2011 — 31 July: Sunday
Not, alas, the earliest of re-engagements with my conscious brain1 but — as I have a walking rendezvous to get to in 40 minutes — I had better shift into gear. Breakfast? Check. Cuppa? Letting it cool. Packed lunch? That's next.
Right. Off I jolly well go. It looks nice and sunny out there, bless it.
It was, indeed
So the three of us had a pleasant ramble, culminating in lunch while sitting at our ease on one of Barbara Rudgard's benches — the one by Shawford Lock in this case.
Now that I'm back I find I'm still ruminating on possibilities for the "upstairs" sound system, including making better use of that tiny, cool-running Class D amp since I find I never actually use my electrostatic headphones down here in the living room.
I also continue to have some further thoughts on the home computing front — including cannibalising one, or both, of the partially-dead PCs that Peter dumped back on me many moons ago. One is (or was) actually the server I configured in January 2007, which quickly vanished into his Battersea flat, though mysteriously (now that it's back at Technology Towers) its two hard drives already seem to have gone walkabout. Mind you, I also find its spec looks lamentably low-horsepower nowadays.
I intend to keep my so-far extremely reliable 2005 Gateway PC as a fully-patched fallback XP machine, and the 2006 HP Core2Duo box as Ubuntu 11.04 Unity.2 I shall leave BlackBeast untouched as my main Win7 working machine. (Not that there's much "working" involved. Apart from fending off the malware in between the occasional diary entry.)
Tea, Mrs Landingham? It's 16:16 after all.
Easy stuff first
Here's the final sound system up in the reading room.
From the top, we have the tiddly Sure Class D amp, the Sony minidisc recorder, the Oppo DVD player (which has the same 24-bit hi-resolution audio DAC as my NAD CD player downstairs) for playing CDs via its co-ax output, and the Panasonic Freeview DVD recorder just used as my digital radio source, playing via its optical output. If I leave the minidisc recorder in "record" mode it happily converts incoming digital signals to analogue ready for feeding straight into Mr Amp.
To switch between radio and CD I just change between "optical in" and "co-ax in" on the minidisc. Best of all, the synchronisation between the Freesat digital radio audio downstairs and the Freeview digital radio upstairs is now well-nigh perfect, because the Panasonic takes about one second longer to process it3 than the Sony I was using yesterday did. Result!
Next task: an evening meal. It's 19:19 and I've just realised I'm starving hungry.
Corrigendum
I was wrong. I made a mistake. Today Mike handed back to me the DVD of "The 2 sides of the bed" that I'd passed along because I'd long thought it was a duplicate. T'ain't so. It's a sequel. So my only mistake was to think that I'd made a mistake. Sadly, that doesn't make the film any better.