2015 — 25 February: Wednesday
Before I turned in last night — well, a few hours ago — I took the Cinnamon variant of Linux Mint 17.1 out for a stroll around the (cyber)block. I returned to MATE with a feeling of relief.
Explain!
Visual bling is all very well1 but I suspect I'm asking rather a lot of my poor little graphics adapter with the 4K screen. And I'd have to repeat some, at least, of the tinkering I've been doing for the last week getting MATE to look the way I like it while also learning how to use it. [Pause] Ever onward. There's a walk on the cards for this morning...
Could this be...
... the first loon of Spring? If so, it's a remarkably early sighting:
I wonder what Capricorn will have to say about his re-election prospects? Me? I'm saying nuffin', in strict accordance with my "live and let entertain me live" philosophy.
Dead composers...
... spend their time decomposing, when they're not spinning in their graves:
Check out the music coming from Audiomachine, a Los Angeles production company whose work shows up in numerous movie trailers, to gauge the aesthetic shift underway. I'm not surprised that this outfit recently got enlisted to provide music for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare — the latest installment of the multi-billion dollar game franchise. Audiomachine has seamlessly integrated Romanticism and electronica into the perfect combo, drawing on the throbbing undercurrents of digital sound, but mixing in judicious doses of dark and foreboding Wagnerian melodies and melodic fragments. When you invite 21st century storm troopers to your party, this is the music to play during cocktail hour.
Now here's...
... a film long overdue a re-watch. Nice to see Pauline Kael's review (click the pic) of it back in "print", too, courtesy of her daughter...
Melanie Griffith in a Louise Brooks wig? What's not to like? [Pause] Right. Time I wasn't here. TTFN
Lunch! Where's my lunch?
Fresh air induces hunger...
As I munch, I've been listening with less than rapt attention to a load of waffling about MPs with second jobs, while browsing a BBC story about the remarkable observational successes of the Hubble Space Telescope. One of the chatting topics on today's stroll was the disconnection we feel from 'democracy', the encroachment of North American attitudes to political engagement, and the growing irrationality of the UK public in the face of poor-quality education and ditto media coverage of science and engineering. So? Then I encountered the final comment made on the HST story:
Good grief!
A bit like one of Kipling's...
... six serving men (I have a vivid imagination) I keep a little HTML file of scraps of useful markup code pinned to the desktop so it's always within easy reach (as it were). Saves me having to try to remember and/or re-type commonly-used bits of code. I was amused to see how Mint's file explorer ("Caja") shows it in a 400% icon view:
Rather cute attention to detail, I thought. I would prefer it, though, if MATE made it easier to find how and where in the Desktop Theme files it's possible — it must be possible because Brian tells me everything (or did he say "anything"?) is possible on a Linux system — to change the width of my desktop's window borders to make it less of a hit-or-mostly-miss affair when trying to grab one.
Oops!
I seem to have hit a file size limit on moving an unwanted screenshot .png file to the wastebasket:
Or have I tripped over another annoying file permissions issue? It lives in /var/www just like the rest of my web files... so I suppose that's entirely possible. "Anything is possible", David.
Linux migration for the unwary
Or should that be "for the unprepared"? I've jotted a few notes here.