Astrolog Reinstalled

During my stay in Melbourne, with only my Macbook Air, I had no access to Astrolog, my go-to software tool for astrological analysis. Let's recall that the usual Windows emulation software doesn't work on the new Silicon Macs. Having returned to home base, I've been able to install Astrolog on my old 2013 Macbook Pro using Bottles.

The installation of Bottles was quite painless using the Application Manager. I created a "bottle" for 

Astrolog and then my downloaded astrolog.exe was able to be installed. A little tweaking of the program for font sizes and colours and I was away. However, it still nagged me as to why I couldn't set up Astrolog on my Macbook Air. I consulted Gemini.

After some to and fro, it recommended Whisky at https://getwhisky.app/. The opening page contains the warning that "Whisky is no longer actively maintained. Apps and games may break at any time". That was OK as I really only needed it to do one thing and that is to run Astrolog. Whisky seems to be a version of Bottles that has been modified to run on MacOS. As before, I set up a "bottle" and installed Astrolog. Now it runs on my Macbook Air. 

One program I had with the Astrolog running on my Linux distributions was the tiny size of the drop-down menu. There was no way I found to modify this. However, on the Mac the menu is normal size so I'm quite pleased. Fingers crossed that I don't have any further problems.

Sway

Another spinoff of installing Windows 10 on VirtualBox was the discovery of Microsoft's Sway, described by Wikipedia as follows:

Office Sway is a presentation program and is part of the Microsoft Office family of products. Generally released by Microsoft in August 2015, Sway allows users who have a Microsoft account to combine text and media to create a presentable website. Users can pull content locally from the device in use, or from internet sources such as Bing, Facebook, OneDrive, and YouTube. Sways are stored on Microsoft's servers and are tied to the user's Microsoft account. They can be viewed and edited from any web browser with a web app available in Office Online. They can also be accessed using apps for Windows 10 and iOS. Additional apps are currently in development for Android and Windows Phone.

Sway is only available within Windows or iOS, so I have installed it on my iPad after discovering it on my Windows 10 installation and wondering what it was all about. Here is my first effort at creating a Sway presentation:

From Evernote to OneNote

With Evernote's decision to limit free accounts to access from only two devices, I decided it was time to abandon a platform that I'd been using almost from its inception. I'm sure I'll have lots of company. There's something very annoying about crippling a service that was formerly provided for free and increasing the price of the paid service options. 

I opted for OneNote over Google Keep (although I plan to test out the latter in the near future) and then investigated whether it was possible to migrate notes from Evernote to the OneNote. It turns out that is possible but the tool provided by Microsoft only works with Windows. I discovered that it was possible to run Windows 10 with no product key under VirtualBox, so I downloaded and installed it. 

I then downloaded Evernote for Windows, synched all my notes, downloaded the migration tool and moved all my notebooks, notes and tags across to OneNote. It turns out that I had 2001 notes. The migration is proceeding as I write and the whole process has proved relatively painless, with the major difficulty proving to be the download of the 4Gb ISO file. The downloaded failed two times but succeeded on the third attempt.

So as well as successively moving all my Evernote notes to OneNote, I now have an installation of Windows 10 on VirtualBox as well as the latest version of Ubuntu.

Jaunty Jackalope: The Aftermath

Having installed Ubuntu 9.04, I now have to face the aftermath. As I discovered with the last upgrade, there are consequences and the first one that I've discovered this time around is that there is no sound when I play flash games or flash videos. However, there is sound for music and movies etc. Why this should be, I've no idea but my six year old granddaughter was not amused when she couldn't hear any sounds while playing her favourite Yahoo flash game this afternoon. I'm now under pressure to come up with a solution. I did reinstall some drivers that had been disabled by the installation and had been warned beforehand that "some 3rd party entries in your sources list were disabled. Reenable with 'software properties' tool or your package manager" (which I did). Maybe when I restart the PC tomorrow, all will be well. I doubt it however, and will probably have to begin the inevitable quest for answers. 

This little problem has been coupled with the failure of my laptop to connect to the home Wi-Fi router. It connects at school without any problem but not at home. For some weeks now it has been slow to connect when brought home from school. Initially, it would not recognise that a network was present but after five minutes or so it would and then the connection would remain stable. This latest trouble seems to be an escalation of these earlier difficulties. So far I can't see any obvious differences between 9.04 and the earlier version but I've really not had a chance to look around much. I'd also like to try to run a portable version of Ubuntu within Windows as outlined on this site. The download is 438Mb. so I might try it next weekend. I really do need to clean up the hard drive on my laptop. As well as having a dual boot system (Windows and Ubuntu 8.04), I also have two virtual PCs set up within Vista using Microsoft's Virtual PC and VMWare. I should just reinstall Vista and start afresh, after all the laptop is now two and half years old and it is full of all sorts of rubbish that I've experimented with briefly and discarded.