Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

Revitalized.

My mid-2015 15-inch MacBook Pro (the last version before the butterfly keyboard was introduced on later models) has been slowing down over the past couple of months with updates from Apple to MacOS Catalina. To be honest, I haven’t really been a fan of MacOS Catalina since it was released in 2019; it asks for my password way too often, Airdrop is not reliable at all, and it rarely unlocked with my Apple Watch like it was suppose to do. All first world problems, I know, but when you invest more than average money in hardware and software you hope for a more than average experience. I kind of think MacOS Catalina deserves the “Windows Vista of Apple” reputation that’s been building on the Internet.

It’s been a number of years since I attempted to install a Linux distribution natively on any Mac. I’ve been playing around with Ubuntu Linux (and a couple of other distributions) in Virtual Machines on the Mac, but they run very slow and they don’t give a fair assessment of the actual performance of Linux.

So last weekend I decided to bite the bullet and see about setting Ubuntu Linux up natively in a dual-boot configuration on my perfectly fine 2015 MacBook Pro.

It was surprisingly easy.

Apple packages a program called Boot Camp with Mac OS so you can set up a dual-boot configuration with Microsoft Windows. While older versions of Boot Camp allowed you to use this same program to setup a Linux partition on the hard drive, the latest version of Boot Camp doesn’t allow for this. It demands the presence of a Windows 10 ISO image. Maybe a way around this is hidden somewhere but I sure as heck couldn’t find it so I ended up partitioning the hard drive by hand. Once I backed up my important data that isn’t stored somewhere else (primarily my flying raw footage) I set about moving some space around to make room for Linux. It went easier than expected and in no time I was booting Ubuntu Linux off a USB drive I had created and I was off and running.

I decided to stay with the stock desktop environment that comes with Ubuntu Linux. It’s called Gnome 3. There’s a huge number of different desktop environments you can install on any distribution of Linux. It all depends on what you need, what you want, and what your resources are. The default setup works just fine on this 2015 MBP and the computer boots up in about a third of the time as MacOS Catalina.

I poked around the Internet after getting things installed and found a black/dark theme with gold highlights that I find amazingly pleasing to the eye. The default Ubuntu orange and purple is just fine, but I wanted to find something a little more distinctive. Back in the day of text terminals I always opted for an amber-on-black screen (versus green on black or white on black) and this color combination is a modern twist on the experience.

I’m still installing the applications I need, all at no cost by the way, and making some tweaks here and there but I haven’t felt this engaged with my laptop in a very long time. Battery life is stable, the fans aren’t screaming in agony, and the Retina display under Linux power is absolutely gorgeous.

I’ll be including updates as I continue to delve further back into the Linux experience and I can always answer any questions to the best of my ability, or at least steer you to the resources I use as well.

Happy computing!

2 June 2020 by J.P. Geek 0

Quiet.

There were peaceful protests over George Floyd’s death last night in our neighborhood. Chicago is still under a nightly curfew and mass transit was shutdown again last night at 9:30 PM Central. As of right now, the ‘L’ and CTA buses are not going into downtown.

As I walked around the neighborhood this morning there were a number of businesses that had taken the initiative to close early and/or board up their windows. It was worth noting that none of the plywood or particle board used to cover up these businesses had been sprayed with graffiti and there were absolutely no signs of unrest.

As word about protests in our neighborhood made its way around the Internet yesterday, my husband and I formulated a plan to keep our home and ourselves safe. Luckily we did not need to implement that plan, as the peaceful protest ended up taking place a couple of blocks from us. We had family at the protest and he reported everything was calm and orderly and most importantly, valid. When asked to disperse, the protestors dispersed.

Most of the protests here in The Second City have had a violent and/or looting element associated with them. Bad actors will always be present at anything of this nature but their actions do not negate the importance and the necessity of exercising free speech.

I hope the right people are hearing the right message. Racism is not OK. Racism is intolerable.

2 June 2020 by J.P. Chicago City Life. 0

Monday Jam.

I was listening to a Yacht Rock radio-like playlist on Spotify when Andrew Gold’s “Never Let Her Slip Away” from 1978 came up. I didn’t really remember the track but it sounded very familiar to me. I knew the lyrics but the syncopation on this original version was all wrong from what I knew.

It turns out I forgot about a track I had spun a lot back when I was a club DJ in the first half of my 20s. In 1992, British dance group Undercover had released a cover of this track. I spun the heck out of this record, always had a great response, and I remember getting a bunch of requests for “that slip away” record. I probably still have the 12-inch single in storage in the basement.

I found it on YouTube, here’s Undercover with “Never Let Her Slip Away”.

1 June 2020 by J.P. DJ 0

Eerie.

I was up at my usual time this morning to go for a walk. The curfew here in Chicago ended at 6:00 a.m. today, so I figured it’d be safe to go out and get some exercise before diving into the workday later this morning.

As soon as I went outside I instantly noticed how quiet the streets were today. Both the CTA’s ‘L’ and the METRA commuter rail run through our neighborhood and neither are operating with any sort of regularity. Westbound landings into O’Hare fly directly overhead as well and of course there’s been a huge reduction of flights since the pandemic took over the world.

Before going to bed last night I noticed in the distance several helicopters hovering over the Loop to the apparent northeast of the Sears Tower. There are no helicopters this morning.

The neighborhood is eerily quiet this morning. Even noticeably more so than when the quarantine started back in March. I think it’s the lack of the rumble of the ‘L’ that’s the most noticeable. Every once in a while I can hear an announcement being blared out on the loudspeakers but I can’t ever make out what they’re saying, even if I’m standing on the platform. Some folks feel the need to yell into the microphone.

