Dual Boot Linux Mint Upgrade

Not too sure what happened but my LUbuntu upgrade (reinstall actually) from 18.04 to 22.04 went horribly wrong. What I ended up in the end after the 'upgrade' was a non-bootable PC with no recognisable operating system detected! I panicked obviously. Something about problems in creating a file system and unable to proceed. Nothing that made sense to me.

I reinstalled WinXP from backup, reinstalled LUbuntu 18.04 and everything was back to where it was. A big sigh of relief. Luckily. Nothing went missing or corrupted. Next course of action - backups. Before that I didn't do any as my previous Linux and Ubuntu installation were non problematic.

Linux Mint

I looked around for another distro, found Linux Mint Xfce with favourable reviews and it suites me fine with my 2GB RAM PC. I then decided to give it a go.

Chinese Pond Heron - Breeding Plumage

Learnt something new today. These Chinese Pond Herons, they look different depending on the season. This blog post contains pictures of a Chinese Pond Heron in its winter plumage.

The two pictures in this blog post here is how it looks in its breeding plumage.

Replacement Thermostat For Morgan 1.7L Cordless Kettle

It has been 4 months. So far, so good. The replacement thermostat, a Sunlight SLD-118, works fine on my Morgan 1.7 litre cordless kettle. Rated at 10 Amps 250V, it still boils water within 5 minutes. Auto shutoff works.

Replacement was easy. It is just a matter of pulling out the live and neutral wires, removing the old thermostat and then putting in the new, and plugging in the wires back again.

x264 Warning: MB Rate [489110] > level limit [245760]

I got this warning dialog box towards the end of Step 1 and Step 2 while saving my video in VirtualDub2.

Never had this before ever since I processed my videos before uploading to Dreamstime. I was stumped.

But this helps. I set the 'Level' parameter in the x264 configuration dialog box to 4.2 (from 4.1) and the warning never occurred again.

Problems with the frame rates per second (fps) of my video I think. I never had this problem with 30 fps video, but this popped up when my video was set at 60 fps.

---

Buy refurbished computers from Amazon.com

(Note: An Amazon.com affiliate link)

---

More Kittens

More kittens in my house.

Date of birth: 3rd April 2023. Time: around 2:15 p.m. That was when we heard the sound of some baby kittens crying. We counted four, but one died 4 days later on April 7th. Mother cat is in the pink of health. Likewise for the rest of the kittens too so far.

Here are two short videos that I've made of the kittens on April 6th:

Old Door Closer Repair

Took me a while to figure it out, but I managed to repair the old door closer to one of the netting doors in my house. All I used was just a small block of scrap wood and a screw that I scavenged from an old VCD player.

Misleading Error Message - "A New CPU Installed"

I didn't change anything. The same old PC that I have had for 13 years. Still runs fine. But why this "New CPU installed!" error message every time when I boot up my PC?

The answer finally revealed about a fortnight ago.

New Cat In Town

New cat in town. Date of birth is 17th November 2022. Time of birth, around 9 A.M. Kitten has another sibling but it went missing 4 days later. We have no idea what happen to it. So sad.

Weifeng WT-1003 Monopod

I have bought myself a monopod. A made in China Weifeng WT-1003. The build is surprisingly quite good despite the budget friendly price. Maximum length when fully extended is about 1.7m which is about right for my height. It is quite light and overall, I am happy with my purchase as it serves it purpose for my needs as it is suppose to.

Olympus E-PL 9 + Zoom Lens With Raynox At f/18 Aperture

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been toying around with the idea of getting a budget manual macro lens. Not too sure why I did not try it out earlier, but after stopping down the aperture to f/18 (with my Olympus camera + zoom lens and Raynox DCR-250), I think I will be delaying my decision a bit. Reason being, the picture quality is not too bad with this setup as you can see from the picture above, unedited 100% cropped ( click here for enlarged image).