2015 — 16 December: Wednesday
BBC Radio 3 was very kindly playing a lovely bit of (what would have been) 70th birthday music — your turn next, Big Bro! — for Christa this morning1 as I tottered downstairs in the direction of (what was to become) my 1st cuppa. I've only recently woken up to what looks like another mild day. In fact, the patio door can stay wide open for a while.
Breakfast next, methinks. I'm starving. Again.
If this isn't...
... the perfect lid to place atop the coffin of Thatcherism...
... then I don't know what is!
Having successfully added...
... my 2,808 or so current film titles into Kodi, I shall next tackle the 342 TV Shows I've so far managed to find matches for in the online DB. Jolly good fun, heh what?
As I wheeled in my wheelie-bin...
... I nearly squished one of the same pretty little yellow and white flowers that Brian spotted on yesterday's walk, and photographed as evidence of global climate change. In fact, I read a suggestion recently that all politicians should be sent up into space to get a glimpse of the fragility of the planet they squabble over. (Who knows? It might help induce the effect I recall in a marvellous 1954 SF story by Theodore L Thomas — "The Far Look" — that I read in 1969.) Indeed, I still remember reading a similar proposal by Mr Geodesic dome himself...
Next we are going to take away from all the countries of the earth all the politicians, all the political ideologies and all the political party workers of every kind, and we are going to send them all off2 in satellites for a trip around the sun. As long as the politicians are absent, everybody on earth who has been eating is going to keep right on eating, and with all political barriers down the prospects of arranging to take care of the needs of the rest will accelerate, and humanity everywhere on earth will prosper.
I'm no longer so naïve as to think it would work, but that doesn't stop it being an enticing thought experiment.
Looking good...
... so far. I mean, the American Typewriter font and Julia Davis:
What's not to like?
My afternoon delight...
... or shall I call it Christa's birthday present? That Mr Brendel knows how to tickle the ivories.
Just downloaded, already nicely auto-ripped for me, and tinkling away in the background while I digest my lunch. By the way, I wasn't the one who added the drop shadow. I've yet to convince the GIMP to allow me to do those the way I prefer to do them.
Linux Mint...
... very thoughtfully automounts for me (on /media whenever I plug it in) my external 4TB USB drive. This disk holds, among much else, all my digital music in one convenient set of lumps. But I've just spent too long trying, and abjectly failing, to persuade Kodi to go off and index all the "music" on it for me in its ever-growing SQLite3 DB in which it already tracks my video material. So, given Kodi's minor intransigence (or my stupidity) at "seeing" this drive, I've just created a symbolic link to it, in my /home directory, to the appropriate "Music" subfolder ...
... and will now try spoon-feeding that to Kodi. Fingers crossed. And, just for my future reference:
$ ln -s /media/david/9150e969-eb31-4d4c-b5fc-edc8da6ae5b3/Music 4TBdisk
I called the link "4TBdisk" but, after it was safely created, I re-named it more sensibly to "Music on 4TB". I shall be revealed as a priceless prat if, next time Linux automounts the drive for me, it gets a different file path! [Pause] No, though until the drive is remounted the symbolic link is displayed as broken (a useful visual reminder to plug the thing in, actually). I think that merits a cuppa before I start the real experiment.
Music victory is mine
The message "Loading media information from files..." was a Good Thing. Well, that and the fact that...
... Kodi was now pointing somewhere sensible. What's been stuffed in the SQLite DB remains to be seen. [Pause] Golly. It took over 20 minutes to chew its way through 56,542 MP3s ripped from my CDs and then pushed a processor core up to 100% for a few seconds while it winkled them out of hiding to show me. [Longer Pause] But, as ever, now that I've had time (not to mention my evening meal) to examine things more closely I've noticed some deficiencies in the music file meta-tagging, and some inconsistencies in "Artist" names and the like. Nothing that can't be fixed. The more I scrub this data, the better any lists based on it.
As for playing the stuff... I shall stick with VLC, or Decibel if I want to shuffle the playback order. For my purposes Kodi's main usefulness is its internal DB.