2015 — 3 April: Friday
Now we'll be able to see whether waking earlier1 makes any Great Difference in the Great Scheme of Things. I doubt it, somehow. Though it's certainly quieter before even the Dawn chorus has unpacked its instruments and started to tune up.
On that 'note'...
... I found the section of "Interstellar" extras I was watching a few hours ago (on the way Hans Zimmer's glorious musical score was painstakingly developed) to be about the best I've seen so far — although watching delightful behind-the-scenes shots of the amiable Bill Irwin2 'puppeteering' one of the ex-military robot assistants ran it a very close second. He was, of course, digitally painted out of the finished footage.
To head off...
... the consequences of too great a dose of Mounce stupidity later today, I've just taken the precaution of making my /backup destination (one of the 480 GB SSDs) mounted at /dev/sdc into a read-only device from Mint's point of view. All it took was to add "ro" to the sdc line in the /etc/fstab file table of device mount points. Since I shall be installing Bodhi on to sdc, I don't want to run the risk of anything I do while Mint is running being able to trample over the parallel Bodhi system3 that will then be in cryosleep on it.
Meanwhile, the jury remains out on the question of whether or not Bodhi's installation process is smart enough to re-use the swap space I've established on Mint's primary SSD, or whether I should simply let it go ahead and set up its own swap space on its own device. Interesting times could be coming up. Though I liked the Enlightenment-derived aesthetics visible during my test drive, I'm not yet convinced Bodhi will be quite as flexible for my purposes as Mint has already shown itself to be. (And there's nowt wrong with the aesthetics of MATE — I always liked the Gnome desktop.)
I was a little taken aback, for example, by the way Bodhi's Midori web browser, although resizable, seemed to be firmly — some might say "stubbornly" — glued to the top left corner of my screen rather than being willing to let me move it around4 in its window. It's all very well for the system to declaim "the desktop is the menu" but I'm awfully used to having separate windows on my desktop... and certainly also being able to do what I like with them, for that matter.
This made me stop...
... and think. (No bad thing.) Source and snippet:
I thought of the perceived disconnect between the electorate and the politicians. I thought of our disgust at the expenses scandal and a government so arrogant they can't be bothered telling us how they're
going to strip the state to the bone if they win another term in office.
When people lose trust in politicians, they need to find it elsewhere. Maybe, because they trust writers to tell some kind of truth buried in the fictions, we're being listened to in a way we rarely have
before. And that's a scary thought.
Isn't it just? :-)
Healthier...
... than the average chocolate Easter egg, I suspect:
Thanks, Uncle ERNIE!
[Pause]
The post-breakfast April shower is dousing the initial blossom that's just starting to appear on my Japanese decorative cherry tree, dagnabbit.
"Why" asks Bodhi Linux...
... "use Midori Web Browser?" After using it for a while, I see that's a very good question. Here's their answer:
When we polled our users asking what default web browser should be, we found a nearly equal 3-way tie among the current version of Firefox, an older version of Firefox, and Chromium. So, instead of choosing one of those that would have left approximately 2/3 of our users dissatisfied and needing to install another browser anyway, we went in a totally different direction: Midori!
I admire the stance, but I shall remain loyal to Firefox, thanks. I've been inspecting the small set of Applications they wholeheartedly endorse, and will be perfectly happy to try most of them, if only for a change.
My Bodhi experiment...
... terminated, with extreme prejudice, after a couple of hours spent playing around with the 'live' system. There were just too many irritations (and one or two very irritating glitches in the pre-install part of the process). I took a very dim view of letting it trample over the target SSD it high-handedly chose (without me getting any option to point it at the one I actually was prepared to put it on). No way am I having that. And several aspects of the user interface were just, well, frankly maddening. Whether this was really Bodhi, or its underpinning Enlightenment desktop manager — which crashed, by the way (not something calculated to increase my level of confidence) — will never now be known.
It won't stop me having a little play with some of the applications, of course. But MATE it is, for some while to come. [Pause] Plus a little dalliance with the Geany text editor. Which looks worthwhile (for me) on the strength of its HTML plugin alone.
It's pouring with rain out there this evening. Yuk. But the folky stuff on BBC 6Music is grand. As was the way Geany just closed off two open HTML tags for me, though it was a good job I noticed!
All play and no work?
I've just drafted the letter that will switch off my mother's monthly private pension payments. There's no point in hanging around until I get the Grant of Probate, as I'd simply have more hassle in returning any payments they make after her death. I expect they'll be only too happy to stop paying after 40 years! Which reminds me... On 10th March 1969, TJ Watson Sr's chauffeur John Persson (who was then aged 84, and had been retired in Sweden for 40 years) "gives $2m to cancer research, and still faces an income tax bill of around $30,000 this year". He bought 100 IBM shares in the 1920s...
Isn't capitalism wonderful?! :-)