2015 — 4 September: Friday
My chum Len has a very large collection of video material that his cats naturally wish to watch on his TV. To wrangle this material (he's given up trying to wrangle the cats) he has recently equipped himself with a neat little Intel NUC and set off down a Linux Mint 17.2 Kodi-based road destined (he feels sure) to lead him to future PC-mediated video-displaying happiness. It is controlled, very neatly, by a Kodi App on his SHIELD Tablet PC that talks wirelessly to his NUC via his network. After our lunch yesterday he gave me a demo of progress so far.
There's dreadful video tearing via the NUC's HDMI output to his TV display, but only if his PC screen is active on the NUC's DisplayPort output at the same time. So he disables that while using Kodi, and then restores it properly afterwards with this "intuitive" incantation:
DISPLAY=:0 xrandr --output DP1 --auto --primary --left-of HDMI1
My own collection...
... of video material is almost all on DVDs or BDs. What PC-based files I do have live on my NAS boxes, and my Oppo Blu-ray player is adept at feeding them to my Kuro plasma screen without using my PC. Since my last painful round of misadventures with graphics cards I now use only the native display capabilities of the Intel HD4600 onboard graphics baked into the i7 4790K CPU. This has HDMI 1.4a, via which I drive my 27" Asus at 2560x1440 at 60Hz perfectly well for my purposes. The NUC's onboard graphics are more "evolved" than the HD4600, so Len's approach wouldn't necessarily suit me unless I were first to dip a toe back into the murky waters of a graphics card. (I don't even have a DisplayPort1 output.)
It was an interesting demo, but seems to show that PCs and TVs are (still) not yet fully converged.
Meanwhile, my first apricots...
... have just proved nearly as unimpressive as last night's pancakes. Back to plums, I suspect. I also have in mind a little expotition at some point today. The sun is shining.
The delightful...
... remembrance of Bob Conquest included one of his fabulous limericks. Source and snippet:
My demands upon life are quite modest,
They're just to be decently goddessed.
Astarte or Isis
Would do in a crisis,
But the best's Aphrodite, unbodiced.
Quite agree.
[Longish pause]
When I got back from my day out, there was an Australian bush hat waiting on my front doorstep. Thanks, Big Bro. I shall open that parcel after my evening meal. I didn't go too far afield today, but I note it's the start of the boat show next week, and Soton is generally better avoided for the duration of that little festival.
My life wouldn't really...
... be complete without an occasional visit to a bookshop, would it? I cannot tell a lie: I picked up Jill Lepore's in-depth analysis of the weird chap who in the course of a packed life somehow managed to invent both "Wonder Woman" and the even more dubious polygraph. The parody title2 in the middle cost me a whole £1. And the letters from Nina Stibbe? Judging by the bits I'd already skimmed in the bookshop, and from what I've now read, it's a total hoot:
I downloaded...
... the "auto-ripped" files of Symphony #14 by Shostakovich — played by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic "under the baton" of Vasily Petrenko — ahead of the delivery of the one CD I failed to find today (of the uniform Naxos set of all fifteen symphonies) on HMV's basement shelves. Amazon assured me I needed the Flash player to be able to do this. Amazon was wrong. (I suspect Amazon doesn't expect people to be using Linux on their desktop PC.)
A nasty black cloud has just finished blowing past without dropping anything. I shall celebrate with what has already turned into quite a late evening meal. And perhaps a small glass of wine? Indeed, I suppose I could even eat in the dining room whose emptiness / tidyness niece #1 has noted in her email. She'll be in the UK for a while, and hopes to squeeze in a visit (having run out of books and music, no doubt).
I'm amazed...
... to discover that my lovely new snugly-fitting XL Wagga Wagga "Aussie Outback" black leather bush hat... is actually made in Pakistan!