2013 — 25 July: Thursday
I've just downloaded last night's "Late Junction"1 for more convenient enjoyment at some point. I see there's been another, slightly more successful, overnight attempt to rain, and I have a nice, hot cuppa to diminish the consequently chilly start: it's a mere 23.7C.
My lunchtime plans...
... may yet take me as far as Fisher's Pond (either today or tomorrow). They are still (at 08:29) in a mild state of flux depending, as they do, on an entirely different (medical, radiative) kind of flux impinging on one of my two intended fellow-lunchers. Nothing quite like a pre-lunch dose of carefully-targetted high-energy EMR to perk up the appetite, is there?
Best £10 note ever!
It's the Bank of England's "concept artwork" for the proposed Jane Austen note...
I found it, of all places, in the Sydney Morning Herald.
A brief exchange...
... of texts suggests lunch today is "on". Gill claims she was just checking to see if I'd got the hang of SMS. Cheek. I'm keeping the newest toy close at hand, and plumbed into BlackBeast (whereon it shows in Explorer, curiously, as both a mobile device and a CD drive labelled H: HTC Sync Manager at the same time).
Having just taken my first photo, I'm now left pondering where "Zoe" has chosen to tuck it away. Nowhere obvious, that's for sure. And, yes, I looked in Dropbox. More research will have to wait until the kettle has done its next boily thing.
Minor-league corrigendum
I mis-keyed: the mystery photo location is partially confirmed. I didn't take one earlier, but the giveaway click as I captured a fetching image of carpet and most of a foot was a clue to my greater success on an inadvertent second attempt. QuickPic now shows I have a container labelled Camera (1) with said carpet and foot in it, though it still doesn't show up anywhere in the Internal Storage visible to Win8 Explorer. Nor anywhere visible to the phone's X-Plore app that I've just installed. Still, what's a random image of a foot worth?
"Zoe" is a red herring. It's some silly way of animating a bunch of still images to enliven it. Who comes up with this nonsense?
Meanwhile, my SSD's Big Bro is getting cheaper:
I'm looking forward...
... eagerly to renewing my (so far fleeting) acquaintance with this delightfully funny young lady. Thanks, Mr Postie:
Following a tasty lunch, I'm...
... now seeing if I can persuade Dropbox to accept the one photo I've taken, without over-exerting myself. I've been warned it can take a while. It also helps enormously if you first find, and then turn on, "Upload from Camera" after which point my foot and its magic carpet arrived safely in about five seconds. So I can now see that the default settings have produced a 1.25MB jpeg of 1520x2688 pixels. I shall now see if deleting it from the phone also zaps it from Dropbox (having taken the precaution of copying the file first, of course, via the auto-sync'ed Dropbox folder on BlackBeast).
Nope, it's still "up there". This is cool. Time for a celebratory cuppa, methinks.
My lunchtime companions were both on excellent form. Considering their current trials and tribs this was lovely to see.
It's just as well...
... my current main use of the smartphone isn't actually as a phone since (for lack of familiarity, I suspect) I find the mundane phone bit of its repertoire — or at least the user interface to it — a bit cumbersome. For example, when I ended a recent call, the thing had already locked itself up. It's nearly as paranoid as me. Plus the mobile reception in Technology Towers has always left much to be desired. So I had to take the call up in my bedroom, which had the effect of roasting me more than somewhat in the late afternoon sunshine.
However, the call (from Len) was very cool news, and holds out considerable hope of being able to set up a VPN between the little mobile Beast and a suitable port on my stay-at-home NAS,2 and thence to all the rest of the data sitting around on my nefarious little network (including the internal Raspberry Pi web server, and data files on BlackBeast itself) wherever / whenever I go a'wandering. Not that I do all that much a'wandering, but I gather a VPN is like having a private (that is, encrypted) data pipe between me and my mobile as we ascend Everest, and the various digital bits'n'pieces safely back (as it were) at Base Camp. The thought of carrying around a virtual BlackBeast in my pocket is a wry one indeed. Until something goes awry.
Better feed the inner man, I think.