Cimorene

Wax and I are cat divorced but we've now switched bedrooms. So I've got the dining room, which is the warmest room in the house now, and Snookums and Tristana can stay glued to the radiator all day and all night. It was getting increasingly difficult to pry them off of it when I had to take them upstairs to bed - after being shut out of the dining room Snookums would go downstairs repeatedly and I'd have to carry him back up. The last night we slept upstairs I had to go downstairs and carry him up three times.

Anubis isn't nearly as fussy. He has been happily sleeping under the duvet with Wax, who is more cold-tolerant than me anyway. And I am happy to not deal with the cold air outside of the bed now, and it's much easier to feed Snookums in the middle of the night... but the mattress in the real bed is nicer and the bed is just overall cozier, I guess. I suppose it evens out well. It wouldn't be fair if literally everything was nicer down here.

Anyway, Wax has the Chromebook upstairs now because she's started watching terrible tv shows on it in bed, which is what she does to destress whereas I binge read fanfiction. The Chromebook is from 2017 I think? Which means the second-newest laptop is from... I guess... 2014? When I was binge-reading this wasn't a problem, but now that I'm trying to get some knitting done the internet keeps failing out and then crashing and you have to reboot to fix it, and of course it doesn't have an optical drive to fall back on. (I may be reduced to watching video files from one of the external hds.) Wax dug out the second-newest full laptop, which is one year older and has an optical drive still, but apparently the newest OS on it doesn't have all the codecs installed and it can't play the DVD we tried to test in it.

I ordered a new laptop to install Linux on (we're probably going to switch to Linux Mint on it and also our desktops going forward, as Ubuntu and all its other downstreams are all currently fucked by a reliance on Snap packages), but it's not here yet because, obviously, packing and shipping is currently at its slowest due to the holiday rush.

Did I mention that it's too warm downstairs for flannel sheets? That's really sad and I am sort of hoping it gets a bit colder still so that I can switch to flannel down here too. That's one of my favorite parts of winter. But it is cool enough to sleep under the weighted duvet at least. On the minus side, the bed (futon) in the dining room is right against the radiator and, as I said, the cats are mostly glued to it. Snookums usually sleeps in my arms for most of the night, but here it's less than half the time. Tristana came and cuddled me twice during the night, but she's stretched out along the radiator the rest of the time.

Yesterday I dropped by one of the little local boutiques that sell house stuff and I got a chip basket for the firewood! Also some adorable handmade candles! I was in luck, because it was the only one she had and it was a bit old and scuffed - she had it out full of blankets for sale - so she gave me a slight discount. And the store was really nice and cozy inside. I'd never been in before, because these sorts of little stores are mostly only open on weekdays, and occasionally a few hours on a weekend. I learned some new interior décor terms in Swedish and saw a near-clone of our cast iron stove, the same shape, but hers is all enamelled white. It was lit, and the door was open! The store is the whole downstairs of a cute wooden early 20th c. house (maybe a bit earlier: I'm just guessing, without a detailed inspection). Big plank floors everywhere and piles of blankets and wool rugs, cast iron hooks and enamel door signs and crystal and china and big piles of baskets and of course, Morris wallpaper, which I still can't buy because it's expensive and the wrong period and I have nowhere to use it, but it's even more tempting when you're touching it.

But also yesterday, my work computer tried to update itself and plunged into an endless cycle of reboots, as some other people have described it. The update doesn't install correctly, and it demands that you restart, and then it says it has installed and wants you to restart, but then when you do it isn't installed. After a bunch of restarts and being unplugged and multiple attempts to simply uninstall the broken update (that doesn't work either), I concluded that you probably either need to do a clean install or go in with admin privileges and delete some sensitive bits manually. I did find some Google results that point to this type of solution, and logic tells me this is how you'd fix an issue of this type in Linux, but I don't know enough about Windows to do that to my work computer without a lot more confidence in how to restore from backups. So I called the local computer company that belongs to one of waxjism's second or third cousins (a descendant of a sibling of her granny who was one of nine) and they're sending a guy Thursday afternoon. The internet still works and my work laptop and the printer are all fine, but the work laptop is without a power cable, and all my attempts to email the groups who might have accidentally taken the power cable have so far come to naught. So I've gotta try to save the laptop's power a bit. It's at 56% now because I had to do some Photoshopping today, not just answering emails.

