As much as I’ve never been a fan of Unity I’ve learned not to hate it as much as my host OS (and even in some of my VMs).  Sure, my go-to desktops of late are mostly MATE distros or Cinnamon, but Unity hasn’t been completely unacceptable.  With Ubuntu’s recent announcement of the demise of Unity and people openly pontificating on if this means Ubuntu is abandoning the desktop or looking to sell to someone like Microsoft who will then kill it on the desktop I started to analyze what this meant to me as a Linux desktop user.  Is this the end of the road for that journey and therefore back to Mac or, god forbid, Windows?

Back in November I started trying to mess around with .NET again, with the twist of I refused to become Windows bound to do it.  After some time experimenting holidays got in the way, then work got in the way, and as usual life gets in the way of hobbies.  Today I needed to work out some standard C# code samples for interacting with REST services I had written in Java.  I could have spent two hours installing Visual Studio in the virgin Windows 10 VM on my laptop, or I could fire up a new Linux VM and give cross platform .NET another try.

I’m being impatient, and it’s my own fault.  I started that Linux Craptop experiment to see how much mileage I could get out of a decade old laptop running a lean(ish) Linux.  That actually became my only home laptop while my 6+ year old (I think) MacBook Air was getting its battery replaced.  I was going to “suffer” through it for just the few days and then the MacBook would hold me over for at least another couple of years.  At this point however I’m really chomping at the bit to retire that Mac and go Linux full bore.

I’ve written several times about the use of periodic fasting days to counteract our periodic feast days as well as health benefits of fasting from the perspective of supposed cancer fighting and potentially longevity.  I’ve also mentioned fasting as a means of accomplishing weight loss too.  Now that I’m a couple months into that practice, I figured I’d show what that actually looks like.

The 2011 documentary Forks Over Knives had lots of testimonials.  Has anyone done any follow ups to see where they are years later?

I’m not a professional blogger.  I’m just a guy that had been doing quantitative self (QS) type stuff, has an interest in overall health and longevity (albeit not with as much discipline in the follow through as I would like), and decided to write this in a blog format rather than just use a personal journal.  My thought that maybe someone could find this information was a bonus.  It turns out that I’m the one who is finding this information useful several times recently.

While using the Goal Accountability Project as a means of keeping myself honest on where I am with my health it occurred to me that a graphical punch is as important as a daily check in.  It’s one thing to look at a table of numbers and see that I haven’t been hitting the marks I want.  However it is of far greater impact when you see a picture of it.  As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Phase 1 of 2017’s Goal Accountability project was a disaster, as I chronicled here .  Phase 1 ended weak, really non-existent adherence, which rolled into Phase 2 beginning equally weak; but I got my butt in gear one week in and finished it strong!

When I wrote about kicking off 2017 (link ) with a new push for goal accountability I specifically stated that it wasn’t a new years resolution and that those don’t work for me anyway.  If my performance in the first phase isn’t a pointed tail of that I don’t know what is.

At the beginning of January I decided to try my hand at using a ten year old laptop running Linux Mint MATE as my daily at home machine . While there is certainly some cruft associated with using such an old machine for the most part the experience was perfectly fine.  In fact I’m using it right now to write out this article.  I wouldn’t recommend running out and buying one solely for the purpose, but the fact remains that Linux Mint MATE, and probably Ubuntu MATE as well, provide a great average user load experience on underpowered hardware.