Interesting filter in Gimp; "Artistic/Cartoon"

 Using the "Artistic/Cartoon" filter in Gimp the following result may be of interest:

Original to the left, Artistic/Cartoon filter to the right. You have to test the settings in the filter to get the result you like. Double click on the filter when in Gimp, to get the settings for it.

Click on the mage and choose "Open link in a new tab", then use Ctrl-+ to increase the image.

Let's have a look at another image. It has all the information you need to make a movie like this (1878):

The galloping horse of 1878. From 
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/06/27/46591-2/

and here is the image:

It's up to you to make the Flying Birds image of 2022!
:0))
Starlings in flight are among my absolute  favorites.

Burn in new disks?

 Once upon a time when I started working with IT, disks had bad blocks that you (yes you!) had to handle. Disk tests  to assess the frequency of bad block production was run. If a serious defect was the cause, more were coming within a short time, usually within the hour (during which I had some lunch) or during a nightly run. If no more baddies could be found, you entered the one you nailed into the bad block table and from that moment, the system had to look it up in this table before writing anything anywhere. That was like a trailing anchor on disk performance, but what could you do?

In these times you aligned heads with an alignment pack from the factory. Writing over that one by mistake would normally end with you being keelhauled. You cleaned 'crashed' heads, swapped out fixed platters, made any other repairs by replacing chips or boards. Scheduled maintenance was standard on all disk drives.

Then came drives where the bad block table was moved into the disk controller which could live in the computer chassis and later on the disk itself. Still, when doing mainenance, one checked the bad block table just to see it wasn't beginning to lack space for new bad blocks.  This freed the system of the task of administrating the health of the disk drives.

The final stage in the process, for obvious reasons, is where we are just now. If we see an I/O error in the system logs and find out its a "Failed SMART"-problem, we know the bad block table is full and it's high time to swap the disk for a new one. The observant reader has now realized this is a state worse than before. This way we may lose data written into a block that later goes bad. 

To get an early warning one can make a small script searching the current syslog for entries containing "[SAT], Failed SMART", put that script in crontab and have it run once an hour or .profile running always when you're logged in, with a while (1 = 1) { run myscript.sh ;} but sleeping 3600s after each run. Preferably this would cause a mail occurring in you mobile so you have ample time to take action.

Anything goes. Alternatives exist, like smartmontool or other tools. Choose what hurts the least.

For system messages I use a separate gmail account. If no other I'd recommend the PHPMailer application for sending mail. There will be notices from Google about what they see as suspicious login  tries but if one acknowledges that you really are you, it works.