Cookie, our male visitor from somewhere in the neighbourhood, is very busy lately. One could easily call him our “chief mouser” now, like the one at 10 Downing Street. I lately saw him tracking down, hunting, killing, and also eating a couple of mice, and he’s always on the watch for more:
Of course, even a cat has to rest sometimes (like 16 hours a day). So here he is shortly before the sun reached him in the afternoon:
At the moment, he’s resting on the sofa (the door to Zuleikha’s room, which probably is his favourite place in our flat, is closed)…
Paul Thompson meant a combined Fender Rhodes and real piano sound overlaid over each other, but here he’s talking about the five great bass players on one of my favourite albums, Donald Fagen’s “The Nightfly”:
And the next one should be interesting for singers as well, because she’s a legend herself:
Now if you’re a bass player, do yourself a favour and go and transcribe these bass lines yourself if possible. And in case you’re a singer/songwriter/poet, have a look and listen to Joni Mitchell’s iconic album. Love them both.
“Next Thursday, 16 June, is Bloomsday” – so begins an article in The Guardian about the upcoming 100th birthday of “Ulysses” by James Joyce. And yes, I still have to read it, and yes I know that it’s hard to read, but I’m still very much looking forward to that. I’d rather start with “Finnegan’s Wake“, but that might even be harder to read…
Recently I reported about another article on why people run Linux on their machines. And one of the reasons is always: because it doesn’t make your hardware obsolete, like Windows or MacOS both are doing. Proof of the pudding: here is Mitchie’s old Lenovo SL500, a dual core (Intel T5670) 2GB notebook from ca. 2008, running a current Arch Linux with the latest 5.18.2 kernel, the same which I have on my main machine:
If you enlarge the photo on Flickr you can probably see that its CPU is at 1%, which means it’s doing nothing except wait for any user input. And the system together with the very nice and modern XFCE desktop consumes just about 750MB of the total 2GB main memory – so it’s perfectly usable. Well maybe not for real number-crunching, video de- or encoding, or music production, but you get the point – as an everyday surf machine or even to watch videos on your lap, it’s perfectly fine.
I always encourage friends to try this, and we have converted many older machines in the greater family to Linux, no need at all to constantly spend any money just to stay “current”. As you can see, the version of Linux I’m running here is as current as it can get, much more modern, safe, and stable than your typical consumer OS.
We only boot into Windows if we absolutely must, and we’re all doing that since years (and Zuleikha since she was born). So this is an easy recommendation from friends to friends, ’cause that’s what we’re doing here. Oh, and by the way: thanks again to my son Jeremy who first suggested trying Arch to me some years ago. If you need “current”, that’s a nice one!
There’s a nice article over at ByteXD on “13 compelling reasons why people use Linux“. In case you aren’t, you still are – you only don’t think about it 😉 And that article also sets some numbers straight.
Good to know that some of us had a vision even more than 30 years ago 🙂 And I knew why some 25 years ago (or more? forgot) I was turning away from closed source because it’s simply not worth your time…