Since @ryanprior and @yomimono were the only ones who answered, I've tried installing @elementary on Dad's old laptop. The installer left a system that showed logo, briefly flashed a login on tty1, and then black screened, but I could go back to tty1 and fix things so I can do a graphical login now. Not a great first impression, but I'll let it have its updates, install the stuff my sister wants to use, and see how things go.
Removing locally cached copies of media attachments from other servers has resulted in a terminal window completely filled with ............................................................... and it's taking a long time, but disk usage has dropped from 100% to 41% so far, so I should probably run that more often.
#admin social.typica.us was briefly down because the server ran out of disk space. I'm finally getting around to learning what I can do with tootctl to free up disk instead of just buying the server more storage.
It always feels a little strange fixing a bug in a program written in a language where I rate my proficiency as "I know of this language", but having a REPL helps. Anyway, this is how my current graphs looked today. Much better. I'm still not doing anything on the receiving end to clean up that signal.
Sent my fix back to the original author, he suggested some further constant tweaks. I haven't checked with a live batch yet, but I can hold a sheet of paper in front of the camera to confirm that the signal no longer drops out when the coffee gets too bright, so I'll see how that goes. I still haven't done any proper calibration on the receiving end.
Nearly everything had been backed up onto the laptop already, but he took a few selfies in the hospital that otherwise would have been lost.
Last night I failed to get the photos off my late father's old iPhone while it was plugged into his old Windows laptop. Nothing was showing up in a file manager, iTunes was unhelpful, couldn't figure it out. Today I tried plugging it into my laptop running Linux and despite a "might be unsupported" message on the phone, everything just worked and I could use Dolphin to copy the photos off no problem.
Today I've been informed that my shop has, as usual, gotten into the top 3 for whatever the coffee category is in the local paper's Best of Racine thing. We always just ignore that and I think anybody who wanted to win that wouldn't have to try very hard to get enough votes, but we've also gotten first on that more than any other coffee shop in town. Just in time for the city to wipe out the business district I'm in with bad road construction planning.
With default data acquisition hardware settings, no calibration (just going from the specs), and no attempt at doing anything to smooth things out, this is my first attempt at capturing degree of roast data in Typica. Apparently when the measured values are out of range on the high end the signal drops out on the bottom (I need to verify that and make sure it's not a bug in my software). It's a noisier signal than I'd like, but I've got some tricks that might help with that. Still promising tech
Author of Typica software for coffee roasters.