Leaving town....

More Computer Stuff....

If your computer clock starts showing wrong times when you start the computer, that's usually a sign that your CMOS Battery on the motherboard is dying. This is a 3-volt lithium battery about the size of a nickel, but thicker. Usually, it's located near your CPU or between it and your RAM sockets. These usually last about five years, give or take, and you can change it yourself if you are careful. Turn off the power (unplug it from the wall), open the box, and look for a round watch-style battery in a shallow socket on the motherboard. It will probably have a number on it that shows CR2032. It will look like this.....

 Looking at that socket in the picture, there's a little spring-loaded tab at 3 o'clock. Push that outward, away from the battery, to release the battery. When it pops up, replace it, and press the new one down until the latch engages to hold it in place.

While you're in there, use your can of Ultra Duster to blow the dust and dirt out of the fins on the heat-sink on top of your Processor, below its fan. Don't take the fan off, just use the extension pipe on the duster can to reach between the blades, and blow out the dust. Then you can put the cover back on the box, and turn on the power. When first starting up, you'll see some info about your Bios, and it will likely say "Loading defaults.......Press F1 to continue...." So you press F1 and it finishes that, and then shows you your usual login screen. You're back in business again.

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Found - The config files for Wacom Pen Tablet for Linux Mint

I've only been looking for this for about three days. If you have a Wacom pen tablet such as an Intuos Art or etc., and you can't find out what its present settings are, you can open your Terminal and type: xsetwacom list devices and press Enter. That shows you which devices are listed for it in your kernel driver.

You may find that your tablet pen and its touch will work, but you couldn't find out how they are configured. This shows you, if you type in the following command:
xsetwacom list parameters and then press Enter. You'll get something like the above. For its User Manual, type: man xsetwacom. There are three kinds of commands you can use: list, get, and set. The manual explains. 

I should add here that all this applies equally to either Linux Mint 18 or to the latest Ubuntu 16.04. The Linux Mint 18 uses the core features of Ubuntu 16.04. So they're pretty-much the same, except for the graphical user interfaces. And I should also mention here that if you're dual-booting either of these with Windows these will now give you the option of mounting the partition on which the Windows system is located, so you can now access your Windows files directly from within Linux Mint or Ubuntu. That's something I've been wanting for quite a while, and finally, someone did it. And I thank them profusely. Now, if I want to use an image from my pictures folder in Windows 10, I can access that directly,  instead of rebooting into Windows, emailing it to myself, and then booting back into Linux to open the mail. Much better! Isn't progress wonderful?

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And another week flew by.....

Our Gabriel's Trumpets have more colors this year. I like the orange ones.

Last night's full moon, rising over the industrial park along the waterfront.

Local wildlife.

This morning's sunrise...

The HUD Weather Gadget is working again

Several months ago the source codes for locations were changed, and the weather part stopped working. One of its users has now fixed it, and it's back up again. If you want these and other gadgets for your Windows 10, click here for 8GadgetPack's latest version.
And be sure to read the FAQs, which have some useful information for you.

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And kids still play Frisbee

Here's a look at Cinnamon 3.0 , used in Linux Mint 18.

Linux Mint 18.0

This is the latest version of Linux Mint, and there are some interesting changes. For example, this one is based on a newer version of Ubuntu, so some of your older programs will probably be removed during installation, and you may wish to either try re-installing them later, or use the newer substitutes for them that will come with this new release.

Another nice thing about this release is that even though it is based on a newer version of Ubuntu, which we're told makes this a major change, I was still able to do an "in-place" upgrade, as we have been able to do with the LM 17 series, which is all based on the same version of Ubuntu. This new LM 18 being based on a newer version of Ubuntu supposedly would make that more difficult. But I did the whole thing using instructions on a website, in combination with Terminal,  the command line program, and while it took some time, everything went without problems, and was quite successful.

When I say "quite successful" I mean that it automatically saved my personal files and pictures and backgrounds from the 17.3, and re-installed those into this new 18.0 without difficulty. There's a video on YouTube discussing installing 18.0 in which the speaker laments the fact that his new 18.0 installation doesn't have his favorite old backgrounds, etc., and I can't explain that. All I can say is that he may have missed something in the instructions while preparing for the installation procedure. There's a couple of things to do beforehand, such as set your Terminal Profile Preferences to allow unlimited scrolling. There's going to be a lot of scrolling as the upgrade starts happening. And you have to read the instructions very carefully, and follow them exactly.  And if you do, then it all has a happy ending.

And before I close this off, I'd like to add that a lot of us are becoming somewhat disenchanted with our Wonderful Windows 10, and even Satya Nadella has admitted that Windows 10 has been a disappointment for them. I'm thinking it may be because I'm not alone in my feeling that Cortana, the personal assistant, is a little too invasive with its need for access to our personal information to let it work as designed. For me, it seems like spyware in a good suit, and I don't like it. The Good News is, we've now got a new release of Linux Mint, with some nice new features. So if you aren't happy with your Windows 10, you know what to do about it, don't you?