Quite productive this week

 This has been quite a bitty week, catching up with not quite finished projects after a couple of weeks away in FNQ.

Shortly before we went to FNQ, I successfully installed a lightweight version of Linux, Crunchbang++, on an old Chromebook I'd bought earler this year.

This has turned out to be a success with the machine functioning as a lightweight minimal writing machine to put together text.

I'm basically working with it the way I did my paperless documentation of the kitchen at Lakeview - create a document either using Geany or AbiWord, upload it to Onedrive and finesse it on my windows machine.

Less successful was my installing Crunchbang++'s competitor, Bunsen Labs Linux, on an AMD Ryzen based machine with Radeon graphics.

At first it seemed to be impressive, but the screen would develop an annoying flicker in use.

Replacing Bunsen Labs with Ubuntu improved matters but was not a complete fix. After a voyage down a maze of twisty passages I ended up installing AMD's Ubuntu drivers over the standard Ubuntu set.

Doing this has more or less got rid of the flicker - it's possible to provoke it occasionally, but the display is as stable as it was under Windows 10, when the screen would occasionally go blank and recover.

Up at the Athenaeum it was basically administrivia, bushfire planning and the like. We've not yet had any movement on the recataloging project, but hopefully we can get that going over summer.

And, inspired by our trip to Cooktown, and the story of the Cooktown gun, I've done a little bit of work on the Russian invasion panic of 1885...