Summary of June
===============

There was too much work in June. I'm working at an university and there
were exams from mid-May  to the first days of July.  In the COVID times
there were  on-line sessions: 30  minutes per student, 12  students per
day.  All  in temperatures  over  30  degrees  of Celsius  (our  modern
building is  hot even when  outside temperature is quite  moderate). In
the days without exams I was trying to do the rest of work. In short, I
was (and still I am) too exhausted to do anything else.

I wrote  two or three  short Gopher posts  but not managed  to transfer
them to any networked  computer. Maybe I will able to do  it in July or
August.

To make thing worse,  my bike tyre get a puncture (I  have been using a
folding bike to commute to work as  it has been almost the only outdoor
activity I have been able to do).  Normally it should be no a big deal.
But it was the rear bike of a Brompton. Not only the tyre of this thing
is unusually  small but  it also  incorporates the  Sturmey-Archer gear
hub.  So a  trivial tire  replacement  required a  lot of  time (on  an
mountain bike I was able to replace it in terms of minutes). Of course,
I had to get the new tyre first which also took some time because these
sizes are  pretty uncommon here.  Fortunately, the Brompton  dealer was
very helpful and shipped the needed things very quickly.

On the  computer side  there has  been also  one considerable  loss. It
seems that  PSU of my  SGI IRIX Indigo died.  I used this  computer for
weekend Gopher reading and for some light writing, too. But I also used
it to some programming, computing (even  for some FEA analyses) and so.
A computer  that probably  did a  lot of useful  work for  the original
owner (the Siemens Nixdorf company) also did  a lot of work for me. Now
it is probably  over - I'm not  so skilled to repair the  PSU by myself
and other options are very expensive.  For example, getting a "new" PSU
from a reliable source [1] means to  spent some UKP 350 + VAT (22% here
if I'm not mistaken) and customs  fees (also a considerable amount). It
is much more that was price of the whole system when I got.

This become a problem for me as  my SGI O2 is still not fully recovered
from its RAM  failure and I have  no other fully working  SGI system at
home except the  Octane. Unfortunately, the Octane  is too power-hungry
and too  noisy to  be used  often. I  still have  a second  Indigo (the
second-generation, 64-bit system with the  R4000 CPU). It's faster that
the Siemens system  but it has a  much worse graphics board  - just the
Entry (8-bit colors, the 1024x768  fixed resolution). I cannot swap the
graphics between the systems easily -  it would mean IRIX a non-trivial
re-installation which  may made even  the this second  system unusable.
Moreover, the R4000 Indigo is the only actual (and working) computer in
our weekend  house - moving  it to other place  will create a  need for
another system.

An another  problem is  my Sharp  Zaurus's battery -  it does  not hold
charge any longer. I have had a spare one but it seems be only slightly
better (the Zaurus  cannot overcome two days of suspend  or few tens of
minutes of use). This was to be  expected but I'm not sure if there are
any new batteries available.

I expected some new things to come (mostly a new stuff not the old
computers) but everything was delayed considerably for various
reasons.


References:

[1] http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgi.html