It wasn't supposed to rain today, but it's raining. I wondered why I saw so many people in raincoats on my way to work!

We've been using Evernote to store our recipes for years. Each recipe has a file, and all of them can be accessed from the tablet or my phone, and I can add new ones from the desktop. In principle there are a variety of cloud storage things that you could use this way, aside from a completely DIY solution (which would require looking up how to do lots of things like make one of our computers into the server, etc. Like, we've used one of our computers that way in the past, but accessing it remotely from an Android tablet would require a bit more effort than from a Linux desktop).

I've gotta assume that Evernote is getting more and more urgently in need of money because it's been escalating its ads and pleas for monthly fees over the years, and now it's making multiple popups every single time you open the tablet, which is pissing me off to the point of being unwilling to use it anymore. The problem is deciding where to transfer the recipes, though. Google Docs, which we already use for other things, is an obvious alternative, but it also seems a little needlessly feature-rich when the recipes themselves are tiny plain text notes. A reminder or list app? I investigated these a little and ultimately it looks like none of them are significantly better than Google Keep, which I already use, for my purposes, but migrating to Google Keep would involve a fair amount of manual re-tagging labor.

But speaking of Google! I was at a board meeting recently for work and one of the board members asked if anybody knew what to do because Google is saying that her storage is almost used up. A couple of board members suggested a computer expert, the ones we hired to update the work computers actually, but another one said "In the end I don't think you have any alternative. It happened to me and now I just pay them every month, because there's nothing you can do. I mean it's all your pictures, and you don't want them to take them away." Amazing.

You don't HAVE to store all your stuff in the cloud! (But maybe if you're not very ~leet you really do? Because modern-day computer literacy, even for 'digital native' children, seems to consist largely in how to use apps and services as designed, and things like migrating, downloading, manual backups, etc are outsourced to ~IT professionals. People who learned computers before they did it all for you, and hence know about file architecture and formats and so on, are evidently becoming scarcer, even though that was like the absolute basics when I was in secondary school. ETA: both these women are older than me, but I suppose they are probably both simply old enough that they didn't learn to use personal computers in secondary school at all. My wife did, and they probably went to the same primary school system as her - this local one - but she was in what we'd call middle school when the earliest Windows computers appeared in schools. Five or ten years earlier and they could miss all that. I wonder what it was like for people who were in college when Windows 3.0/3.1 came out?)

In fact, years ago I started going through my old photos and downloading them, organized into month folders, and that gave me the opportunity to delete the ones I don't want that I hadn't deleted at the time. About a year ago Google gave me that message and it was a good motivation to finish backing them up and culling the bad ones, which has the side effect of making it easier to find old pictures - reducing the pool to a size that's more manageable and searchable.

It's not really that time consuming, and computer storage is no longer prohibitively expensive: we can store all my years of photos in two separate copies with multiple SSDs and external HDDs in the household. HOWEVER, even though I deleted most of the photos in my Google Photos account over a year ago, Google Photos still doesn't know about this. In the days right after I did it there were some weird errors when I tried to scroll back - like it got confused and froze up trying to adjust how far the scrollbar should go, and jumped around when I went back in time. Now a year later, though, it's telling me that my storage is full again, when it most definitely is not. So I'm gonna have to send a support ticket about it, I guess.

In the past, I always switched between android phones using the Google thing that transfers apps and data.

This time, for the first time I bought a Samsung phone. There was a Samsung-branded app that offered to do the switching for me (the Google one showed up later in the process, I don't remember exactly where, but the process was underway so it was too late). And it didn't transfer the data - it probably couldn't. It just transferred the applications.

I wasn't really prepared for this, nor did I discover it right away, because I didn't launch everything to check it and I don't use everything every day.

The first two days with the new phone, I kept being summoned by my old phone's alarm going off even though it was in a drawer or inside the sofa, even though I had turned it off. I'd dig it out, going, "Didn't I turn you off?" and it was on again somehow. I'd cancel the alarm and turn it off again, carefully, and then check that it WAS off and it was, and then an alarm would go off twelve hours later or whatever. After this happened about four times, I said, "I'm just going to restore it to factory settings. I've transferred everything now and we were going to test out installing one of those cracked OSes." I'd been using the new phone for a while then and things seemed to be going okay. I deleted the alarms first, and I did have a moment of thinking Actually deleting the alarms is enough, I wouldn't really need to reset it,, but then I reset it anyway because I was still annoyed by the alarms and wanted to do something emphatic, or something.

