Hello hello, I'm back again

The standard way to upgrade a Debian-based Linux system to a new version is via apt-get. You tell it where to find the packages (the programs and libraries) that make up the system, then say 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade' ('as the administrator, do a more involved upgrade than usual').

Works on Debian, works on Ubuntu which is based on Debian (although there's also a graphical tool which hides this process from you), but doesn't really work on Linux Mint which is based on Ubuntu. I know this, even if I have never had a good answer as to why it doesn't work on Mint.

Does this stop me trying it though...? ( Read more... )

Food conspiracies

The other thing that's annoyed me this week is that three favourite foods are not available:

Morrisons' sun-dried tomato paste - an absolute staple here: any tomato-based dish tastes better with a large dollop of this added (along with plenty of oregano). They're discontinuing it. I bought about twelve jars when I saw that, but that will last about a month or two at most. Alternatives exist (Sainsbury's and a popular Italian food brand whose name escapes me both do one) but they've got more oil and less s-dt in them.

Newberry Fruits - this is possibly the only food item I am addicted to. They're the fruit jellies with liquid centres. Some years ago, the Woolworths near the flat had a 'bogof' offer on the 400g boxes, each of which in turn had a free 200g box added = 1,200g of fruit flavoured sugar for about £2.99! That lasted two days. The firm that made them went out of business, someone else attempted to make them and failed (the outer crust wasn't right at all), and the brand disappeared...

... except for occasional sightings. In the run up to last Christmas, £-Stretcher had some £1.99 200g boxes which were reduced to 99p for periods. Oooh. Last week, I see they have some more, except at their £1.99 price. 'They'll be reduced', I say to myself, and leave them on the shelf. Except that some annoying person or persons unknown has bought them all and there's no sign of any more arriving.

Aldi muesli - they still do muesli, but the nut and seed one that was featured in their ads as being particularly good (and it was) has vanished. To make it worse, the ad stayed around longer than the actual muesli did, taunting me with memories of it. Now their 'better stuff' range is in smaller boxes and is either too fruity or not nutty enough.