I fixed the grub (again)

Penguin time again!

This has nothing to do with food preparation. If only it did.

As mentioned a few days back, I was playing around with a few Linux distros. Most of the well-established ones allow you to install them alongside other operating systems (usually Windows, but could be another Linux distro). One of the ones I tinkered with was Pop!_OS, which is Ubuntu-based, and I forgot it does not do this.

What it does is it declares itself the One True OS and the only way to access anything else is to mash the F8 key when booting up and choosing a boot partition, like some kind of caveman.

I’d had this happen once before (probably the last time I messed around with Pop!_OS) but couldn’t remember the details on how to fix it, so off I went to the interweb. I’m recording the process now for the inevitable time I do this yet again.

First, grub is actually GRUB and is an acronym for GRand Unified Bootloader and the version I’m using is GRUB 2. You can read a little more about it here.

By not supporting grub and doing its own thing, Pop!_OS would just boot automatically, never giving me the usual menu and 10-second (default) time to choose which OS to run after a reboot.

To get my grub working again, I had to repair the grub using these steps:

  1. Boot using a Linux Mint live CD (in this case, actually an ISO file living on a USB stick).
  2. Open the Terminal and install a program called Boot-Repair.
    • Command: sudo apt install boot-repair
  3. Update Boot-Repair, then run it.
  4. Important: Choose Advanced Options and make sure I select the right partitions that Mint is on (in this case, it has its own internal SSD) and copy and paste the necessary commands into the Terminal when prompted.
  5. Remove the USB stick and reboot.
NOTE: Since I still had a working Mint install, I could have mashed F8, booted into Mint and installed Boot-Repair and run it from my actual copy of the OS, rather than from the USB stick, but I only figured this out later, because my brain likes me doing things the hard way, at least the first time. More here.

It worked and I have my boot menu back. It was even nice enough to keep Pop!_OS listed after it was acting like a punk and trying to take over. The only hiccup is Boot-Repair sees Linux Mint as Ubuntu, as it is an Ubuntu derivative. Unless I actually install Ubuntu itself again, this isn’t an issue, though I can use a graphical grub editor to tweak the name if it really bothers me (it will probably eventually other me).

In the end, it was a hassle, but now I’m both better prepared and (hopefully) smarter about this for the future.

I’m still toying with making my next PC Linux-only, which would mean no need for grub at all. I feel I’m pretty close to that now, as I find working in Mint pleasant and Windows 11 regularly annoys me (to be fair, it has a bunch of stuff I really like, but it’s akin to a plate of yummy food where you have to keep picking out little rocks before you can enjoy it1Or whatever analogy you prefer. All analogies kind of suck.).

Calm is the bomb (also, an MRI update)

Calm is the bomb. Serene is keen.

These are thoughts I had today while out on a walk. It is mild out and we are between showers. I’ve been thinking about how the world at both the macro and micro levels are somewhat of a dumpster fire, and how that makes me angry. But I need to recognize that anger and do things to channel it productively. And I will, starting with this post by writing the thought out.

***

Also, here is my MRI update:

I got a call from the doctor today (phone appointment) and correctly predicted a few things:

  • The MRI would be inconclusive (it was)
  • Further testing would be needed (it is)
  • Said tests might include a biopsy (this was mentioned)

What the doc confirmed:

  • The mass in my chest (about 2 cm around) is not affecting anything else around it
  • It has not changed size since the CT scan back on (checks blog entry) January 9th
  • It could be a tumour (cue Arnold saying, “It’s not a too-mah!”)
  • If a tumour, it could be cancer (benign or otherwise)

I am not overly concerned, because I had recent blood work that came back negative, this lump has not grown, nor has it had any impact. But you never know, and that’s what makes our bodies so mysterious and magical.

Next up:

  • Another CT scan
  • Consultation with a thoracic surgeon to see what they think
  • Possibly a biopsy, depending on the above
  • Ice cream. I’ll need ice cream at the end of this.

In conclusion: Our meatbag bodies are kind of dumb. Here’s a nice fall photo:

Run 978: Beating the rain, setting a record and a psychic music prediction

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run. Calm, cool.

A few things:

  • Yes, I beat the rain again. Yay. It’s still not raining yet but if the forecast is accurate, it will start within the hour.
  • I think something is up with either my Garmin watch or me. More below.
  • I set a new 5K record on the Garmin watch. Yay. More below.
  • Psychic music prediction: I was listening to a playlist on shuffle mode. It consists of 53 songs. It was wrapping up “Apparitions” by the Mathew Good Band and I predicted it would play “Sharp-dressed Man” by ZZ Top next–and it did!

