Graham Whitfield

Which Linux for an 84 year old neighbour who wants email, photos and the footy?

My neighbour Margaret is 84 and sharp as a tack. Her laptop is a 2017 HP with an i5-7200U and 8GB of RAM, running Windows 10, which stopped getting security updates last October. Windows 11 will not install on it. The shop told her to buy a new laptop. She does not want a new laptop. She wants this one to keep working. What she uses it for: Email (a Gmail account, she uses it in the browser) Photos the grandchildren…

Reminder from an old man who has seen things: a backup you have never restored is not a backup. It is a rumour. Cheers, G.

Someone else's computer, rented by the hour: what my spare room costs versus the cloud

Every few weeks someone on here tells me the cloud is cheaper. Sometimes it is. So I sat down with a pot of tea, my power bill, and my receipts, and worked it out properly. I have included the numbers that do not flatter me, because a comparison that only counts one side is an advertisement. What is in the spare room One Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micro, i5-8500T, 32GB, running Proxmox. About a dozen containers and two…

The Novell server under the desk that nobody was allowed to reboot

In 1997 I took a job looking after the systems at a mid-sized firm in Hobart. On my first day the office manager walked me round, pointed under a desk in accounts at a beige tower with a handwritten sign taped to it, and said: "That one runs payroll. Nobody touches it." The sign said DO NOT TURN OFF in capitals and was signed by a man who had left the company two years earlier. It was a NetWare 3.12 server. It had…

Eleven months retired and I still wake up at 3:12 am

For thirty-four years I carried some form of pager. First an actual pager, a Motorola thing on my belt that went off in the middle of my sister's wedding speeches in 1997 (a Novell server, naturally). Then a Nokia, then a BlackBerry, then whatever the company issued and the on-call app that screamed like a smoke alarm. I retired eleven months ago and I want to write down a few things nobody told me, because some of…