Good afternoon on this World Pasta Day. Feel free to drop off some riggies to my place in North Syracuse, if you would like. Mostly cloudy and 46 degrees right now. Kind of a late October day for sure. There is a west-northwest breeze at 10 mph. The skies will clear tomorrow around noontime.

My old laptop is chugging along for now. Most of the reason I replaced it was the case is pretty beat up and the built in keyboard and mouse are quite worn out. But with the external monitor and the keyboard and mouse, it’s working okay for now. Not as fast as my current laptop, but not unreasonably slow, especially if I limit the number of windows that I have open as I only have two gigabytes of ram to work with.

That said, when I increase the load on the computer, like when I’m running something CPU intensive, I get a burning smell. I’m hoping it’s just dust I smell burning of the guts. Or maybe it’s running too hot as the fan isn’t working properly. i remember the fan being louder, but maybe it’s my imagination. The CPUs are running around 170-180 degrees F. That said, I’m not sure if the thermal temperatures are much higher then they used to be. It’s been so long, and I don’t really pay much attention. I would think if the guts are running too hot, it would crash from overheating. But it has yet to crash over the past two days of use. I guess it’s in the normal range.

I’ve done some research onto what is wrong on my dead laptop, but I think it’s done as a laptop. Something is shorting out internally or their is a bad connection between the motherboard and charging port. The later I might be able to pull it apart and solder it, but I don’t know. It’s a nearly four year old laptop, and I’m not hopeful on recovering it going forward. I could replace the logic board myself, but by the time I buy it and install it, I’d be better off just buying a used model. It certainly doesn’t make sense to take to a repair shop.

I hate to junk a laptop that is in good shape besides not booting up, and works relatively well, but I don’t know if I can fix it. I will keep the old hard drive for backup, but I don’t know if I can reuse any of the other components. Maybe I can find the fault, but I have my doubts. I had disposable equipment, but I guess that’s what my I’m not that good at soldering, especially tiny electronic equipment. I hate disposable equipment, but so much of it is nowadays. I guess they make the hard drives easy to pull and cheap to mount in a USB box, because so many of them die. I think I will be buying a new laptop sometime in mid-November after my road trip. My hope is my old laptop connected to my new hard drive will do everything I could do before, only slower.

The laptop drama has been a bit all consuming, but I’m keeping things moving along. I guess sometimes those budget laptops just die. I guess I better keep my trusty Thinkpad in case this ever happens the same. Been trying to get my old laptop to date with modern software, to ensure its safe and secure. The upgrades are ongoing, first from 12.04 to 14.04 and now to 16.04 LTS. But things are moving along.

The sun will set at 6:04 pm with dusk around 6:33 pm, which is 1 minutes and 28 seconds earlier than yesterday. Today will have 10 hours and 32 minutes of daylight, a decrease of 2 minutes and 43 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a slight chance of rain showers before 1am, then a slight chance of rain and snow showers. Low of 32 degrees at 6am. Five degrees below normal. Northwest wind 5 to 7 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. One year ago, mostly clear with a low around 32. The record low of 20 occurred back in 1952.

In 1962, with the start of Cuban Missile Crisis, Adlai Stevenson shows photos at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council proving that Soviet missiles are installed in Cuba.

There is one week until November 1st when the sun will be setting at 5:55 pm with dusk at 6:24 pm. The average high temperature is 54 degrees, with a record high of 78 in 1950.

There are 13 days, 5 hours and 16 minutes until the polls close in NY State on Election Day.