Clear and cool and minty

Those of us who used to watch the “other channel” in the early 80s will remember the above advertising slogan for Fox’s Glacier Mints. Younger readers may simply think that it’s an attempt to try to talk up my latest venture into Linux distro-swapping, which of course it is.

But to start at the beginning, the beginning of the week arrived with a slightly familiar failure to boot my Kubuntu main machine. I’d finally wrestled the last remaining error messages at boot time with some judicious re-working of my fstab a few days before, when suddenly nothing would start at all. It’s all a bit of a shame since the second bootable system on my main PC, Windows 10, had also stopped working a while back and I hadn’t got around to fixing it.

To make a long story shorter, it turned out that the SSD holding my Kubuntu image had died. Remarkably, and despite a 35 year career in IT, this was the first time I’d personally had a drive fail on me. First step was to work out which drive it was – I had two identical drives running off different ports. Then it was time to empty the other one, install Kubuntu again, get apps working, etc etc.

Except, well it made me re-evaluate my distro choice. I’ve enjoyed Kubuntu, and the amazing configurability of the KDE Plasma desktop environment. But it has begun to feel just too much like a beta test. Support for multiple screens is, for example, rudimentary. You can’t spread a single picture across both screens as a background without additional software, though to be fair Windows multiscreen support didn’t become sorted properly until Windows 10. Also I’d begun to get bored with the random screen losses after locking and sleeping, and on the new install it would just not remember my taskbar settings.

So I decided to trash the windows disk entirely – it was on an NVMe disk, and I had intended to put Linux on it at some point – and pick a new distro. I didn’t want to go too far off the beaten track, so I’ve alighted, for now at least, on Linux Mint. So far so good, and I’ll make some more comments later. I will say that I’m happy with my bacup strategy…

It’s all imap to me

It was a historical thing really. When I first started using a personal email account tied to my first ISP (Demon Internet) they only offered POP (Post Office Protocol), so that was what I used. Wind on 40 years and I was still using it for my main email accounts. But I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable managing the knowledge of where my emails actually were as my use of the phone increased.

So, how hard could it be to switch to imap? As it turned out, quite straightforward, and I find myself wondering why I hadn’t done it years ago. Since my main client use is via Thunderbird, it meant I had to create a new account, but once done I could simply copy all the downloaded emails over and hey presto, they’re backed up on the server. Well of course it wasn’t QUITE that simple, there’s a little configuration to do to make the folders appear separately and not all as subfolders of the inbox (comment if you need to know how), but once that’s done, and I removed the old accounts, it’s super. Now I can REALLY deal with mail while on the move.

Oh, and kudos to the Manually sort folders add-on for Thunderbird to make it easy to put my favourite accounts at the top!

The “Just Look At It” school of computer fixing

You probably know about this already, but it’s a common occurrence in our house, and one I’ve experienced most of my working life. It particularly infuriates people who ask for help when something isn’t working properly on their computer, only to find it works immediately when someone else is watching.

Of course it isn’t really a magical non-tactile uber power for machine fixing, though it is tempting to think so. I think that most of the time it is the presence of an onlooker which causes the person concerned to go just a little more slowly, or concentrate just a tiny amount more. This prevents the mistake they’ve been making, and hey presto it works!

But if you want to think it’s my magic influence, go right ahead.