Saw PROJECT HAIL MARY first session and really enjoyed it. Lots to think about. I was kind of shocked to be given the PROJECT HAIL MARY patch going into the cinema. Was it because it was the first session. or does everyone get one?
Easily saying "lethal injection with a shot of heroine", was a line that really hit me. Going out on a high, and being okay with that as an option shows how desperate the situation was.
I did this piece of music a couple of weeks ago and tried making a music comic with different subjects since then. This is the 3rd version. Previous attempts were Ricky vs BIlly, then MINT LINUX 22.3 CINNAMON, but both were dull...
Other Things
About a week after having the stiches out, and consistently healing, things started to swell and get painful again Tuesday last week. Wasn't well at all. So went to the clinic and he said a thread that should dissolve seems to have caused and issue, so he took that out from under the skin. Anti infection cream with some tablets, an oozing sore and later that evening and all good again.
Spent much of the last week playing with the Mint Linux laptop and evaluating what I really want from it. Thing is I don't really need a laptop at the moment, only if I have to visit Australia in the future sometime, or something like that.
I found Inkscape, THE Linux vector illustration program is very weak compared to my 23 year old CorleDraw12 I used since 2003. I bought CorelDraw2024 last year, and it is a bit more polished, but doesn't really do anything new that the 2003 version didn't! What I mostly use in the new version is the presets for saving PNGs directly.
So I spent a few days learning Inkscape and trying to get CorelDraw12 to run under Linux wine. Corel installs and runs, but can't open a template so is useless. Tried all the options found in the Linux forums on the subject.
Eventually installed older VirtualBox, Win10 HOME in it without an internet connection, and put CorelDraw12 in that, and the fonts I use for my comics. Can drag and drop files between the systems and it all works. A Laptop for Internet use and a safe to use Win10 isolated from the Internet for CorelDraw12.
But I also made up a JUST THINKING comic template in Inskscape that easily allows me to make that series of comic natively in Mint Linux to. Adding topic based images and text balloons works well enough in Inkscape.
I found KRITA on Linux seems good enough that I don't need to install Photoshop in the windows VM too.
I went and installed REAPER DAW, to see how that works too, but using only cockos plugins isn't an option for me, and putting my windows VSTs in via wine is way too much trouble. I'm not going to be making music in this. What I did do is bring over the stems from a project. Could do "mastering" on it, but don't need to. So far REAPER works, but doesn't seem it will be useful for music.
Now this Lenovo ideapad520 is from 2018 and I used it daily on my desk here from end 2019 till October 2023 when I upgraded my 4GB 32bit Windows XP machine to 64bit Win10 with 16GB memory. and 2 displays. I hate the fan noise in the laptop and keyboard, and moving to the Desktop meant I didn't hear that any more, and had big screens and a way better keyboard.
But before the PC upgrade in 2023 during summer the Lenovo started to overheat, fan on fastest and the keyboard would stop working. So I opened it up expecting it would be full of cat hair and have all the vents blocked. Up until this point, the laptop had never overheated that way. It wasn't filled with dust and hair at all. Some pictures of cleaning out the dust. The machine is very easy to open up.
I found that if I turned the performance of the machine down, the overheating stopped, and for non CPU intensive things, didn't slow the machine either.
I now know ideapads and some other slim Lenovo models can overheat with age as the heatsink compound on the CPU wasn't done well, or hasn't lasted.
I might replace the compound sometime, but at the moment, PowerSav and Balanced in the MINT Linux Power Manager Options handle the issue. In PowerSav the fan noise is never a problem, even if the machine runs noticeably slower.
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