Author Archives: gmcdavid

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About gmcdavid

Retired IT professional with a wide range of interests. Married. Three sons, two with autistic-spectrum disorders and the third being transgender with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. From Chicago but now living in the Twin Cities metro, Minnesota. Episcopalian. Carleton College (BA 1972, physics) and Stanford University (MS 1974, Applied Physics; MS 1976 Statistics).

Replacing another hard disk

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Following my success in Replacing a hard disk I decided to do the same for a Lenovo ThinkPad X130e, which I had purchased for about $250 (again) from Micro Center. The BIOS on this system dates from 2011, not quite as ancient as the Optiplex I had modified before. This replacement was somewhat more risky, since I had installed Linux on it in addition to the Windows 10 home edition it came with. Would the GRUB dual boot system survive the cloning process? I also used a 512GB SSD to replace the 320GB hard drive, hoping to install an additional Linux distribution or two.

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Rang Gaeilge, 10ú lá Mí na Lúnasa 2021

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Duinnín agus na Bollain

bullan, A round hollow in a stone, a bowl.

tuathal … cursing stones (clocha breaca) at Inishmurray, Sligo, are turned to
the left to effect a curse…

  • Bhí an oíche caite ag an Duinnineach i nDrom Gabhar le
    muintir Magee. Tar éis bricfeasta, rinne páistí an teaghlaigh é a
    chomóradh go Tír Sheanacháin go bhfaigheadh sé radharc ar an
    Sionnainn agus go bhfeicfeadh sé an áit as ar shnámh Daideo
    Magee Béal na Sionna. Bhi an lá bioranta fuar, an ghaoth ag
    saighdeadh as gach aird faoi seach agus nimh inti. Rith an bheirt
    bhuachaillí thart ar an Duinníneach go meidhreach gan aon
    aird acu ar an bhfuacht ach shiúil Hanna taobh leis go modhúil.

    Dineen spent the night in Drumgour with the Magee people. After breakfast the children of the family as an to Tiershanaghan so he would get a view of the Shannon and would see the place where Grandpa Magee swam the mouth of the Shannon. It was a piercingly cold day, the wind blowing from all directions with poisonous sting in it. The two boys ran around Dineen merrily with no regard for the cold but Hanna walked beside him politely.

    comóradh gathering, assembly; celebration m
    radharc sight m
    lá bioranta fuar piercingly cold day
    bioranta sharp
    saighdeadh inciting, provoking m
    aird direction; attention f
    faoi seach in turn; occasionally; respectively; in confusion
    nimh poison f
    meidhreach Mirthful, merry, gay; frisky, sportive
    fuacht cold
    modhúil Well-behaved, mannerly; mild, gentle, modest

    • Léigh tuilleadh

Replacing a hard disk

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I have a Dell Optiplex 780, which I bought used from the Box Shop some years ago for about $250. The date of the BIOS is 2008, so it is quite ancient. However it is a 64 bit system, with 4GB RAM, and virtualization support. It must have been considered a fine machine in its day. It still works. I have installed Windows 10 on it, even that OS is not officially supported on it, and before that two varieties of Linux. It is no longer my primary system, but I am not yet ready to part with it. Hence How to Copy Your Windows Installation to an SSD caught my eye, since replacing a hard drive by an SSD is a good way to speed up an old system.

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WSL: Files and Environment Variables

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Continuing from WSL: Directories and Files.

The Ultimate Guide to Windows Subsystem for Linux (Windows WSL) points out that with WSL2 the Linux file system is a virtual disk. In my case

C:\Users\Glenn\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu20.04onWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx

I hope there is a way to relocate this file into a directory format that is fit for human consumption.

The Ultimate Guide goes on to consider environment variables. Opening an administrator command prompt as in the example:
“Failure is always an option.”-Adam Savage

Rang Gaeilge, 29ú lá Mí na mí Mheiteamh 2021

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Duinnín agus an Bhadhbh (tuilleadh)

  • Bhí tost sa seomra. Bhain an Duinníneach taitneamh, soicind,
    as éifeacht a scéil ar an gcomhluadar. An soicind ina
    dhiaidh sin, chúb sé roimh an mbéic a lig Woodley as.

    ‘Mo chuid sionnacht [var pl?]! Iad á ngoid ag mo thionóntaithe féin!’

    ‘Ach ni bhíonn tú ag seilg sionnach, a thaisce, agus tá’s agat
    go n-itheann siad na piasúin . . .’arsa a chéile.

    There was silence in the room. Dineen enjoyed, for a second, the effect of his story
    on the company. The second after that he cowered before the shout Woodley let out

    ‘My foxes! My own tenants are stealing them!’

    ‘But you don’t hunt foxes, my dear, and you know they eat the pheasants . . .’ said his wife.

    taitneamh Shine, brightness; Liking, enjoyment
    soicind second [of time] m
    éifeacht Force, significance; efficacy, effect; value, importance f
    comhluadar (Social) company m
    chúb bend, cower, shrink
    béic yell; shout f
    seilg hunt, chase f
    piasún pheasant m gs npl piasúin

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The United States-International keyboard layout

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I have used the United States-International keyboard layout for years to enter Irish Language accented letters (á,é,í,…) and occasionally German letters with umlauts. I have done this with dead keys: In this layout ‘, `, “, ~, and ^ are dead keys. Nothing happens until you type certain letters following the dead key, at which point the letter appears with the appropriate accent, umlaut, etc. This has worked very well for me. TIL that you can do much more with that layout. How to use the United States-International keyboard layout in Windows 7, in Windows Vista, and in Windows XP explains all of this. Using the Right-Alt key and the Right-Alt-key with the shift key let you enter all sorts of wonderful things, e.g. ß (for German), € (Euro), ¥ (Yen), þ, ð, ø, Ø, ©.

Some of you may know this, but I suspect the vast majority of Windows users, and a lot of Linux users, do not. The link above refers to older versions of Windows, but the layout works on Windows 10 and on Linux. The process of installing the keyboard will depend on your OS. Look for “keyboard layout” in the documentation.

Networking with the Windows Subsystem for Linux

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Networking was built in on the Ubuntu WSL install. WSL Ubuntu under Windows has an IP of 172.17.xxx.xxx, but it can see my local 192.168 network, and the entire internet. WSL Ubuntu says it uses a DNS Server on the 172.17 network. Since WSL uses NAT, I expect that translates to my router on the 192.168 network, which in turn accesses the DNS servers of my ISP. IP addresses in the range 172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255 are private, so apparently WSL creates its own network.

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