Breaking from my typical theme here for a brief moment, because I believe in honesty and transparency when s*** gets real and hits the fan.

I'm sure the fact that I haven't done anything in a considerable while here has not gone unnoticed. I've had some rather significant IRL drama (which I do not wish to discuss with *anyone* at this time -- seriously -- don't offer, don't ask) which came to a head last night. I will be spending, as a direct result of that, roughly the next week mostly away from Hackaday.

I didn't want that.

I didn't want the drama.

I didn't want the mess that happened last night.

I didn't want any of this.

I didn't get that choice.

Hopefully, sometime around Monday the 22nd, I'll be able to start going again on this project and a few others.

My first task will be yet another OS reinstall on Steampunkish Too, as this morning the Feren OS install cratered, badly. While Ubuntu (on which Feren OS is based) has always given me issues with its network connection/management utility -- I almost always am using WiFi, and every few weeks "something happens" (probably mild filesystem corruption, but I don't actually know) and I have to delete and rebuild the profile for that connection, or it won't work any more -- I have to say, this is the first time *ever* that I've had it Humpty-Dumpty an entire OS install to the point of rendering it entirely unusable. Manually unplugging-replugging my WiFi adapter presently results in a temporary OS freeze on the order of 10-15min+, and even with a freshly-rebuilt connection profile, I get no Internet *at all* -- the adapter connects to the network, I *assume* it's getting assigned an IP address, but no data ever goes through. All webpages 404 out or report "No Internet" in Google Chrome. Mind you, this is after reinstalling Chrome and rebuilding my profile within it -- prior to that, just *opening* Chrome was sufficient to lock the system up solid.

Screw you, Feren OS, I'm going home.

Right now what I'm planning to do is vent my spleen, rather pungently so, on the XUbuntu support forums about how the XUbuntu 20.04 LTS installer, unlike the 18.04 LTS installer, does not handle 64bit systems with 32bit UEFIs -- it essentially reverts to the behavior of the 16.04 LTS installer, which is to work just fine until it tries to install GRUB2, and then -- even if it was given the BOOTIA32.EFI file in the appropriate place (which is supposed to bypass this issue) promptly s*** the bed, completely crashing the installer in the process, which results in an entirely unbootable system, even *with* a manual GRUB2 install later on.

Considering that this behavior implicates all Intel NUC systems, at least of the appropriate era (Intel Bay Trail), and considering that every other system I've encountered that's Intel Bay Trail- or Cherry Trail-based has the same configuration, including *ALL* Atom SoC systems, most notably those with an Atom Z3735f or Atom x5-Z83xx chip, and probably *everything* out there (although I haven't tested my one Celeron N4000-based system in this regard yet) with 2gb/4gb DDR3L and some kind/quantity of eMMC for OS/userdata storage, I don't think it'll take much to get this fixed fairly quickly.

[Whoops, pressed "Publish" before I should've.]

After that's taken care of, I should be returning to SETEC Astronomy, and bringing in a few other projects that are presently on ice, fairly shortly. I have quite a few interesting surprises and such, including one I started late last year but paused because Life Stuff and then never wrote up, and something fairly small that started as an afternoon-livener and soon grew slightly larger that just needs a little attention and some last-minute buffing and polishing to be considered completely finished... and something like *five* new computer builds, all of which are in the planning stage, that need attention in some way -- and all of them deserve to be broadcast loudly.

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BTW -- if you don't follow my friend, @esot.eric, you should. He is a freaking genius in so many ways, and a heart of pure gold, *and* he's an all-around awesome dude -- but he has some personal issues baked in, stuff that isn't his fault but he has to deal with it (and sometimes the rest of us do, too) that occasionally gets in the way of showing others who he really is. Right now we're both feeling a little lonely, and we're both going through some stuff, so I thought that I'd see if maybe I could make karma help us both by sending some light his way. Lately he's been telling me a lot about a project of his to make a positively *antique* Canon BJ-10e (an inkjet printer in an era when nearly everything was dot-matrix or daisy-wheel) act like a typewriter or line printer over a Linux console connection. The goal, as I understand it, is to be able to print a single character at a time, as if it were an electric typewriter... he's not there yet, I don't think, but he's making progress and it's incredible. Oh -- and he's using the cartridge that came with the printer, which I'm pretty sure is almost as old as I am!

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...speaking of which, my birthday is Saturday. I'll be 34, and almost certainly alone and miserable. "Chat"/Private-Message me for my address if you want to send me something, I'd appreciate it to a depth that words cannot adequately convey.