2016 — 6 October: Thursday
Hello pension! Come to Poppa!
Meanwhile, I've just followed, as best I can, my own instructions1 to establish, on Skylark, the same process of publishing 'molehole' web pages that I have been using on BlackBeast. Basically, if you can see today's ¬blog entry, then it worked.
I'm counting that...
... as a victory. I haven't yet persuaded my handy-dandy short-cut publish-aws script to work, but simply pasting its one-line command into a Terminal has certainly done the trick. One day, perhaps I shall fully grok all the ins and outs of Linux file permissions, ownership, and executability. That day has yet to arrive.
Nonetheless, this is both the first attempt, and the first time, I've ever published a 'molehole' external web page from Skylark... and without firing up BlackBeast. I shall celebrate with some breakfast.
I had no idea...
... of this version of the history of crime fiction. Source and snippet:
Like many of [De Quincey's] plans, this one eventually went awry, but a few years later he would publish "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (1827); that essay, along with two follow-ups, had an influence that continues to be felt in crime fiction and in the distinctly modern predilection for the dandyish killer. Alfred Hitchcock paid tribute to the "delightful essay," adding that murder should always "be treated delicately" and "brought into the home where it rightly belongs." De Quincey is so domesticated a part of our collective consciousness that we've forgotten he's there.
I read an amazing statistic...
... recently about Scottish revenue. Its share of North Sea oil tax revenues collapsed by 96% from £1.8bn in the previous year to £60m now. Since the EU demands an annual spending deficit lower than 3%, how can that Northern nation hope to go it alone?
Today's treat...
... is a rapidly-approaching lunch date, by the way. Yum.
Since it's only been nine years — to the day! — since buying a boxed set of 22 CDs of "Stravinsky conducts Stravinsky" it's about time I finished listening my way through it. I was more than a little distracted back then, of course. And the supply of spare time in retirement is ever-diminishing. It's a strange phenomenon.
My BlackBeast PC can continue to "live" where it does, just out of kicking range, but it's now powered off. I shall fire it up for the occasional update, of course, but I think I can finally make the switch2 over to Skylark.
[Five hour pause]
After a delicious lunch, it took about five minutes to upgrade my i5NUC's kernel from 4.4 to 4.8 and a bit longer to confirm that it can now successfully drive both Len's 34" Dell via DisplayPort and his Full HD TV simultaneously. There remains the curious need to press the Ctrl/Alt/F2 and Ctrl/Alt/F7 key combinations to recover the desktop screen when switching the Dell away from, and then back to, whichever DisplayPort input is in use by the NUC. Bizarre.
I shall try it on my own 34" Dell and my Full HD 60" Kuro this evening. Until now, my NUC has only been able to produce a working desktop display on the Dell via HDMI. So that's eight months or more that half of its display capability was, erm, broken (by a kernel regression, I gather). Meanwhile, Mint 18 seems unperturbed by this brand new kernel. There aren't that many applications in use on the NUC, so I haven't exactly stress-tested it. In fact, playing music files has been about all I've asked of it since putting Mint 18 on.
Just for a change...
... I actually read the latest snailmail bundle of gorp from Virgin Media before chucking it out. They are offering me a £660 discount on my first year's subscription, providing I sign up for their fattest package of unwanted Sports and HD movies. Plus a whole slew of unwanted other "unmissable" viewing opportunities. I was mildly interested to see that my address is served by their 200Mbps optical fibre broadband (£50/month, I gather), but what need have I of that?
Come what May?
A chum is developing a new rating system for politicians. "Each aspect of their personality will be rated against an exemplar of that attribute. Since for the most part the exemplar will be difficult to equal, let alone exceed, ratings will generally be in milli-whatevers, in the same way as atmospheric pressure is measured in milli-bars." His initial rating of our fragrant new PM was a value of 800 milli-Thatchers along what he dubbed the "Repellancy" axis. I hope this piece will help him to refine his measurements. Source and snippet:
As the country faces an unprecedented concatenation of economic, strategic, diplomatic and constitutional uncertainty, the woman at the helm seems devoid of intellectual resources. The one decision she has definitely taken is to give the go ahead to Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, a boondoggle incapable of justification by any criteria of integrity. The Pharaohs built their own pyramids, Theodoric built his own mausoleum. But these were designed as monuments to generate the admiration of posterity. Surely only an idiot would make their first decision the go-ahead for a colossal radioactive tombstone to her regime.
I also found a prescient little paragraph or two lifted from Winston Churchill's 1948 book "The Gathering Storm". It's a few pages into "Chapter II: Peace at its zenith" and, although describing the Wall Street crash of October 1929, could just as easily apply to our more recent global financial meltdown. (Link.)
I'm reluctant to...
... concede defeat to a few sets of recalcitrant silicon, but enough is as good as a feast. I have spent far too long wrestling with the evil (and largely unpredictable) combination of DP input to the Dell, DP output from the i5NUC, the Rotel pre-amp connected via HDMI, and the Kuro plasma screen hanging off the Rotel.3 Skylark and the i5NUC are now connected to the Dell screen via HDMI and are both behaving perfectly (and predictably). The i5NUC is my backup PC to Skylark, and a media player, playing audio on the hi-fi and video on the Dell.
Time for Plan Z. My first attempt to use my Raspberry Pi3 as a media player for the Kuro. What could possibly go wrong?