(Almost) catastrofic heating

The week started quite uneventfully this morning. It is obvious that the pace is picking up now that more and more people are coming back from vacation (even if they just stayed at home to avoid having to observe a quarantine on their way back), so I had some email to attend to and a couple of exchanges about the tool I was updating all last week. Then I had time to continue with my Octave tutorial, which I found significantly less painful than anticipate. Indeed, my previous knowledge of Python has proven to be rather helpful. On the other hand, the language itself is fairly well designed, so kudos to John W. Eaton & Co. for their good work.

As I was ready to break for lunch I suddenly realized that my laptop had a significant bulge on the front left side, right under the Z and X keys and all around. It also felt rather hot to the touch, so rather than letting it run through lunch as I usually do, I decided to power it done and prevent further damage until I had a chance to assess the damage.

Photo: pxfuel.com

A quick search on the desktop machine quickly confirmed that area affected seemed to correspond to the battery, so it was clear that I was not going to be able to use that laptop for much longer. That meant that I had to dust of my previous laptop, an ancient ThinkPad X121e and try to recover it for service in as short time as possible. It turned out that it was running Linux Mint 18.2, so faced with the choice of installing from scratch or apply successive updates I decided the latter. So far I have managed to update to 18.3 and from there to 19. This post is proof that the update has been successful so far. I am afraid that I have some work to do today if I hope to have it running up-to-date software (19.3 and 20 are the next updates) some time soon.

The good part is that I have been able to boot my new laptop and commit all the changes to all my programs to the version control server, so once Mint is running on this one I can simply check out all the software and keep working. Of course, the performance is somewhat lacking, but with some luck it will only be a week or two.

Stay tuned for the next update tomorrow.