19-VIII-2022.
On sunday I still messed with the phone, and by the evening it progressed to not recognizing Globaltel, not to mention sending a SMS. The updates get stuck somewhere and Arches mechanism is different from Debian's, where the dependencies are resolved on the fly.
On sunday (14th) I just made four shots of Sanda and Linda with identical bangs, the rest of the day I fiddled with the phone. It got worse - almost okay that it can't send messages, but can't make calls either, loses the modem every five minutes. Almost looks like I'd have to learn the AT commands from scratch, just like 30 years ago.
But no, I joined their forum and found out that there's some Megeus aka Megi (something dot eu, but on one of the photos there's czech text on his screen) built a complete madhouse, a package which installs fifteen linuxes so you just pick the one you like and boot into it.
So far I'm just reading a lot, will do the rest tomorrow, when I buy a microesdee card.
So in the evening I called Borko and Dragana on the landline. She refused to pick up three times, but the four time, seeing how persistent I was, she assumed it's probably something important, relented and answered the call - it's an old habit not to reply to calls from unknown numbers.
About the bangs - it was Linda who tried to make them herself, seems to be her all long hair was getting in the way, and of course she botched it so Nina finished. Neša is the only kid I know who always did it right. A natural. So the girls now look almost the same... as if they were twins.
In the evening we chatted with Lena first - the apartment is almost finished, they bought the instillable appliances finally, so the woodworkers (particleboardworkers nowadays) can complete the design of the kitchen cabinets. Then in the evening we talked with Go and Stanley as well. Her garden is a bust this year, nothing grew. The kids are fine, even the tomcat's ball healed, and he seems to have cloned himself, there was a very similar one in the yard, so Go did a couple of double takes to check that it's neither a clone nor a teleport - just a lookalike outside. Stanley is taking some Z4 cabrio to get painted and then to sell it... All in all, pleasant and fun talk.
On monday we had the regular frendz parti, the 80th, with Dragana now being completely confused with the girls looking the same (and so were we, at some times). I brought her a stool to lift her leg again, it does swell visibly after a while. News about Staša aren't too good, he's got another extension of the therapy. His wife went with one daughter for a vacation (prob'ly Greece), he stayed with the other.
Borko suggested that we bring the brandy in plastic bottles next time, so they don't have to be returned, and they'd decant it into a proper bottle on arrival. I declined, my religion forbids. I strongly believe that our brandy should never touch plastic. Later she said we'll switch to one liter bottles henceforth, there's always enough of those, no need to return them. The point here is that nothing we buy comes in 1,5l plastic bottles - the knjaz mineral is in 1,75 and the potable water for Nina and the kids in 6l bottles and the coke that Violet consumes is either 1 or 2l. So we first drank the calvados that Magi brought last year, then our apple.
And, yes, news from DBA, I suppose the last: the office space under the square is finally sold. Or maybe I heard this the next sitting, didn't write it down at the time.
The next day I swapped the microezdee cards between her and my phones. Took out the handful of photos from hers, then burned Megi's distros on it and just did whatever he said I should, and it worked. It boots into his assortment of 15 linuxes. Opened a new table in Calc and started trying them out, which things work which don't.
Magi's mom called, said she fucked off the girl who brings her groceries, so she agreed that to do this bi-weekly. The reason for fuckoff was that the girl was being paid and still complained a lot.
In the afternoon we went to Čankovo. She gathered plums and apples and I kept sawing off the thicket of cherries and laying them on the heap in the shed. She didn't get much, it would suffice for just one still. The hidrofor couldn't even reach water, so watering was off the list. But, amazingly, the barrel was full of rainwater - so the last rain did do something. At home we got three drops.
Of the four kittens, two greeted us, thin as they were before, but otherwise in good shape. It seems they sleep in the attic. She was their best friend forever that day, having brought them cat food. They followed her everywhere.
(at the pharmacy, which still has the corona style warning that only two customers at a time are allowed inside; no masks are worn)
On the way back we went to Magi's mom to get her meds and grocery, which is a bit of a bummer, the nearest pharmacy being 750m away, practically halfway to downtown, and we walked it during a scorcher. Luckily, it was late enough so we walked half of it in the shade. Then to Lidl for groceries, this other, smaller one, where I got completely disoriented, as if driving left, because it's a mirror image of ours. Found a new dough squeezer - the one we have is mostly worn out, didn't fall apart yet but already can't make thin noodles and the handle squeaks a lot. Eggs have accumulated, we could make another batch.
The report on Magi's husband is very bad - he already had half of a foot removed, and now is getting infusion, they pumped out 15l of water out of his lungs, had a brain stroke, lies with some forty tubes and whatnot stuck into him... Bad fate ahead. On top of it, he and the surviving son bought an apartment, to pay off by halves, and then bank called him for being in the arrears. Luckily, he was able to document his payments, and his son (a junkie, as we heard) paid none. The outcome is undetermined so far.
She speaks hungarian with her, and amazingly, I understand at least 90% of what they say. About the grocery girl and „I'm paying and she's not willing“ - she was paying her 200 dinars per batch, which looks expensive for her and is almost nothing for the girl. Of course it couldn't last. Our forecast for the rest of the year: the guy dies, Magi retires, comes back from France.
