2015 — 2 July: Thursday
Forget all that "'Twas a dark and stormy night" business.1 Where's my cuppa? :-)
Years of bitter...
... struggle against the oppression of a variety of PC systems (not just Windows) has taught me the value of backing data up, so (as it were) I'm currently all backed up (and then some). The latest 5TB external USB3 drive is a great help, and slurps stuff up plenty fast enough at rates in excess of my (limited) patience.
I will say this in defence of the virtues of a temporarily restricted-resolution display screen: it forces you to concentrate on the essentials with literally no onscreen room for visual distractions. Furthermore, ahead of the pending re-installation I've remembered to copy all my browser's bookmarks. Even though I have surprisingly few regular web watering holes it's still a bit of a pain to rediscover them.
There's an...
... interesting essay here. Source, and not terribly representative snippet:
That controversy ended with a double defeat. In a case that was heard by the Supreme Court, the NEA Four failed to have their grants restored. But Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Newt Gingrich likewise failed in their determined effort to defund the NEA (total budget at the time: $165 million). And the American public — left with an impressionistic vision in which urine, bullwhips, and a naked but chocolate-streaked Karen Finley figured largely — drew the fatal conclusion that contemporary art had nothing to offer them.
It's just that I remembered a sketchbook entry by Shary Flenniken that "captured" some of the Finley furore at the time. (And I also heard "furore" given only two syllables on BBC Radio 3 just yesterday morning. Oh, Clemmy!)
Further supplies...
... gathered in, I shall now focus on breakfast. It was trying (not very hard) to rain while I was out. Indeed, I almost need some room lights on. The living room is currently a very much more pleasant 24.0C (cooler than the sleeping quarters upstairs) and steadily dropping. I have a lunch date, and there's a few Linux notes to be made ahead of that.
It's quite surprising...
... how quickly you can adjust to a change of PC screen (whether size, resolution, or both). As long as the thing doesn't flicker or tear I can get used to it. I must admit I became very weary of the inevitable tearing and image lag on the Philips 40" 4K screen when I moved stuff around inside Inkscape, repositioned desktop windows, or even just simply tried to watch a video in a VLC window.
I conclude it was "one small step" too far.2 The trouble I had with support for the necessary graphics cards (certainly in Linux Land) horrified me. And in terms of its sheer size on the desk I can't pretend it wasn't a bit "in your face". As one of my chums remarked:
I'm not going to say "I told you so". We both knew that going to 4K was pushing the current tech to its limit. AFAICS you really need DisplayPort 1.3 and/or hdmi 2.0 but I don't claim I knew that when you started down this path. The former should fix the tearing, the latter should up the refresh rate to 60Hz. Neither are readily available, certainly not on large monitors (of which there are very few besides the Philips).
Whether my experience will "lern me" is a more dubious proposition. But I'll settle for getting all my pixels back on this 27" screen for the time being. If necessary, on a fresh Mint 17.2 system. KBO.
I'm acidly amused...
... to note the glacial pace at which Barclays opens Executor's accounts (current and savings, exactly matching the pair that dear Mama had) in my name. Having already taken an amazing 15 elapsed days just to set up the new accounts they today tell me, by snailmail, that although these accounts (or this account, depending which paragraph of their letter I read) are/is "now open and ready for use"
- they will take 10 days to post a cheque book to me (how quaint is that?), and
- they intend to allow themselves a frankly outrageous 15 further working days to move the digital bits representing the funds across.
If I want online access, I must schlep back into my local branch (they've neglected to mention which that is, but I shall start with the one in the village here) to request this. If I want a debit card, tough. Executor accounts can't have one. I will be surprised if I see any interest payments on these funds while they are within this glacial system. I further doubt this relationship of mine with Barclays has very long left on the clock.
Considerably later...
... I'm now typing this into an editor session running under Linux Mint 17.2 MATE (predictably, I suppose). The new screen is at its full native resolution and refresh rate. And — sadly — my relationship with BlackBeast Mark III is at an all-time low. Most of the strikes against it are to do with its BIOS, but suffice to say it kept Len fully occupied for several hours, burned through a USB stick, and necessitated a lot more faffing around.
At least I paid for lunch :-)
Resizing the original...
... system partition and moving it "along" its disk made plenty of room for "just" the new Minty system. Making a symbolic link from the new system's Home to the previous one (on the same SSD, but in a different physical location on the disk) kept all my user data available. Judicious editing of the fstab entries made sure all three SSDs and the two NAS boxes remain where I expect to find them. Putting Filezilla back on the system picked up the configuration data I need to access my internal and external web servers — I still need to jump through a minor hoop to re-instate 'localhost' web serving from lighttpd. My Thunderbird email is all still in place.
I need to re-instate the HP printer/scanner. Make sure I can still convey digital audio over to the hi-fi. Make sure get_iplayer is back and ready for radio downloads from the BBC. Put back my Ultra Edit text editor. My desktop search tool, Recoll. And anything else I've forgotten and stub my toe against.
But I am also now...
... looking for a more sensible, less workstation-oriented, approach to meet my future computing needs. I'm not a PC gamer. Nor do I do much audio or video processing. I edit simple text-based files. Generate the occasional PDF. Run the odd bit of Python. Manipulate simple graphics. I barely need a Raspberry Pi for most of that. Watch this space!
The appearance of MATE's desktop is just about back to what I want. (Or do I mean "what I'm used to"?) The Bach burbling in the background is as pleasing as ever. And the living room is a balmy 25.6C at 20:07, give or take. Time for a celebratory cuppa, methinks. And some non-PC time.