miscellany category archive

system76 creative alternative support

I’ve been happy with the system76 desktop machine I bought last year pre-installed with Ubuntu. I got it partly to support a company selling GNU/Linux machines, and partly to avoid the Microsoft tax and possible complications with buying a cheap Dell machine and replacing Windows with Ubuntu. (This was before Dell started offering Ubuntu.)

I’d consider going back to system 76 before buying a Dell Ubuntu machine. Dell hasn’t particularly earned my loyalty after my past experience with them, although I hope the Ubuntu machines sell well for them and they keep it up.

The machine has worked out great, but then recently there was the problem with the integrated Ethernet NIC on the motheboard. After throwing in a spare card and getting …

Summer Days, One Step at a Time

Thursday marked one year of “Moving to Freedom.” But this isn’t the post for that; I’m planning another entry with graphs and stats and suitably pompous observations. I bring it up as a way of explaining my posting lately. I don’t feel the need to apologize, but I realize I’m not posting a lot of on-topic entries, and what I am posting is pretty light-weight. (Although that could be just because I’m shallow and uninteresting.)

I feel compelled to explain that I really want to post more on topic stuff and more in-depth, but I’m busy enjoying the summer. Last year we had a new baby and so weren’t out doing as much, and I also spent a lot of time working on getting this site started. I enjoyed learning …

Mostly Done!

Not particularly impressive, but here are the Amur Maples in their new bed. Of course now I wish we had planted them five or seven years ago so they’d be a good screen by now between us and the neighbors. (Not that we don’t like our neighbors; it’s just that we’re all jammed together in suburbia here.) Can you see the grass covered stump in the next yard? That was a nasty Cottonwood that nevertheless provided some separation and privacy in the past. Damn thing sent lots of surface roots and suckers in to our yard, so can’t say that I miss it. It made us less motivated to plant our own hedge until it was gone.

Hard …

Doing Things the Hard Way

I’m on vacation this week and it seemed like it would be fun to remove some of the grass from our yard. I’ve rented a manual sod “kicker” to cut sod in the past, but was seriously questioning my decision this time around. It’s hard work, and I’m older and fatter now. I could have brought home a noisy, gasoline burning, smoke belching machine from the same place, my inner slacker complained.

It got easier after cutting the initial strip and figuring out that downhill is better. (Just a slight slope, but what a difference.) You also want to attack at a low angle. Keeping the handles lower while you kick seems to cut more smoothly while at the same time putting maximum strain on your lower …

The Recklessness of Storms

Remember that storm I told you about a couple of days ago? The one with the rap sheet a mile long? Here’s some evidence of its delinquency at my mom’s house.

This is big ash tree from the neighbor’s yard. I think a combination of the power company and some tree service did the cutting here:

A closer view of the turf displacement around the base:

See below the fold for one more…

A view from the neighbor’s yard to my mom’s. It’s kind of hard to see, but all those branches in the upper right corner of the picture are large branches left hanging off the garage roof by the power/phone companies. The storm also took down some branches from a …

The “History” of Storms

We had some severe thunderstorms move through the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area yesterday afternoon that pelted my house with marble-sized hail. (There were reports of “tennis ball” hail in the area, although the largest I saw on the news was closer to “golf ball.”)

I heard sirens and along with the rattle of chunks of ice raining hard against the windows upstairs, I decided I better wake up my 16-month-old daughter from her nap and head to the basement with the dog and whatever cats I could collect along the way. (My wife was at work.)

By the time I got down there and logged in to an old computer to check the radar, the heavy stuff had passed. I went up to see what TV news had to say about the whole thing, and was treated to this …