July 2nd

We started the day with the excitement of me seeing a yellow lab running around the road in front of the house.  I was working, so Vic went and grabbed him (he was very happy to see her), setting Tilly off into frantic yowling as she could see all this unfolding through the front window.  As he had no collar, she called animal control as they carry microchip scanners.  She was waiting for John to show up when the Comcast guy arrived to hook us up to their internet service, which is cheaper and faster than Surewest.  Vic called to check on John, and he was going to be a while as they were having a lot of calls.  She loaded the dog into the van (he was quite scared of this) and took him to the SPCA to use their microchip scanner.  He has a microchip, his name is Boomer and he lives in the close over the road from us - she took him over there, and it appears he's being house sat by people who were unaware that he was even missing.  We got the Comcast stuff all finished up, and everything converted over to it.

I've been getting annoyed with my little weather station PC, as it hangs up from time to time.  I've had it restarting every day, but occasionally the restart fails to reconnect to everything, so it stops sending data until either I realise it's not working, or until it restarts.  I think a lot of that is that the software isn't really designed to work over the USB-serial connection, which is a bit of a hack.

Aaaanyway, I decided to try running a Linux release on there, as that natively supports the USB-serial connection.  I started out with Ubuntu 12.04, the latest release.  I got that installed, along with Wview, and it all works.  Sort of.  You have to install Apache and PHP to administer the thing, and by the time everything was said and done, I had basically no disc space left - the EEE 701 only has a 4Gb SSD.  "Aha", I thought, "I'll just throw an SD card in there, and move /var and suchlike to it".  "No you won't" said life, as the EEE doesn't support SDHC, and I can't find an SD card > 64Mb.  Doy.  So, I installed Xubuntu, which is a lot smaller (and seems to have installed a bunch of crap that I didn't ask for, so I might be able to get even more space back).  It's all set up and working now, and I can ssh to it, rather than trying to use the 7" screen, and connect to it over the network to see what it's reading.  Yay.

In the evening we watched "Ray", which Vince has lent us - it's a very good film, and doesn't seem to hide his dark side.