2015 — 20 August: Thursday
My evening viewing was, perhaps predictably, "The Big Chill" followed by all the extra features — including confirmation by Kasdan that it was indeed Kevin Costner who ended up on the cutting room floor — that (as usual) Criterion had fitted alongside their pristine print1. There's also an interesting essay by Lena "Girls" Dunham in the accompanying booklet. Nice.
Moving right along...
... there's the business of a pile of laundry to be folded away and a pile of supplies shopping to be gathered in before the pleasure of today's lunch date. Breakfast sounds like a good idea, too. The rain has stopped, and there were2 even a few hints of sunshine.
Depression is...
... melancholy, minus its charms, wrote Susan Sontag. Apparently. Well, the writer of this essay could have used a bit of that earlier sunshine. Though I liked this snippet:
Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something in common with our understanding of depression today — or at least of the depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue.
I grilled (and enjoyed) some sausages with my salad last night. Does that mean I'm not melancholic? :-)
What makes me think...
... the splendid team of technical writers and translators who laboured mightily to produce the many, many pages of my Mazda2's user manual failed to include (or, at least, listen to) anyone who'd ever actually sat in the car and tried to follow — to the letter — its annoyingly cryptic instructions regarding the enabling of the potentially vitally useful "miles you have left on this amount of fuel" display of what they laughably describe as a trip computer?
On the evidence I was able to glean, my first 393 miles have managed a paltry 43.5 miles per gallon. I'd hoped the many enforced miles spent at 50 mph on those motorways on Tuesday would have been a little more fuel-frugal than that, though I admit 50 mph wasn't my speed at all times (as it were). It seems that resetting the Trip 'A' value (something I did every time I took out the Yaris) may also reset the accumulating data, so I shall now try leaving it undisturbed since this morning's re-fuelling.
I shall pick up my "proper" space-saver spare tyre and its associated accoutrements tomorrow morning. Bang goes another £389. But better than trying to fiddle with cans of temporary foam filler, surely?
Following...
... the usual splendid steak and ale pie at "The Wheatsheaf" in Braishfield — we are but simple creatures of habit, after all — it was back to Len's for a quick demo of a Kodi system (the new name for what used to be XBMC) that he's set up as a proof-of-concept on his Intel NUC. His need to play video files is mirrored by my wish to play audio files. Hard to believe, but it's now been over eight years since I watched that Google video about breaking into an Xbox to turn it into a competent media PC. And Brian first demonstrated an XBMC system running on just such a box to me shortly thereafter. (He now uses Kodi running on a Raspberry Pi.)
[Pause] Back at Technology Towers, it turns out that Kodi works just fine on BlackBeast Mk III under Mint 17.2 and could recently have been heard playing music on another virtual workspace:
A good solution. A simple keyboard toggle (\) to flip between Kodi's default "visible from 10 feet away" fullscreen and a desktop window was extra goodness. I will now turn it loose to graze on the full audio library on one of the NAS boxes and see how it behaves under a heavier load.