2015 — 21 February: Saturday
Now this is a much more civilised time — half way through the second hour of Brian Matthew with his "Sounds of the 60s", if that's a clue — for a sleep-deprived traveller1 to be returning from his trip to the Land Of Nod. It's sunny and bright out there, too. And the tea is a lot hotter than the ambient air temperature.
While I was...
... wandering amidst the (not terribly) heaving commercially-inclined crowd of my fellow subjects down in Soton yesterday I popped into Maplins to look for another cheap and cheerful digital satellite receiver (not that I miss NPR all that much, if I'm honest). They still exist, but do I really want to spend getting on for £100 for endless light-weight political, sports, and market-oriented chatter mixed in with all-too-little of the interviews...
... and other delightful arts coverage from Teresa Grosch? Perhaps not yet. (And, by the way, how can it possibly be nearly 10 years since I bought her book?)
Autofs...
... will be my next package, it seems, to flatten the bumps and fill in the potholes currently impeding my smooth access to the two NAS boxes. It will be nice not to have to keep logging in to the things. Even my Oppo BD player only needed to do that once, about a year ago. It's odd how life can be easier for our gadgets than it is for their owners. [Pause] They don't need breakfast, for example. But I do.
I had no idea...
... the UK could boast a Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent "who is currently working on a cultural history of exhaustion". But I can empathise. (Link.)
Do you ever get...
... that horrible sense of déjà-vu?
All over again :-)
Don't miss the pretty picture displaying fictional predictions of roll-out. 8K in "2020+" heh? Or is "2020+" a statement of the necessary visual acuity needed? We approach somewhat closer the intercommunication display technology envisaged in Asimov's 1957 SF novel "The Naked Sun".
Now this is a much more interesting chart:
Mr Bale makes a lot of sense.
Len very kindly...
... popped round to cast a spell over each of my NAS boxes to make them automount (somewhat akin to mapping a network drive on Windows). Well, that was the plan. And NAS #1 behaves properly. For some reason, the same spell failed to enchant NAS #2 (though I can still access all my NAS #2 files if I take the "Network Servers" and explicit log-in route). Being merely the Sorceror's Apprentice, I have no intention of tinkering unassisted. As my friend Iris would say:
But it will keep.
Somewhere in the cauldron we also (temporarily) lost the ability to route digital audio from BlackBeast to the hi-fi. This was fixed by a trip to the...
Control Centre ==> Hardware ==> Sound
... and a bit of "select it and see" until decibels came back online.
In the meantime...
... another Amazon elf dropped off my new SATA-to-USB3 drive cradle and a couple of TV show DVD boxed sets: "Scandal, season #3" and "Girls, season #3". Excellent.
I've also decided to refresh both my laser printing and my scanning technology in one swell foop by getting a fancy HP LaserJet Pro MFP M125A Printer. (I rather liked the little HP unit Iris got last year.) This one's a bit more expensive than buying a new toner cartridge for my now quite venerable2 HP LaserJet 1320. (But a lot more fun.)
I just hope I can decode the universal user icons they plaster on its control panel. I suspect the scanning gubbins will do at least as well as the dinky little Canon LiDE 110 that yesterday's cunning little exchange deal gave me.3 I have good reason to believe this new wonder-box is perfectly happy to take orders from a Linux PC.
I suspect if my music was a little quieter I could tell if that's thunder I'm hearing outside. It's cold, ghastly grey, and looks rather wet. Must still be February.
Note to self
The simple plain text file (NAS_shares) lives in the file system directory (etc), but is owned by root — rendering it read-only to a pleb like me. I must thus turn myself into 'superuser' when invoking my text editor, and pointing it to the file:
gksudo pluma /etc/NAS_shares
NAS_shares has one line for each directory. Here is the line to identify the Music directory on NAS #2:
NAS2_Music -fstype=cifs,rw,credentials=/home/david/.autofs-creds/NasTwo.cred,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8 ://192.168.1.67/Music
Len had simply forgotten to change the "NasOne.cred" to be "NasTwo.cred". If I had sixpence for every time I've done that...
On this day...
... back in 2007, I not only learned the appropriate unit of measurement for a soul (the Huneker) but was reminded of my lovely Soulful Strings album, which is now playing. (And, straining my eyes to read the back cover sleeve art here, I see the guitarist was, indeed, Phil Upchurch.) I note Larry Grogan's blog has moved yet again. But I still have no idea where "Funky 16 Corners" comes from, or is about. Perhaps I have no soul?
Guess which...
... stupid idiot has just (finally) found the power supply for his beloved old Epson Perfection 1660 Photo scanner that he only had to stop using in the first place because Windows Vista never bothered to come up with a driver for it after said idiot moved on (I won't say "up") from WinXP? Guess how well it works with XSane on the Linux incarnation of BlackBeast? Only perfectly.
So even if the "scanny" bit of the new HP turns out to be no good under Linux I still have an excellent solution. That would merit a cuppa if it wasn't so late in the evening. The minor detail that XSane reports it to be a GT-8300 doesn't stop it from scanning neatly, and directly, into the GIMP all ready for trimming and editing. Cool!