 128 GB SSD, but I changed my mind. I installed Linux to the hard drive, and will use the SSD as a second drive devoted exclusively to data. When I leave the house for anything more than walking Colin, I’ll unmount the SSD, slide it out of its bay, and take it along.

09:33 – I just boxed up another forensic science kit and set it out to ship tomorrow. That’s the third one in the last week, which is about two more than I’d expect to sell in a week this time of year. (The biology kits and chemistry kits both ordinarily outsell the forensic science kits by a factor of four or five.) We’re down to only six forensic science kits in stock, so we’d better get another 30 built soon. Or at least get the small parts bags made up and the chemicals bottled and bagged. Given those, we can build kits as needed on the fly.

Going through the list of chemicals and reagents we’ll need for the new batch of forensic kits I noticed glycerol, which is one of my least favorite chemicals to fill bottles with. The stuff is viscous, which makes it very difficult to fill bottles manually because it wants to form a bubble at the bottle’s mouth and then blurp over and run down the side of the bottle. Using the automatic dispenser is easier, but the viscosity of glycerol makes it almost a gym workout to use the pump. Then I realized that the viscosity of glycerol is strongly affected by temperature. At room temperature, the stuff is gloppy. At around body temperature (37 C) to hot tap water temperature (50 C), the stuff is much, much less viscous. So, the next time I fill glycerol bottles, I’m going to run a bucket of hot tap water and put the 3.8 liter stock bottle of glycerol in it to warm up before I dispense it.

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Sunday, 28 April 2013

08:55 – It’s really annoying when a later release of Linux breaks something that worked automagically in earlier releases. When I built a replacement for Barbara’s sister’s old system, I told Frances and her husband just to take it home and connect up their printer (a Brother MFC) and their webcam and it should Just Work. Although that was true on the earlier version of Ubuntu they’d been using, that turns out not to be the case with Linux Mint 13.

Not only did it not Just Work, but getting it to work is going to be non-trivial. The last time I installed their printer, I just brought up the printer administration window, choose Brother in the left pane and the correct model in the right pane, and Linux installed the proper drivers and auto-configured the printer, scanner, and fax functions. This time, Linux no longer offers the opportunity to choose make and model manually; it offers only the make/model it detects and offers no option to change or configure the drivers. So I’m going to have to do this the hard way.

Fortunately, I was able to find a page on the Brother web site that looks as though it should work: Brother Drivers for Linux® distributions

13:23 – We just got back from Frances’ house. Her printer and webcam are now working. Surprisingly, everything went smoothly and quickly.

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Wednesday, 24 April 2013

07:29 – The hospital discharged Barbara’s dad to a rehab/nursing home facility yesterday. The transfer was supposed to happen at 3:30, and for once it sounds like they got something done on time. Barbara left work early to meet the ambulance at the facility. I finally called her cell phone around 5:00 to find out what was going on. Barbara was too busy to talk long, but she said she was signing a whole bunch of papers. I hadn’t thought about it until I talked to her, but then I remembered that the same thing had happened when we transferred my mom from the hospital to a nursing home. And it really pissed me off, because I remembered that the papers they’d really want signed would be financial responsibility papers that would ask someone other than the patient to voluntarily assume responsibility for paying. Of course, they never mention that accepting financial responsibility is entirely optional. They’re just looking for as many “co-signers” as they can get, to make sure that the facility isn’t stuck if the patient’s insurance or the government doesn’t pay. And they take advantage of the confusion to sucker family members into signing these agreements.

Actually, these financial responsibility agreements should be void on their face. A contract requires a meeting of the minds, and it’s obvious that no family member who understood what they were signing would agree to sign. By doing so, they’re voluntarily assuming a potentially large liability that they’re under zero obligation to assume. Most people in that situation just assume that this is routine paperwork that must be signed for their parent to be admitted. It’s completely unethical for health-care facilities to present these papers for signature without fully informing the family members that it’s their right to refuse to sign, and such refusal will have no effect on the patient being admitted or the level of care provided.

In practical terms, this is unlikely to affect us, but it still enrages me that the facility took advantage of Barbara’s concern for her father by requiring her to sign financial responsibility papers that she wasn’t legally obligated to sign without disclosing that she wasn’t obligated to sign them. Bastards.

09:50 – I just finished the physical build on my new system, which is Barbara’s old system. It’s a Core i7 980X hex-core processor, which not all that long ago was a $1,000 CPU. I don’t remember how much memory is in it. There are three sticks, but I couldn’t see the labels, so they may be 4 GB or 8 GB sticks. Doesn’t matter. Even 12 GB is more than enough for what I do. I pulled Barbara’s old hard drive, labeled it, and stuck it in a drawer, just in case. Then I spent an hour or so vacuuming the case (an Antec Dark Fleet DF-85) and installing a new 3 TB hard drive. I’ll probably add more hard drives eventually, but that’ll do for now. I should also connect my eSATA external hard drive frame, which holds one or two standard hard drives. Either that, or I may just use the quick-swap bays in the case.

