I’ll start with the good news! I needed cheering up, and the birds have done this for the last 2 days (though I have put out a lot of food for them to gain this support). Either nuthatches (there are at least 2, though squabbling, so not a pair I think), and great spotted woodpeckers (M & F adults collecting food, and at least one Juvenile which seems to be able to feed itself), plus the pair of bullfinches – never seen them here until this year.

The reasonably good news – new HD TV arrived Friday, so I was able to follow the Canadian GP, and the cable came yesterday which allowed me to try plugging the iPad 2 into the TV, and the results were very impressive.

The really dreadful news was that I tried to install the latest Apple updates this morning, and it reported that all the updates failed, and then refused to boot with a kernel panic. Searching the web, this seems a quite common problem, and it would appear the only answer is a complete reinstall of OS-X, and possible loss of data. This is probably the worst instance of a computer problem induced by the manufacturer themselves that I have encountered in nearly 45 years of programming computers, I have wasted at least 6 hours already trying to solve it, and re-installation will take another 3 hours, and maybe then a lot of time trying to reinstate lost data. My faith in Apple is currently near zero, and I may well go back to Windows instead – whatever its shortcomings, it has never created a disaster on this scale.