I discovered belatedly that my bank identification app, which is the official way to authenticate EVERYTHING OFFICIAL, didn't transfer its app data. It wouldn't let me sign in without generating a QR code from it on another device, which I didn't have anymore; the alternative was ordering a code in the mail, on paper. The ID app used to have a paper backup - the method used by Finnish banks before these apps came along, a long list of randomly-generated codes that had to be used in a specific order. But this method is less secure than two-factor authentication, so they discontinued it. Now there is no backup. Presumably the alternative is just not paying for anything electronically anymore?

So to sign in to a newly downloaded bank id app, they text you one code, and then they send a second code by snail mail, and you need both of them to sign in. But when the letter arrived, my new phone could not find the text message. It definitely arrived. I saw it! There was a notification and I tried to put it in right away, but then I saw on the app screen that you should wait to enter it until you have both codes, so I closed the app to wait. When the letter got here, I tried to open the phone's messaging app - confusingly, there were two with the same name AND the same icon; great UI design there??? - but it was nowhere to be found. Or rather, one app had no mesages and one had only a branded 'welcome to Samsung shit' messages. But I spent hours trying to figure out new ways to search the phone for it. Finally I gave up and cancelled the signin attempt and initialized a second one, so I have to wait for a second letter. (This has certainly never happened to me before, but it's also so bizarre that it's hard to see how it could be, idk, a Samsung flaw somehow? That's not how phones are supposed to work! It's crazy! So did closing it initially somehow delete it??? But I guess I'll never know.)

This means Wax had to renew my bus card because I couldn't pay for it, and then after I blithely told my career counselor I would send a message to the employment bureau as soon as possible, I belatedly realized that I can't because you have to use bank authentication to send a message to the employment bureau.

Last year things were happening a lot and we got a huge apple crop that mostly just filled us with despair. I remember tasting a few of them, but we never managed to get around to gathering up any or doing anything with them. The main thing was just that there were WAY more of them than normal and they picked a poor time for it. Last year I didn't even KNOW that they were my favorite variety of apples, Kanel apples! That means "cinnamon", and it's a common home garden variety in Finland at least, especially hereabouts, but by no means the only one. They're on the small side and sweeter than average, and distinctive because of the red/pink veining in the flesh.



Well, this year I wouldn't say that we're ON TOP OF anything, but we have managed to gather most of the windfall apples before they've had time to rot underfoot, and to get many of the inedible ones out of the pathway and either into the bushes or onto the compost heap. Friday I went a little nuts trying to pick up all the ones that had fallen in the last week and take them inside though, so we decided to make a big batch of apple jam and a big batch of dried apple chips (bunny treats). So today Wax peeled and segmented while I washed and mandolined apples until she had 2 kg in a big soup pot and I had completely filled the fruit dryer. Snookums curled up next to me on the other half of the table but Tristana was interested enough to keep her awake staring at me for most of the process.

Last week we impulse-bought an external hard drive that was supposed to have a licensed picture of Captain America on it, but the store screwed up and sent us the wrong one. It was on sale, and it felt too silly and petty to return it for that even though it WAS quite disappointing, especially because they sent us the Avengers group image one, which was the least visually striking of the bunch. Nonetheless, we proceeded to excavate all the three-year-old backups from the harddrives in our spare PC and go through them, and in the process I also went through my data and media files and updated the backups on the external harddrive, then reformatted the harddrive I keep my media and data and settings on. I renamed it as a matter of course, but without pausing to consider that that would break links in my system files because I had set it to mount on boot when I installed the OS. As a result, I had to edit the configuration file manually and then delete and remake all the symlinks in my file browser (which has to be done at the command line now because Gnome in their infinite wisdom removed the ability to create symlinks from Nautilus a while ago). I even had to go find and replace the file paths in my saved playlists because they're all saved as xml! But I rebooted the system and everything is working perfectly. My files are now all hosted on Pierrot (albeit the same physical volume as before!)... and I'm feeling quite proud of myself.

