n December of this year it’ll be 3 years of uptime (not just 1,000 days), so I am extremely pleased with the stability of Linux. It runs mostly on old hardware.

Yesterday we went to a store that used to be known as “Cash Generator” (it looked like it changed ownership) to assess laptops that are pre-owned (used) and understand the correlation between storage (disk space) and price.

It looks like the insane price surges did not spare the “pre-owned” space.

For now, thankfully, we have enough hardware and storage.

Mintro looks OK (can’t complain), but where was the dog that was inside when it was “Cash Generator”?

Mintro, bring back a (or the) dog. It attracts customers like us.

still remember how I found out about the 9/11 (2021) attacks. I was likely on a plane at the time, flying back to Manchester. After I had landed and picked up my suitcase the cab driver told me that a plane hit a building in the US. I assumed it was 1) a small plane (one person); 2) only one collision; 3) an accident.

When I arrived home I began to realise what happened. Maybe some of the collisions happened after my landing^*. I never checked and compared the times; the media focused on entirely different aspects (not the exact times).

That was 25 years ago. I was a student at the time. The world has changed profoundly since then, and not at all for the better.

____

^* If the air crew (onboard in English airspace) knew about what happened, then they chose not to tell passengers. That’s understandable. Panic is a safety hazard.

think the derby this coming Sunday (2 days from now) will be hard for Manchester City. United is doing OK since that awful first match in Hull and despite last night’s rival (quite new in European football) being generally weak, United handled it very well. Yesterday we walked in Town for a couple of hours and saw salespeople of match scarfs in the streets.

Manchester United used to be almost synonymous with Manchester. Not anymore.

did not know if I’d ever make it. But I did:

roy@bubi:~$ uptime
 07:43:19 up 1000 days, 22:55,  3 users,  load average: 7.07, 7.03, 7.04

And notice the lack of comma, it says “1000″.

n Manchester and elsewhere, Stevie Wonder has new concerts coming up. We nearly went last year. My sister changed her mind at the end.

In my family, nearly everyone is a Stevie Wonder fan. Even my wife likes his music. I’ve asked my sister to invite us.

Stevie Wonder might not live for much longer. Based on video of his last performance here, he’s doing well, nowhere near rusty. But he is not getting younger, either.

started this year on a high note and with good momentum. It seemed like I’d manage to publish 8,000 articles per year in Techrights. With Rianne very active as well, 12,000 in Tux Machines (this year alone) seemed attainable. It’s still going at that pace.

Somewhere along the way I realised that Techrights was probably published too much, so I decided to offload and post more personal topics in this blog.

As a result, Techrights focuses on what it does best and this old (22 years) blog of mine is more active again and it sometimes receives comments.

wo days ago we decided to carefully try to use the underwater lights we had acquired virtually for free (for context, there’s a home project this week [1, 2, 3]). I first tried them outside the water. All OK, no problems. The next step was, try the same inside the water. Oh, no. First, it was very hard to attach the darn thing to the glass. It kept floating upwards. I tried to use the water filter to force it down (in tandem), barely managed to do so. But worse yet, after some time in use we started to see the lights flickering a bit, then bright lights if not sparks came out from the socket. In the process it caused disruption to other appliances, including Rianne’s laptop. OK then, totally not worth the risk! Took it out of the socket, let it dry up for a few days. Today, in the laundry room (away from other valuable appliances and with its own distant fuse; the fusebox splits up the rooms), I plugged the thing back again. Lights not coming back up. None at all. Hmmm… try another socket. Same outcome. Try in the kitchen. Same. Just give up.

“Come on, Roy, you cannot just force it to work…”

My guess is that the fuse blew at some point. Good. Rightly so. Fuses blow up for good reasons, they’re a protection mechanism. I won’t bother replacing the fuse (I have spare ones and know how to handle these).

Whether the lights were not functioning “OK” or the goddamn thing was no longer water-resistant… who knows, right? I’ll never know. Either way, the thing was rendered unsafe to use, either underwater or outside the water (I was prepared to let it be used exclusively as the latter).

Some things are cheap for a reason. Having said that, all the other things we acquired are very good, they just needed a lot of very stubborn cleaning.

Let’s see how long those other things can last. I’m not counting on 5 years, let alone a decade.

My trust in “modern” electronics is waning. I still use appliances older than 30 years old. They still function perfectly.

t has been nearly 24 hours for the new arrivals and they seem to be coping OK. I spent many hours working on them yesterday, checking their condition every 10 minutes or so until going to sleep. Time-consuming? For sure. Even gave me a physical headache. But the first few hours or days are critical, I wanted to be sure the creatures all get along and, if not, intervene before it’s too late.

Learned from experience…

I don’t expect this week to be busy anyway. Many things have calmed down, people go back to work, and this coming week/days/weekend there are many fans walking past the streets here to concerts, including the very weird fans of Melanie Martinez. The music scene has gotten truly bizarre.

t is turning out to be a good winning streak for Enzo, with a fourth win in a row and this time a different tournament and difficult away game against a very potent rival. Just weeks ago, after the Community Shield defeat, it looked like there was going to be another loss, this time at home (against Bournemouth), but 0-1 became 2-1 in a matter of minutes. So now, instead, Enzo is off at a better start then Pep’s a decade ago.

There’s a derby coming up on Sunday, then a straightforward Carabao Cup match.

Video summary.