Cooler today, cloudy and a spattering of rain, but at 20degC still humid

I didn't do my walk yesterday since I was in the office again this week. I took the Victoria Line back from the office and two people seemingly had passed out -- one at Victoria, one at Oxford Circus. The heat was almost unbearable.

Oxford Circus is an oven even on normal days. At near 30degC heat it is more like a furnace.

There was immense relief in the evening when it started to rain, but that relief was soon turned in comfortable, sticky, sweaty feelings as the water then evaporated and made the air really humid, making it almost impossible to sleep. I didn't get any decent sleep till around 2am and FitBit noticed that with my sleep pattern.

Fortunately, it seems like there's rain forecast for the rest of the week at least.

Have been slacking off logging my exercise again, but there's a reason.

It's TOO. DAMN. HOT.

Like, crazy hot. And when the sun shines into your bedroom where you're trying to work so you have to have the curtains closed while you work, and the fan only provides some minor relief, it doesn't help

Meanwhile, today, my walk was comfortable -- even though it was hot, the breeze helped matters a bit and made it not feel too bad.

No walk today as I was back in the office for one day this week. With the 25degC heat, it was not a pleasant journey. I tried to offset it by using only the airconditioned trains route (Thameslink, Great Northern, District/Circle) but that didn't make it much more comfortable.

Still topped my step count for the day, as I normally do for the commute.

And we're back to hot weather again. No rain at all today and a nice day to walk

After several days of extremely hot weather, today was pretty much constantly raining.

Did go for a walk, but got caught in some (light) showers. Nothing major, fortunately.

My walk today was bit interrupted as my dad lost his driving license and Freedom Pass (memory + age are bit of a pain) but oh, well.

Another hot day on the trot, and yet another day without a cloud in the sky, although somehow it did seem to spatter with rain for short periods, I've been told (but I never noticed that happening)

I started this post over a year ago, then abandoned it and though perhaps its high time I actually finished it.

You may recall I lost my uncle to cancer in October 2017 and felt I should write down the phases of dealing with the death

Stage 0 -- Normality

This is the normal day-to-day life no indication of any problems in the future

Stage 1 -- Terminal

This is where you or your loved one is diagnosed with an illness that cannot (normally) be recovered from.

Stage 2 -- Death & Disbelief

Immediately after death, this starts. You run through a period of "this can't be happening", "this has got to be a dream" and keep wanting to wake up from the nightmare, even though it isn't one.

Stage 3 -- Guilt & Denial

After you've gotten past the "this can't be happening", you get to "this isn't happening" -- you don't want to believe this is true and refuse to believe this is true. Also, you start second-guessing yourself thinking "did I do everything I could to save them?" "could I have done something differently?" "could they still be alive had I picked up on that symptom just a day earlier?"

This stage lasts the longest, and to some, the guilt consumes their lives

Stage 4 -- Acceptance

The hardest stage to reach is acceptance. You accept the death and move on. Some keep a piece of the loved one with them -- a piece of jewellery, a photo, a locket, a favourite song -- something that lets them remember them going forward or when they want the feeling of warm, loving memories.

Where am I on this list? Stage 4. I have photos of my uncle in Google Photos I can look back on whenever I want to remember him. I have pictures of him playing with my cousin's children; I have fond memories of playing poker with him (and me losing :-) ); I have memories of having drinks with him -- he was an alchoholic, but really was loose when drinking. I remember that I also didn't know him as well as I thought I did. His drinking buddy took the pedestal at his funeral and told about how he donated food from his KFC-style shop to people at the pub.

I really did not know my uncle as well as I thought I did.

This one's for you, Uncle.

Another hot day, with almost no clouds in the sky. Another day of angry drivers on the road too.

Found out why I couldn't backup my new machine -- Windows 10 had BitLocker setup which meant CloneZilla couldn't clone it. Ubuntu installation on computers running Windows and BitLocker turned on - Documentation - Ubuntu Community Hub told me how to remove it. But still had a few issues with the backing up, namely Clonezilla still reporting some filesystems being read-only.

Turns out Fast Startup was also enabled by default https://help.uaudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/213195423-How-To-Disable-Fast-Startup-in-Windows-10 for disabling it.

