Well, I'm back

[nameandnature]

I have slightly ambivalent feelings about this time of year (let the reader understand). This Christmas was a good one, though. I saw my family and S, drank a moderate amount of wine and had a lot of nice food. I have a new digital camera from my parents, some shirts from my sister, and a Thunderbirds Tracy Island from S, who clearly knows me far too well :-)

I have spent today unsuccessfully trying to replace the ancient kernel on my Debian Linux box with a recent one so I can do USB stuff like talk to digital cameras. My root partition is too small to take the new kernel, alas. Today's top tip is that Linux really does not like it if you move /lib to somewhere other than the root partition. Many hours later, I don't have a new kernel but I do now have a working Linux machine again. Will try again tomorrow. Transferring from the camera works under Windows, but rebooting is annoying.

Also dug out the Acorn Electron and had a play, prompted by S's interest in an adventure game I wrote for it ages ago. I'd really like a way of transferring some of the software and View documents onto a PC, so I could run the software in an emulator and keep the documents in a readable form. Since the Electron uses 5.25 inch disks in an old format, I'm guessing the only workable option might be to use the printer port.