2015 — 7 March: Saturday
I noted — without pleasure — the enforced departure of Professor David Nutt back in late 2009. A sensible chap — I believe his unofficial job title was "drugs tsar" at the time — whose only fault as far as I knew was to tell truth to power. Good to see him back, this time with a proposal1 for crowd-funding further research into LSD for the light he suspects it will shed on our perception of reality and our place in this weird Universe :-)
In my own, more mundane, version of reality this bears further research too.
As does my need for another cuppa and some breakfast. [Pause] The Grauniad had a short profile of John Maynard Keynes the other day (extracted, I suspect, from the new biography by Richard Davenport-Hines). It had a lovely quote on the man's attitude to excessive love of money:
But the love of money for its own sake seemed to him "a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a kind of shudder to the specialist in mental diseases". Traditional capitalism "exalted some of the most distasteful human qualities into the position of the highest virtues". He saw his task as saving capitalism from itself.
A filthy job, but someone has to do it. Hard not to recall that in light of this disgraceful story. (Link.)
Given what was said...
... in this Edge interview about future battlefields I can only balefully regard this technology as a thoroughly depressing development, no matter how clever it is. Keep it out of the robotic hands of the Terminator.
What is wrong with our clever technologists? Have they no imagination? No better ideas? This amusing tale of modern TV woe made me smile more. And as I browsed through the "Radio Times" I bought yesterday, I actually skipped Sunday through Friday TV and flipped to the radio section relegated to the back (on the naughty step, perhaps?)
I do watch TV of course; just not the stuff broadcast live in the UK. Last night, for instance, I very much enjoyed Hugh Grant and Marisa Tomei in "The Rewrite". But it was delivered to my Kuro plasma screen from a spinning DVD, not through the aerial (which now only feeds the Sony set-top box I use upstairs in my reading room purely as a digital radio).
This strikes me...
... as heartening news this morning:
And Mr Yodel hit the road at 09:40, too. Is it too early for a celebratory cuppa? Ever?!
It's here!
But I'm too much of a scaredy-cat to even think of installing it until I've had a late bite of lunch to stave off any trembling digits of the human variety hereabouts. Then my Game Plan will be:
- Reset BlackBeast to use the non-proprietary graphics drivers that were able to give me a working display, at least, on the 4K screen (albeit one of merely Full HD resolution)
- Shutdown, and physically swap cards
- Reboot
- If the system still basically works, load the 64-bit lump of binary driver code I downloaded from NVidia
- Reboot
Len is confident that nothing he did by way of NOMODESET in or around the GRUB loader...
vmlinuz-3.13.0-24-generic root=UUID=25878526-7aec-4c96-a1ae-d71e82b1f1cc ro quiet splash nomodeset $vt_handoff
... will blow anything up. Much. We shall fairly soon see.
For "fairly soon" read...
... about two hours, 90% of which (approx) was spent trying just to fit2 the new graphics card, followed by repairing the damage to the various bits and pieces I'd been unplugging to move them out of the way temporarily. The other 10% was spent chatting to my two gurus for various bits of advice (software and hardware). Still, all is now once again hi-res sweetness and silent light, or whatever they say. [Pause] Tea! I need tea!
Tips...
... for the next time I do this:
- Try not to look surprised when your 40" 4K screen is driven in VGA mode (640x480) for the duration of the graphics card 'outage' — after all, it was good enough for several years back in the 1980s
- Admire the way the terminal prompt extends half way across the screen, but is now entirely legible from way out in the kitchen where the telephone lives while you "phone a friend" for help
- Remember how to kill the X-server next time (sudo service mdm stop) as the nVidia binary driver can't update what it needs to while there's a desktop active
- Remember to plug in the extra power connector the hungry new graphics card needs (this saves it the bother of telling you to do that before it shuts everything petulantly straight back down the first time you switch on)
- It's not cool to dangle all your SSDs randomly from their power and data leads, but — given the way the graphics card has sucked all available free space out of the interior of the case — I suppose it's excusable
- If you must pull out a bunch of LED status leads, the power switch lead, the system reset lead (accidentally), the X-Fi sound card, and the great, fat, power cable bundle3 (deliberately) during your feeble but increasingly-despairing attempts just to get the card into the case, let alone plugged in and wired up, at least remember what goes where when you re-instate things
- That includes the spare Molex to SATA power connector you now seem to have left over, after closing the case post-surgery — yes, I checked, all the SSDs seem to have power and data connections... though I'm now left wondering if the BD-ROM optical drive does
Having just used it to skim through the 99% of irrelevant information (gaming tweaks under Windows) in the PDF user manual on the supplied CD-ROM I can confirm it does. How did it get to be 19:16 already? No wonder I'm starving.
Now why should...
... changing my graphics card stop scanning from working? Running 'hp-check' gave a Code 12 communications error. Power cycling the HP LaserJet and changing the USB port it's on induced a partial recovery, but not a full one. This is a bit annoying. Of course, it may just be evidence that I dislodged some internal gubbins in the engine room earlier. Grrr.
I think it's time for a change of my hobby focus this evening. [Pause] I've just added some notes about Brian's recent burst of SQLite and Python-charming for me, here.