Episode 45
Author: Andrew
An electrical engineer, amateur astronomer, and diver, living and working on the island of Hawaiʻi.
Throw me Away
Cleaning out an entire business operation has led to a few discoveries.
Hidden caches of tools, bottles of unknown substances, pieces of strange equipment that even I struggle to identify, and so much trash… All of the stuff a couple dozen employees leave behind in five years of a busy algae-growing operation.
This included a stack of five laptop computers, two Macs and three pc’s. So one evening I handed off the Macs to my wife to check while I diagnosed the pc’s.
One Mac is toast, a cracked screen and damaged case, clearly dropped at some point. Checking the model and vintage, we find it is not worth the effort to fix… One for the bin. The second Mac is questionable, with a flaky charge port and dodgy WiFi.
The pc’s? One, a very low-end HP model seems fine.
The second machine, a more promising-looking Lenovo IdeaPad that is only a couple of years old. Opening the machine, stuck beside the trackpad, I find a bright yellow sticky note with large, friendly letters written in Sharpie… “Throw me Away”.
Hmmm… Maybe not.
Well? The machine boots easily enough, screen, keyboard, and trackpad are working just fine. I am presented with the login screen for an employee who left the company over a year ago. I cannot go further, Windows and the drive are locked down pretty hard.
This is not a real concern, I really do not want another Windows machine. I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu and set up a USB drive. The machine boots just fine into Linux off the thumb drive. It took some command-line futzing and a fair amount of AI assistance to find the right Linux commands to wipe the hard drive. I cleared the encrypted Windows partitions and configured an Ubuntu install.
After waiting for Ubuntu to install, I found I have an operational laptop that seems to be in pretty good shape. I wonder… why the doomed sticky note? Was it the lockdown and encrypted drive that stopped anyone from re-using the machine?
Well? I need a reliable work machine, and Windows has become increasingly unacceptable over the years, time to get serious about Linux. I peel off the yellow sticky note and follow the instructions… I throw it away.
Photographing the Eruption
Poinciana Blooms
Hurricane Season
It is a wee bit active out there…
Three major hurricanes are wandering the eastern Pacific right now, two uncomfortably close to the islands.
Last month’s hit from Hurricane Lala did significant damage to the southern parts of the island, dropping up to 40 inches of rain, flooding Waiʻōhinu and Nāʻālehu, destroying homes and businesses. At our house, we spent a day without power and lost one of our mature plumeria.
It was only a couple of weeks, and we are facing another round…
Hurricane Lowell has passed us here on the Big Island, but is forecast to take an abrupt turn to the north, threatening Kauaʻi and Niʻihau. Hurricane Karina is forecast to swing north of us, but close enough that we may experience some impact.
With a record-breaking El Niño warming the water of the central Pacific, it is more than likely we will see even more storms beyond these. To live in interesting times…
Elephant
The Futility of Going Home
I had not been back for over four decades.
My parents sold my childhood home shortly after I joined the Air Force in the mid 1980’s. They abandoned the suburbs and bought a very nice home in the city, which they still own today. It is this home I stay in when visiting Portland. For four decades, this is now “home” in many ways, but not the house I grew up in.
My childhood house is still there, along Sunrise Lane in the far southwest of the Portland metro area. This is the home featured in childhood memories spent roaming deep forests and neglected orchards. A green childhood of trees, sheep and chickens, endless mowing, picking blackberries and plums, or wandering a wonderland created by another ice storm.
Continue reading “The Futility of Going Home”Awaiting Dark
Hurricane Lala
Lala was not our first hurricane.
After two decades of island life, we have been through a few hurricanes. In general, our location on the island, in the lee of a 13,802ft mauna, has protected us from the worst. Stiff winds and heavy rain from some, while a couple of hurricanes have passed with blue skies and almost no wind for those of us in the lee.
Lala was not our first hurricane, but it was the most serious yet.
Continue reading “Hurricane Lala”Telescope Walkabout
