Bike
Speaking of Scott & Kellyn… I went looking for new parts for my road bike, but found instead that the component supply chain is still completely disrupted by COVID, and I may need to wait a long time to replace that freehub. So I went back to CAT, where Scott helped me find find a wheel compatible with my shifting system, and then guided me through rebuilding it: cleaning out and re-greasing the freehub, ditto the bearings, and putting it all together with my old sprockets. It looks a bit weird on my bike — even though it’s also Campagnolo it’s decades older than my other components — and I am still on borrowed time with my other worn drivetrain components, but the bike is rideable again. Thanks Scott!
Computer
My laptop started making a tiny creaking sound when I opened it, and the other day I noticed that the right hinge had become detached in some way. Fixing this, according to YouTube, is an easy enough home repair, and System76 says I can send the laptop back to the factory to get it fixed, but I think I’ll split the difference and bring it to some local repair place.
Before I brought it somewhere though, I wanted to make sure I had my data backed up. (I used to do backups regularly but, ironically enough, my old backup drive crashed a while ago. So, step one was to get a new drive.) I picked up a 2.0 TB, USB hard drive at Staples, then spent a little time fixing it up the way I wanted it, re-formatting it with a more Linux-friendly filesystem and replacing the drive’s icon with one I like better. After that I just copied my home folder over to the new drive and called it a backup. (I also needed to back up a few other things, like global configuration files, but that was just more file copying.)
My last remaining backups were the databases. These required using a few special programs, which, since I haven’t used them since my last major upgrade, I just discovered in the moment that they were not configured correctly, and in fact my whole database system was a misconfigured hodgepodge… I had to backtrack a bit and get my system in order, which meant I had to do a bit of learning first, but I eventually got the whole thing running and even managed to automate the process.
The next step is to bring the laptop to a repair store.
