Secure Your Home Network: Simplified Mint Linux Installation

It used to be a real pain to install Linux.  My first Linux distro was Slackware on a v0.99 kernel that came on 35 floppy disks (ask your parents, kids) way back in the early 1990s.  Things have come a long, long way since that.  You don't even need to muck around with dd and create a boot USB anymore.  Super easy. 

Somehow I missed this

Sometime in the last two or three weeks the odometer here ticked over 20 Million page views.  Seems kind of weird that I wasn't tracking that, but whatever.  In three months we will celebrate the 18th blogiversary here.

Silicon Graybeard has an interesting theory about all the traffic lately. 

The shameful decline of the Royal Navy

His Majesty's fleet seems to be entirely unable to protect His Majesty's subjects abroad.  There seems to be only a single ship (MHS Dragon) that can be sent to Cyprus for anti-missile defense, and it has taken more than a week to prepare to sail.  And they still haven't left port.

The Royal Navy is no allied force worth considering.  Perhaps HMS Defiant can comment on his place. 

As they point out, the Royal Navy was ready to sail in three days when the Iron Lady Maggie Thatcher told them to stand ready in the Falkland crisis. And then they had something like 100 ships.  Now they can't get a single one.

As Donald Trump would say, sad!

Although I like what he says about the "1000 ship Navy" at about 11:40 into the video.  'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But after all, what today is the "special relationship" or even the transatlantic alliance?  But it's really weird that we're getting more support from Germany than from Great Britain these days.

Whatever you do, don't mention the war. Gosh, the darn Krauts have no sense of humor ... 

The Royal Navy is the fleet of Great Britain.  You know Great Britain, right?  It used to be where Britain is now.  Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

Jeremy Clarkson on the USS Eisenhower

This is Jeremy Clarkson from 1998, four years before he rebooted the Top Gear show.  They still had F-14s on the carrier.  This is a very cool look back to Old America when it still was America. 

The Blues Brothers - Soul Man

The 1980 film assembled an all-star cast of musicians.  This was perhaps the weakest song in the movie. 

How far back in time can you understand English?

The English language has evolved for basically as long as there has been English.  A great book on this subject is Robin MacNeil (and company) in The Story Of English (highly recommended if you are a history nerd like me). 

Well, via a link from someone I've forgotten (sorry! Midwest Chick? A Large Regular?) there is a fabulous demonstration of this where the writer starts in the present and where each paragraph goes backwards in time 100 years.  I started getting lost around 1200 AD, and I've messed around casually with Old English before.  I would catch the odd word before 1200 but the overall gist was a mystery.

And I love the URL for his site.  LOL.

But at the end of his post he links for a Youtube video of a guy who speaks the different versions of English, starting in 400 AD and going forward 100 years at a time.  I found this a lot harder than reading, only starting to pick up some comprehension around 1500 AD.  But when he turns on transcriptions it's amazing how far back I recognize a lot of words.

Wild.  I've embedded it here.  Highly, highly recommended. And I guess I'm not the only one who's interested - 1.2 Million views in two months?  Yowser.

New Zealand Navy grounding update

I posted about this 15 months ago. Midwest Chick has an update:

The New Zealand navy was so proud and happy to have a lesbian from Britain come on board that they gave her a $100M survey and dive vessel, which she crashed and sank.

The lesbian “diversity hire” captain of a Royal New Zealand Navy ship that ran aground and sank off Samoa has been charged with negligence along with two other officers over the loss of the vessel.

The $100 million HMNZS Manawanui, which was under the command of UK-born homosexual Yvonne Gray, crashed on the south side of Upolu on October 5, 2024, due to human error including failure to turn off autopilot, an inquiry found last year.

This is the official inquiry report which is leading to Commander Gray's Courts Martial.  Obviously the entirety of His Majesty's New Zealand Navy is a bunch of dirty misogynists ...

Midwest Chick adds this tidbit that I had missed:

This isn’t the first time that a NZ naval diversity hire damaged a ship. It happened in 2024 with a different female captain.

And that’s what happens when you choose diversity over competence. Wonder if the New Zealanders will actually learn from this??

Now maybe our own Navy could do something about our (multiple) female commanders who run into ships on the high seas. 

 

Bravo Zulu, Coasties

A cruise ship got stuck in the ice off Antarctica, and the Coast Guard (by chance) had an icebreaker nearby.  Well done. 

Country Comfort - Waimanalo Blues

I stumbled across this and like it.  Not sure if it's Country or not, but if it's finger-pickin' then you're at least Country adjacent. 

Tatiana Eva-Marie & Avalon Jazz Band - La Mer

11 Million views can't be wrong. 

Borepatch, you magnificent Bastard! I read your blog!

So Donald Trump seems to be following the ravings here.  Consider this post from December: 

In general, mid-term elections favor the party out of power.  This is true so often that it is almost considered a law of nature, particularly during a President's second term.  What you don't ever see is anyone ask why do voters reject the party in power in the mid-terms? There's quite a simple answer.

Fatigue.

The voters have had some time to get used to the Administration and starts to tire of the typical amount of scandal, incompetence, and general dum-assery that any administration accumulates.

That's not at all what we see today.  The main focus of the Trump 47 administration has been border security, deporting criminal illegal aliens, economic growth, and lower inflation.  There are remarkable results for all of these, despite the legacy media's frantic efforts to hide them.

Each of these are 80% issues - i.e. the issues all get 80% support in polls.

I would go so far as to say that the voter fatigue is on the other foot.  It's the Democrats who spent the last four years stumbling through a morass of dumb-assery.  And who are all on the 20% end of the issues that voters care about.

And here comes DJT with the State of the Union Address.  Here's the TL;DR version:

Boy, those Democrats are crazy, aren't they? 

You're welcome.