29 January 2026
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And again, the whole family is sick. This time with a somewhat mild
case of the cold, it mostly seems to attack the vocal cords leaving
everything else in a "somewhat okayish" state. Junior had it for
about a day and it was gone, my wife got it the last and she is a
bit more affected and opted to stay home and i myself isolate myself
at my office at work and enjoy the undisturbed time as anybody else
in the company treats this office now as a form of containment
zone.

This somewhat undisturbed time gives me the opportunity to work
further on my big plan to move the PCs of the company away from
big American tech companies.  While most of our software now runs
in the browser (but thankfully, not in "The Cloud" but on our own
servers) it now mostly depends on our ERP software, but even on
this front there is relieve coming: They announced that it now has
a browser based frontend and they expect a new release around the
second half of this year. This leaves only DATEV (the accounting
software)...

In my quest to find the most boring, simple and "just working"
system for this task i now settled my sights on the most "normie"
Linux distribution out there:  Linux Mint. I have now running it
on multiple test systems (and a few live ones) and there was not
a single issue, the hardware of our PC systems was recoginized and
supported perfectly, the UI (in the MATE flavor) is approachable
even to my least computer literate coworkers and in regards of
performance it runs well even on our oldest PCs (Core2Duo, 2 GB
RAM) still in use in our metal workshop where i set two systems up
to look into PDF versions of manuals. I am now setting up a full
on test network with every software we have in use right now (or
the alternative thereof) to fully test everything out... but as of
now, things look promising.

Regarding world affairs i am - for now - pretty statisfied with
the way the EU handled the Greenland affair: They spoke softly and
carried a big (economic) stick, letting Trump purchase what he
already had for the little price of losing tons of trust (and
perhaps a couple billions of investments now going to other economies
than the US). What i absolutely NOT like is that our (German) very
own rightwing nutjobs are now openly advocating to set up their
very own ICE equivalent. And the scary part: It is not unlikely
that those nutjobs will very soon have the majority in some of our
states. It also doesn't help that our biggest traditionaly
moderate-a-bit-right-of-center party is moving ever close to the
political positions of the nutjobs. *Sigh* i really don't know if
its the cold, but recently i have not the most optimistic outlook
towards the future...