Preparations for summer vacation
Our summer vacation is coming up quickly, and on Saturday I spent a bit of time making bookings. Things are looking good. We’ll be flying from Amman to Mumbai, then from Mumbai to Chennai. Thereafter we’ll be in Tiruvannamalai and Auroville. The second part of the trip, from Auroville to Mysore and perhaps the Nilgiri hills, we are leaving open for now. Our hardcopy information consists of an old Lonely Planet – inherited from Yonatan, a good map, and the Insight Guide to southern India, ordered from TheBookDepository. I like the Insight series.
Linuxmint
The latest install of Linuxmint (Isadora) has lingering problems, due to a minor mistake I made at some point in making the upgrade. About the time of the upgrade I was suffering from a strange bug, the nature of which I’ve managed to forget in the meantime, but which resulted in me using the Terminal for some basic commands. I think I did a backup and restore using Sudo, and that assigned Root permissions to a number of directories. Maybe I also did the install using sudo – I don’t remember. Anyway, now I have problems with some of the software. Chrome and Chromium will only work with sudo, and there seems to be a difficulty with importing photos through Shotwell. So I’ve been using Opera and Epiphany for my home web browsers.
Today I was excited to notice that quite unannounced, the latest version of Ubuntu, and hence Linuxmint, have the ability to work with Ipod Touch. That’s an important feature for me, and I’m quite thrilled about that. (I don’t want to get too thrilled, lest it stops working again.)
Social Networking
Partly because of my browser setup, I’ve felt much less of an urge to follow tech developments (it’s harder without Feedly). And I’ve made a parallel disengagement from social networking services. Maybe the latter urge has been diminishing anyway. I think this blog, which sends links through Twitterfeed.com, will fill the bill. On Twitter, I’ve jettisoned most of my followers, and follow mainly news sources, companies and organizations that I want to keep up with. On Facebook, I got rid of most old stories. On MyOpera.com I’ve kept only what I wrote that pertains to Opera. I’ve got rid of a few other accounts that I hardly use these days.