I resurrected my wife's 13 year old Sony Vaio as an emergency laptop recently with MX Linux. I had previously tried Ubuntu and also Zorin Lite on it, both worked - but slowly and things like hibernate were broken and freezing up if left unattended.
MX is amazing on it, it runs as fast as I remember XP did when the laptop was new, hibernate works perfectly, screen dimming, extending display over multiple monitors and handling unplugging a monitor fine...all the things that Linux has been known to have issues with on random hardware.
I have now put in a bigger SSD and 8 more GB of RAM and the laptop is a great little media centre and simple gaming machine for the kids. I'm tempted to setup dual booting my Dell with MX now, it's a great desktop and project
I was 4 when it came past, I remember going in full cowboy gear late in the evening (9pm?) to Signal Hill in Cape Town to watch the comet over the ocean. Perfect starry cold evening...maybe I'll survive long enough to see it back again!
Thanks for the all the critiques that is very valuable feedback.
wrt choosing Wordpress - it certainly does have a lot of drawbacks like you mention, our reasons for going with it:
1. There are about 10 web designers in our town, they all use Wordpres...Wordpress runs just about every small -= medium site in South Africa, so if I fall under a bus theres someone to pick up the (website) pieces
2. We had a very broad set of requirements - event ticketing with seating plans, accommodation booking with calendars, payment processing, members directory with subscription and free options. Since this was very much an 'after-hours' project we needed fairly plug-and-play functionality.
3. Low budget for hosting - this site needed to run on a shared server that already had PHP / MySQL
But thanks again for the tips, I will review them with the team and I'm sure we can get most sorted! (the broken links were Wordpress permalinks misbehaving...oops)
Regarding speed - we have done a fair bit of optimizing Litespeed cache and reducing the unnecessary scripts that get loaded but yea its still slower than we would like. Also since we are not using a CDN, if you are far from South Africa latency will be a big issue.
That's fantastic you visited Greyton! no worries about AirBnb, everyone uses it - not just international visitors. We used to rent a room on Airbnbn (maybe you stayed with us even - near the mountain :) and we've certainly travelled plenty using it.
Greyton is definitely a hidden gem, for some reason it's not on many travel itineraries with most people doing a long one day drive from Cape Town to the Garden Route - but its without doubt the best village in the Cape, decent facilities & restaurants, fast Internet, lots of English speakers (if thats all you know!)
I don't know what the solution is wrt Airbnb, for someone planning a trip around a foreign country it offers some element of security and a lot of convenience...everything gets booked in one place. But for many small towns a tourist info office is more than just a place to pick up a map and its a social / emergency / Internet connection hub of many towns. Taking away the accommodation booking commission means that they can't operate or just get replaced by a sign board and some flyers that you can pickup at any petrol station anyway.
Greyton is fortunate in that there are lots of events, festivals, marathons & MTB races to sell tickets for and keep the office open, and it's close enough to Cape Town to get the short stays.
Next time you come, book your stay on GreytonTourism.com - insider tip, there are some unlisted, exceptional properties that can be booked...just send Ros an email on bookings at greytontourism dot com!
Living in a small village in a rural part of South Africa 2 hours from Cape Town. Off grid solar & water, keep chickens. Coder / remote sysadmin mostly for EU based companies. Same timezone as CET, so it works well. No cars needed, everything is in walking/biking distance & reasonably cost of living. Online shopping is big here, so if you are prepared to wait a couple days everything is available (no Amazon but it's coming soon I hear)
From a sample size of one ATC I know. After they retire with a very generous pay package, they spend their time getting involved in local flying clubs, going on holiday and spending time with their families. They have enough money not to need to work again.