Trying to back up the machine before installing Ubuntu

Backup was fine, completed successfully, and was able to install Ubuntu

Benchmarked both Windows and Linux on 4K, and Linux performed a bit less, presumably due to the APIs being different

And it's been another hot day, and people have been really tetchy today, lots of horn tooting and then, inevitably, this happened

The heat really does bring out the worst in people.

I've been slacking logging my walks lately, so apologies for that.

This was should have been logged yesterday. It was very hot, so much that I didn't even need to worry about wearing a jacket or anything while walking, and perhaps I should have worn sunglasses, it was that bright.

In other news, my laptop seems like it's on its way out so I have got a replacement and an upgrade, and spent Saturday trying to set it up but clonezilla seems to be having trouble registering the partition labels. I had already purchased a 2TB NVME so instead of cloning then restoring, I cross-device cloned directly, making the 2TB disk exactly the same as the 1TB, but with the space at the end of the disk which I will use for Ubuntu.

Then took the rest of the day downloading my games from Steam. Warframe and Stellaris are the main ones I've been downloading

Streaming also seems fine, with only a slight fps drop.

Another wet day, but also very windy today, multiple bins had been blown over and I had to hold my hood from not being blown off my head in the wind -- haven't had to do that for a long while.

Rain started during the walk, nothing too heavy, mostly drizzle and made it back before it really turned heavy.

As you may be aware if you follow my non-exercise posts, I've been contacted by the hire car company to start legal proceedings against the third party's insurance company to recover funds from them for the cost of the hire car I held on to for around 45 days due to being unable to get a new during because of lockdown.

Yesterday I was contacted by the lawyers and today, I've got the details to log into their portal to provide details for them to start the case.

I'm hoping I don't have to attend court for this, but you never know with insurers.

Delayed logging from yesterday. Another walk in between rainshowers. Made it back home before it totally pelted down with hailstones too.

Warmer day, but still rained, didn't get caught in any rain today during my walk, so that was good.

Forgot to log this yesterday, but it was another on-off rainy day. Went for my walk in a period where the rain was easing and it was fine, but it started to rain on the way back home, so got a little wet.

Also got called by the hire car company from my accident last year (just over a year ago now) -- the insurance company on the other side are still resisting paying the hire car charges and now its going to legal action. So potentially I might end up in court.

But since the accident is a no-fault accident from my side (my car was stationary and parked, and the other driver was arrested for drink driving), I should not be getting any costs coming my way.

LineageOS has now gone to Android 11, and like most users, I went ahead and upgraded to it. But then I started hitting lots of problems. Predominantly on location.

Android 11 changed the way location is requested and this breaks functionality in multiple apps. Ones I have noticed this issue with:

• Just Eat
• CityMapper
• Google Maps (yes, surprisingly Google's own app had trouble with locking on)

Other location apps may have also had the same issue, but I didn't check those.

Waze did not have any issues locking on to location or tracking movement

Some non-location apps also broke. Fenix 2 (a Twitter client) and WeChat both stopped working and would not install off the Play Store, presumeably because of API differences.

I installed Plume instead (which I had previously purchased) and that installed and functioned happily.

WeChat I sideloaded by getting the apk from a mirror. That functioned okay, but could not log into Web WeChat

I decided to clean wipe and downgrade back to Android 10 (Lineage OS 17) to at least get things working again.

I formatted my SD card for Portable Storage, then took it to my laptop and saved the LOS flash zip, Open Gapps zip, and the latest Magisk.

I booted into TWRP Recovery and wiped, data, cache, system, ART and internal storage.

Switching to external storage, I then flashed LOS, OpenGapps, then Magisk.

I rebooted and let the OS do its thing until I got the welcome screen -- that's a good sign. I went through the setup but opted not to setup my Google Account yet.

Once through to the home page, I went and unlocked Developer options and enabled ADB, Local Terminal, Force Allow External Storage, and Force Close on Hold Back.

Then I plugged my phone into my pixelbook, allowed the debug connection and started up scrcpy which allows me to copy-paste text to and from the device.

I installed TitaniumBackup and the pro key so I can batch move apps to/from the storage.

The SD Card is still setup as Portable. So I formatted it as Internal. This took a few attempts as it kept erroring.