I’m so very tired, especially of the woes and injustices plaguing American society. I hope and pray that the rest of the world isn’t like this. I know there’s places in much worse shape than the United States right now, I hope there are places that are in better shape as well. We can do better than this.

We must do better than this.

1 June 2020 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 0

Truth.

When society didn’t listen and/or instead clutched their pearls because football players took a knee during the National Anthem, I totally get why people would be pushed to the point of outrage that we’re seeing this weekend. Now, this doesn’t mean I think everyone should go out and start smashing windows and grabbing anything they can get their hands on, but it does mean that I hear them, I get it, and most importantly things need to change.

Perhaps if we stopped judging and started listening we could start moving in a positive direction again.

31 May 2020 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 0

Again, No Words.

I don’t want to live here anymore. Take your pick: Chicago or United States or Earth. My heart weeps for our country. My heart weeps for our planet.

30 May 2020 by J.P. Political BS. 0

Shore Leave.

So I took the day off to get a breath of fresh air. My husband and I are back from a nearly 12-hour road trip across the prairies of eastern and central Illinois. For the record, we did not choose LSD for this trip.

Now, we went for a much shorter ride last weekend, and it was a nice taste of what I was needing to clear my head, but the going out for 12 hours today was just what the doctor ordered. The sky was blue with puffy clouds, the roads were relatively clear of traffic, and the winds brought us a pleasant breeze as we drove south on Illinois 1 in our Jeep Cherokee.

Along the way I stopped for some Starfleet photos; it’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed a day of shore leave, so I thought it was prudent to take some photos of me in my Starfleet Shore Leave uniform.

29 May 2020 by J.P. Fun and Games Dept Geek 0

No Words.

I wish I could write something profound today about everything that’s going on in the world right now but I’m overwhelmed. My heart breaks when I see photos from Minneapolis, my heart breaks even more when I read the number of people that have passed during this pandemic, and my heart screams when I see what the U.S. government is choosing to focus on right now, mainly the labeling of one tweet from Trump as being factual inaccurate.

I managed a paragraph. That’s all I got.

28 May 2020 by J.P. Why. 0

Launch?

I’ve been excited about today’s schedule launch of the SpaceX Dragon since they announced today was going to be the day. Not only did this mark the first time astronauts would be sent to the International Space Station via equipment designed and manufactured by SpaceX, it would also be the first time American astronauts would head to the ISS via U.S. soil instead of hitching a ride with the Russians.

Not that cooperative international efforts are bad.

It’s been too long since the Space Shuttle was decommissioned in 2011 and quite frankly I was almost convinced that would be the end of the manned American space program. Luckily I was just being a cynic and through amazing technology and the efforts of thousands of people smarter than me, astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken were aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft on countdown ready to head to the ISS. Unfortunately, Mother Nature decided to get in on the act and the countdown was stopped at -16 minutes and 54 seconds due to weather.

I had cleared my schedule at work and was watching the proceedings all afternoon when two things happened: a meeting popped up on my calendar scheduled for launch time and then the weather call was made and the launch was rescheduled for Saturday.

I will be on the ground ready to watch the proceedings during Saturday’s launch. I’m giddy like a young boy with the thought of these two men going into space from American soil.

Space exploration is a major reason why we have all this amazing technology at our fingertips. It’s our quest to get to the stars that has compelled us to push forward on technological advancements. Today’s crew will be using touchscreens, I believe a first, to navigate a commercially developed and built rocket to orbit. The open source operating system Linux has played a key component both with SpaceX and with the International Space Station.

I always enjoyed the math teacher that wrote in my yearbook way back in 1982, “Reach for the stars!”.

Though many will disagree, our country needs to get its people back in space under our own power. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new era of discovery, wonder, and exploration.

27 May 2020 by J.P. Geek 0

Delete.

I went ahead and deleted my primary Twitter account today. I have more than one Twitter account, but the one I call the primary account is the one that’s been around since 2007 when I used to tweet by text message on a flip phone. I wasn’t a superstar in anyway; I had only a little over 1200 followers. I had tweeted approximately 46,000 times.

My Twitter feed has become incredibly noisy. A lot of the noise was due to my own actions; when motivated I can belch out some pretty nasty tweets in response to what I perceive to be idiocy. I’m perceiving a lot of idiocy these days, and have been since the election season of 2016, but that’s no excuse for me spewing out some of the stuff I’ve put in tweets since Trump took office.

I started out by deleting my tweets, but that’s not an easy thing to do. Twitter makes it a tedious experience at best. There are third party services that can bulk delete tweets but I’m not shelling out money to a company just to undo my doings so I decided to just go ahead and delete the whole damn account.

It was one of the most liberating experiences I’ve had in a while.

I’ve had my “quiet” account for a little over a year and I intend on keeping it quiet. The focus is extremely narrow. I’m being very selective as to who I’m following. I don’t have Twitter on my phone at all.

Another reason for my nuking my account was because of recent actions of Twitter around censorship. Trump can spout out the craziest things, many of them damaging and/or simply completely untrue, but Trump is the gravy train for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and friends, so they’ll never treat Trump like the other users on the platform. It’s a burning bin of hypocrisy that’s pretty much destroying democracy, but hey, Jack and friends have enough money to travel the world ten times over while enjoying a bath in a bucket of ice.

There are such better ways to do eccentricity.

So don’t go looking for me on Twitter. I’m not there in a meaningful way anymore.

And that’s what I call progress.

26 May 2020 by J.P. Let's All Rant. 1

Revitalized.

Quiet.

Monday Jam.

Eerie.

Truth.

Again, No Words.

Shore Leave.

No Words.

Launch?

Delete.

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