Progressing Along Nicely

My Linux Mint desktop replacement is settling in beautifully in the office, and honestly it's way quicker than the Windows 10 machine it replaced. I'm taking it step by step, loading and testing things as I need them rather than throwing everything at it at once.

The old Windows 10 Desktop PC had been with me since my consulting days, so it was pushing close to 10 years old. Over that time it had accumulated just about every piece of software I'd ever owned, and it had gotten painfully slow switching between programs. On top of that, I was dealing with complications from a corneal graft at the time, which made screen glare a real problem. I could only manage about 20 minutes of detailed computer work before it became unbearable. Safe to say I don't miss that setup at all.

For the hardware I went with my old Toshiba laptop, affectionately known as ICE because it's white. It's probably around 15 years old and had a rough patch with what looked like an internal disc corruption. Fingers crossed that's sorted now because it's cruising along nicely. It's also the only laptop I have with an Ethernet port, which means I can connect directly to the NBN router rather than relying on wifi. It's not exactly exciting hardware but it's a comfortable old friend and a reliable workhorse.

The main task now is figuring out what works well in Linux and what I might need to find alternatives for. I started with Firefox and webmail, but quickly switched to Thunderbird Mail for email and found it much more to my liking. I was also keen to reduce my dependence on Google where possible, but still wanted to keep using Gmail, Calendar and Drive. The answer turned out to be Ungoogled Chromium, a stripped back browser that follows the same basics as Chrome but without all the Google tracking. It works really nicely with Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs and Drive, so that box is ticked.

The last piece of the puzzle, for now, was finding a replacement for Microsoft Office. Fortunately LibreOffice was already installed and it's been great. It looks and feels very similar to Word and Excel, and it plays nicely with Google Docs and Sheets too. I haven't stress tested the compatibility yet but for my everyday needs it's doing the job perfectly.

A long way further along than I expected, and so far so good. Best of all, it's all completely free!

Pleasant Surprise at the 9by5 Exhibition

Yesterday I headed along to the City of Greater Dandenong Council's 9by5 exhibition opening at the Drum Theatre and was genuinely impressed. The foyer was packed with both a large crowd, and also with 225 works on show spanning a huge range of styles and media, from a few beginners right through to very experienced artists. Each artist could enter up to two pieces, and having everything the same size (9" by 5") made for a really cohesive exhibition. The organisers did a wonderful job fitting it all in.

My work ended up down the back (as usual), but I was pleased to find a red sticker already on one of my watercolours!

It was great chatting with some of the other artists. Everyone was enthusiastic and grateful for the opportunity to show their work. A point that kept coming up in conversation was how wonderful it is for people to be able to see and buy affordable original art, and I couldn't agree more.

The exhibition runs until 1st. May If you're on the south-east side of Melbourne, it's well worth calling in. and if you can't make it in person, the most works are also available to buy online.

Experimenting with Plein Air Easels and Sketchboards

I'm not entirely sure what to call these things: plein air easels, sketchboards, drawing boards? 

Whatever the right term is, I'm on the hunt for a minimal, easy-to-deploy setup for sketching and painting outdoors. The important restriction is that everything has to fit in my red art bag alongside all my other tools. So I've got three prototypes to test on my next trip.

Option one is a simple drawing board I cut down to fit the bag. I've added a quarter-inch T-nut so it can mount on a tripod, which gives it a bit more stability to the bag. It's just a flat sheet of plywood, 33 by 24.5 cm (about 13" x 9¾"). Nothing fancy, but solid.

Option two I'm calling a sketchbook holder. It's a prototype cut from matte board, 34 by 16.5 cm (roughly 13½" x 6½"). The clever bit is a slot cut into it where your sketchbook spine slots in. The back cover sits behind the board while the pages open out in front, held firmly in place with a couple of bulldog clips. The exposed board at the top gives you space for your sketching and painting media. There are plenty of DIY versions of this out there and I've been particularly inspired by Sarah Burn's design experiments. Commercial versions like those in the Etcher series are also worth a look. For my prototype, I'm using Velcro, though a lot of people prefer magnets.

Option three is a watercolour sketchboard, a bit bigger so it can handle larger sheets like an Arches block or similar pads. It's square at 29 cm (11"), mostly because I had a square piece of matte board handy. It loosely follows Doug's Sketching School design. The extra space means there are two configuration options: one end suits a bigger layout with a full size palette and room for a water container, while the other works better for larger pads but has less room for a palette and no space for water.

