2015 — 14 September: Monday
Despite the depressingly heavy rain this morning I'm cheered up by evidence of my parcel's overnight progress:
Its early delivery is a Good Thing (for today's Free Lunch) but I suspect its commissioning is a feast of fun yet to come. Disabling the compositing manager may be needed to diminish image tearing. I only know the compositing manager is currently active because it puts a silly shadow1 around each window:
I don't yet know how to disable2 the thing. Meanwhile, there's always the much simpler issue of more tea, and a fresh batch of stewed plums for my simple breakfast. I tried adding a greengage into the mix yesterday, but the result was underwhelming.
One lives and yearns :-)
Having sorted out...
... Big Bro's expressed desire to test his broadband speed (and while I wait to hear his 'score') I can now enjoy this nice anecdote:
Followed by the nice reminiscences here of Frank Cioffi.
I've called off...
... my free lunch today as there's still no sign of Mr Parcelforce or his nice red van. Grrr.
[Pause, while I make / eat some lunch, and dig out my last remaining DisplayPort cable]
Going offline now...
... while a certain amount of PC upheaval and experiment gets started:
- try to get a decent result on my WQHD 27" Asus screen from the new card via its DisplayPort output. If successful,
- transport BlackBeast Mk III across the village and hook it up to my chum's Ultra WQHD 34" Dell screen to see if it can drive that at full resolution and decent refresh rate. If successful,
- scrabble round the back of my sofa to find some spare cash. If successful,
- decide which screen to get...
What could possibly go wrong?
I was pleasantly surprised...
... by how little actually did go wrong. The smartest move (besides inviting Len to sit in the driver's seat) was the complete disabling of the motherboard's integrated graphics and telling the BIOS to go straight to the ATI Radeon graphics card3 just fitted into PCI-e slot #1. (Though to do that we first had to unearth and temporarily use an older keyboard to be able to "catch" the BIOS setup before the GRUB loader blasted its way through at approx. Warp 10 so it could then get on with waiting for 10 seconds before loading Linux.) Disabling the integrated graphics stopped a nasty clash between the newly-installed proprietary ATI driver and the existing video driver.
Paying for the spiffy...
... new screen — a Dell Ultrasharp U3415W 34" Curved Monitor — was much more difficult. My card was declined. Twice. Three chats with the supplier could only yield the suggestion that I talk to my bank. As I put the phone down on the third chat it rang again. It was an automated call from my bank to tell me that the card had been declined, and checking that nothing fraudulent was going on. So order #3 worked fine. (Of course, whether the Dell shows up "by 10" on the next working day now remains to be seen.) Nice if it does! It will give me time to get some more fresh food in. The last of the nice garlic and lemon roast chicken was scoffed earlier today.
Delving around...
... the Dark Side of BlackBeast I quickly realised the dust that had accumulated around the two NAS boxes sitting quite near it meant they both needed their (semi-annual?) clearup. I confess I had to ask Mrs Google to show me how to open up the earlier box, which has been whirring away since early 2013. The later one needs no screwdriver. But was rather dustier inside.