2013 — 14 June: Friday
Having briefly considered1 the merits of a Sansui network device (the WLD+201L should you be curious) I've moved on to slightly bigger fish:
Twenty-six new black hole candidates have been discovered in the neighbouring Andromeda galaxy. According to the astronomers involved, these could be just the tip of the iceberg... Black holes were first discovered not in space but on the pages of a notepad in the German trenches of the first world war. Physicist Karl Schwarzschild was serving as an artillery officer on the Russian front in 1915...
I'm not quite sure that "discovered" is le mot juste but I do love the idea of 26 of the things being "the tip of the iceberg". However, down here on Planet Earth, there's some supplies shopping to be done before my lunch date and since I didn't even clamber past my own local event horizon (my bed, that is) until after 10:00 it's fair to say I'm running a bit late.
Were someone to...
... suggest (or even hint) that I derive an unhealthy pleasure from occasionally torturing my museum-piece Pioneer Kuro 60" plasma screen, then today's Blu-ray delivery would do very little to help me deny the charge:
This second edition — since I cannot remember who currently has my first edition — fills a neat gap. There's a bonus DVD, too, which should be interesting.
Very long pause...
... during which lunch was enjoyably lunched, followed by a frustrating afternoon and some of the evening making a series of (ultimately doomed) attempts to clone a copy of my Win8 system drive on to a portion of my main data drive (one of the two 3TB SATA 3 beasts that live actually inside the belly of the BlackBeast). The theory was fine, but we had failed to allow for all the complexities of trying to work around the pitfalls involved in making such a large disk an active, bootable drive. In the absence, too, of a new enough BIOS. (Recall this? All about "beyond 2TB"?)
Failure modes included an Acronis tool not working on Win8, another one lacking a facility in "trial" mode, or being restricted to a 100MB partition size. Then there was a Knoppix recovery disk signally failing to do what it said on the tin, followed by a Linux Mint session that was going to take five hours to do something (moving a data partition from one end of the disk to the other) that could — we thought — probably more quickly be achieved by simply zapping the entire 3TB drive and starting anew (which is why [of course] I'm now repopulating that drive with the zapped data instead of doing anything more interesting like, say, examining gamma test patterns on a new Blu-ray).
The upshot is to leave me exactly where I was this morning, but with lots (and lots) of data bits that are probably getting as tired of being shoved around as I am getting of shoving them. It's now 22:25 and I need a cuppa.