Kaimusailing

Unfortunately I started a blog post in the middle of this laptop conversion, so it was overwritten. The process continues and I am writing afresh.
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The problems with BIOS are simply that I can't access it to make changes, but everything seems to work OK, it accepts the hard drives, wifi isn't blacklisted, but the chassis with the locked BIOS doesn't produce audio. No sound. Strange. It looks to me that audio is not a variable in BIOS.
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So, the process has put Navigatrix 64 on a 128 gig SSD. It runs quickly and I'm populating it with charts, the old desktop items, the old documents folder, and the old downloads folder. Some of these folders are large with big files and it takes time to transfer them with a USB drive. An ethernet crossover cable would work more quickly.
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A blank 320 gig SATA drive was wiped and Ubuntu was installed on it. It received the documents, charts, and desktop from the old 128 gig SSD, it also received the charts from the old 320 gig SATA drive. The 128 gig SSD received its old documents, downloads, charts, and desktop. That process is still going on. Takes time.
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I'm thinking I will keep the old 320 gig drive as it was as a repository of charts and everything else. I will have a quick SSD for my navigation computer, a slow but laden laptop with my books and everything else on it, and the old drive as a backup.
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The two new laptop chassis cost $150. The time and effort to get them organized costs more. There are snags, when I wiped and installed nx64, which is navigatrix 64 bit, on a drive, there would be an error in the installation. This could be due to a corrupted file in the download of the operating system, which is free, but I donated $10, or a bug in the downloaded install. Finding the solution was difficult and time consuming. I should have saved the script of the fix. When I ran into it again I had to redo the whole nine, but I saved it. I will post it when I can get access to the laptop that has the saved script.
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Needless to say, winter is shoving us around with polar winds, even down here near the Florida border. I can't imagine, well yes I can, the cold up North. I lived on a boat up there and dealt with Winter. When we had our Pizza Night it was cold and windy, but the pizzas were pretty good. Some of the usuals didn't show up and there were no walkins. We were hunkered down in the woodshop which became warm from the oven and we didn't want to leave. We left and quickly got to other warm places. Do the dishes tomorrow.
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Rough Rider Lynn came to my boat in distress, her phone was not working and her partner, Helicopter Dave was having a health crisis. I let her use my phone to contact the VA, Veteran Administration, to let them know she might have to transport him to an emergency room.
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The next morning Trawler Paul knocked on my hull and even boarded the boat, without permission, to ask about computers, tablets, some of which I know almost nothing about. I didn't hear from Lynn and Dave. It was incredibly windy with whitecaps and breaking waves out on the river in the marsh. I was able to make an appointment for the vaccine in a week. Although I had felt that I must have already been exposed to the virus, Dr. Fauci said to get vaccinated to be sure. The goal is to defeat the virus and getting vaccinated takes one more person out of the pool of infection, make it smaller, and so small that the virus can't get to an unvaccinated person or someone who hasn't had the disease. Then it will die out.
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I didn't hear from Lynn and Dave, but called her phone late in the day and it turned out she only had to reboot her phone to restore service, and Dave was OK. He said he wasn't, she said he was. Glad to hear that.
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I had to call the marina in Crisfield. They had sent an electric bill that I thought would be paid by my card on file. It turned out I had no card on file, so I set that up. The electric by month, up through the end of the year was about $30 a month, then it jumped up to $45. I was using a small heater loaned by Cornelia Marie, a questionable unit with spliced power cord, but it worked, I don't want my boat to freeze up and sink.
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We had the coldest morning so far, down to 27, frost on deck. There's about a month more of this sort of winter here, then things will bloom. It will be time to launch and set out North. I want to sail up to Crisfield, if I can.
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I sorted out the audio problems with the new operating systems, both are either Ubuntu or a derivative of Ubuntu, version 18 and 20, one chassis had no audio from the speakers or headphone jack no matter which OS I used. This chassis was newly purchased. The other newly purchased chassis would produce audio at the headphone jack, but not from the speakers. The old chassis produced audio from both speakers and headphone jack, but only with the older version of operating system. Curious. There is something about the newer versions of Ubuntu that don't allow speaker audio. It isn't much of a problem because the speakers are pretty lousy. I ordered bluetooth headphones and a USB/bluetooth adapter.
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The image is of the latest Pizza Night in the woodshop.