2015 — 16 April: Thursday
Sadly1 I've read only one book, by only one of the authors listed here, but it's a fascinating programme.
Nearer to home...
... I have a lunch date, and the food cupboard is now getting a little sparsely-populated. I've also gone just over a week without any major Linux mishaps or being forced to delve and tinker. Though I have removed one side of BlackBeast's case to improve the cooling since yesterday afternoon. It strikes me as a better solution than running a system fan.
Thickening?
The chap writing here has taken more than somewhat against the Marxist interpretation of Westeros and its "Game of Thrones" I mentioned last week. Source and snippet:
A properly materialist reading of Game of Thrones can only conclude that, as a matter of historical necessity, in the fifth season the White Walkers will burst through the Wall, the dragons will break free from their petulant queen and her cloying white-savior complex, strange
sea monsters will turn the Braavosi banking houses into heaps of rubble with a sweep of their vast tentacles, and all will unite with the smallfolk of the land to dethrone all the bickering pretenders, melt the Iron Throne into tractor parts, and build a new and better society.
And maybe one day, in the not-too-distant future, when Marxist theory is no longer needed, people will enjoy telling each other fantasy stories set in that strangest and most mystical of eras, a time of malign magic and crushing poverty — the early twenty-first century.
That could never happen. Unlike breakfast :-)
Old tricks
It may be that I was never in any danger of having an easy time with my GTX970 graphics card under Linux. To be fair, it did work in BlackBeast Mk II (for less than a day) driving my 40" Philips monitor at full 4K 60Hz. But, frustratingly, nary a pixel appeared while it was in BlackBeast Mk III with a newer motherboard. (Link.)
Exactly one year...
... after agreeing to send mother's snail mails directly to me, the "Pru" has just asked for (and, of course, received) the return of her final annuity payment from the remnants of my father's pension scheme. Their payment was made in the "window" between her death and my being in a position to send them a copy of her death certificate. I'm unaware of any further estate 'debts' that need paying.
Exactly one year, too, since I noted this:
Watching Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Beta strutting...
... its funky stuff this afternoon has revived my curiosity regarding what, if anything, keeps me on the Windows platform. If DVDProfiler is, indeed, the only native application then the sooner I complete the editing of my video master data file (and let Brian's Python parsing skills loose
on it) the better. Mind you, I've never yet succeeded in running any of my flatbed scanners under Linux, which is not something I'm prepared to accept. I think just about all my other applications are pretty well catered for, one way and/or several others.
Vaguely prescient, I suppose!
Having skimmed...
... the latest issue of Len's "Custom PC" magazine I shall now be looking into an M.2 SSD "drive" for possible use as a go-faster Linux system disk. My motherboard may have let me down when it came to playing nicely with the GTX970 graphics card, but it also has one M.2 PCIe connector (although using that automatically disables two of my six SATA3 ports).
In partial, and potential, preparation I've removed the 'rusty' 1TB disk (adjusting /etc/fstab accordingly), rebooted, made sure my Mint is fully updated, and now moved gently along to the latest level of kernel for my system: 3.13.0-49. I've also identified the precise part of the motherboard into which an M.2 SSD fits, and noted the claimed 10Gbps that it ought to be able to achieve (if one can believe what's printed on the motherboard). That's a theoretical 67% increase in speed over the SATA3 connection I'm currently using.