2015 — 13 September: Sunday
I've done all I can1 ahead of this morning's upcoming malware skirmish on my friend's potentially-afflicted Win 8.1 PC. Namely, download two of the three most useful malware scanners to take with me for running on her poorly PC. Microsoft (quite sensibly, but slightly irritatingly) refused to let me download my third candidate onto what they no doubt regard as an inappropriate OS. Since that's how I feel about their OS too, let's not get into a fight.
Copying the two tools...
... on to a USB stick reminded me why I keep the Xfce file manager Thunar knocking around alongside MATE's "own" file manager, Caja. The USB stick I'd formatted back to FAT32 for sneakerware transfer duties auto-mounted just fine but is treated as a read-only device2 by Caja. Thunar, more helpfully, simply lets me copy anything I want straight on to the stick without so much as a quibble.
Time to stew a fresh breakfast plum, methinks. Better sort out a pair of socks without holes in, too. Iris likes to keep her carpets untainted by the outside world.
If I heard...
... the 8 o'clock BBC Radio 3 newsreader correctly, a Scottish politician has said "she would only want another poll if she could be sure of winning it". How very honest. Or perhaps she simply doubts the wisdom of crowds?
On a vaguely-related note, I've just declined to provide an online "Revoo" of my new car. Nor am I particularly happy that Mazda let this third-party contact me. I'm not a motoring journalist, and at 664 miles or so, it's far too early to give a meaningful answer to the question "Would you recommend people buy this car?" I also doubt the wisdom of crowds, but that puts me in a tiny minority straight away. Perhaps I should move to Scotland?
I'd forgotten...
... just how very unblissful is the process of thoroughly scouring a Windows PC — even one as 'clean' and simple as the HP All-in-One Win8.1 system I set up for Iris — for signs of a malware infestation. The entire process of confirming inner cleanliness to my satisfaction, then adding a couple of web sites to the set Rapport will safeguard keyboard entry on, then cleaning out accumulated cruft, and then finally assessing and installing several items I found stacked up in a neglected queue (by running Windows Updates explicitly) took over 90 minutes, and I think three re-boots. One of which hung, of course.
Meanwhile, a guru asserts Caja (which is a derivative of Nautilus) still suffers from a known USB bug in Nautilus first reported in the distant days of Ubuntu 12.04 and still festering away. However, his workaround is more work than my workaround, so I shall be keeping Thunar pinned to my auto-hiding left hand panel... And yesterday's email from a dead person had an unsinister explanation, too.
Today's lunch is...
... approaching as David Gilmour turns up on BBC 6Music. Tomorrow's lunch, by contrast, will (if my parcel...
... is delivered early enough for me to sign for it) be a treat from Iris, who feels for some reason she is in my debt. Who am I to argue?
After dithering about with rotational...
... experiments, I finally ended up with satisfactory scans of the covers of last week's three individual DVDs making up David Hare's "Worricker trilogy". Each cover had to be rotated physically by between six and eight degrees before scanning — and, of course, then rotated back by the same, erm, degree in software after scanning. It was the only way I could find to minimise the nasty interference between my scanner and the colour block printing screen settings used by whoever had produced these perfectly normal-looking pieces of artwork.
I assume this isn't a deliberate action to try to stop people copying the artwork, but who knows? My previous workaround (simply scanning at twice the resolution) turned out to be not enough. I think I've earned my next cuppa, and perhaps a change of entertainment for a while to let the Mk I eyeballs cool down.
When I filled up...
... with go-juice on the way back from the land of the dubious PC I noted that (a) it's now come down to just £1.11 or so per litre, and (b), my first 680 miles have cost me around £67 with the trip computer currently suggesting just over 40 miles per gallon. When I'm (sort of) coasting down hill, the 'instantaneous' reported mpg figure goes as high as 170 — the Toyota Yaris couldn't count above 99.