2015 — 10 August: Monday
The siege conditions prevailing hereabouts1 will be dispersed in an hour or so by an expotition to fix the echo in Mother Hubbard's cupboard. And get some non-mouldy bread etc (with any luck)... It's pretty damp out there, and extraordinarily quiet as (I suspect) many people are away with buckets and spades. Good luck with that, say I.
Six months...
... after my forced march into the world of desktop Linux — and one day after browsing a series of notes on virtualising some incarnation of Windows in a VirtualBox — I thought it appropriate to take stock. I still hanker, mildly, after Xara's sophisticated graphics package — after using it in various incarnations since 1990 that could just be over-familiarity, I guess. Then there's Omnipage's undeniably very polished OCR. And my inability to scan slides and negatives with my simplified HP All-In-One device. But I doubt any of these gaps in my computing life is worth the pain of a Return to the Dark Side. In essence, I conclude I shall stay with the devil I have come to know.
A recap:
- CD ripping (still yet to use, but I expect no problems)
- desktop searching (Recoll holds its own against Copernic)
- email (Thunderbird)
- file editing (UltraEdit — not free, but very capable)
- image creation and manipulation (the GIMP and Inkscape)
- image viewing (gThumb)
- MP3 playback (VLC)
- Music collection management and tagging (Quod Libet)
- NAS access (symbolic links to Samba served files)
- OCR (still investigating tesseract and gscan2pdf)
- printing (HP LaserJet Pro MFP M125a is supported)
- scanning (HP LaserJet Pro MFP M125a is supported using XSane, via the GIMP)
- spreadsheets, documents, and (heaven forbid!) presentations (LibreOffice)
- SSH server file transfers (FileZilla)
- video playback (VLC)
- web-browsing (Firefox and Chrome)
What more could a chap want? It turns out I haven't missed DVD Profiler at all. I see I left PDF viewing (Document viewer) and creation (LibreOffice) off my original list. It's a doddle. And downloading BBC radio with "get_iplayer" works perfectly (at least, until the next time the BBC "improves" its zany delivery system). Better not forget to mention Python, too. And SQLite. And my "lighttpd" web server beavering away on both BlackBeast Mk III and the Raspberry Pi2 upstairs. Yes. It's official: I like Linux.
But then, I like breakfast, too.
My Hadrian's Wall...
... correspondent has just sent me a marvellous link to a Tube map of Londinium. Thanks, Brian! (I asked him if it was Red Shifty up there; will I Garner a reply, I wonder?)
It pains me...
... whenever I spot something sensible in "The Economist" as it makes my ingrained prejudices2 wobble:
... assign students a paper of ten pages, and then tell them the real assignment is to trim it back to five in class, with the clock ticking. The resulting skill will, in its usefulness, far outlast anything they might learn about symbolism in Tolstoy or the causes of the Reformation.
Having completed my next batch of supplies shopping, I can contemplate the attempts to rain with equanimity, and the sound of the Tallis Scholars live from Edinburgh.
[Long pause]
Some of the leaves in my garden are already changing colour. Good grief!