All three are light and fit neatly in the bag, so I'll take them all out and put each through its paces. With some creative use of clips, they can all handle pretty much the same tasks. Tripod mounting and a water bowl are the exception for now, but maybe I'll sort that out later.

Hopefully just a Hiccup

 After a bit more testing and reloading Linux from my USB key, I'm starting to think the real culprit was corruption on the laptop's hard drive all along. So I took the plunge, reformatted the whole disc to clear out any lingering issues, and did a fresh reinstall of Mint Cinnamon.

So far, so good!

Ditching Microsoft and Google

Ditching Microsoft and Google

My main (office) PC recently died a silent upgrade death. This was the machine that ran a lot of my personal life, emails, on-line banking and purchases, Zoom, website development, photo management, and my local network. It did a lot without complaint.

My backups were not so good. Photos were fine, but documents and other files hadn't been properly backed up since around May last year. Oops. To make things worse, I'd been relying on Google to sync my browser settings and passwords across computers — except it turns out it wasn't doing that as reliably as I assumed. Lesson learned.

So I'm officially a bit annoyed at both Microsoft (endless updates) and Google (false sense of security). Older and wiser.

My solution? Well, I'm not going to buy a new computer, no Windows for sure, and definitely a different browser. I already knew Linux was an option. I'd previously booted a old notebook from a USB stick running Linux Mint xfce, and it worked well. I then dug out an old Toshiba laptop that had died upon update and been gathering dust for years, fiddled with the boot settings, and got Linux Mint Cinnamon running from USB. After a week of testing, I was confident enough to install it properly. A few disk errors made for a tedious afternoon of troubleshooting, but eventually it booted up perfectly.

I really should have stopped there. I ran some updates, noticed a restart was recommended, and thought — why not tidy up some cables at the same time?

Restarted the laptop.

Bugger… Blank Screen……

Fed Up with Microsoft? You're Not Alone

Well, it happened again. My Windows 10 office desktop has bitten the dust. This time a mysterious "disc error" that I'm not entirely convinced is a coincidence. Why suspicious? Because right around the same time, I noticed OneDrive (personal) had quietly crept onto the machine and started doing its thing: silently squirrelling files away into its own little kingdom, and generally slowing everything to a crawl.

I'd already watched this happen on my two other Windows 11 computers, after updates, but at least I caught it eventually. After it had renamed/moved My Documents, Pictures, and Download folders and was filling its secret directory and also making a copy on the cloud. Once I untangled the mess, which involved copying files back to where they belonged (not moving, because some weren't being picked up properly). It was a tedious, several frustrating afternoons I'll never get back. Not cool, Microsoft.

This is the fifth time a computer of mine has died shortly after an update. Fifth!!!!!  At some point, that stops being bad luck.

As a retiree, I'm done throwing good money after bad. So here's where I stand: two Windows 11 machines still running, one ancient Toshiba notebook happily air-gapped and ticking along on Debian Linux (doing backups beautifully, no drama), and five dead Windows machines gathering dust in a cupboard.

The dead ones are hanging around partly because they once held client data from my consulting days. I occasionally pull out a hard drive, wipe it, and repurpose it for storage. So there is no chance that their data is accidentally revealed to the public.

But honestly? This feels like the nudge I needed. I'm seriously considering tinkering with Linux or even a Chromebook setup to get at least one or two machines revitalised. Once I summon the enthusiasm, that is.

Microsoft, that was your last chance.

The mythical origins of Dragon's Blood

The “pigment” dragon's blood NR31 is actually a resin that medieval artisans used, and despite the dramatic name, it came from a rather more mundane source than you might expect. It was harvested from the dracaena draco tree, a type of rattan palm, which grows in places like the Canary Islands, northern Africa, the Arabian peninsula, parts of Indian sub-continent and famously Socotra island off the coast of Yemen. The resin is a beautiful deep, warm crimson-red with slightly brownish undertones and was prized for painting, varnishing, and even medicinal purposes. Medieval crafts people valued it because it was vibrant and had decent staying power, though it could be pricey, which meant it was often reserved for important illuminated manuscripts or high-end decorative work.

 I’ll leave the best story telling to Evie Hatch, Jackson’s pigment expert and researcher.

Proof reading and summary assisted by Claude Sonnet 4.5 (AI)