Two steps forward

Today I welded ends on the mold I made for the plaster that will form the basis for my aluminium casting/welding. That went OK but I did have the amperage up a little high for the 1/16th rods I'd pulled out. This resulted in one turning into a sparkler. I turned the amperage down from 70 to about 45. That worked and I completed welding the two ends on.

Following the welding, when everything had cooled, I mixed some plaster-like stuff that I bough a bag of in Lowes. I have no idea what exactly it is. It seems somewhat soft so it could be gypsum. Needless to say there was just a brand name I'd never heard of before on the sack and no description of the contents. It was a white powder so it could be plaster. On the other hand it could be a lot of things but somehow I doubt I have a sack of Heroin. 

After the "plaster" had seemingly set, I scraped it level pretty easily using a piece of metal. That was a huge clue that it wasn't really plaster. I'll have to see how it goes when I play a blow torch on it next weekend. For the moment I shall put it in my car so it can bake dry in the heat.

After the debacle of the Chromebook, I went and bought a cheap laptop. This actually works and I've now installed Linux Mint. Windows never got a look in. As soon as I switched on, I pressed F2 and got the bootloader. 

I really wanted to load Raspbian but it didn't seem to want to run on my new Asus. Instead I put Linux Mint which will do pretty much what I need. The wifi driver didn't like the built-in wifi board so I had to use an external wifi dongle but that was fine. There won't be wifi where I'm going to be using it.

Meanwhile I had a response from HP that indicated that they didn't think an awful lot of their Chromebooks. In fact one representative pretty well called it a cheap android tablet with a keyboard. Well, if HP thinks it's trash then it must be.

As for the Chromebook, HP said they'd escalated to a higher level of help and they'd be in touch in a few days. I told them the Chromebook was waiting to go to the shooting range as a target. Interestingly a friend from Britain tried a Chromebook and called it a false economy. They couldn't do anything worthwhile with it either. I at least tried to put Linux on it.