Good afternoon! Happy Saturday. Five Saturdays from now it will be New Years Eve. Four weeks to Christmas. Rain is falling and 44 degrees in Delmar. Too warm here to impact the roads. Calm wind.The skies will clear somewhat tomorrow around 5 pm but the bulk of the week will be quite gray.

Today will rain and snow likely, becoming all rain after 9am. Areas of fog before 9am. Otherwise, cloudy, with a high of 44 degrees at 1pm. Typical for today. Northwest wind 3 to 7 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. Little or no snow accumulation expected. Last year, partly cloudy with a high around 53. The record high of 67 was set in 1979. There was 9.6 inches of snow back in 2014. I mocked how little snow we got that year but it really was a pretty snowy winter, a bit one that did kick the bucket by early April the following year as is expected.

The sun will set at 4:24 pm with dusk around 4:55 pm, which is 29 seconds earlier than yesterday. That’s almost the earliest sunset of the year. Today will have 9 hours and 23 minutes of daylight, a decrease of 1 minutes and 37 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be mostly cloudy, with a low of 32 degrees at 5am. Four degrees above normal. Northwest wind 6 to 8 mph. One year ago, mostly cloudy with a low around 47. The record low of 8 occurred back in 1957.

There are 5 weeks until New Years Eve when the sun will be setting at 4:32 pm with dusk at 5:04 pm. The average high temperature is 32 degrees, with a record high of 61 in 1895.

Back today in 1970, 1.5 inches of rain fall in a minute in Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in the world’s history. I can’t imagine it. 1.5 inches is a lot of rain to recieve in a day, much less a minute.

While I didn’t do a lot yesterday besides pick up my new laptop and configure the settings, I did walk about 3 1/2 miles between going to the library and my evening walk. Less than my 7 miles I did on Wednesday but still a good healthy and walk. Monday assuming that the weather is reasonable, I’ll walk down to the Park and Ride, then walk my whole lunch hour, than walk down to the library and then my evening walk which should get me in the 7 miles range again.

Got my new laptop mostly up and running with most of the files copied on over. I discovered that I am missing a few libraries I need for GIS work, most notably the PostGIS server and the GeoTIFF tools library. Also need jhead for image processing. I have PHP 7 and the dbase extension working. I should have everything up and running for the LAMP setup for coding and debugging the blog but I haven’t fully set up the configuration files.

I like my new laptop, especially the high resolution 1920×1080 screen. My last laptop was a really inexpensive budget model and it had a 1366×768 screen. If your not a techy, that means the old screen was very cramped and made it no fun for making maps or even surfing the web without my big monitor hooked up to it. As I don’t have Internet at home, it meant a lot of times u was using that cramped screen and it really wasn’t fun. Paying a little extra for the higher resolution screen was definitely worth it as I use the laptop a lot. Plus it came with a faster processor, bigger hard drive and more memory than I’ll ever use. It’s ready to be upgraded to an SSD which will further boost its performance when booting and loading apps.

The WiFi was somewhat problematic to get working properly, but now it seems to be working great. I ended up having to compile a newer version of the RealTek kernel module (driver), and then playing with the antenna settings. I’m not sure if it’s playing nicely with bluetooth enabled, but I don’t really care as I rarely use bluetooth for anything, except occasionally syncing files slowly with my phone. I am sure support will only get better with future versions of Linux.