I started to install Linux Mint 13 Maya LTS from the same disc I used to build Barbara’s new system, but quickly realized that it was the 32-bit version. I’m downloading the 64-bit version now, but only because I want support for memory above 4 GB. I know there are still some apps that don’t work properly on 64-bit Linux, so I’ll just hope that all of the ones I need work properly or have adequate substitutes available.

Once I get the OS installed and make sure everything works properly, I’ll move the system unit, the new 23″ display I bought for it, and the other stuff off the kitchen table and into my office and plan the cut-over. I’m nervous about that because I have so many applications on this old system and I’d really like to get as much of the data and configuration settings migrated so that I don’t have to start from scratch. At least I’m running Firefox on the current system, so everything on it should migrate easily to Firefox on the new system.

I decided to give up Kontact/Kmail/Korganizer in favor of Thunderbird, so I’ll export the data from Kmail, including my contacts, in as many formats as possible before the cut-over. I also need to make a detailed list of all the applications I have installed for stuff like video/image/sound editing and so forth. I’ll leave the old system set up right beside the new one for a while, just in case.

12:57 – Well, this is depressing. I set up my new system with a 128 GB Crucial SSD and a new 3 TB Seagate Barracuda. I booted the 64-bit Linux Mint Maya disc and chose to partition manually, setting up the SSD as the system drive and the hard drive with a small swap partition and a large ext4 partition for data. When I told the installer to continue, it went to work and I watched the progress bar progress to about half way done. At that point, I heard an odd buzzing sound from the system unit. It lasted only a second or so, and I was hoping it was just one of the eight fans installed in the case. Alas, it wasn’t. That buzzing was the sound of the new 3 TB Barracuda dying. The partitioner finally blew up and said it couldn’t write the filesystem to the hard drive. I rebooted the system, and the BIOS told me the DVD and the SSD were now the only ATA devices present. Crap.

This drive is one that Seagate sent me as an eval unit a year or so ago, so there’s no warranty on it. So I headed over to NewEgg to look at hard drives. Not that I’ll ever again buy anything from NewEgg, but their reviewers tend to be a bit more technically-ept than the Amazon reviewers. I decided to look at capacities of 1 to 3 TB. There’s a 4 TB Seagate available, but that’s more than I care to put on one drive, and the cost/TB is much higher than for lower-capacity drives. It seems the sweet spot is 2 TB, so that’s what I looked at. I was surprised that the drive of choice seems to be the Seagate ST2000DM001 rather than a WD model, but so be it. NewEgg had them for $90 with free shipping, but I won’t do business with them ever again, so I went over to Amazon and found they had that drive for $99 with free shipping. Let’s hope it’s not DOA.

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Monday, 22 April 2013

07:57 – Barbara’s dad is still in the hospital, but I suspect they’ll soon be transferring him to a rehab facility. Given the way the hospital has behaved, I suggested to Barbara last night that she tell the hospital that getting him to the rehab facility is up to the hospital. If Barbara and Frances picked him up at the hospital to transport him to the rehab facility, I’m afraid they’d be stuck with him, with the rehab facility refusing to accept him. So I told her to refuse to take custody of their dad until he’s well enough to be on his own at his apartment.

Nor is just Barbara’s dad. When Barbara was walking Colin yesterday, she talked to our neighbor Kim. Kim’s mother, Mary, is in her 80’s. A week or ten days ago, she fell and fractured her pelvis. She was in the hospital for a few days, and was then transferred to a rehab facility. The rehab facility is discharging Mary this Thursday to go home. The problem is, Kim is totally disabled with a back injury and Jasmine is away at college. Mary is not supposed to put any weight on her pelvis, which means she can’t even stand, let alone walk. And yet they’re expecting Kim to take care of Mary by herself. Barbara said Kim’s teenage niece was at Kim’s house while she was talking to Kim, helping get the house cleaned up and ready for Mary’s return. I’d already told Kim when her mom was in the hospital to call me if she needed help lifting or moving anything, because Kim simply can’t lift anything and I’m only three houses away. I’ll tell her again today, because she’s going to need help when Mary gets home.

I keep thinking that with millions of unemployed people drawing government benefits, there shouldn’t be any shortage of unskilled labor to provide assistance like this to elderly people. We, the taxpayers, are paying people to sit at home watching TV and pretending to look for jobs that aren’t there, when they could and should be doing something useful with their time like assisting the elderly or cleaning up public areas.

