Ian Kenway @iankenway@social.cleverlibre.org

#symi #climate #IT #laptops #greece #global

I don't normally indulge in FB-style personal commentary. But I'm really glad we're now into April. Winter here on Symi has been long, wet and sometimes very cold, reaching down to 0 degrees C (such a contrast to last August when we exceeded 42 degrees). And yes the island experienced snow.

Spring has sort of arrived - though I'm still waiting for the my severely pruned vine and peach tree to start budding.

After Easter, the tourists will arrive in increasing number. Like most Greek islands, Symi has two aspects. November to April when the island is resident only to Greeks and a small number of ex-pats and then April-November when the population swells and sometimes groans with tourists. Fortunately, I live high up at the bottom of a mountain (Vigla) and can opt out of the tourism invasion as much as I want. Very few make it up here.

Sadly, my much-used ten-year old Samsung laptop started showing signs of its age about a month ago - the hinge broke, there were signs that the HD was on its last legs, the battery wasn't holding its charge well and I couldn't enter the BIOS because of the CMOS battery.

So I bought an HONOR MagicBook 15 (Intel® Core™ i5 processor version, 512Gb SSD version) from Germany for circa 750 euros. It arrived here in two weeks. I immediately got rid of the installed Windows 10 and installed the latest version of Linux Mint. It all went went well with just a few initial glitches - reflecting my unfamiliarity with the German QWERTZ keyboard as well as the soon-discovered need to manually upgrade the Linux kernel. But now all is fine. Compared to the old Samsung, it is incredibly snappy and responsive with no issues with hardware acceleration or running Pulseeffects. Also, I can enter and close down a legacy version of Windows 7 in VirtualBox in about 8 seconds or less. Nothing of course is perfect and, like many reviewers, I have reservations about the keyboard video cam despite its privacy plus point. Also I had to buy an external DVD/CD player.

Come on Spring, the Beach Awakes!

#greece #european #global #environment #ecology #technology #social #cultural #social #economics #politics #news

Food for Thought - March 2022

https://www.phidoc.net/food_for_thought.html

#phidoc #books #literature #music #greece #symi

The Book of the Month for March is Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie and the Track of the Month is the Sarabande from the Fifth Cello Suite by J. S. Bach.

https://www.phidoc.net/book_of_the_month.html

https://www.phidoc.net/track_of_the_month.html

#IT #facial_recognition #ClearviewAI #ukraine #russia #war #casualties #bodies #global

Ukraine uses facial recognition software to identify Russian soldiers killed in combat

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/24/ukraine-facial-recognition-identify-russian-soldiers

#rishi_sunak #statement #tories #wealth #poverty #fuel_prices #social_exclusion #overseas_aid #economics #politics #democracy

Toot Redux (first published 17th December 2020)

#IT #computing #information #mathematics #anthropology #ethnography #hierarchies #gregory_johnson #tsinghui #china #global

Information processing tied to emergence of hierarchy in human societies

https://phys.org/news/2022-03-tied-emergence-hierarchy-human-societies.html