2013 — 2 July: Tuesday
My haphazard1 music listening strategy last night led me to Pat Metheny's oddly-named "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls" or, more accurately, to an Amazon order for same. It's entirely Fiona Talkington's fault, of course. Prices varied from the entirely reasonable £7-55 plus postage I paid all the way up to the demonstration of the dismal science suggested by getting on for £170.
Is the Library still Open?
Long time no visit: the Open Library. In fact, that's a neat demonstration of another (slightly less haphazard) entertainment strategy of mine. It's become my habit to spend just a couple of minutes each day looking back at the same date in my earlier diary entries2 — it's a rotten job, but someone has to do it. Not only do I repair the occasional dead link (where possible); I also remind myself of my various follies (and those of others, of course) as I travel along Life's somewhat hazard-strewn little Highway.
If nothing else, it's a sobering reminder of the amount of tea I drink. [Pause] Now, if only I could persuade my kitchen fridge to be as thermally well-disciplined as BlackBeast...
... not to mention as quiet, I would be well-pleased. I'm already pleased to report that the SSD seems to have bedded in, and applications do now load much more quickly.
Though my chums...
... have all assured me at various times that "if I want real speed I should be running Linux" I note they all run Windows too, with varying degrees of discontent. Still, being an open-minded sort of chap, once again I took a careful look yesterday at the latest Ubuntu 13.04 pages. The stumbling block (as ever) remains that set of useful applications only available under Windows. I'm an old dog, and my facility with new tricks3 (or my patience? and time?) is finite.
I could disconnect the three current internal drives, re-instate the Velociraptor, or indeed any convenient spare (I seem to have about five of the things knocking around) and take it out for a spin with just a Linux build on it to get some idea of the potential behaviour on BlackBeast. Brian tells me (between coughs, poor chap) that Linux Mint 15 with Mate 1.6 is his current lightweight favourite flavour. He's also warned me that he bricked at least one USB installation stick, so I should use a small cheap old one (I seem to have about ten of the things knocking around) "just in case". Good tip.
I now have...
... an md5 checksum-checked ISO image of Linux 15 Mate 64-bit safely burned to a DVD and am pondering my next move. I suppose it had better be lunch and a cuppa to stave off any pangs and/or upper-limb shakiness as (if past behaviour is any guide) I may otherwise neglect the wetware in favour of the hardware and software. It is already rapidly approaching 12:42 after all. So let's pause first, and admire...
... yesterday's pretty little moth — I simplistically assume that any sufficiently hairy butterfly is a moth.
That was a fascinating...
... little exercise. Mint installed in about 15 minutes flat, with negligible interaction required from me, on to a spare, completely empty, 500GB SATA II drive. Then I updated it with about 78MB of accumulated security and other patches and took it straight out for a tiny test drive:
OK, so I didn't get so much as an audio 'peep' from it; I'm not exactly unused to that behaviour from Linux systems. Videos played perfectly from the NAS. Firefox browsing (without my usual shields of AdBlock, NoScript, and Ghostery) was a visually noisy experience. I had to read a spot of Ubuntu documentation to find out how trivially easy it was to get back to my preferred twin-screen desktop as the default is to mirror one desktop on both screens.
But perhaps most revealing was a quick check4 that showed me:
System disk occupancy: 3.7GB Working set in RAM: 535MB
The contrast with my Win8 system is a stark one, that does not seem to reflect very much credit on the efficiency of Seattle's coding. Mint claims to be the world's fourth most popular desktop OS. It was very smooth by comparison with the Linux desktops I still shudder to recall from years gone by. Most interesting.
If there's a more...
... spiteful bit of wild flora than your basic Model T bramble Mk I anywhere in my 'garden', I, for one, don't wish to meet it. But, having noted the (entirely logical) location of Christa's best secateurs in a hanging pocket on the inside of the door of Shed #2 — the one whose door I had to mount "wrong way round"5 to make sure we could still open it in years to come — I've been out hacking and slashing.
Still, the rewards of some minor league (no, not bush league) clearances have been a few scratches, a variety of seeds clinging to my trousers and, for all I know, a tick or two. Plus a sizeable dish of strawberries. I thought these had all emigrated a couple of years ago, but it turns out they've merely done a Shift Left Logical and tucked themselves away largely out of sight. Apart from a few ants that beat me to some of them.
It's later than I thought
I'd noted, while Mint was installing itself, its admission that Daylight Saving Time didn't always get set 'properly'. Now I've just noticed that, back in the arms of Win8 (as it were) the system clock was indeed an hour adrift and I've just had to re-sync it with Internet time. I wonder if Mint managed to tinker with any other motherboard settings while it had the run of my system? Crikey! Mind you, I'm also wondering if I should switch the damn' central heating system back on...