2013 — 17 July: Wednesday
I cannot bring myself to take what's presented to me as the national "news" seriously.1 Today's random examples:
- Capping (and removing by 2027) the stupid subsidy on encouraging new biomass power stations to burn trees imported from America.
- Cuba shipping military kit (concealed under 10,000 tons of sugar) to North Korea.
- National ranking of kids at 11 (presumably to make quite sure they are all above average).
- A third runway at Heathrow (but no transport policy to deal with the increased passenger flow).
- Five new BBC HD channels similarly squeezed into the limited bandwidth on terrestrial digital TV. What joy.
- The unawareness of the boy Dave (who agonised over the problem of political lobbying in his election manifesto) of the links to the tobacco "industry" of his election strategist.
- UK guvmint approval for £12,000,000,000 arms sales (including "items of use in suppressing peaceful, legal protest") to 27 countries of 'questionable' human rights.
The silly season is, it seems, now in continuous session. They'll be telling me next that BoJo has done so well at it that he should get another term as Mayor of London. Nope. It's back to music and the divine Jane for this boy Dave... And some breakfast, of course. Heck, I may even be forced to examine more closely that auction parcel of postage stamps for Big Bro.
HDCP
I'm obscurely pleased to find that these chaps have not yet been lawyered out of existence. I shall celebrate by listening to last night's "Late Junction", just downloaded in all its full audio glory. Thank you, get_iplayer. (It's impossible to listen to Gideon Coe on 6Music and "LJ" on R3 at the same time, I find.)
Only in America, I suspect. (Link.) And, equally, only in Rome. (Link.)
Where is purgatory, by the way? I thought it had been swept away.
Having just stubbed...
... my toe on the dinky little Creative USB external Soundblaster box2 on the floor of the books warehouse upstairs (while I was checking my anti-heatwave measures were all in place) I thought it might be interesting to bring it downstairs and hook it back up for another play. The later (and more costly / capable) Creative X-Fi PCI card brought with it a whole suite of unwanted software, so I have some hope this might be a cheaper light-weight route to digital audio input as well as digital audio output. That's the one facility currently lacking from BlackBeast's audio repertoire while I've been using the motherboard's onboard audio chippery.
I live in (long-term, and very low-priority) hope of converting some, if not all, of my large collection of obsolete minidiscs into a neatly "ripped" set of MP3s before either dying of heat-exhaustion3 or lapsing into the brain-melted state that dear Mama has now attained. Of course, I will first need to persuade myself to grapple, once again, with the horror of Audacity's almost equally brain-melting user interface.
Crikey. It worked so unfussily, and auto-installed its drivers so artfully (without crashing anything, I might add, or demanding a CDROM that could be just about anywhere in the house by now) that I'm tempted to re-instate the PCI soundcard simply to see if that, too, can manage so handily. It is, after all, rather higher in the "fi" than its older sibling. Though I could first take a little lemonses break, I guess. It's 12:37 already, and I have been working terribly hard. One mustn't over-exert oneself :-)
My celebratory...
... after lunch single square of dark chocolate from the SCR (see Monday) marks the successful relocation of the two-port SATA PCI card and the installation of the X-Fi soundcard into the gap thus created. Again, drivers were on tap without effort, and certainly without any trace of a reappearance of the great, fat set of unwanted Creative Media Toolbox programs. A moment's dalliance with the system's "Sound" settings and the Creative SB X-Fi is once again the default digital audio I/O device. Cool, unlike the afternoon (though I note the sunlight is now [14:25] being diffused through haze and clouds, which I take to be a good sign).
Win8Pro seems (in general) to relax and simply go get the drivers it needs. This is a pleasant change.
Hi-res audio
What is one to make of this? The comments include as elegant (though lengthy) a dissection as I've read in ages. (Link.)
Live fruitily, or die
I was correct in recalling that I'd bought a pack of frozen "Black Forest fruits" from Waitrose, and I was also correct in recalling that I'd popped it into the freezer section of my fridge freezer. Some time ago. What I hadn't recalled were a couple of minor details: (a) I'd already scoffed, and enjoyed, half of them, and (b) they are described as "Best Before" October 2010. Still delicious, I can report. If a little ice-encrusted. Be interesting to see if any ancient bacteria make their presence known. Or felt.