2015 — 5 August: Wednesday
My minor-league manifestation of a gambling streak — I jest — has let both me and dear Mama down. Neither I nor her Earthly representative for another six months (erm, me again) will be hearing from Uncle ERNIE any earlier than next month. Never mind; tomorrow — if I bump into Smaug and he asks "What has he got in his pocketses?" — I shall be able to answer "What, this little thing? Oh, that's nothing. Just my IBM pension.1 Let me pass."
Now, what have I done...
... with today's lunch money? I've already checked the back of the sofa when I was scrabbling around for the first petrol-filling of the era of the new car yesterday afternoon. Must remember to check I didn't break the wing mirror, too. I had to twist it to squeeze myself past it and the gas supply pipe while struggling to assess the remaining gap 'twixt front bumper and, erm, front bump. Pity the Monty Python "machine that goes beep" to warn about my rear end doesn't also have a forward-pointing mode.
Lies, damned lies, and...
... the range now showing on the Mazda's trip computer. Just before I gave yesterday's "Finished with engines, Mr Sulu." command — with a tank that I'd stopped filling as soon as the sensor cut off the pump at the garage — Mr Trippy was showing a full set of "blobs" and 390 miles on his display. Now that's already about 60 more than I ever felt comfortable trying for in the Yaris, but it's still far short of the brochure's claimed economy. Even one of the (Photoshopped?) brochure photos shows "472" miles, and that's with one blob already gone, dagnabbit.
Of course, the sophisticated algorithms in the trip gubbins may already have assessed my heavy-footed driving style, found it wanting, and re-calibrated their range accordingly. On the other foot, it's a brand-new engine, has only "done" 100 miles total so far, and was just back from an urban 3-mile hop that barely warmed it up. I shall keep an eye on it.
Despite having culled...
... my copy of the 1965 Pelican "Electronic computers" by Hollingdale (not "Holligdale", note, Mr Merriman) and Tootill some time before February 1994, I instantly recognised this fragment from its cover design:
And, having skimmed a couple of Moretti's books, I remain distinctly underwhelmed by the digital humanities, too. Just call me old-fashioned.
Today's little project...
... (though it will have to wait until after lunch etc) will be to re-examine OCR on Linux in rather more depth. At the moment, I can get a scanned image of text 'converted' into a PDF from which I can edit individually recognisable words. So just the remaining steps, erm, remain on that particular journey. I'm leaving my web browser loaded with a couple of very promising tutorials. #1 and #2.
"I'll be back!"
I've long regarded...
... Sean French as an excellent magazine diarist. Here's an extract from his comments in the "New Statesman" on Remembrance Day nearly 15 years ago:
Remembrance Day is running more strongly than ever, like The Mousetrap or Cats. The dignitaries at the Cenotaph, as likely as not, now outnumber the total of surviving British and empire combatants. There they stand, all the leaders of the political parties, each with an identical-sized wreath... You could imagine a wreath competition from year to year, like the toughness competition between Jack Straw and Michael Howard... Poignantly, if problematically, relatives of soldiers who were shot for cowardice were also present — a compassionate gesture, no doubt. And cheaper than a pardon and a back-dated restoration of the pensions they lost.
Whenever I hit...
... an intractable Linux problem — yes, it happens — I contact a guru, try to explain what I'm trying to do in a way that doesn't cause gales of hysterical laughter, try to obtain a workaround, or some alternative approach, and try to get it to work. Rinse and repeat until the problem sooner or later migrates from intractable to tractable. Today's problem? It started out with a perfectly normal 4GB USB stick, previously used as my Mint 17.2 ISO installation 'disk', but which I'd now just reformatted to FAT32, for me to use to transfer some data files to a Windows-using chum — yes, they exist — tomorrow. (I used FAT32 to sidestep any problems with the file transfers as he has plenty of more fun things to deal with.)
Fine. Except for one teeny-weeny thing. Caja (the default Linux Mint MATE file manager I was using to copy the files across to the USB stick) insisted my USB stick was read only. Thus making writing files to it, erm, tricky. Thunar (the default Linux Mint Xfce file manager) had no such qualms. Problem solved. Sort of.
But what was the root cause of the difference in the treatment of this stick? It took over 90 minutes to find out how to persuade Caja that the stick was indeed read/write. My stick's partition had had its 'Boot' flag set. Unless one also set its 'LBA' flag, or unset both flags, Caja stopped anyone from writing anything to it. (Sort of. We will skate quickly past the fact that I could still "sudo touch" it with a dummy zero-length file ending up written to it as that way lies madness.) Thunar continued to treat it as read/write all the time.
Nurse! More meds, please!