I recently updated a 15-year-old IBM Thinkpad R32 laptop (Pentium 4, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB hard drive) to Lubuntu 16.04, and I set it up to run my Blog Poster script written in Ruby.

Since this is a Linux environment, I like to use the Ruby version that the system offers in its repositories, also installing as many Ruby gems as I can from those same repos (instead of using gem install from the console).

The Blog Poster app, which attempts to make it easy to create social and regular blog posts from the command line, uploading them to the blog and sending them directly to Twitter, is fairly simple. It uses two gems: Nokogiri to help pull the titles of web pages and Twitter to (you guessed it) send a post to Twitter.

On Windows I used gem install to get both of those gems, and I could do the same in Lubuntu. But I'm very comfortable with Linux package management, so I opted to install ruby (which, believe it or not, isn't in the Ubuntu/Lubuntu default install) as well as ruby-nokogiri and ruby-twitter, all from the Ubuntu repository.

It worked.

Curiously, the script's call to vim did not work. There is, theoretically, no vim in the Ubuntu/Lubuntu default. But there is vi. You can install vim, but I opted to stick with the vi default, and I modified the system call in my Ruby code to call vi instead of vim.

Also, copy-pasting into the terminal (LXTerminal is what I am using) via right-click works great (though ctrl-v does not work).

The Ruby script works great, and I did a few successful updates to my blog and Twitter feed with this very aged laptop.

I'm a procedural programmer at this point. I understand the idea behind object-orientation, but going from those hokey examples (start with an animal class, then add a dog class) to actual code is another thing entirely.

I planned to base this post on a link that was supposed to be about procedural programming vs. OOP, and the article was pretty much a mess and didn't help me, so I'm not linking to it.

I need to see real code that uses OOP. That's the only way I'll figure it out.

Even though the new Firefox promises to be twice as fast as the old one and a legitimate competitor once again to Google Chrome, I have to stick with Google's browser. I'm working today, and I have 25 or so tabs open. I can see all 25 at once in Chrome, but Firefox only shows so many -- you have to hit arrows on either side to see them all. That doesn't work for me.

After I installed the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update on my HP Envy laptop, the Windows Hello facial recognition login feature stopped working.

I Googled and found a simple solution that works.

Basically:

• Open Device Manager
• Expand Imaging Devices
• Right-click on IR camera (or any camera, probably) and choose to update the driver

The driver updated, then I went to Set Up Face Sign-In and re-configured Windows Hello.

And now it works.