2013 — 13 July: Saturday
My normal routine1 will be disrupted soon enough, I guess. Still, change is supposed to be good for you. And it's always good to see the offspring :-)
Better get dressed. Then, perhaps, I shall have another wrestle with the mysteries of get_iplayer. I was able to list, and thus identify, precisely the three "Late Junction" radio programmes I would have liked to download in better quality than the "Listen again" stream offers. But none of my attempts to build the necessary parameterised command strings did anything but provoke whinges. I suspect some componentry still needs updating.
Software. Yah gotta love it. [Pause] Speaking of which, is it me, or was Win8's anti-viral 'system' being extra paranoid this morning since yesterday evening? It depends, as Professor Joad used to say, what you mean by "for a while". BlackBeast was, after all, powered off for about 9 of the 14 hours since its last scan:
Nothing found, as usual. But perhaps something extra ghastly has just jumped out of cyberspace into the known malware universe? I have to admit this does seem far less of an issue in the Minty-fresh world of Linux. Though perhaps I'd better at least look for a virus scanner for my laptop PC next time I switch it on... [Pause] The Synaptic package manager on my VirtualBox Linux Mint system assures me Clam AV is already in place as part of the base installation. I suspect, therefore, the same will be true of the "real" Mint on the Laptop.
It did cross my mind to fire up VirtualBox on the Mint system now running inside VirtualBox on the Win8 system to see if Win7 would install and run under it. Or would that be too much like that Hall of Mirrors climax in the 1948 film "The Lady from Shanghai"?
Cue F/X: sound of breaking glass.
One fresh download...
... later, with a complete re-installation, and use of mode "best" and I have 'as good as it gets' files of last week's Late Junction to catch up with at my leisure. CD sample frequency and 320kbps fixed-rate MP4a files that play beautifully. Cool! The magic spell that eventually worked its, erm, magic was:
get_iplayer --type=radio --mode=best --get "Late Junction"
Quality v Size
For my own interest, I fed one of these three downloaded files through the 'audio format converter' portion of my Poikosoft CD ripping suite. BlackBeast chewed up 13% of its cpu for two and a half minutes to convert what was a 90-minute 211,456KB MP4a file to a 164,177KB MP3 VBR file of essentially indistinguishable playback quality. Hardly seems worth the effort.
As I impatiently await...
... my now well-late young visitors2 I'm left wondering whether the latest bit of punctuated equilibrium that marks Google Mail's continuing attempts to evolve its web interface into something more, erm, usable (a mutation imposed on me just yesterday) hasn't slightly out-clevered itself. They've introduced totally unnecessary "Social" and "Promotions" tabs alongside what is now to be called my "Primary" email tab, and are blithely assigning incoming email accordingly.
Deleting an item from one of my online banks from the three items most recently making their début under "Promotions" sent the other two items scurrying away unread into some outer darkness that is neither Spam nor the Bin. Was it something I said? Were they important? Do I even care? I'm hungry, dagnabbit!
I was quite surprised...
... to discover that I hadn't passed along my old Pentium D Gateway PC to Brian — this is, after all, what quite often happens to surplus hardware hereabouts as he invariably knows someone who can put it to good use. In this case, Peter found the eight-year-old PC in 'his' room and now proposes to displace the WinXP currently on it with the FreeNAS build I downloaded and cut for him as he's been having a slight touch of the "failed NAS" / "potential data loss" woes back home. I didn't think it polite to ask if he's been using a Buffalo Terastation.
In the meantime, we discovered that we neither of us know how to get into the BIOS on my Laptop PC to change the boot order to let him try the FreeNAS install image he'd popped on to one of my spare USB sticks. (I rather hope the stick can be bent back to the Dark Side after he's gone; it's one of the two relatively new USB3 devices I acquired recently.) So, while they're both out foodie shopping in Asda I've been rooting around to sort out a spare screen, a network cable, a couple of power leads, a keyboard, and a mouse, all ready for Young Frankenstein's revival attempts when they get back.
We lunched at quite a crowded "Bridge" at Shawford, by the way, and have just been taking it easy since then in all this nasty and unaccustomed heat. In fact, Peter's g/f sparked out on the sofa for an hour or so, so I've yet to finish listening to all that lovely "Late Junction" music. It will keep. I think the rest of the game plan is to retrieve wet suits from the loft as their upcoming jaunt to Cromer is (they feel) likely to feature a sea cold enough to warrant them. They may yet wish to watch a film tonight, and I assume they'll depart at some point tomorrow...