egeiro

We bought a new barbeque a couple of months ago and I spent a little time looking online for barbeque rub ‘recipes’.

Most (all?) recipes have added sugar, but we wanted to avoid that so we just leave the sugar out. That may affect the flavour and caramelisation a little, but it doesn’t bother us.

I narrowed down the choices to a couple of recipes and merged/deleted items to arrive at the following:

It’s five years today since my Dad died. Sometimes it seems like only a couple of years. On other occasions it feels like ten or more years.

We’re living in the house that he and Mum lived in for close-on thirty years at the end of their lives. There are a few remnants around the house–the odd bit of furniture, some cutlery, a stack of slides and photos to continue to cull and distribute. It’s funny looking at some slides and photos that Dad features in when he was in his twenties and thirties (he was usually the artist, not the subject). Here we are sixty or seventy years later and everything has moved on apart from that frozen image.

Three years ago I posted about installing Debian and Openbox. Well. I’ve done it again. Only a month ago I had declared I was fully slack but here I am writing on a machine running Fedora 36 writing about my Debian 11 installation.

I ran into a couple of issues with Slackware. Some apps were very slow to open. I thought I had it figured out, but apparently not. I also couldn’t get Wine to run correctly so opted for a couple of other tried-and-true distros.

A couple of months ago I was reading a book that made reference to a couple of parables found in Matthew 13. The first, found in Matthew 13:44 from the ESV reads:

[Jesus said] The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

I have always identified and understood that the believer is the person who finds the treasure; and that the treasure is the gospel message of salvation through belief and faith in Jesus.

After last week writing about my trying Slackware for the first time and how it may become my daily driver if/when my Arch installation breaks, I can report that Arch broke and I now have Slackware 15 installed on my primary notebook.

I’m not sure what the problem with my Arch installation was. I’d had some difficulties with our router and had made some adjustmants to DHCP and DNS on the router and Arch install, and so my internet would disconnect after about 10 minutes of uptime. I would invoke my VPN and internet connectivity would be OK again (both with and without the VPN tunnel).

For the past fortnight I’ve been using Slackware 15 on a secondary notebook.

Slackware is the oldest Linux distribution still in active development–having been released in July 1993 by Patrick Volkerding. Patrick is still in charge of the project and has the title of ‘Benevolent Dictator for Life’¹

I’d obviously heard of Slackware over the years as I’ve tried alternative distros such as Fedora, Arch, Debian (and its children, Ubuntu and Mint), Void and openSUSE, but I had never tried Slackware until a fortnight ago so thought it was well overdue.

My wife and I have been customers of the nab for the past 27 years. But no longer. Over the past couple of weeks we have opened a new account with a bank that is not one of the ‘big four’.

There were a number of direct debit arrangements to change; screenshots of the details of commonly-used payees to grab, and ensuring we had csv downloads of our recent transactions.

After 11 years, 435 books read and 418 reviews I have deleted my goodreads account.

I loved it when I first began using it (before Amazon owned it), and it is still useful to obtain some information about a book or author; but my screen seems to be increasingly consumed by advertisements and banners; and I seem to get logged out about once a week for no apparent reason.

I wanted to keep a record of what I have read, what I thought about it at the time, and what I may want to read in future. Goodreads met that need for quite a while, but for the time being I’ll keep those records in a spreadsheet instead.

Something Bill Muehlenberg quoted on his site yesterday from CH Spurgeon has got me thinking.

Bill quotes Spurgeon as follows:

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them, masticate and digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analysis of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride come of hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be, ‘much not many’.

I most recently wrote about my Linux distro of choice and window managers a little over a year ago.

At that time I was running the i3 window manager on an Arch distro. That is still my setup of choice, but in the interim I did use both dwm and Qtile for quite a while (probably 9 months in dwm and two months using Qtile). dwm did take some fiddling with patches to install a systray, but it eventually came together.