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WEEK 46 2020
Last Week- Sun- Mon- Tue- Wed- Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week
Saturday - Still too windy in the morning to work. It is supposed to calm down later.
Looking at my pavers f earlier in the week...a lot of subsidence. Did I forget to compact? I can't remember. I did on the first tranche. That would suck if so, I'd have to pull the weeks work out, compact, and re-level to the 1:10 slope, which is a pain.
The Eneloop batteries are working very well, at 5am the solar lights are still quite bright, despite the sun going down 12 hours before!
Did a bunch of bills, including the property tax, and went into town and mailed them.
Ordered a wireless dongle from Think Penguin, which has an open source driver. Let us see it we can get Devuan working.
Book #51 was Piranesi, by Suzanna Clarke. Odd and surreal, but enjoyable. Think "Elf" for the innocent main character, in a strange and weird world.
Friday - Windy.
Too windy to work on the walkway in fact, by 9am. By late afternoon and into the evening it was howling, with a wind advisory of gusts up to 60mph possible.
I fiddled around for a bit in the back, but even in the lee of the house it was too blustery to do much.
Instead, for most of the afternoon I just worked on the computer, mostly Jupyter Notebook stuff, with a little bit of iOS reading thrown in.
An interesting article, Your Computer Isn't Yours, on just how invasive and locked down the Apple world is becoming. Ugh.
Maybe I'll spend some more time on getting Devuan running...
Thursday - Reasonably nice weather. No need for the pellet stove at night, and only needed the propane heater for a couple of hours in the morning to bring the house temperature up from about 60F.
I felt reasonably healthy, and considered working on the walkway, but reason asserted itself and I decided to leave that for tomorrow. Every other day is fine with moving hundreds of pounds of block and sand.
I did a few small yard tasks, taking down the awnings, coiling hoses, setting the chair cushions out to dry, and some small indoors chores.
Book #50 was A Deadly Education: A Novel (Scholomance Book 1), by Naomi Novik. Wow. This takes the "school of wizardry" thing to a new level. Think Hogwart's or Roanoke Academy, only the school itself is out to kill you, and monsters are everywhere and out to get you, and there is no way out once you enter, and no instructors to protect you. It is something of a Battle Royal or Lord of the Flies kind of scenario.
Wednesday - Veteran's Day. A shout out to my brother and sister, and everyone else that's served!!
Warm. Into the 70's maybe?
I went out and put down some weed-block, sand, and the composite panels that are supposed to replace base, and did about 45SF of walkway. It took longer than I expected. The pavers move and rock a bit on the composite panels, which is not good. I'll give them some time to settle down, but that's not something you want to feel. I had hoped to avoid more digging and having to buy/transport hundreds of pounds of base, but...
Good enough for now.
Played with the Jupyter Notebook thing for an hour or two: it's easy to get started, but I've only scratched the surface of it. Basically I wanted to interactively plot from Python.
Tuesday - Getting warm again, into the 60s.
Again ran the pellet stove overnight, from about 10pm to perhaps 9am. The front room was a toasty 65F at 6am, and the bedroom a pleasant 60F. That's with the stove on the lowest setting.
I went out and replaced the batteries in the solar lights with some decent rechargeable Eneloops. They are rated for two amp hours and 2,000 cycles - much better quality than what you get in $5 solar lights.
My back was aching after that - I'm getting old. Thank God the outdoor work season is coming to an end...
I installed Mint 20.04, and it went just fine, the WiFi working immediately upon install. Amusingly the disk partitioner left the Devuan install in place, taking up half the SSD. I can always delete it and re-use the space, if necessary.
I also installed Conda, and Pip, and Jupyter - Jupyter Notebook's being the reason for all of this in the first place.
Monday - Cold, but OK.
There was frost on the ground, and it looks like snow down to about 3000ft on the hills to the north.
The pellet stove, despite the occasion rattle, kept it quite comfortable overnight, even on low.
I went out and improved the solar lights basing on the front yard wall pillars. Basically some bricks and some pea gravel that their base stakes are set in. Rather than trying to fill the entire column I just used a piece of thin sheet metal between the top and next-to-the-top column blocks so that I'm only back filling a little bit of the column.
Nothing too permanent, but better than the cardboard and foam that was already failing.
Sunday - Cool and windy. There is a tiny draft around the front room windows, some from the a/c and some from the bad window seals. But not much, it isn't perceptible unless you look for it, even in 30 degree weather and high winds.
My brother got snow up in Carson City, a couple of inches. He says he is already tired of it, after only three years up there!
It is supposed to be in the low 20s tonight, I made a point of bringing in the hummingbird feeder. Supposedly the sugar should drop the freezing temperature to about 28F, but they are predicting well below that.
Fiddled with Devuan a bit more. I found the non-free drivers package, and the files I need, and the system no longer complains - but there is still no wifi, even tho modprobe says the driver is, in fact, loaded. After 8 hours of install hell I think I'm done with them.
So, the heck with it. Started a Mint 20 download. Yep, "As the dog returns to his vomit...", that's me.
Generally just relaxing otherwise. Pretty stiff. Did a few chores around the house, laundry and cleaning, some beginning of the month bills.