Wax's third week of vacation is starting now. We have done a lot of the little things that don't get done, like some errands and baking and started (not finished) catching up on laundry. That's fine, I guess. I guess it'll... get done sometime... idk.

We watched Robocop next from my list of silly 80s movies. It was very dumb, but it wasn't what I was expecting at all. That was funny. Not exactly fun, I guess? Point Break and Top Gun were the only two to live up to their iconic status so far, but there's still Blade Runner and Interview with the Vampire on the list, among others. Interestingly, Wax remembered Robocop being anti-cop, but it's not intentionally anti-cop. It is showing a future dystopia and it's very much against the privatization and militarization of policing, with capitalism very much coming off the worse for wear. It shows the ordinary cops being pretty terrible too, mostly not in a very realistic way - they're wearing body armor and are ridiculously violent, but the armor isn't as complete or effective as modern riot gear, ironically, and their ridiculous violence, far from being shown up as out of proportion, is kind of... less violent than the criminals. All the crime we're shown is stereotypical semi-petty ćrime straight from the 80s reaganite racist narratives about inner cities, but almost all of it is perpetrated by white guys who are apparently just permanently tweaking, except their behavior is both too bad to be explained by drugs (too coherently sadistic and psychopathic) and too good to be explained by drugs (their coordination and driving and planning ability and... stuff). They're just sort of weirdly inherently evil not-exactly-human bad guys who simply are bad in every overacted way they can think of all at once because they're just naturally bad, like fantasy creature villains, except they're a collection of random teenagers and Kurtwood Smith who is clearly an evil accountant although he's also a hitman, a coke kingpin micromanaging every stage of the enterprise, and apparently now a mafia boss who thinks he can executive level crime boss every facet of the city's nightlife going forward, and a single black guy to show they aren't racist against black people, the villains are just all white while being suspiciously anti-black stereotypes because of Reasons. The police chief is also black, and we see him prove he's a hardass in the introduction when they inadvertently show the cops are shitty and all stupid while attempting to show that they're genuine well-meaning salt of the earth types, but then later he goes easy on the white lady cop and says that cops can't strike because of their public duty, so he's obviously meant to be a good guy.

Anyway, there are two sequels I'm not gonna watch at all, but they probably address none of these issues.

Also my os crashed last night so I need to reinstall. I hope it's not my ssd - that's where the boot loader was. It doesn't seem to be a common issue. I'm just going to install a different ubuntu-based os alongside it so I can go in and at least save my settings.

I have spent a few days mostly restrainedly panicking, but today after I filled out the enrollment questionnaire the printer suddenly wouldn't work.

The new printer problems (multiple) infuriated first me, then Wax for about 3 hours before we gave up, and it somehow replaced most of the panic temporarily with frustration. I will have to offer to email it to them tomorrow, so that they can print it there. Who knows when the printer will work here. The easiest way might be to actually upgrade an OS entirely.

Last time I was supposed to print something to bring somewhere the printer also wouldn't work, though that was a different printer, but we got it up and running soon thereafter and since then TODAY is the first time it's refused. So that's good timing.

I really want to do all that leaving-Google stuff but this admirably detailed article is so long that my executive function just gave up in despair before I even finished reading the first step.

In all the excitement I let a warning message about low disk space slip my mind. Actually, I started investigating which disk it meant and trying to decide what I should do, but I got distracted and ended up forgetting about it. So last night my desktop refused to boot back up after reboot, and apparently that's what the error messages indicated, and it wouldn't even go through the cleanup option in recovery mode without it hanging up.

This isn't a really severe problem, of course; it just means I need to boot a live session so I can use a disk utility and at worst I'd have to install a newer os in a new partition. And we have plenty of live disks already so - but no! Because I have no idea where I packed our usb sticks. We both spent a while looking for them last night, but we couldn't find them, so I'm camping out on the Chromebook until we can buy another usb stick.

The only important function the Chromebook doesn't have is access to my whole music library actually - well, that and its miniature keyboard doesn't have a capslock and I keep calling up the system search instead by mistake - so it shouldn't be a big deal, but I'm too accustomed to my desktop being down qualifying as a state of mild emergency to talk myself down from it.