I wore two layers, thinking it might be a bit of overkill for the run, but nice to have on the walk there and back. I was correct! And it wasn’t even overkill. There was very little sweating today and, despite minimal wind, it felt chilly in that, “Yep, it’s fall” sort of way.

Other than beating the rain, I had no specific plan going in, but I did have a concern. The HRV status tracked on my watch has plunged from Balanced to Low. In fact, it’s so low it’s almost as far to the left as it can get (which means no exercise/flabby, etc.). I missed two runs last week, but have remained fairly active and did a run Monday per usual, yet it seems to not be budging. Also, even stranger, the watch claims I had an average BPM of 68 on my 4 km walk to the lake before today’s run. This is basically impossible, unless my heart teleported out of my body for about a third of the walk. For reference, my heart rate is usually 110-115 on these walks.

For the run it was 145 BPM, which is low but not implausibly low (I’ve hit 147 on some recent runs), especially with favourable conditions. My performance rating 1 km in was also +7, which is very high, adding further confusion to my training status at the end being listed as “strained.”

In all, it’s disconcerting, but I think it’s more the watch–or Garmin–than me. In fact, this came up when I was checking stats on my phone:

Quite possibly unrelated, but still an interesting coincidence, if nothing else.

Back to today’s run: I decided, somewhat randomly, to start at the 10K marker and skip the side trails, as I would double back the same way post-run. I managed to improve on my pace each km and finished with an average of 5:32/km–and my best 5K since adopting my Garmin Forerunner 255 just under two years ago:

I believe the time is faster than what’s recorded in the stats below because it is capturing the exact 5 km, not the additional 0.04 km before I stop tracking the run. Or something like that. I don’t know how math works.

Right near the end of the run, I usually go straight off the bridge at Still Creek and do the small loop around, but today I had to cut left and stay on the main trail due to construction:

There is no explanation of this work at the Burnaby Lake website.

I’m not sure why they are digging up this strip of trail here, but you can see a new concrete culvert (?) in the shot below, which might be a clue. Alas, this does not seem to be part of a larger project to resurface the trail along the fields, though it badly needs the work.

They have widened this area and added the concrete culvert near the stump for…reasons.

Overall, I felt good, pushed but never felt I was pushing excessively, and put in a very solid mid-week performance, weird glitches and all.

Still Creek, post-run. The creek is looking clearer as fall colours encroach.

Stats:

Run 978
Average pace: 5:32/km
Training status: Strained (?)
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Start: 11:01 a.m.
Distance: 5.04 km
Time: 27:50
Weather: Cloudy
Temp: 11-12°C
Humidity: 75-73%
Wind: light
BPM: 145
Weight: 165.7 pounds
Total distance to date: 6,720 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (315/674/989)

Music: Pop Stuff (playlist, on shuffle)

Pricing out larger tablets in 2025: Yikes.

If you want a “pro” tablet with a display above 11 inches, you are going to pay dearly, especially if you’re using Canadian currency.

The reason I’m checking is that my current iPad, a 12.9″ Pro model from 2020, is now five and a half years old and will eventually stop getting support from Apple. Apart from the battery not lasting as long, the iPad actually still works perfectly fine, so I’m not in a rush to replace it, I’m just preparing for the eventual possibility.

And here are the prices:

Apple 13″ iPad Pro with M5: $1,800 (this doesn’t include the pen(cil), which adds another $170. This is LOL pricing and is over $500 more than what I paid for the 2020 equivalent. Someone’s got to pay for the gaudy gold trinkets Tim Cook is using to curry favour with wannabe dictator Trump. This is also a good reason to never buy Apple again.

Wacom MovinkPad Pro 14: $1,260. This is actually pretty reasonable compared to Apple and even to Wacom itself. Also, it comes with a larger screen, and expandable storage, but no cameras. And you also get Wacom’s industry-best stylus. It runs full Android.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra 14.6″: $1,750. Only $50 less than Apple, but Samsung gives you a larger display, expandable storage and includes the S Pen.

If you go with the low-end tablets, like the base iPad or Galaxy S10 Lite, you get a smaller display around 11″ but only pay around $500. I moved to the larger iPad Pro specifically because I wanted the larger canvas, so these wouldn’t really appeal to me.

