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Perhaps the best choice for Linux newbies?

I have a sister who still owns an older notebook which runs Windows 7, and a friend from England who just moved from a Windows 8 to a Windows 10 machine. Both machines wouldn’t run Win11 I guess, tho I didn’t ask. You don’t recommend that to friends anyway.

So what to recommend? Linux of course, yes, but which one? Liam Proven (and many others) think it’s Mint. From his article in The Register, let me just cite these two sentences:

“Linux Mint remains the most sensible, pragmatic desktop Linux out there.” and, a bit further down, “If you have an aging PC that can’t run Windows 11, this is the one to try.”

One remark tho: Mint’s website, documentation, and all are really cool as well – as long as you speak English fluently enough. Maybe the user base could be much bigger if these pages were localized, like Debian’s for instance? Just saying…

For my late brother, using Debian – with a little help of myself – wasn’t a problem, but for any beginner who doesn’t have more “expert” friends or relatives, Mint might really be the sensible choice for now. Try it in a VM if you have the resources to do so, and if not, have a look at the Live image which you can start from a USB stick. One thing it *does* have as an advantage over its grandma Debian is the possibility of an OEM install (like “Mama” Ubuntu offers as well), so I could offer an installation to my sis or to close friends…

Anyway, have a look. It’s better than Win11, as are all other Linux distros.

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Congrats, Tadej!

Congratulations go out to Tadej Pogačar for his third win of the “Grand Tour”, as the “Tour de France” is also called. Congrats as well to all other riders. There’s also a nice interview and “Cafe Ride” which Matt Stephens did with him some 7 months ago, and in case you’re interested in his bicycle, have a look at how it’s built for him. The estimated costs of those parts sum up to the equivalent of your used Toyota btw…

As always, thanks for reading.

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Half a year. Two million steps.

On January 9th this year I’ve bought that little step counter, and one day after that, which is now half a year ago, I installed Gadgetbridge on my phone to keep track of everything without sending all my data into anyone’s cloud. The first days I more or less played around with the software to see what it could do, and in the beginning I wasn’t sure how many steps a day would make sense, so I started reading about that. I started with some 6000 steps a day which was the default setting on the device makers’ software, corrected that to 8000 steps a day later which was recommended as the perfect in-between measure for the 60+ year generation. But end of January, I finally settled on a daily minimum of 10000 steps.

And I kept that minimum since 164 days now, so my grand total since I installed the counting software is now a bit more than two million steps, or with my average step length of 75cm, around 1500km:

So in case someone wants to follow that example, expect to have some 4 million steps after the first year – if you can keep up and do this every day of course. And if you look at my last blog post, I think I’ll add some kilometers on a bicycle to that as well.

Anyway, and like always: thanks for reading.

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Links from Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024

Our “Tagesschau Online” has a wonderful feature of Larry, Chief Mouser of Downing Street 10 today. And they also inform us that from today, those plastic caps on bottles *have to* be fixed (instead of avoiding plastics at all).

Hessenschau reports about a rental company who has to pay a ticket for a falsely parked e-scooter.

And the Kontext:Wochenzeitung from Stuttgart writes about an Italian company whose workers took over since about three years now, still fighting for justice, and against vulture capitalism. The same magazine has a peace speech from 85 year old pastor Paul Schobel.

Thanks for reading (if you speak German or are willing to have those texts translated).

Edit:

And before I forget it, here’s one more. The current Tour de France bicycle race reminded me that I finally want to buy a bicycle helmet. My wife & daughter both wear theirs since – like – forever; I was the only silly one refusing to ever consider one of those life saving tools until now. And I’ve found a video from “Anke is awesome” which I found both funny *and* informative, even if she’s advertising a bit too much for my taste. Still well done, so thanks Anke! Now at least I know more about “Mips” 😉 And to save Anke’s reputation, she writes in her video notes: “Loudly presented by @anke_is_awesome Surprisingly supported by Specialized, Rapha, Shimano, Bike Components, Oakley, Fidlock, Ortlieb, Komoot und Wahoo Spread by Gran Fondo Cycling Magazine und Bergwelten Magazin”

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Yesterday: thunderstorm warning. Today: rain, mostly.

Yesterday we’ve had a warning of severe thunderstorms, so after a short stint outside, I kept the cat in:

If you have seen the football game between Denmark and Germany, yes, that was the storm they’ve warned us about. Wasn’t that severe here tho.

Today, the forecast is rain for pretty much the rest of the day, so after she’s been out for about three hours (and probably meeting some of the neighbours’ cats which I saw outside), now I’m keeping her in again. Of course Bella protests about that, even if I try to tell her about “dog weather” 😉 But the sun will shine again…

Anyway, thanks again for viewing and for reading.

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Bella from yesterday (Wednesday, 26th of June, 2024)

Yesterday I’ve found Bella in the shadow of a tree outside:

She was home faster than me 😉 This photo is straight out of my phone and on a small Mastodon server in England.

Today she was screaming – she felt or was molested by a neighbours’ Birman. So after she came in through the window in our lunch area, I kept her in.

Like always, thanks for viewing and for reading.