Good evening! Mostly cloudy and 39 degrees in the City of Albany. There is a west breeze at 9 mph. The skies will clear tomorrow around 4 pm. A bit chilly outside, but then again it’s December 8th, and that’s to be expected this time of year.

Tonight was the earliest sunset of the year. We only get more daylight after tonight. Sure we have many cold nights ahead of us but each night, the days will be getting longer. 

Tonight will have a chance of rain and snow showers before 11pm, then a chance of snow showers. Mostly cloudy, with a low of 27 degrees at 6am. One degree above normal. West wind around 11 mph. Chance of precipitation is 30%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. In 2015, it got down to 23 degrees with periods of fog. The record low of -11 occurred back in 1902.

Look to the east, the moon is quite pretty. We have a Waxing Gibbous Moon tonight with 64% illuminated. The moon will set around 3:47 am. The Full “Cold” Moon is on Wednesday night with mostly cloudy. It definitely will be cold that night with temperatures getting down to 12 degrees for the full moon.

Right now, a split verdict on the weekend. Generally a cool weekend is on tap but we got to watch Sunday, as the roads might get slick. Partly sunny on Saturday, with a high near 30. West wind 6 to 10 mph. Sunday, a chance of snow showers. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 32. Chance of precipitation is 30%.Typical average high for the weekend is 38 degrees.

I think I’m dropping plans for the Adirondacks next weekend. It’s just too much of a risk of slick roads on Sunday for me to go north. I don’t know anything on winter driving and I don’t plan to learn. I’ll probably stay home all day on Sunday except to walk places to avoid the risk of dealing with icy roads. 

In four weeks on January 5 the sun will be setting at 4:36 pm, which is 15 minutes later then tonight. In 2016 on that day, we had mostly sunny skies and temperatures between 19 and 2 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 31 and 15 degrees. The record high of 64 degrees was set back in 1950. Pretty cold. January is awful in Albany. 

I bought a second charger for my laptop. It’s one of those things I like to keep one in the office and one at home. Otherwise, I will forget to pack my charger with me all of the time, and as you can guess, that I can be problematic. Plus carrying a charger back and forth to work causes the wires to get frayed and broken. So I like to have one in both locations. Spent the extra $10 to a get a geniune HP charger, because sometimes the cheap knock-offs are less reliable, with wires that tend to break easier — and who knows how fire safe they really are. You never can trust non brand Chinese stuff you find on Amazon.

I also gave up on ordering those Sears Oxford shirts online. They have many of the same colors that I like at the store but they are hard to figure out online, because each color gets a separate product listing. Moreover, when I went to order them, they were going to charge extra for certain colors to ship, because they come from different warehouses. The Sears website crashed multiple times when I was looking in the cart. I give up. I guess when I need more of their shirts, I’ll just go to the Maul. It’s an excuse on a cold evening to go out and do something.  I do like their shirts, but it was difficult to figure out their website — and I think I’m fairly computer literate.

Fixed the grub bootloader so now it automatically comes up when I power up the laptop. I had to rename the default Windows bootloader and put grub in its place, and fix the grub configuration to see the moved bootloader for Windows. It was annoying that Linux didn’t do this automatically but it was easy to do. Of course on my machine, it’s called Microsoft Winders 10.

I’m no computer expert but I enjoy tinkering a little with Linux, and being able to take a look and study the computer guts. So much of Linux can be adjusted by messing with a text file. And the Internet is full of answers on how to fix it. And with Linux, you don’t have software developers intentionally making it more difficult than necessary to get into the guts of a program.