2015 — 14 March: Saturday
My globe-trotting half-aunt1 just emailed from her iPhone (what's an iPhone, I wonder?) to tell me she's "At Cairns today and just had a helicopter flight over the Great Barrier Reef. Weather beautiful, saw some rays & turtles". I had to go to Orlando to do that, in October / November 1992 on a family holiday trip part-paid by IBM, bless 'em. No chopper involved, though. Never been in a chopper. Nasty, noisy things that defy the laws of aerodynamics as I misunderstand them if you go forwards too fast. I feel she should at least have emailed actually from the flight ("I'm on the helicopter...") but perhaps there's poor coverage over said Reef.
While waiting...
... for the Kinder to arrive last night2 I wrote up exactly how to get the (lightweight but nifty) lighttpd running on the local machine to serve up a local website, or three, here in Technology Towers. My notes will come in handy after the (inevitable) next few Linux installations, I expect. My next task will be a choice between
- downloading and remaking the newer version of the SQLite DB browser than the one that's currently on the Mint repository,
- resuming battle with the new HP LaserJet printer / scanner device (which Len suggested I hang off the network rather than relying on a direct USB connection) by first chasing down another copy of the proprietary HP binary that makes the whole thing work a lot better, or
- making some breakfast in the wake of the Kinder's unusually rapid early departure this morning.
They must return the van by 11:30 this morning, it seems, and arrived too late last night to get done that which they wanted to do. There will thus be a return visit in the near future for them to attempt the dismantling of Bed #1, its removal, and the mantling of Bed #2 in its place. Good luck with that, I say. All the bits are now stacked in "his" room. My advice was sought on 4K TV screens of circa 40" (utterly pointless, of course, but that's a discussion for when they have more time). And I've been left a bunch of ZFS-oriented NAS site URLs to browse at my leisure. (He was under the [mistaken] impression that I had a Synology NAS "going spare" as well as one of my 27" monitors for his upcoming birthday.)
Breakfast, and the cleaning-up of a bloodied stubbed toe first, methinks. Ouch.
Currently thwarted...
... in my attempt to get working the 2.92 version of "get_iplayer" that I've just snaffled off github (it's more recent than the version on the Mint repository). More precisely, it's working "Up to a point, Lord Copper" as it finds radio and TV feeds. But it's stubbornly failing to download the three "Late Junction" programmes from last week I have my beady eye on despite being happy to list them, and despite trying all modes in which to download them. Since Seth Lakeman was on last night's "World on 3" and I (naturally) turned down the volume when Peter and lady eventually arrived, I wouldn't mind hearing that again, either. It, too, is in the list of available feeds, but also fails to arrive at Technology Towers. Not what I pay my BBC licence fee for :-)
To allay my current pangs of thwartedness (it can't be hunger already can it? It's only 14:13) I've ordered a new-ish book about Roger Corman:
I'd heard John Landis talking about it3 on the steam wireless recently — "recently" being sometime within the last year or so. Corman was an interesting (and very influential) Hollywood Player. One has to wonder if Elmore Leonard's "Harry Zimm" character in "Get Shorty" was a relative.
[Pause]
Doubtless...
... it's just my unfamiliarity with aspects of Linux, but I find it a bit disconcerting — when trying to right-click on, and thus open, an MP3 file with the 'decibel' player from within a subdirectory called "Fiona" (for the divine Fiona Talkington, within my "Late Junction" collection, obviously!) on one of my NAS devices — to hear nothing but silence and, after a puzzling pause, eventually, see a warning that...
"Fiona" isn't responding
... if, like me, your first thought is "WTF?" and your second is "Mercy me! What program or process in my Linux Mint system is 'Fiona' for, erm, goodness sakes?" However, Time wounds all heels, and I'm now listening to her curating a fine collection of very odd stuff while reluctantly concluding that, at 15:24, somebody round here really needs to do something soon about lunch before the low blood sugar and the relative lack of sleep gang up on what's left of me and I collapse in an unfed, ungainly, heap on the carpet, to be found in mummified, semi-skeletal dessicated form in months to come...
OK, OK, I'll get right on it. <Sigh>
Turns out...
... the new secret get_iplayer incantation is a matter of specifying one of the 'modes'. So I just guessed which one seemed most likely...
./get_iplayer --type=radio --modes=flashaachigh --get "Late Junction"
... and got lucky. Not sure of a way round the:
WARNING: Required ffmpeg/avconv does not exist - not converting flv file
with which it teased me, relating (I guess) to a missing plugin.4 But good ol' VLC plays the resulting downloaded .flv file in glorious 320Kbps stereo so, do I look bothered? That's all I wanted, after all. And when I then tried the more familiar...
./get_iplayer --type=radio --mode=best --get "World on 3"
... down came Mr Lakeman, also as a Flash video file containing just audio. That will do fine for now.
Back from an...
... unplanned mercy mission delivering the only spare, working, USB-wired keyboard currently5 in the house over to Iris, whose fancy wireless one that came with her fashionably-red HP All-in-One had curled up into a terminal decline that neither fresh batteries, nor my attempts to force it to re-handshake with the Mother Ship, could entice it out of. Not a bad idea, methinks, to equip myself with spare keyboard and mouse for just such an event even though I personally have never got on too well with the wireless sub-species.
Then, of course, the one time I turn left out of her little road (to take the Bishopstoke to Eastleigh route back for a change) rather than turning right (to take the windy, narrow, dark Bishopstoke Lane route that takes me [eventually] past Brambridge) is the one time I hit a roadworks diversion directing me through bits of the Dark Side of Eastleigh I've never visited in over 33 years.
Never mind; I'm back now, and shall make a light supper, methinks, before a change of activity. It's 20:39 all of a sudden... When's the last time I watched a film?! Or revisited part of my former life?