Made this House of the Dragon wallpaper earlier this week. It’s my first one on my new laptop! So nice to have the newest version of Photoshop again. I’m really happy with this one – I wasn’t even trying to do anything, just wanted to play around and check that Photoshop was working perfectly in my new laptop. Funny how sometimes you get great results when just fooling around in Photoshop and not even looking to do something worth saving actually! Wanted to post this before I leave tomorrow.
I’ll be away the entire next week! I’ll be in multi-professional individual rehabilitation and will be staying overnight. I’m leaving early tomorrow (Monday) morning and will be back sometime after 3pm on Friday.
I’m not taking my laptop with me, so if any server problems pop up during the week with my sites, I’ll look into it after I’m back – maybe Friday evening, but more likely, Saturday.
Yesterday’s downtime was because of a router problem in Asura Hosting’s Luxemburg datacenter. Looks like it’s fixed now!
I always post a note on my Dreamwidth where there are server problems and I can’t post here – so check https://intothisshadow.dreamwidth.org whenever you can’t get here and wonder why!
I’m so exited! Mom bought me a new laptop for my 50th birthday which will be in a month. It’s a Lenovo ThinkBook 16 G6; we bought it online on Monday and it was ready for pickup yesterday afternoon in the store! I of course went immediately! 🥳😍
It’s 16″ and has 32GB of RAM, Ryzen 7 and 1TB hard drive with Windows 11 Pro. I got it all done installing Windows and Lenovo things yesterday and it laptop seems wonderful! I love the keyboard, how thin and light it is, how quiet it is and that it stays cool all the time so far. It also doesn’t that much smaller than my old 17,3″ one which I was worried about – I don’t have a TV so I watch TV on my laptop and it needs to be bigger because of that, and larger also feels more comfortable to do work on my websites or whatever.
I don’t think I’ve ever owned a computer/laptop that didn’t have problems when just bought – this time is no different. There’s 3 problems:
EDIT 1,5 hours later to add: #2 and #3 solved! All I had to do was to install newest version of AMD Adrenalin, and that solved the software + driver being unsuitable problem, and once AMD Adrenalin was working, there are settings there for screen colors which solved the yellow problem ❤️
EDIT October 3, 2024 – today single finger tapping twice and dragging to move and resize windows and scrolling the scrollbar is working and easy to make it happen! I couldn’t get it to work yesterday – not sure if it was me or the mousepad. Either way I can now do everything by the mousepad like in my old laptops even though the pressing on the lower right corner to right-click still isn’t working although I think it should be? Maybe this is actually Windows 11 feature and you’re suppose to use tapping instead?? I don’t know!
The mouse pad problem is only on the mouse pad – I tried my physical separate wireless USB mouse and it worked as it should!
I actually like quite a bit that two-finger tap opens context menu and I’m getting used to it), but it’s cumbersome having to use the keyboard to select text because using shift + arrow buttons to do it are so slooooow. So I hope I can figure this one out quickly!
But I’m very excited and quite pleased (and a little frustrated because of the 3 problems) so far. This laptop seems like mine right away!
In other news, I of course had a migraine coming in since Monday evening 🙁 and it got active going towards night yesterday. Didn’t get sleep really last night because of it, maybe 2 hours plus some resting until midday today. Now feeling better but my head is feels like it threatens to re-start, maybe.
Also, interestingly – I don’t have that as much patience and energy for computer problems solving as I used to have. I have had my previous laptop for 10 years and whatever problems that one had, I solved them 10 years ago and haven’t had real new features or new problems if drivers or anything since then. It used to be I’d be happy as a clam to spend hours/days/weeks troubleshooting some problem, but now I’m kinda wishing I could just bring over the Lenovo to someone who’d fixit for me! Unfortunately, I’m the most computer savvy person among my family and friends, so I’d have to pay for it.
I noticed this as well 3 years ago when Mom bought a new laptop and I set it up as I always do – I was happy to do it, luckily there wasn’t real problems just one or two things took time to teach Mom to do, but I noticed I didn’t feel like spending time to get real up close and personal with Windows 11 like I had with all the other operating systems I or we’d had had (Windows 95 all through to Windows 10 by then, Linux Ubuntu, Linux Mint). I myself have had Windows 10 until this Lenovo so Windows 11 was new to me and things seemed to harder to find than in previous versions. If I didn’t have to, I didn’t really want to explore it just for the hell of it. I just made everything work for Mom and her SO, and figured out and taught Mom the few things she needs to know to do herself. So I guess this is one of the downsides too of not being healthy: not having the mental wherewithal to do explore the same things as before even though I’m still interested.
But yes, I’m excited! I watched some HDR 4K h265 tv episodes and this Lenovo played them without problems! My old laptop can only play 1080p easily. I’m so happy to finally be able to play HDR 4K eps and movies 🥳
Oh, and the Lenovo was on sale – 200 euros off the regular price! So that was really good 🥳
This week’s questions at thefridayfive@DW
1. Most everyone will recommend a book or two to read, but are there any you would tell people to avoid?
No specific titles but I’d tell people to avoid reading books that don’t bring joy or feel like a duty when they’re reading as a hobby – whether that’s some classic like Jane Eyre or some current domestic award winning novel or a popular pure entertainment novel. And also, if you’ve started to read a book but it feels like work in a bad way, it’s okay to quit it!
2. If you take a book on vacation, are you more likely to take something you haven’t read yet or an old favorite?
Physical books: something I haven’t read, and preferably at least 2 of them! But I’d also bring my tablet which has books not yet read. books read many times over and books I’m in the middle of.
3. Do you read any genres by the season? Like horror around Halloween? Cozy Mysteries in the Winter? Romance in the Summer?
No seasonal readings for me! I read whatever I can get my hands on whenever I get it in my hands! I have a lot of books on queue in the library, so they get to me whenever regardless of the season and I’m always excited to get started on them.
4. If you read a lot of Fiction do you prefer an author that has a series with the same character(s), or do you prefer stand-alone stories?
I used to prefer series by a slight margin, but the last few years I’ve started to feel like everything needs to be a series nowadays to get published and it’s boring, sometimes even unsuitable/unneeded. I’ve noticed I get a lot of delight from stand-alones now!
5. Is there a book that you wish you could read again, but experience it like it was the first time?
Oh, so many! Watchers by Dean R. Koontz (first ever I read from him!), The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, the entire The Expanse series by by James S. A. Corey and many more!
Then there are several books series that I wish I had read in the correct order. Back in the day, it was often not mentioned anywhere on the jacket that it part of a series and you only figured it out after starting. Or now the jacket says “Shetland Series” but not number, so you’d accidentally read them in wrong order if you didn’t make a point of finding out the correct order. I’m very strict about reading in correct order these days, having been burned so many times.