I’ve had exciting. Exciting ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Grew up in “The Valley” you know. Actively engaged in a War, you know. Mom was a barmaid at a Trucker Bar in South El Monte, you know. You know?

So, I’ve had exciting. BUT, this past week couldn’t have been more boring if you’d thrown a Star Trek DS9 Marathon on the heap. Rain. More Rain. So dark I’ve had to attach a charger to my solar batteries. The 3 solar panels just aren’t keeping up.

Speaking of which: decided to build/assemble a 24 volt system to see if I can get it a bit more efficient. Yea, I know; a 48 volt system would be the best, but I really can’t afford to do that right now. Maybe next summer. Oh, I have the panels; but I need batteries. Batteries are spendy. Way spendy. And I need at least 8 of them. (15 would be optimal.) And when you’re talking LifePo4 batteries you want to buy as many of one manufactured date as possible for electrical consistency. (Did that make sense?)

We’ll see. Should be fun just as long as I watch what I’m doing. Higher voltage means a greater chance of getting electrofried if I decide to be stupid. Plus converting DC to AC for transmission then back to DC for storage, well, I need to watch my P’s & Q’s.

RV sprung a leak sometime during our last trip. Found a large pool of water on the counter top during my last check. Spent $54 on a 20×25′ tarp and about an hour getting it over the RV. Surprising what one can do with a 20×25′ tarp, two 8′ wooden poles, and duct tape. When the Wx clears up (along about next May) I’ll have to take it in for repair. That’ll be expensive.

Gathering things for Thanksgiving. SWMBO’s son is still mad at, and not talking to, me, so, he won’t be coming over this year. His loss. SWMBO invited one of her future cat lady friends over and we’ve offered to feed the Missionaries if they don’t get an invite somewhere else. I’m making my instant pot turkey again. (Hey, it’s good and it works!) So, depending on who shows up, I could have a week of cold turkey & mayo sandwiches in my future. Yummy!

Anywho, y’all have a great Thanksgiving. Be safe in your travels.

Well, it’s a plan. Not a good plan; but a plan never the less.

Sorry, just not a lot going on around here. Unless you count the rain. Been raining (mostly) all week. It is WET outside! Even the Dog has decided that he’s only going outside when his bladder is causing physical discomfort. Or he thinks he’ll make it wetter inside than out. I don’t know. He’s a Dog and you never really know what a Dog is thinking until it doesn’t bite you. Don’t get me started.

Been pulling together all the Game/Program Demo disks my father-in-law gave me trip before last, giving them a try, and if they’ve been interesting enough, I make a .iso file out of it and throw out the actual disc. I mean, these games/programs are from the 90’s from, like, Computer Magazine and such. Remember when they sent out those demo discs? Yeah, he kept every one for the past 35 years.

And, I gotta admit, some of those old games brought back memories of how it was WAY BACK WHEN home computing first started. Remember having a 50 lb monitor that showed a whole 4 colors whether you used them or not? Remember going from CGA to EGA to SVGA but you had to take out a loan against your kids college funds. (If you had a college fund for your kids. Or even had kids.)

Twin floppy systems were cool because you had TWIN floppies for gosh’ sake. I was proud of my  twin floppies. I invited friends over to see my twin floppies. I don’t know how the Police got involved ..

Er …

Posted some videos on my Youtube that I captured playing on the Quest 3. (Can’t believe I have 145 videos and 36 subscribers. 36!) I am enjoying the HELL out of that Quest 3!

Eco-worthy had their ECO-WORTHY 400W Solar Panels 4pcs 100 Watt 12 Volt Monocrystalline Solar Panel Module on sale for less than $200 so I bought one. (4? Well, one order of 4 panels.) Then bought a MPPT controller for them. I just couldn’t pass up that deal even if they are the old Monocrystalline and not the new poly-stuff. They’ll probably outlive me. So now I’ll have 7 new(er) 100 watt panels and 4 (way) older 100 watt panels to play with. Next I’ll save up for one of them sun-tracker things to mount them on. Need some micro inverters too. Hmmm…

Last Date Day SWMBO was going to take me to Sheri’s in Silverdale but when we got there it was closed. Permanently. Damn! The one in East Bremerton was closed a long time ago. We stopped by the IHop just down the road from Sheri’s but wasn’t impressed when we walked in and left. Then she (SWMBO) told me she really wasn’t hungry anyway so we made a quick stop at Burger King (cause *I* needed something to eat!) and made our usual stop at WinCo before heading home. Tucked her into our bed and even wrapped her in a heating blanket. So, success! Got my girl into bed at the end of the date.

I’m so lucky!

Or I may not. Depends.

Need to rebuild my system. Completely upgrade the OS (Linux Mint XFCE usually), sooooooooo

My present desktop is a SFF  i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz with (DDR3) 12G ram (8 cores) (according to lshw). GeForce GTX 1050 Ti video card. Has an Internal DVD (laptop quality) and I added an external Blu-Ray drive. Haven’t had any problems with it until recently (random lock-ups needing hard reboot) and it’s done everything I have (reasonably) asked of it. With the NVIDIA video card it even rips and converts movies fairly quickly. Been up and running about 3 years. (1998 motherboard.)

The “Windows” SFF I bought to (badly) run MSFS is an i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60 GHZ with (DDR4) 30G ram (8 cores). GeForce GTX 1050. No optical drive at all. 

And, really, about the only important difference between the two is RAM.

But still: Hmmm…

I mean; I gotta reinstall the OS anyway, why not upgrade the hardware at the same time? I have it and it ain’t doing anything but gathering dust.

Downloaded and burned the latest Linux Mint to a thumb drive. (Do we still call them that?)

Killed Windows (felt SO good!) by installing said Linux Mint XFCE and installing/re-installing everything I usually use. (Leaving out things I’ve installed but hardly ever use. We’ll see how that goes.)

Now comes the tedious part: setting up e-mail and all the ‘online’ stuff and password files and all that. Reinstalling the Virtual Machine ‘stuff’ I use often is going to be a pain. Sometimes just getting the  3 monitors I use to show up in the right order is a pain. Computers are a pain! Why do I subject myself to this? Aaarrrrgggghhh!

Er

So, tomorrow sometime I’ll shut down the ‘old’ computer, pull my data drive out, unplug it and set it off to the side. I know I’m going to have to start it up someday and see how something was installed/set-up and instead of reinventing the wheel…

THEN put my data drive  (and maybe one other (12 TB I’m not really using elsewhere)) in then begin the reconnect everything part of the evolution. Ugh. So many customization’s to redo. Hell, Thunar alone will take an hour or two. (But, maybe not. I did find the uga.xml file with all the custom settings and MaY be able to just copy it over.)

So, I may be offline for a day or two.