So yeah, three months gap here.
I had quite a lot of tech support business - new printers, new hardware, etc. Jeff's desktop died, by my inspection by faulty capacitors and power phasing on a shitty Athlon 64 mainboard killing the circuitry and hard drive. The memory also seems unsable, but I have tested all that ddr2 and it does still at least run.
I got a Freedompop Galaxy S4 in preparation for the expiration of my Tracfones end of life. So far so good - it gets service everywhere I usually go, and the device itself is fantastic and useful. The 500MB a month of mobile data will be invaluable surely. So far, great reactions, and if I end up using it full time I will make an effort to persuade light mobile users to adopt it as well. I even get bonus data for doing it.
Getting worried about the electrical noise from my z87i-deluxe. If necessary, I will RMA it to ASUS, but the noise frequency is down from an unacceptable high of near-hourly. Has not happened all day today, for example.
Still working on the Lubuntu article. I got distracted, I guess? Either way, I have significantly extended it to fit its use case properly, and am writing a lot of how-to instructions on basic usage of the OS, which was what was critically lacking in my last drafts submitted in May.
The plan there is still to push the Lubuntu article, then do a 4 part series covering the Linux desktops, the distros, the graphics, and the software (games majorly included). After that I hopefully would be able to move into hardware reviews, which would be much less time consuming.
Additionally, Civilization 5 has been a thing. I have 421 hours played at the time of writing this, and it came out in June. It is a really fantastic game, and I even got Matt Council to play it a bit this past weekend. He got bored though, probably because he was high and drunk. We then majorly sucked at Dota 2. He said he would get Brave New World at least, since that expansion makes the game exponentially better.
I also finally organized my contacts in response to this new handset. They are all in Google though, which is not the greatest, but I can at least back them up. I really think the micromanagement of dozens of passwords, bitcoin wallets, personal keys, and now contact and email logs and books is getting ridiculous, and I will need to automate it all better in the future.
It is an opportune time to speculate on what my goals are right now. In the short term, I want that Lubuntu article done. I want to in parallel work on the additional articles while developing a few programs and patches - I want to write my multi-sink sound recorder and a cross platform reimplementation of the Corsair Link API. I want to patch Clementine with an overhaul of the sound conversion UI to enable whole-library converting between formats. I want to contribute something to kde telepathy, one thing that might work is a tox based backend, because Tox as a technology is proving interesting.
In the longer term, I still have several projects I am still looking for "cofounders" to work on - the distributed content creation platform with patronage funding through cryptocurrencies, gaming (in general, if anyone is interested), a syntactically appealing low level typed compiled language, a la Rust revised, microkernels (who wouldn't) and a processor architecture that makes sense (ie, having sequential consistent execution guarantees for multithreading implementations, hybridized SIMD / GPU compute / serial cores and pathways, workload distribution a la NUMA / HSA on a more comprehensive scale). Oh, and one serial and one parallel interface wtih scaling frequencies and power draws.
On top of all that, some contract work on the side would be great. The 2002 Ford is still not working, albeit Jeff has ordered many parts and done a lot of work. I systemically murdered the front gardens of my mothers dilapidated homestead with the highest rated herbicides from Amazon, and it seems to be working. Bird is still bird.
Oh, and I have my own room! That would be one of the most significant differences between updates here. I took one of the twin beds from the master guest suite and Mary T from across the street gave us her old glass computer desk. So now Marian's computer, sewing machine, etc are all in the master guest room with one bed, and I'm in the room across from the bathroom with my own bed at the old monolithic computer desk. I am even putting my clothes in drawers.
Speaking of Marian's computer, her new one is an MSI am1i based system now in an ISK 100. So far so good, the first board from Newegg was defective, got refunded because they ran out of stock, and I ended up getting a replacement from Amazon - the last one in stock there. Not promising for future builds since the $100 mobo / cpu combo was a nice budget proposition for the size. Now I'm looking at either a much more expensive i3 based build to fit in the same case, or a bigger case with higher power potential to fit a Richland / Kaveri based system. Because that MSI board was perfect for the intent. A case with room to use the pcie port would be nice, though.
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