2015 — 31 January: Saturday

I realise the whole fabric of modern civilisation (if that's what I'm living in) utterly depends on everybody having, and constantly using, trackable mobile phones but that still doesn't persuade me that I have any obligation, or should feel any pressing need, to answer an unknown1 caller from a number I don't recognise. Bite me.

It took rather less...

... than a day's use of yesterday's "new, improved" Desktop modus operandi to convince me to re-pin seven of my applications back on to my Task Bar:

My pinned Apps

As I should have realised before over-enthusiastically unpinning2 stuff, my Thunderbird email, Windows Control Panel, WinSCP server access, Copernic desktop search, Pale Moon web browser, Windows File Explorer, and Windows snipping tool are all in more or less constant use, so they might just as well move back in with me (as it were). Should you be wondering what my "BBC radio" program is, by the way, it's merely a Windows File Explorer shortcut to the folder that contains downloaded radio programmes (mostly BBC Radio 3 Jazz, 'World on 3', and 'Late Junction' shows fetched using get_iplayer) but I thought the modified icon more appropriate.

Windows let me capture the upper left hand corner of my desktop with its snipping tool, but this shy tool decided not to show itself (as it were) in the act of working by not highlighting its slot on the Task Bar in the way that WinSCP has.

I find I already need...

... another pre-breakfast cuppa :-)

The New Yorker has just slapped me on the wrist and told me I've read my last complimentary article this month. (I was a subscriber for a couple of decades, trading that with Carol [to whom I gave a subscription to Grauniad Weekly.]) Matters not; I've just been reading an interesting piece on Open Access publishing (of scholarly material) in Harvard magazine. Who knew it now costs $28,787 a year for the monthly Journal of Comparative Neurology? That must be a rivetting read.

And how's this...

... for a superb opening sentence (requiring both chutzpah and cojones, I suspect) in a review of yet another biography of Freud in the LA Review of Books?

We must reach beyond English to name the essential traits any
biographer of Freud must have: chutzpah and cojones.

Link.

How much longer...

... can I endure the wait? Heed the spoiler warnings for the first four (excellent, in my opinion) seasons should you follow the link in this text :-)

Game of Thrones

Very entertaining tosh, with very high production values. If it's good enough for Clive James, that will work for me. [Pause] NPR's current mission-to-explain is the rôle of the pre-frontal cortex in the toddler. Not a large rôle. "All Joy and No Fun" indeed?

A Windows guru...

... following my Desktop progress said I could avoid pinning my favoured few (or "Magnificent Seven" — take your pick) by simply banging them all into the Startup folder. Would that it were still that simple.3 Mrs Google showed me a Microsoft KB article tellingly called "Why can't Windows 8 find the Startup Folder?" and I then embarked on my first-ever use (when I eventually succeeded in finding it via mouse rather than by following Microsoft's own Win8 touch-oriented instructions) of this well-obfuscated little item:

Startup

Auto-starting the Magnificent Seven takes my boot time up from 4 seconds to well over a minute(!) and then splatters seven unwanted open windows randomly over my nice clean desktop. I've reverted to pinning. It's neater. And faster, as the pinned programs only actually fire up when I click on them instead of all fighting for a share of the mighty CPU while keeping me locked out.

Now...

... all I need to figure out is why my spiffy new monitor and/or my spiffy graphics card between them occasionally forget they can both 'manage' a 60Hz refresh rate. The monitor hasn't forgotten it's using DisplayPort 1.2 after all. Odd, and a bit annoying. But fairly minor in the Grand Scheme of Things. Grrr.

It's also too cold for my liking, which is even further beyond my control, what with it being the middle of winter and all. Brrr.

  

Footnotes

1  This caller's the first one to use a free text facility I didn't know my ISP provides to say "You missed a call from me". The ISP's text message also tells me how to disable this facility, so they must know it pisses off some of their customers, mustn't they? 99.9% of the text messages I receive (and ignore) are marketing ploys from said ISP. I hope nobody I've actually given my number to would be rude enough to leave such a boilerplate message, and nobody else gets a call back. Until O2 improves the signal strength here in Technology Towers I fear my fancy HTC One remains merely a portable toy computer.
2  And thus having to track down where Windows hides each application so I could fire it up before I could then repin it...
3  Microsoft still keeps Win8 program startup shortcuts in the same folder as Windows 7 does, but has unkindly / stupidly (take your pick) removed the shortcut to that folder. And, of course, it's a hidden system folder. If I didn't know any better I might start thinking they didn't want me to find it. Shades of the way in which "the planning charts and demolition orders" for the pending destruction of Earth to make way for a "hyperspatial express route" through the solar system have all been conveniently on display for 50 Earth years in the local planning department on Alpha Centauri (a mere 4 light years away).