The saga of computer upgrades continues downhill. The one thing worse than printers is scanners. I've got a nice, Brother multifunction printer with a sheet-feed scanner that we got in 2005 or so.

Needless to say, it was discontinued long ago.

The 20 year old printer worked fine with the 15 year old Linux installation.

No surprise, Linux support for this device is also discontinued. The 20 year old printer/scanner will not work with a modern linux.

I spent several hours trying tricks and tweaks and finally gave up.

To console myself, I air-fried a couple rock cornish game hens, and this worked out perfectly. Nice crisp skin and moist, tender meat.

Step one of this exercise, however was removing the hens from their plastic bag and discovering an ocean's worth of water/blood mix.

Now, any normal human being would have dumped the bags and sent the nice rich blood-mix to the septic system. Instead, I poured it into a paper plate, and microwaved it until the proteins coagulated.

This left me with a thick gravy-ish stuff that the cats have declared to be better than treat-in-a-tube.

I was the most-favorite two-legger in the house until they got the last of this with their daily treats. I'm still the most-favored two-legger, but only because I'm running without opposition.

I bought a potato and onion to go with the game hens.

The onion got sliced and separated into rings, so I could try making air-fried onion rings. I put the rings and a little oil into a tupperware bowl, added a tablespoon or so of falafel mix, and agitated gently while singing "Shake it Up, Baby".

This breading was far and away the tastiest onion rings I've ever made, and might rank in the top ten of rings I've ever eaten. This experiment was worthy of a repeat. Falafel mix is also great breading on air-fried chicken.

The potato got sliced into roughly 1/8" thick slices, tossed with oil (re-using the Tupperware bowl that I hadn't washed yet), and airfried at 400 degrees, because that's what the AI said was a good temperature to try.

This worked a lot better than my previous attempts of frying them at 350. The chips are crispy and taste like potato chips instead of baked potatoes.

Score one for the AI. I think that's the first time I tried something from an AI and had it work.

So, back when computers were first developed, they were very deterministic. You knew just how long a calculation took and you could predict just how long a program would take to run.

By the '80s, networks had made run-time non-deterministic. You never knew if a message packet would hit a busy network and be delayed or how long it would wait to be transmitted.

Now, with self-training Deep Learning AIs, we've got no idea what the answer will be.

And then there's upgrades. You never know what's going to start or stop working when you click the "Upgrade Now" button.

I got lucky, and a few days after I gave up on making the scanner work, I installed an upgrade, and now it works.

I don't think an AI was involved with this upgrade.