On seventeenth I took to chop the plums and apples for the brandy. She had some of her ideas on how and what I do wrong, first of all that I intended to chop apples with the cleaver. Somehow she left me alone and I did the plums and the grapes and half of the apples on my own. Then she came to help and we spent a few minutes in misunderstanding - who's passing what to whom - and then the girls called her away and I went on on my own. I thought I wasn't annoyed, but it seems I was, because at some point I did a wrong half move with the cleaver - didn'p push it away and slightly down as I do for a knife-like cut, and also didn't do a proper swing and chop, which is the other kind of move. I just slightly pushed it downwards on an apple, wrong, downwards you hit it. So the cleaver slipped off the apple and landed on my left index finger, including a notch on the fingernail. No fuss no panic, stuck the finger into my mouth so I wouldn't have blood on my shirt and shorts, went into the kitchen and opened the little jar with hot ground pepper. Just said „it seems it was a time for a break“. She poured a good spoonful of the stuff on her palm, I rolled my finger in it and then she put a band-aid on it. There were maybe some six or seven drops of blood more from it, the peper is good, closes the wound rapidly. Two days later I still didn't remove the band-aid. And no, there was no pain at all, not for a second.
In the evening I tried Ubuntu Touch, which accepted to do everything in serbian right away, what with keyboard, names of apps etc... but when I tried to make a call, ouch, it can't find my service. The modem went on and off, more off, and even when I managed to make a call, heard nothing. Tried to enter the phonebook, but after some eight entries it stopped saving. Some entries it accepted on the third try, some never.
By thursday evening I went through other linuxes, and in the end it turns out that the Mobian has the least number of things which don't work... except the keyboard layout, which is easy to make, it's just that I can't find where the existing ones are, and the directory where they should go simply doesn't exist (later I found out that I should just make it, but it doesn't say so in the tutorial, just like it doesn't say that the bundled layouts are somewhere else, in some other format). If it had something like TotalCmd the search would be easy, but hey, this is a phone.
At least found a way to drag the files out of it, namely photos. The camera... whadoeyekno, the old nokla did better, but at least this one has more vivid colors, the CCD dances mad with sensitivity, goes up into some insanely big numbers, saves photos also in a .dng raw format, but in it they are a bit overexposed (and there's nothing you can adjust), but okay, give what you give. On this picture I intentionally kept the finger in the frame, just to see where will it focus. No use, the same evening I found somewhere on the forum or on reddit that proper autofocusing wasn't written yet.
On saturday, around 10:45, Magi's mom called to say her son-in-law died. Though, he did manage to stay, he was in the hospital in hopeless condition on tuesday. Just when I meant to launch skype and confer my condolence, a thunderbolt hit somewhere near (but still no rain), and we lost connection. It recovered quickly and I managed by 10:45.
Sunday, 21st, finally the rain. We waited for it all evening, watched the radar images every few minutes, but no, it waited until eight in the morning. Magi's mom called again, said the guy will be cremated. Now it's anyone's guess whether it was his wish or just simpler to organize. She'd be retiring this september, now whether by french or only serbian law, we'll see.
Monday, still raining, light drizzle. Everything's recovering. I found how to make a keyboard in Mobian - did all as it says in the tutorial, it's just that the name of serbian layout shouldn't be sr.yaml but rather rs.yaml. They didn't name them after the linux language codes, but after the country domain codes. Then I tried to import the phone directory, just the seven numbers I got there, from what I exported to zmajček and edited to have names in cyrillic, but no, says bad format. Then I let it upgrade its distro and bang - several things stopped working. Can't even retype the existing names in the directory now, it exits on any button, just like the camera app does. Well, at least I now have a keyboard.
We stayed to drink a few, and stayed quite late because of a late start. That evening Nina and Vera stayed about an hour longer, just chatting. They had an idea to do a small maturski with the elementary school gang, and then spent time trying to remember the names, faces, whereabouts and current looks of each classmate. So I don't know when did we go to sleep - I got up at 12:30, so thoroughly overslept that I had some back ache and headache just from lying. Didn't last, that, past half first coffee.
When Dragana congratulated me for birthday, I was able to reply properly, I have a keyboard layout. With Bajlo I talked briefly, he was just getting lost in Belgrade in a shopping mall, trying not to lose sight of his cousins, „don't know where I entered, even less how to get out“.
Went to Čankovo again after lunch, just to feed the kittens and check out the tomatoes. Didn't go as planned - the kittens weren't there, and the tomatoes were aplenty again. So we came back with four buckets full, with squash and plums and apples, some vineyard peaches and some grapes. Just about enough for one more batch.
Mentions: Čankovo, DBA, Dragana Vitas (Dragana), frendz parti, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), Mališa Borkovski (Borko), Margita Gunaroši (Magi), maturski parastos, Nenad Bajlo (Bajlo), Nenad Berger (Neša), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), nokla, Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), Stanley Berger, Stanoje Serdarević (Staša), TotalCmd, Vera Vraneš, Violet, zmajček, in serbian