I used to love fiddling with tech. Lots of evenings, nights, hell, even days spent getting a computer to do things Just Right. Obsessing over config files. Custom configurations. Window managers. All the wonders that Linux systems have to offer. This didn’t end when we had kids. Now I had less time and energy left from a day full of carework and wage work, but I still found relaxation in tweaking an OS install.

Some time around last Christmas, I decided that my kayaking technique could really use some improvement. So I booked a one-week course with Outdoordirekt. I had had a good experience with them before, on a one-week trip of guided runs in northern Greece. The kayakers I met there had done most or all of their training with that company, and they were good at what they did! I had also heard very good things from others.

Finally, the first proper river run of the 2023 season! Once on the water, I felt the weight of winter and too much time indoors fall right off my shoulders. The Leitzach is an easy (grade I-II), pleasant little creek at the foot of the Alps. It’s a good place to kick off the season and recover the feel for the boat. That’s why our club traditionally heads out there in April, when things get going.

For whitewater kayakers, winter is a quiet time. Part of the reason is obvious: when it’s cold, flopping around in mountain streams is less fun, because your hands freeze. A less obvious, but perhaps bigger problem is that most rivers have little water. Levels rise only when the mountain snow melts in spring. Until then, a lot of creeks are kind of, well, boring. Last Saturday a small group from our kayaking club ventured out for the first time.

I recently mentioned that my backup strategy has room for improvement. Fortunately I have a fairly capable router with a couple of USB ports, and a 1TB SSD. I’m going to use those things to set up an automated on-site backup for my laptop. Acquaint the router with the SSD You likely have a router made by someone else. In that case, this part will be different for you. First I plug the SSD into the router’s USB port, and follow the router manufacturer’s instructions to configure the box as a NAS (network attached storage), using the SSD to store data.

I was in university at the start of the millenium when I first heard about electronic arts, and about the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. Launched in 1979, this event has been a cornerstone of the digital arts scene. Only recently did I realize that in addition to the festival, there’s also a permanent center. And at about two hours by direct train, it’s an easy day trip from our place.

I must have been in my 20s when I first encountered Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity‘s Rainbow”. I was very confused and very dazzled: dazzled by how this book seems to go off in all directions at once. So many things happen, and most of them never get resolved. It was fascinating. I dug through this book, inching forward slowly like a miner in a coal seam deep below the surface of the earth.

So my ThinkPad just borked itself. It was running Ubuntu LTS. I got tired of Ubuntu’s faffing about with ads in the terminal, pushing private data to Amazon, and general asshattery. From a previous install I knew that installing Debian wasn’t as difficult as I recalled from the before times, so I went with that. Unless otherwise stated, everything here happens in the terminal. Don’t be afraid, it’ll be ok. Just open a terminal.

Occasioned by an imperfect backup strategy (ahem) and a used ThinkPad off eBay that may just be a little dodgy, here are my notes on how to recover data from a Linux machine that refuses to boot. I’m mainly writing this down to save myself some trouble the next time this happens, as it inevitably will. Starting situation: The computer turns on fine, but won’t boot into the installed Linux OS.

This is not a book review, don’t get your hopes up. Someone on the Fedi asked if I had any thoughts on the book, and I found it easier to type them here. Published in 2009, “Inherent Vice” is a strange and exciting in a different way than Pynchon’s earlier works. Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day - these are Big Books, each creating an entire world for themselves.