Weirdly, this means Wacom is likely to have the eventual replacement for my iPad Pro. By the time I’m in the market it will probably be $1,800.

Run 977: Beating the rain and my 1K record

Brunette River, pre-run: The right side is going full Fall.

The first was intentional, the other was a pleasant surprise.

I didn’t have a set plan on where to run this morning, but generally I favour the lake because it’s more exercise and a more interesting location. But the weather app on my phone promised rain by 11 am, so I changed to the river trail. They also said wind gusts up to 19 km/hr.

Neither the rain nor gusts materialized, and I was able to complete the run both without getting wet or blow down by a rogue burst of wind.

Even better, I managed a pace of 5:35/km, matching my Friday pace. My BPM was higher at 152, but I felt I worked a bit harder. It was both cooler at 10°C1Future reference: In Linux, I can make the degree symbol by using Right-Alt + oo and a lot more humid, starting at 93%–which made me think rain was indeed imminent. It is still not raining as I type this, which is pleasant after a few days of The Rains.

There were dogs, but on leash, and a platoon or whatever you call a large group of cyclists, but I managed to stay behind or beside them as they rode by. They were very yellow, as most were wearing rain gear.

As for the fastest 1K, I beat my recently set record of 5:18/km with a pace of…5:17! I shaved a whopping 0.4 seconds off, woo. And this is not an official lap, like going from 1 km to 2 km, it seems to be just tracking the fastest 1 km stretch of the run, because my fastest lap was around 5:19/km.

In all, a good start to the week: fast, dry, a new record, and no issues!

The river, post-run, with some foliage especially eager to put on its fall colours.
Run 977
Average pace: 5:35/km
Training status: Productive
Location: Brunette River Trail
Start: 10:18 a.m.
Distance: 5.03 km
Time: 28:06
Weather: Cloudy
Temp: 10°C
Humidity: 93-91%
Wind: light
BPM: 152
Weight: 165.3 pounds
Total distance to date: 6,715 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (310/662/972)

Music: Pop Stuff (playlist, on shuffle)

Engadget: At least we’re not using AI (are we?)

A story in Engadget:

A new retro console! An Intellivision console, just like I had as a surly teen! It’s called the Intellivision Spirit.

But wait, there’s a YouTube link in the same article…

This seems to suggest the name is Sprint, not Spirit. And yes, it is the Intellivision Sprint, not Spirit1Bonus: How does a carpet get “cigarette-soaked”, exactly? And were the kids playing Intellivision back in 1982 chain smokers or something?.

The story was posted two days ago (as of this post I’m writing) and this curiously obvious gaffe has not been corrected. The first (of two) comments also points out the error.

But hey, it’s just a sloppily rewritten press release, rather than AI slop, so I guess we should be thankful for that.

Walk 134: Fall, with leaves and stuff

View from Cariboo Dam, looking east, with bonus heron.

With The Rains easing up for the afternoon, I decided to don my running clothes and get my steps with a walk to the lake and back. I recorded the return as an official™ exercise, which is recorded below.

It was cloudy but relatively mild, with some light drizzle, some sun and basically a bit of everything. I saw two herons, no salmon and pretty near every dog was on a leash, hooray.

I ran about the last 500 m, just to improve my overall pace and burn a few extra calories, as I had bacon for breakfast.

There is still a lot of debris at the lake and on the river trail from the wind, but nothing that wasn’t difficult to navigate around.

Overall, a pleasant afternoon outing. Now I can transform into Couch Potato Man.

‘Tis the season for changing leaves.

Stats:

Walk 134
Average pace: 8:40/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 4.03 km
Time: 34:35
Weather: Cloudy, some drizzle
Temp: 12°C
Humidity: 80%
Wind: light
BPM: 108
Weight: 164.5 pounds
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255
Total distance to date: 947.07 km

A few more fall fotos, October 17, 2025

Taken before and after my run today, and shot on my iPhone 12, now five generations behind the curve (and loving it).

Leafy river trail.
Burnaby Lake, from the turtle nesting area (turtles not included).
My feet before the run. Yes, I need new trail runners.

Linux distro madness: Fedora, Ubuntu, Pop_OS and Bazzite

I have an external 2 TB Samsung SSD and wasn’t using it for anything in particular, so I loaded up some of the better-known or regarded Linux distros and tried each in turn to see how they fared.

