2015 — 28 February: Saturday
You can "never go back" — a truism in the alien — but occasionally intersecting / colliding — worlds of hi-fi, A/V, and (I now find) large, high-resolution PC displays.1 First thing in the morning, before the neural circuitry that improves signal-to-noise ratio kicks in, a large screen is just what the optician ordered. Meanwhile, I note that simply switching on BlackBeast has perked up the new USB-connected toy to the point where it looks as if it's all ready to print (or scan) its next job. I will soon find out if yesterday's disconnect / reconnect cycle is actually mandatory.
Unlikely...
... as the proposition may seem here in Technology Towers I do actually appreciate these rare chances to cut down on the clutter.2 A neat little black box combining mono laser printing, colour scanning, and manual photocopying is a step forward. The only facility my earlier LaserJet offered that this one lacks, in fact, is duplex printing. And, since pinning myself to the web, I don't seem to need that. But I do need another cuppa.
This amused me...
... not least because it brought to mind both Captain Queeg fiddling with his steel ball-bearings in The 'Caine' Mutiny and a delicious putdown3 of the ghastly Bruno Bettelheim. Source and snippet:
Rebellion was in the air. The man sitting next to me, an ethnographer who studied street gangs, whispered, "They've lost control of the room." David was jangling his change so frantically that it was hard to keep your eyes off his groin.
I recalled a long-forgotten pop-psychology guide to body language that identified change-jangling as an unconscious masturbation substitute. If the leader of our sexual-harassment workshop was engaging in public masturbatory-like behavior, seizing his private pleasure in the midst of
the very institutional mechanism designed to clamp such delinquent urges, what hope for the rest of us?
What hope indeed? :-)
I was mildly irritated to have to break off from this TLS piece just to find out what the hell "authorial kenosis" was supposed to mean. I'm not left much wiser, trust me.
A pair of...
... good questions. Tesla's life was fascinating:
The search is over — we have a winner!
Having first told me how to use command-line grep, Len also mentioned a GUI-based program — equivalent to Copernic on Windows — for potential use as my Linux desktop search tool. I snaffled it off the Software Manager and indexed the entire 'molehole' web site. I was both astonished and delighted (a loud chortle could have been heard hereabouts) not only by the speed of indexing my 1.3GB set of 'stuff' but also by the elegance and power of the searching capability now at my fingertips.
The name of this paragon? Recoll
Having "instantly" found my Bettelheim putdown anecdote, by the way, I now think I'd better keep it to myself :-)
It's very annoying...
... when losing oneself inside an Inkscape tutorial session — not to mention gleefully bestriding the rubble left behind in the wake of several enjoyable practical experiments of, erm, varying success4 — to have to break off and re-fuel. I was amused, on gently inquiring of Mrs Google "Creating an arrow with Inkscape", to be offered a potential 125,000 search results. That's a lot of mildly puzzled people, methinks. I gather one of the 'approved' methods involves concatenating and grouping individually drawn line and triangle! Although that had occurred to me I rather hoped there might be a 'better' method hidden somewhere. There is (of course).
Draw a line, click on 'stroke', go to 'stroke style', click on end marker, choose your arrow head. Job done. Elapsed time? 20 seconds, max.
I only need to create a couple of the things to keep in a virtual quiver, and can easily clone and mutate them afterwards. Kudos to the creator of the somewhat more elaborate, but undeniably attractive, example here:
Riding off...
... in all directions? Some people read a great deal more into stuff than I ever remember doing. Source and snippet:
The books we read in adolescence often have an extraordinary effect on our lives. They are, among other things, an attempt at regime change. In Freud's language we could say that we free ourselves of our parents' ideals for us by using the available culture to make up our own ego-ideals, to evolve a sense of our own affinities beyond the family, to speak a language that is more our own. In the self-fashioning of adolescence, books (or music or films) begin really to take, to acquire a subtle but far-reaching effect that lasts throughout a person's life.
I read because I love reading, and I hate to be bored. Bite me.