2015 — 3 July: Friday
I'm completely astonished to discover1 that my new Minty installation has a few teensy bugs. What care I when Uncle ERNIE is just about to thrust another £25 in my direction this merry month? And Big Bro should shortly be in town. Where's my cuppa? :-)
Progress so far?
Let's see. I can once again print and scan on my fancy HP all-in-one courtesy of an updated proprietary binary module re-installed by following the walk-through on the HP website. I've added the PPA needed for updated "get-iplayer" builds and already used it to download two BBC "Late Junction" radio programmes. And proved I can play them digitally on the hi-fi. (Disabling the motherboard audio in the BIOS yesterday and thus forcing Mint to use my X-Fi soundcard may well have been a Good Thing.)
I have yet to tackle UltraEdit — and certainly don't want to have to pay for it again! — which is making file editing a little clumsier than necessary at the moment (using gEdit). I've yet to re-instate my Recoll desktop index, let alone decide what to let it index in this incarnation... perhaps not all the NAS music files this time?
Then there's the matter of re-making the SQLite browser (unless the Mint distro now uses a newer build this time). Plus whatever else I've overlooked. I've already had to change access permissions on my local webfiles directory back from read-only. Simple enough once I recalled those vital two characters at the end of the simple command...
sudo chmod 777 -R ./
... and remembered where I needed to be folder-wise when executing it.
Road blocks on my path to Nirvana?
Well, I set up my set of Virtual Workspaces, but they have now gone off the reservation somewhere. Haven't a clue where. Can't find anything to click, poke, prod, to re-enable the things. And exactly as before (with MATE) I've already managed to lose the ability to minimise windows to the panel and then retrieve them. Weird. I'm thus using the "roll up" behaviour to "minimise" windows to their Title Bar just to get them out of the way.
It all helps work up an appetite for my breakfast on this gloriously sunny morning before (I gather) the heavens disgorge Noah's flood later on.
Thanks, Len!
Restoring my Virtual Workspaces is simple. Click on an empty bit of panel, choose "Add to panel", select "Workspace Switcher". A virtual workspace pops back out of hyperspace. Right-click on it, and off we go. I now once more have each main application in its own Workspace. Profligate, I don't doubt. Bite me.
Minimised windows?
Choose "Add to panel" again. Select "Window List". Job done. Thanks again, Len. (I removed his earlier hint as the mechanism had changed.)
This can be...
... a tricky time of year for me. It's the doleful anniversary of Christa's terminal diagnosis in 2007. Couple that with all the ghastly news about climate change, resource consumption, population pressures, economic refugees, pollution, military adventures, political (and other human) stupidity, illness and frailty of chums... and existential angst can start to twitch a bit.
But at least all my display screen tearing and lagging has gone away :-)
Time for lunch. Man cannot live on "lemonses" alone. [Pause] That's much better. I do like a nice sardine salad. [Pause] Right, I've just updated my notes on BlackBeast Mark III. As I hinted yesterday evening, I suspect Mark III will now (and, possibly, quite soon) become the last of that particular line. Research continues.
Tread softly...
... lest you shatter my teenage delusions!
... as well as the tales written by Idaho-born food chemist Elmer Edward "Doc" Smith, creator of the popular Lensman space operas of the 1940s and 50s, in which eugenically bred heroes are initiated into a "galactic patrol" of psychically enhanced supercops. For Smith, altered states of consciousness were mainly tools for the whiteous and righteous to vaporise whole solar systems of subversives, aliens and others with undesirable traits. Herbert, by contrast, was no friend of big government. He had also taken peyote and read Jung...
Golly! Some while ago, I mentioned the death of Ken Slater — the amiable chap from whom I'd obtained, in 1968, and at a pocket-money-crippling 8/6d each, the six "main" books from the Lensman saga. Published by Pyramid, cover paintings all by Jack Gaughan, in a uniform edition at 60 cents each. I'd read the first volume2 "Triplanetary" when I found a battered hardback quite by chance in the Harpenden library in 1964. My Easter 1965 trip to Italy (where I fell in love, recall?) turned up an Italian comic that made me aware of the existence of further titles, and the game was a'foot.
It still took three years to track them down, which demonstrates (I suppose) one of the things the Interweb has made a bit easier.
I've just skimmed...
... an Ofcom report on Public Service Broadcasting here in the Benighted Kingdom. It's full of turgid prose like this:
Restrictions on advertising minutage on PSB channels: We have previously concluded that given our existing legislative duties, the purpose of regulation in this area and the evidence gathered, we believe that...
I lifted the PDF file's text directly out of Mint's "Atril Document Viewer" which, I suspect, used to be called Evince. Took less than half a minutage. [Pause] Browsing the classic essay by Garret Hardin ("The Tragedy of the Commons" in the December 1968 issue of "Science") similarly yielded this little gem:
... if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance — that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of "like father, like son" implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact.
Neatly put.