A few weeks ago, I rode Amtrak’s Silver Meteor 97 train from New York City to Jesup, Georgia. As I’ve reported before here and here, it was an enjoyable experience and recommended.
I used this overnight journey to catch up on writing several letters, which I mailed from the Jesup post office after I arrived. I also made use of the on-board power to run my laptop to watch some shows and do some light Internet work. One problem on this trip was unreliable WiFi, so I relied on my phone’s limited data plan.
The roomette was much quieter than on my last trip, which made my sleep much more restful. There was a delay at some point during the night, which made us almost three hours late (we were still on time when I had gone to bed around 1:00am). I’ve learned that delays should be expected.
Since I was traveling alone, I asked my car’s steward if I could have dinner service in my room. I ordered the steak dinner with chocolate cake and a Heineken beer (one alcoholic beverage is included with the meal service).
This particular car was like one that I had ridden on before with the roomette having a sink in the room, but the toilet was located at the end of the hallway by the exit. My roomette’s sink worked very well with the hot and cold water dispensing properly when I needed to wash my hands or face.
Here are some pictures from inside my train car and roomette on this trip.
If you’re like me, you might have newer computer hardware that isn’t fully supported by Linux kernel 6.1, which is installed with Debian Bookworm 12. Thankfully, Debian offers Backports, or newer software in testing in Trixie, the development name for Debian 13, that will eventually find its way into future Debian releases for use on an otherwise stable release of Bookworm.
Updating to a newer kernel often brings more hardware compatibility. However, it’s important to remember that using a backport kernel can introduce potential compatibility issues with the software officially supported on Bookworm. Even if installing the latest kernel causes some issues, you can choose to boot from one of your older 6.1 kernels on your install as long as you don’t delete them (by using the apt autoremove command).
I wrote this guide based on my experience installing Linux kernel 6.12 from Backports with the non-free firmware that my hardware needs to work. If you are trying to keep your system free from non-free software, you can omit those references in the instructions below.
Before doing any changes to your Debian installation, remember to backup your files first. Saving important files in more than one media and storing it backups in different physical locations is best practice.
After backing up your files, make sure your install is up-to-date with these commands:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
After those updates complete, it’s a good rule of thumb to do a reboot to begin working with a clean slate.
Next, add Debian Backports to /etc/apt sources.list. I used vi to do this:
sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list
In vi, arrow down to the bottom line, type a lowercase “o” to add a blank line below the current line, type lowercase “i” to enter input mode, and type the following line into the document:
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
After double checking the added line, press the “Esc” key, and type “:wq” to write the file and quit vi.
Now, you need to update apt again:
sudo apt update
After the completes, enter this command to install the latest kernel from backports along with the kernel’s headers and firmware that might be needed for your hardware (such as networking card, video card drivers, etc.).
It might take awhile for the installation to complete. If there are no errors, it should return you to your terminal prompt. If it did, reboot your computer to load the new kernel.
After your computer boots up again, you can verify that you are running the latest kernel by entering this command:
uname -r
After installing the latest kernel, my computer reports this from the uname -r command:
Click through here to see the other interviewees and topics covered in this special issue.
Editor Sean Scanlan sent out this press release for the issue:
A new issue of NANO: New American Notes Online has been published
Special Issue 17: The Interview
Publication date: June 2025
ISSN: 2160-0104 (Online)
NANO is an indexed, Open Access, and Open Source humanities journal. NANO never charges to submit or to read content. NANO is published by City Tech, part of the City University of New York.
NANO announces its new issue, an exploration of the ways that interviews connect people.
The interview is woven into our hyper-connected world through podcasts, Zooms, magazines, newspapers, social media, and they still occur in private settings. Interviews are ubiquitous. They can be formal and informal, closed or open-ended; they can yield quantitative and qualitative results; they can invoke power and symbolic capital. But, the interview can also be less about gate-keeping and more about the tension inherent in knowledge production and sharing. The eight interviews in this special issue of NANO create spaces of exchange, where the goal is not interrogation but collaboration, curiosity, and mutual understanding.
Two interviews focus on teaching. A multimedia project by Shauna Chung, Naila Butt, Sandy Fougeres, and Khemraj Persaud describe ways that interviews fuse writing and workplace readiness while the scholar Laura Westengard reveals the communal spaces where gothic and queer reinforce each other.
Two interviews focus on visual art. Jennifer Lockard Connerley discusses ways that academia and spirituality enhance portraiture while Bill Saylor reveals how his environmental and natural abstractions arise.
Two interviews focus on translation. Dana Crăciun acknowledges the difficulty of translation while Johannes Göransson eyes translation’s inherent creativity.
Two interviews focus on creativity and theory. The writer and editor Emily Hockaday discusses the challenges of running a science fiction magazine in the age of AI while Marcus Boon reflects on his interdisciplinary practices.
Editor’s Introduction for NANO Special Issue 17: The Interview
Another project for my dad and I was setting up his Grizzly oscillating spindle sander, which had been sitting on a broken pallet for some time.
He had a rolling Shop Fox equipment stand, but it was slightly too large for the sander’s base. So, we cut a piece of 3/4″ plywood to fill its support area and distribute the weight of the sander.
Then, we layered some boards to create a ramp from the pallet the sander was on down to the Shop Fox equipment mover.
When he’s ready to use the sander, the Shop Fox mover has floating feet that can be lowered to take the weight off the front caster wheels.
My dad has a dozen or two of screw bottle car jacks that he used to press and hold every tongue-and-groove cypress board covering the walls and ceiling of the upper floors of their house. We made use of four of them to move two pieces of his heavy machinery into place in his shop.
Some time back, he purchased a milling machine and lathe from Grizzly. He had managed to get them into his shop on furniture movers. Of course, they can’t be run on those platforms, so we needed to find a way to place them flat on the shop’s floor.
For the milling machine, which was heavier than the lathe, we drilled four holes through the metal cabinet and constructed a wood box with bolts going through the short sides of the wood box into the metal cabinet. We placed the four jacks under the long arms of the box, raised it a fraction of an inch to remove the furniture mover and then lowered the jacks until the cabinet rested on a 3/4″ plywood base that we cut to fit. Then, we removed the box from the cabinet after unbolting it and unscrewing the deck screws we had built the box with.
If you do something similar to this, be mindful of the total reach/height of the jack and its minimum. We built the box around the cabinet at a height that allowed for a slight lift and enough lowering to allow the jacks to be removed after the cabinet was lowered.
For the lathe, we did something similar, except we couldn’t drill through its cabinet to bolt the box to the cabinet as we had done with the milling machine because it is double walled and could potentially create problems with bolt alignment (and we would need much longer bolts).
With the lathe being lighter than the milling machine, we felt safe building the box around the lathe’s cabinet and adding two “tongs” that fit into the recesses at the bottom of the cabinet. To make sure the tongs remained in place, we put a tie strap around these and the cabinet.
We lifted the lathe slightly to remove the furniture mover.
And then lowered it onto a custom piece of plywood for it to rest on the floor.
When you don’t have the muscle or manpower, use the tools at hand to get things done. As William Gibson writes, “the street finds its own use for things.”
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