Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   Sentelic (or is it Sentilic?) hell
Monday, June 28 2021
I had to go get some emergency dog food from Barnyard Feeds today. I went in the Subaru and then thought maybe I'd stop at the new location of the Tibetan Center Thrift Store, which has moved down the hill (closer to Barnyard and Kingston). But they didn't look to be open, so I kept driving westward to Zena Road and came home from the north. The car seemed to be performing okay.

While I was doing other things today, I was also installing a 32-bit version of Windows 7 on my old MSI Wind U123 netbook, the one I intend to use as a malware sandbox. Most of that was effortless, and I didn't have to install special drivers for anything except the Sentelic touchpad. I keep a directory of drivers for all the equipment I have called devices_i_have, but I couldn't find the subdirectory I would've made for the U123 back in 2010, so I was forced to search online for Sentelic touchpad drivers (or "finger sensing pad" as Sentelic refers to it). I found a lot expired links to drivers and a few actuals drivers, but none of these worked. Some would install and cause the mouse control panel to hang for a long time upon launch and then not show any special functionality. Others would install functionality that was of no interest to me. What I needed from the Sentelic driver was precisely one thing: disabling "tap-to-click" (which is also known on other trackpads simply as "tapping"). I cannot happily use a laptop with tap-to-click, because my normal use of a touchpad creates a lot of taps that are interpreted as clicks that I don't want interpreted this way. (Perhaps I could change my touchpad behavior, but that is a difficult thing to do and, since tap to click can usually be disabled, unnecessary.) It was amazing that I could find no Setentelic driver that did what I needed, especially since I'd managed to find such a driver back eleven years ago. This suggests that one really does have to save things one finds on the internet or risk losing them forever.
By this evening I'd given up on finding a usable Sentelic driver on the web, and I went back to my installs directory to see if maybe my MSI Wind U123 driver directory was somehow up one level in the hierarchy. It turned out it was, and the old Sentelic driver (spelled "Sentilic") was in there as well. It was one I'd used for an installation of Windows XP, and it had allowed the disabling of tap-to-click. Fortunately for me, it worked just as well for the 32 bit version of Windows 7. This time, I didn't just mention that old driver, I also uploaded it to the server hosting what you're reading here.
After I got the Sentelic/Sentilic driver installed successfully, I celebrated by riding my scooter the length of the Farm Road and back, and, on the way home, I picked up some flat pieces of bluestone to stock a supply I will eventually use to rebuild some stone walls near the house (something I'd done only once before). The scooter can transport fairly heavy pieces with ease, although its lack of suspension on that rough road jarred my skeleton and all my organs uncomfortably, causing the onset of another wave of acid reflux (which I'd mostly avoided today).
It had been brutally hot and humid all day today, and the dogs had mostly stayed with me in the air-conditioned laboratory. In the early evening, they went off to do other things and I went out briefly onto the laboratory deck. To my horror, I saw Ramona half-heartedly killing what appeared to be a baby rabbit as she lay in the yard. Happily, she'd apparently eaten all evidence of the crime before Gretchen got home. At least she didn't kill the baby rabbit for nothing.
After Gretchen got home from the bookstore, we walked with the dogs up the Farm Road and went for a swim in our neighbors' salt water pool, something I hadn't done for over a year and a half (owing to the pandemic).


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210628

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