When we were first acquent
Some years ago I was rummaging through some photographs taken by my father, when it occured to me that the significance of a photograph can change over time. A photograph that can be considered to be just a snap now can convey so much more information, simply through the passage of time. I'm sure everyone has informal family portraits that captured ephemeral moments but the photographs later became much more significant with the loss of a loved one. Even simple things such as...
Ticks in 2017
We take care not to expose ourselves unnecessarily to pesticides, and we extend this precaution to our doggie companion. In particular, this means we do not use a spot-on insecticide or a tick/flea collar.
Flea and tick collars work in one of two ways, and often combine both. Some collars emit a gas which acts as a repellent for many insects. The other type of flea and tick collar has an embedded insecticide that seeps into the pet's skin, and then spreads throughout its body...
Scotties are great
For the avoidance of doubt, the title of this post refers to the breed of dog. It might also refer to the human inhabitants of this country, but, that is a topic for another day. Furthermore, on the point of nomenclature, I prefer the breed's original name Aberdeen Terrier, but, most people probably know them as Scottish Terriers (Scotties for short), and that is the term I will continue to use in this article.
Posted by
fitheach
on Fri 01 December 2017
Echo CS-620SX chainsaw review
The Echo CS-620SX is a great pro-level, medium sized petrol chainsaw. This is my personal review after a year's worth of ownership.
Background
Although I had previously been a long-time, and happy, Stihl user there were three things that made me consider Echo as an alternative brand. Firstly, Stihl have taken a stance of preventing sales via online resellers by insisting that customers can only purchase from registered dealers...
Black Friday: Banned
I have noticed an increasing number of retailers promoting Black Friday sales in the last few years, but this year I have been inundated with "special" offers. The concept of Black Friday makes sense in the USA where a large proportion of the population have a four days off work due to the Thanksgiving celebration being on a Thursday. Anyone promoting Black Friday here is just...
Pinentry confusion
Signing email messages is a requirement that I have several times a day. Claws Mail handles this requirement very nicely with the GPG Plugin. The plugin provides a configuration option to set a time period for the pinentry passphrase to be stored. For example, I have set the passphrase to be stored for 600 minutes. This means that when I enter the passphrase in the morning it is being cached for the...
From Hot Space to 32GB
I decided recently to dig out some of my old cassette tape music albums. Most of them are pre-recorded tapes of albums purchased in the 1980s, but there are also many home recordings of vinyl LPs . I wanted to make digital copies of the albums and include them in my collection, which I carry with me on my mobile 'phone. I had a quaint notion that with a bit of work the music on the tapes could be of...
Green capsicums
Call them what you like: capsicums, peppers, bell peppers, peperone, poivron, paprika or whatever, they are very popular in every shade except green. I have never conducted blind taste tests nor have a I seen any capsicum market research but I just know that the green ones are less popular. All the evidence I need is there on the supermarket shelves.
Firstly, green capsicums are rarely sold separately and when they are they are always much cheaper than the red and...
Hidden GTK3 scrollbars
My continuing journey of discovery after upgrading to Debian Stretch has led me to the hidden vertical scroll-bars in some of the latest GTK3 apps. Presumably, the idea is that hiding the scrollbars gives the user more visible screen area for displaying content. Another possibility is that scrollbars are considered to be a visual distraction and should be hidden until needed. I haven't...
Manual browser opening in Liferea
I recently did an upgrade from Debian Jessie to Stretch on my laptop which as expected, and desired, brought in a whole lot of new versions of the packages I am using. One such package was the highly configurable and versatile feed reader Liferea. One of the features of Liferea I have used for many years is the ability to open web pages in a...
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