Bazzite: Billed as the distro for gamers, this took a very long time to install and when it finally did, I kept getting odd error messages and quirky behaviour. I tried installing again and it booted to a blank desktop, with only the mouse pointer visible. Could be my system, but whatever it was, my experiment with Bazzite ended here.

Pop_OS: I installed the beta, which is using the also-beta Cosmic desktop environment (DE). It seemed fine, but I decided I didn’t want to mess around with a beta after all. I’ll try it again once it’s a regular release.

Fedora: The KDE version. The default wallpaper is weirdly unattractive, but it otherwise it was perfectly fine. No issues stood out, but overall it felt a bit bland. Not a bad choice, though.

Ubuntu: I have played around with Ubuntu before and the setup was fast and polished. I am unconvinced that Gnome is better than KDE for the desktop, it’s more just different. However, I got further with Ubuntu than all the others, so it was doing something right. I missed the desklets from Mint, but other than that, everything else seemed to work well.

I’ll keep Ubuntu for now and tinker with it some more, but none of these have convinced me to move on from Linux Mint just yet, partly because of the time I’ve invested in customizing Mint, and also in part because none of them do anything better enough to woo me away, even though there are bits and pieces I like about each distro (except Bazzite).

One plus: All distros now use the grub loader to make it easy to dual (or triple) boot between Windows and one or more Linux versions, so it’s relatively painless to try them out.

Run 976: As the wind blows

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Sunny, but also windy.

How windy was it? Windy enough that I had to clamber over a downed tree on the Piper Mill Trail. Fortunately, it was not a giant sequoia, so I was able to hop over and keep running.

As for the run, I knew the wind would be strong (16 km/h and gusting at times), so I wore two layers. This turned out to be the right call, because the wind did indeed bite through when it picked up. Also, the second layer came in handy post-run, as I will explain shortly.

I missed Monday’s run due to birding (though I got a lot of walking in) and Wednesday’s due to getting an MRI scan (which involved a lot of laying on a bed while a very noisy machine whirred around me), so my plan for today was to adopt a more moderate pace, given the week off. I started with a respectable 5:47/km, then…got faster each lap, finishing with an unexpectedly strong overall pace of 5:38/km. Nice!

No issues experienced during the run, other than that weird strobing effect you get when it’s sunny and the trees are starting to lose their leaves and the sun will flicker in your peripheral vision through the increasingly naked branches. But even that wasn’t too bad.

I had a late start and did not see any regulars, but apart from the wind, conditions were pretty decent. In all, a good way to wrap the week, running-wise.

As for the benefit in wearing two layers, two blocks from home a group of crows in a yard across the street from me took over and flew over. One of them pooped on my left shoulder, but it was only a glancing blow. The OR hoodie is in the wash now, but the shirt underneath was unaffected. This is why layering is important when you go outside to exercise. Pooping birds.

Brunette River, post-run.

Stats:

Run 976
Average pace: 5:38/km
Training status: Peaking
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW, short loop)
Start: 11:32 a.m.
Distance: 5.04 km
Time: 28:24
Weather: Mostly sunny
Temp: 13°C
Humidity: 74-72%
Wind: light to strong
BPM: 149
Weight: 164.1 pounds
Total distance to date: 6,710 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (305/658/963)

Music: Savage, Eurythmics

I ate a McVeggie Burger. I have questions.

My McVeggie burger did not radiate or glow (to my knowledge).

The obvious question from readers would be: Why? And my answer would be to see what magic McDonald’s could work on a “healthy” burger option.

My own question, though, is different. How can a McVeggie burger have only 10 fewer calories than a McChicken? Observe:

  • McChicken: 480 calories
  • McVeggie: 470 calories
  • Filet-o-Fish: 400 calories

And keep in mind, 90% of the calories in the Filet-o-Fish come from the giant blob of tartar sauce they put on each one, and it’s still 70 calories less.

Given that this is not the calorie-friendly delight you might hope for (it was slathered in the same volume of mayo as a McChicken), how did it taste?

It tasted fine. I think the spicy variant might be better, because it’s probably not hot, but may add a little more kick to it. As it is, it was OK and given the high calorie count, I’d only opt for this if I swore off being a meat-loving hedonist. Next time I’ll go for a Sausage and Egg McMuffin (440 calories). In the meantime, I ponder the market for a healthy option that is nearly 500 calories.