08:44 – I got Barbara’s new desktop system installed and configured yesterday. That was harder than it should have been. All she really uses the system for is OpenOffice, email, and web browsing, with Kontact/Kmail/Korganizer for email and Chrome for the browsing. After pulling three full backups of her system, two to DVD and one to a flash drive, I disconnected her system and slid it out of the way. I slid the new system, an Intel Atom, into place, connected it up, and got rolling. The first problem was that the current version of Kmail uses a completely different format for storing email and contact information than the version Barbara had been running. I’d copied her email/contact data to /home/barbara/.kde, and expected the new version simply to see it and use it. No dice. When I started Kontact on the new system, it informed me that it was using a new data format. It offered to import the old data, so I told it to proceed. About two seconds later, it said it had encountered a fatal error, and terminated. So I tried running it again, and it said it had already been run. So I deleted all the appropriate directories, recopied over her data, and tried again. No dice. The new version simply wouldn’t touch the maildir email files, and apparently had no clue what to do with the contact information.

So I fired up Thunderbird, which was installed by default, and tried to get it to import Barbara’s mail/contact data. I screwed around with that for a while, including installing a maildir->mbox converter, but no joy. So I disconnected the new system, reconnected the old system, fired up Kontact, exported her contacts as a .VCF file, and forwarded all her email to myself. I then disconnected the old system, reconnected the new system, blew away Kontact and all the old data, and reconfigured Thunderbird, including installing the Calendar plugin. I then forwarded all of Barbara’s email from my own system back to her and pulled it into Thunderbird. Geez.

But at least I was finished except for getting the Chrome data off the old system and into Firefox on her new system. (I’ve found I don’t much like Chrome; compared to Firefox it’s feature-poor and unstable.) Surprise. The conversion didn’t work. So I installed Chromium on her new system, expecting it to just use the data from the old Chrome installation. Surprise. It wouldn’t import Barbara’s old data. So we just said the hell with it and re-entered her bookmarks and so on manually. Geez.

Barbara’s old system is now sitting on the floor of her office. She says her new system is working fine, but I think I’ll leave the old system there for a while, just in case we missed migrating something. Once I’m pretty sure everything on the new system is present and working properly, I’ll pull the hard drive and put it on the shelf. I’ll then clean up her old system (a hex-core i7), install a 3 TB hard drive, and turn it into my new system.

Given what I just went through migrating her simple configuration to a new box, the idea of migrating my configuration to a new box scares the hell out of me. I don’t have just OpenOffice, email, and browsing. I have literally dozens of other apps installed, from science number crunching to DVD ripping to video/photo/ sound editors and converters to scanning apps to astronomy apps to who knows what else. Even just figuring out what I have installed will be time-consuming, let alone getting everything moved over.

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Saturday, 20 April 2013

08:58 – I watched with disgust last night as the authorities captured the second muslim terrorist alive instead of gunning him down as he so richly deserved. I kept thinking how unfortunate it was that the cops used flash-bang grenades instead of fragmentation grenades. Or they could have just done a Bonnie & Clyde on that boat, and put a thousand rounds or so through it.

10:51 – Barbara brought her sister’s failed desktop system home the other day. At first I thought it was a dead power supply, but replacing it did no good. I suspect a dead motherboard, and the system is old enough that it made no sense to replace a bunch of components. Instead, I just picked one of the systems sitting under the table in my office. That turned out to be an old system that we’d built as a project system for (I think) the second edition of the Perfect PC book. The system is old, but it has almost zero time on it. When I fired it up, it sounded like a leaf blower. Barbara said it didn’t sound all that loud to her, and Frances said they didn’t care because the system sits in a spare bedroom where it wouldn’t bother anyone. So I went ahead and installed Linux Mint 13 LTS on it, which gives me four years of not having to worry about updating the OS. Frances and her husband are stopping over sometime today so we can get their email, Skype, and so on set up. Right now, it’s in Barbara’s office, connected to her peripherals and Ethernet cable.

As long as I have Barbara’s system disconnected, I’m going to go ahead and swap it out for her new system. The old one is a hex-core processor with lots of memory, and was originally intended to replace my main system. Barbara’s old system failed, and the hex-core system was just sitting there, so she’s been using it for the last year or more. It’s much more system than she needs, so I built an Intel Atom system for her to replace it. The hex-core then moves to my office to replace the antique Core2 Quad 9650 that’s currently my main system. Barbara uses little more than email and browser on her office system, so a quad-core Atom is more than sufficient.

I’ve already done several backups of her hard drive, so once I pull the hex-core system from her office, I’ll put her current hard drive on the shelf, replace it with a 3 TB drive, and install Linux Mint 13 LTS on my new main system.

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