I went into Play Store and installed a few apps. A couple installed file, but the other errorred with a message:

"App requires external storage"

This was weird, I never saw that before, but checking around, I found this: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/app-requires-external-storage.4098673/ which describes fixing the storage permissions. I ran this:

adb shell
su
restorecon -FR /data/media/0

I reinstalled the apps again, and there were no errors. Fenix 2 installed happily this time, enhancing my suspicion of some API change breaking it on Android 11.

Also found out that Strava required Google Maps so I also had to install Google Maps.

WeChat finally did install, but was then told by the app that my account cannot use Web WeChat, and I should use WeChat for Windows or Mac..... and I'm running Linux, so both of those options are not feasible.

However, I did find this: https://github.com/qo6xup6/ubuntu-deepin-wechat which is a Wine wrapper around the Windows WeChat app. This seems to work well, although I did have to update the client using the instructions on the README.md

FitBit refused to pair with my Ionic (again -- it always seems to have this trouble whenever I have to reinstall the app). I eventually resorted to factory resetting my Ionic, and re-setting it up again. It worked this time, although the pairing took a few attempts.

Surprisingly, I was then able to add my Curve card to FitBit Pay, and the SMS verification worked.

All in all, it took me from around 7am to 12:30 pm to reflash, reinstall, and setup all the apps again, and reboot to make sure the apps still worked. So around 5 hours.

A very mixed bag of weather today. Windy, then sunny, then rain, then repeat.

Did my walk and decided to wrap up warm in case the wind came round again.

Just my luck, it didn't and the stayed sunny meaning I was sweltering by the time I got back from the walk.

Had my MOT done today. Took surprisingly low amount of time -- I dropped the car off at 10:30 for the 11:00 appointment and they called me back at 2pm saying it was done.

They had a check-in process where you sign in, and deposit the car keys (with a tag saying which bay you had parked the car) into a small locker and that signals the mechanic you have left your keys. It's contactless so you are never near another human.

My daily walk as a result, was much later than normal.

Had to shop for more milk, so went up to Tesco but they didn't have the organic milk needed. Went to Sainsbury's instead and they did.

Booked my MOT, but they said they did not have any "While you wait" slots for that date so it would be booked as a drop-off.

So instead, I booked for this weekend.

The showroom is only a single bus ride (plus a 15-minute walk) so it's not too bad.

Forgot to log this yesterday.

Was another wet and windy day, didn't really do much of a walk, and just managed to walk to the local Co-op to get some milk in the pouring rain.

Toyota later called me advising my MOT on the Yaris was due next month and I should book in the MOT.

Did that today and surprised that they offer a "While you wait" MOT that you can drop the car off and wait for them to do the MOT and then pick it up afterwards.

Next available slot for that is in two weeks. Still in good time for the 9th June deadline where the MOT expires.

Today's been raining, windy, sunny, rainy again and repeat all day.

Managed to get a walk in between the rain and wind phases

Finished reinstalling my apps and had a few issues with location. Waze and Google Maps had trouble locking onto GPS and found out that even though the option to allow location "only while app is running" was available, I needed to set the permission to "at any time" otherwise they would lock on.

Citymapper had no issue

Just Eat still has issues and does not have a "at any" level for location permission, so I just use the postcode for that.

Most of the apps are now working. A few will not install from Play Store, presumably they're not built to support Android 11 yet:

• WeChat
• Fenix 2

For Fenix, I went back to Plume (I had previously paid for the Premium version and that works fine). I installed GBoard so I can put gifs into my tweets again (one feature I really liked from Fenix)

WeChat, I ended up sideloading from apkmirror and it worked fine.

Decided to finally action the upgrade notification on my phone and Lineage OS wanted to update from Android 10 to Android 11.

The upgrade went off without too many issues, but I then found out Open Gapps had no package fro Android 11, meaning I had to resort to MindTheGapps -- a minimal package that only allows Google Apps to work, but doesn't actually install any. Consequently the Google Apps I had installed via OpenGapps decided to stop working as a result. I had to uninstall and reinstall everything from Google -- Search, Notes, YouTube, Maps, Home, etc.

But fortunately everything else seemed to work. Camera MX decided to stop working, so I've gone back to CameraZoom

I also went round the torched fence and managed to get a pic of the new fence

Didn't log this yesterday, but did my usual walk, pretty warm day and most of the pubs are now open, though my local one isn't still. And I'm beginning to wonder whether it ever will.

Meanwhile, I finally got round to going to Costco and sorting out my physical membership card.