Taking time out

 I'd actually expected to finish Lake View this week, not last week, so I had nothing scheduled for this week, and with the end of the project, my Tuesdays are my own again and this Friday was a public holiday, meaning no session at the Athenaeum, so I did some personal things, a little gardening and getting my covid shot before winter proper set it. 

And I also baked some bread for the first time since the pandemic. Until now, when we couldn't get bread from one of the local artisan bakeries, we'd been using the old breadmaker J's niece gave us fifteen or so years ago when she went to live in Norway for a bit.

The breadmaker died over the Easter weekend, no bakeries were open, but we had flour and yeast, so I went back to doing the whole job by hand. 

I'm obviously out of practice, my first attempt was a little dense, and needed a tad more salt, but perfectly edible.

I also went down an internet rabbit hole with the Monaghan Lunatic Asylum Soviet, not to mention the story of Ethel Voynich.

I still need to go back up to the Library and follow up on Katherine Scragg, and to this end installed Chrome on my old Dell laptop.

While I've tried to use Firefox, I do find that some tools are optimised for Chrome, and given that I'm hopelessly entwined in the Google ecology for software tools, one more installation wouldn't count against my claims to be FOSS first.

And it's not just the browser, it's the ecology, Google drive, Keep, Docs and the rest. If it wasn't for that I'd probably struggle on with Firefox, or perhaps swap to Vivaldi.

However Chrome it was.

Installation was simple. Google provide a .deb file for debian distributions as well as Ubuntu, so it's simply a matter of going to the chrome download page with your current browser from your Ubuntu or Debian machine, and downloading the file.

Now I'm old school, I first touched a computer terminal back in 1974, so I did the rest from the command line

cd ~/Downloads

sudo dpkg -i install_file_name.deb

Obviously you change the bit in red to the actual name of the install file, but that was basically it.

Just like when you install Chrome on a Mac or a Windows machine, Google wants you to log in to Chrome, and asks you if you want Chrome to be your default browser, but that's nothing unusual or difficult.

The next test will be to see if it works with the Library's Ancestry subscription...