House and Household

#deletefacebook Last night I followed Musks lead and deleted my facebook account. Second time. First time was because I had been the coordinator of an international group and I had several hundred "friends" who I only knew thru the group. This time its for a lot of reasons but was triggered by the Cambridge Analytical scandal. Reasons; I wasn't reading any more. Just sucking up the feed each day. "The Guardian" and "the conversation" were sources to repost. I got a buzz from "likes". It took time from my day. It was insidious and reinforced my own opinions. It was polarising.  The quality of my communication diminished. What will I miss? Easy communication.  Communication with old friends for whom I have no emails. Information sources and selling opportunities. What will I have to do to achieve the same level of communication is use email more and also a range of apps - sites - Linkedin - Gumtree - Skype G+ and so on. ...

Well I finally got sick of my mac not living up to its potential. Yes its 5 years old but its still a nice piece of gear. 32 g of memory an 5i processor and a slow hard drive. I was running drop box - 120Gb two google drive  accounts 100gb each. Zotero a bibliographic data base. Scrivener 3 - Gimp photo editing. iThoughts and Xmind for mind maps. Shotwell on parallels. Mail and web browsers (Firefox). Music thru itunes. It took 10 minutes to wind up. Then it would grind away and low and behold if you wanted it to compile something or save it. I realised my HP360 was running the same programs (functions) under Manjaro Mate so I tried that route with the imac. Manjaro and netrunner were tried. Both were OK but lacked zest. Manjaro Cinnamon worked well. So then I tried Mint Cinnamon 18.3. And yes everything work with a bit of zest. Scrivener 3 (beta) is running fine in wine. Xmind works. and the rest all work in Linux. And it does not run like a dead slug. C...

Installed several distros on this duo core machine and it dies with most when Dropbox and Insync start up. With Ubuntu and most gnome desktops its slow. So I put  Manjaro XFCE Edition (17.1.4) on after trying Netrunner rolling. Strangely  the Plasma desktop did not suck resources but is not to my liking.  So I installed the XCFE version then added Mate and Cinnamon.  I like both but in my situation Cinnamon is the best as the indicators for Dropbox and Insync both work "out of the box". As ever I also added Scrivener 2.9 running under wine. No issues. Zotero_standalone. Vivaldi - Browser of choice. Not a resource hog. So far so good.  Also found a great Ever-note client for Linux in Tusk https://klauscfhq.github.io/tusk/

My 11.2 is not that much different from everyone elses. 250GB SSD, 8GB memory, and a 250gb sd card in the slot. My install was painless thanks to Racters wonderful writeup. Technically correct and wonderfully written and worded. Thanks. Several other links are worth noting. http://teslabs.com/articles/ubuntu-15-04-mbp-11-2/   and Phils wich I used when I did a Majaro install earlier. All works well and producing battery life of 6 plus hours. Note though the interrupts fix has to be done as root not Super user (sudo) Installed Scrivener in wine and as the last deb. Zotero-standalone and my other favorites. I've set up my directories and backups so I don't have to worry about data loss and so I can upgrade to Manjaro when I get the urge again. My dropbox directory is on my main ssd so I don't loose it each time we suspend. I just haven't set up the fix yet. I-sight camera work but will need reinstalling at ever kernel upgrade. network can be iffy ...

Earlier this week I "upgraded" my MBP 11.2 to Sierra. Big mistake. Lost that wonderful battery life of 10.11. Then 10.12 decided another upgrade was necessary and my 250gb sd card on which my lifeline dropbox folder was started going AWL each time the screen-saver came on. Soooo no longer any reason to procrastinate- I upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04.01 and copied all my files across from my backups. I rejigger my partitions and such. But it did not feel right after my resent experiences with Manjaro. So I bit the bullet and reinstalled a Manjaro core. Wireless works but took a bit of stuffing round. Don't use the latest kernel 4.4 will do and the modules will work with that. see https://forum.manjaro.org/t/broadcom-bcm4360-wifi-not-working/2141/3 end result - all my critical programs are working well. Evernote (thru web), Zotero, Scrivener native or thru wine, Xmind, Aeon (wine). :-) Oh and shotwell -shits- all over photo for a photo-management app... to use "ma...

  Today my mac mini started to make strange sounds and eventually died with loss of the screen. Sot its heart (the hybrid sad drive) got transferred into a old Dell till I can find something better. Manjaro KDE worked well as does gnome. Loving manjar more as I get to know it. Afraid it does make the rpm and deb style systems look  a bit dated. Being able to use the community repositories to install “foreign” programs like scrivener of Xmind is a real plus. Adding printers is still a bit clunky though.

If you have one of these beasts linux installation can be a pain. Seems they use a 32 bit efi for the boot. So when you put any of the standard CD disks - yes disks as booting from USB doesn’t work -  it hangs asking you if you want method 1 or 2…. Early disks of ubuntu or fedora will boot but then you have to do a series of online updates. A total pain. I did want to do a Arch install but debian works - as ever so thats what I did. Debian will boot if you you use the mac image see;  http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/amd64/iso-cd/ Described in the following blog; http://sadevil.org/blog/2016/01/24/replacing-os-x-with-linux-on-my-mac-mini-21/ I did eventually get Manjaro linux installed by using a 686 net install version. https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?title=Installation_Guide_for_the_NET_Edition_0.8.10 It boots well on the 2.1 mini  boot and but you must ensure when installing that you set the whole thing up to boot in BIOS mode on all the i...