As forecast, this week has been quite a bit drier than last though gloomy with a lot of haar early on and pretty breezy later. After a bit of reorganization of stuff in the container I got on with making up a bit of the purlin frame.
More...SExpr lives in the same space as Peter Norvig's Lispy and Michael Nielsen's Tiddlylisp but the internal representation of S-expressions is just different enough to be worth writing down if only to give context to following blog posts on other aspects of the language.
More...It's been a damp and chilly week with drizzle most of most days so not a lot has happened. On Thursday I went to Inverness and got various odds and ends - most usefully some welding cable, connectors and croc clips to make up a better connection from the van to the inverter allowing the inverter to work in the container - much safer if it comes on to rain.
Today (Saturday) was a bit better but still with a chilly northerly wind.
More...As mentioned things are not going quickly and the weather has not been helpful so it's become pretty obvious that it wouldn't make sense to try to get any structure up permanently before the weather gets cold, wet and, most importantly, windy. Meanwhile, all my timber was looking very sad in the wet, whether I covered it up or not and however carefully I tried to make sure it was well ventilated. It's difficult not to get holes in a tarpaulin if you keep taking it on and off wood with corners in stiff breezes.
Therefore, I decided to get a shipping container on site in addition to the one I'm renting for storage.
More...I've been making some progress on the house but it's all been painfully slow. The main problem has been with boring holes through the largish bits of timber with sufficient accuracy to match up with the existing steel work for reasons I've discussed previously.
The summer having been abnormally wet, with only a handful of days with no rain at all, somewhat chilly and quite windy hasn't been exactly helpful, either. On the other hand, there have only been a few days where it's rained all day meaning nothing could be done. At least the wind has kept the midges down most of the time.
More...Encrypting the whole of your disk is a jolly good idea if there's any possibility at all of the computer being lost or stolen. Which there is, of course. It's also the decent thing to do if you handle other people's data; having an email address book is a rather minimal example of that.
Ubuntu (and Mint and, I guess, related distributions) provides the option to set up full-disk encryption (FDE) as part of the installation step. However, it's not very flexible.
More...Having faffed around a bit on Monday in not such good weather I made some useful progress cutting posts and beams to length for the remaining four days of the week.
More...I got a new laptop the other week to replace my HP one which came to a rather messy end last autumn. It wasn't something I was going to bother with for a while but the little netbook I've been using was causing me some eyestrain.
It's a Toshiba Satellite C50-B-189. I took a bit of a punt on it as there was nothing much online regarding how it would work with Linux so I thought it'd be a good idea to write down what I found.
In general, it works fine with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS except that the internal Bluetooth adaptor doesn't seem to be recognized. [Update 2016-09-04: see below.] I haven't tried the optical drive yet. [Update 2016-09-04: have since used it for reading CDs - works fine for that.]
More...I have the timber and fastenings for the post-and-beam structure on site but haven't got anywhere with finding a joiner to help me put it up. I have a few more local leads to follow up on but will then have to look a bit more widely, I think.
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