Nibbled

No sure what nibbled this flower, but it's mostly surviving well. The bush is waking up a bit more and now has quite a few of these pink flowers on it - though the highly variable weather must be confusing it. Some days are super mild and some are freezing cold and not so nice. Either way it's been very dry too, so must be a very stressful time for plants.

My mother-in-law has been out planting new flowers for this year, some will spring up on their own, others are new this year. This shrub is a few years old I think. I do know I lugged enough top-soil and compost into and out of her little car for her last weekend for her garden...

I had the afternoon off today and went to the IT club. My plan was to install Debian Linux on a pair of old Lenovo desktops replacing Windows completely - and possibly having ago at installing Debian on an old Mac Mini. My plans didn't quite run as I planned, but I think in the end I got where I wanted to be.

For one of the machines I set up last week, I finished of some tweaks on it. I then set up the new machine but didn't get very far as the IT club president asked if I could install Debian Linux on his PC. So that derailed me a little - not helped by installing it in French and explaining what it was doing as we went along in my bad French. He also picked some very fiddly passwords - which are a pain to type (I said long I didn't say line noise....)

I finally started the install of the machine I actually wanted, but that took longer than I hoped so we left a little late from the club - but it was installed - but it's not been configured yet.

Finally we took a Mac Mini home, as we had run out of time, to install Linux on that. To make the Mac boot from a USB you need to press the Options key, except the French Mac keyboard doesn't have one, as it's called the Alt key. Anyhow once I'd figured that out, the install went very well and it's running Debian like a champ. The hard disk took a knock about 300 hours into it's life and is warning that it will die in the next 24 hours, but it's been running for 600 more hours without issue, so I think it will be okay for our needs.

Next week, I'll install Debian on the other Mac Minis, and try to get all the systems running at the same time, and give them all static IPs and connect them to the server, so that they are easy to access and manage in a centralised way.

Once all are configured my wife will use them with children and the Raspberry Pi systems. We can use a Pi as a computer in it's own right, but it's not so practical to connect a screen and keyboard while is running about on the floor as a robot!