2015 — 17 February: Tuesday
As I predicted on Sunday evening, the spiffy Creative Soundblaster X-Fi sound card that still lives in BlackBeast spurns (a technical term I've just decided means "remains massively silent under the spiffy new software Quartermaster1 now in charge of all the dropped bits around here") my feeble attempts to, erm, tempt it with any of my audio files. But Intel's motherboard HD Audio is nowhere near as churlish, being happy to hurl a 44.1KHz digital bitstream across the living room carpet over to my Audiolab.
Oops. That diagram reminds me I need to update the "Win8.1 BlackBeast" description to "Mint 17.1" at some point.2 Not to mention some of the descriptive wording. I haven't yet decided, for example, what my replacements for "Boom!" or "Foobar2000" are going to be, long term.
Bear with me! It's just turned 07:30 and already I've long been in urgent need of my next cuppa :-)
Just missed...
... yet another of the monthly recycled glass bottle collections. Judging by all the "tinkling of broken glass" sounds out there. But since the base of my crate is less than half-covered — and the crate itself tends to get concealed by flowers of unrecognised virtue — I shall continue to refuse to worry about it.
Besides, one option would always be to take up alcohol. That way my bottle collections could more proudly stand comparison with those of my tippling neighbours.
Suitably refreshed...
... here comes my first attempt at a captured screenshot:
I first found, and then had to install, a program called "Shutter". Brian had mentioned something called "Gnome screenshot" but I was obviously (or, rather, unobviously) looking in the wrong place. Still, it did the business once I'd worked out how to drive it. Personally, I wouldn't have chosen a .png format, and I may yet rework it into a smaller .gif format. GIMP to the rescue...
Hah! Guess which idiot just found something called "Take a screenshot" already installed under "Accessories" (right where I might have expected to find it had I had the wit to look there in the, erm, first place.3 This, too, seems content to let me outline an area of my choice of a window on the Desktop — in this case, of course, my Firefox web browser — and save the 'offcut' as a .png (of, I notice, subtly different size).
Meanwhile...
... I didn't know that:
All 48 of Japan's nuclear reactors remain offline after a March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster in north-east Japan.
I mean, I knew about the tsunami, but hadn't realised they'd kept all their reactors shut down ever since. (Link.)
Nor did I know that the innocent sexed apostrophe on that Grauniad page was another pitfall for the unwary cut'n'paste artist.
The idea of...
... the House of Lords actually not only having a "digital skills committee" but letting it earnestly debate the merits of a radical rethink of UK schools teaching in this area is profoundly depressing given what little I see and hear of the average member of our upper chamber. Can't we just give each doubtless splendidly-gowned Lord or Lady a Raspberry Pi as a sort of entry qualification test? Or, better yet, get them all on to Linux to share my pain?
Right. It's nearly time to set off. A task that would be made slightly easier were a tree-surgeon and his woodchipper not currently parked more or less across my driveway. Mind you, I'm not yet suitably dressed for today's expotition, and having just spoken with the lady concerned, we're reset our rendezvous time to give us both a bit longer. Meanwhile Linux Guru #2 will swing by to kick the tyres and re-align some of the steering later this afternoon.
Much later
This is brilliant though my brain is at least partially wiped out. The pre-lunch chatter and stroll morphed seamlessly into a lunch and a quick trip back to Iris's home to inspect and swap out a potentially dangerous wall-wart power block in exchange for a carton of unwanted vanilla icecream. Then it was time to offer to nip out to collect not one, but two, Linux gurus as the tree-surgeon sorting out the bungalow's foliage was still making parking and manoeuvring in the vicinity of Technology Towers quite tricky.
I explained, as clearly as I could, the various foibles or missing facilities and functions that I didn't yet know how to bypass or invoke, and they set to with a vengeance. First task? Rework the way BlackBeast boots so, regardless of Kernel or other upgrades in future, I shouldn't now be in any further danger of losing any of my 8.3 million pixels on my spiffy new 40" screen. I value them all — even the partly-dead one that now seems to have revived to the point where I can no longer actually see it. Len had worked out the tinker needed to the boot config file that drives this process and where to tuck the all-important 'nomodeset' to stop the process collapsing in a heap when trying to work out how to spray all those pixels on my screen before the graphics card has finished waking up. Or something like that.
Next? Digital audio from the Creative X-Fi card rather than from the Intel HD audio chippery baked on the motherboard. (Not that that seemed in any way audibly inferior, but I've paid for the card, dagnabbit!) Crikey. Who knew it was just a question of mixer settings and other such audio esoterica? Brian did. He has about four sound cards for a variety of purposes, and has learned the hard way the various tweaks and incantations (or well-buried bits of function set-up) required to get them singing harmoniously.
The scanner proved impossible, rather to the surprise of both parties who'd each launched into a series of confident and varying attempts to get working something that was supposed to work, but which (in a word) doesn't. Shame on you, Canon, for not supporting Linux. Shan't be buying any more kit from you. But now at least I know that the powered 7-port USB hub is actually fine providing I unplug it and replug it after a re-boot. I shall in due course look into either another scanner or maybe even one of the all-in-ones. But I also now know to check first for the degree of support under Linux (which, of course, I've never previously given a moment's thought to). I'd already managed the printer all by myself.
Ebooks? No problemo. They both knew how to get Calibre up and running. BBC audio downloads? No problemo. Not only is get_iplayer up and running, but it's also tagged to be updated whenever the splendid chap looking after it churns out a refresh of his code builds.
I've saved...
... the best for last. Virtual desktops? Easy peasy, once everyone realised these are now called workspaces. So I've got four of them, represented by four blobs on the MATE panel that I park along the top of the screen. Or the 'taskbar' in the Windows world. I have a couple of handy Linux Mint web pages and an Enigma album blasting away from one workspace, this file edit session and the FileZilla SSH file transfer program in another, my email in a third, and my local web view of 'molehole' in the fourth. Each is a mere mouse click away, so I now have the luxury of four 40" screens at my fingertips.
Just you try doing that on Windows.
But OCR is something...
... that only occurred to me is AWOL more or less at the end of my immersive learning session. It's of little use without a working scanner. If Len actually manages to restore the 480GB SSD with my Win8.1 system buried on it, I may yet end up able to dual-boot and thus able to scan and OCR material under Windows while doing the bulk of my stuff under Linux.
Nurse! Is it time for my next meds yet?
One of the emails...
... that arrived while I was out and about in the glorious (but cold) sunshine warned me my "email address" had been stolen. I didn't bother to contact the outfit telling me this (not least because I last knew my login credentials for them about seven years ago) but I did visit their free checker just to see what advice was on offer. It's perfectly sensible:
And my email password is already a Thing of the Past. Again. Just in case.