2015 — 30 October: Friday

Momentarily ruffled1 I've woken up rather (too) early this morning, with thoughts of NUCs running through what passes for my mind. However, having now (once again) browsed the likely cost (and assessed the unlikely benefit) of various smaller, quieter, and only potentially less-temperamental PCs than BlackBeast Mk III — both DIY and pre-assembled, but all Linux-based — I can't say I'm any nearer making a decision yet. But that doesn't lessen my enjoyment of the quest, or stop it from being interesting. Well, "Up to a point, Lord Copper."

Certainly more fun than the rain I can currently hear out there in the pre-dawn world :-)

So to today's...

... first cuppa, before I email my favourite cousins with an all-in-one composite of birthday greetings, a welcome home message, and a "good luck with the new knee" wish. Remind me of the benefits of advancing age and frailty. Again. I keep forgetting them, clearly.

"The days are just packed"...

... if you recall Calvin and Hobbes. Too long yesterday morning was lost fossicking around for my 2001 copy of Karla Jennings' The Devouring Fungus: tales of the computer age. I'd re-read Mark Sinker's review of it in a "New Statesman" clipping from 1991 but actually ended up (during our customary post-lunch cuppa) asking Len to find me an image of its front cover to remind me what it looked like. And thus increase my chance of judging both its size and its more likely shelf locations. (Having exhausted all the usual suspects, as it were.)

No rush; I'm still ploughing on through the John Boyd bio to the detriment of overmuch "progress" elsewhere. Like, say, watching a pair of Bond BDs I've been lent. For which I shall 'respond' next week with...

Dechronization

... since I know he enjoys time travel yarns as much as I do, and he doesn't know this (excellent) one. The manuscript was only found among Simpson's papers after his death. Glorious title, is it not?

A momentary lapse...

... of Lehrer. Having read this review of "Malevolent Muse" (another glorious title) I decided for obvious reasons I now wanted to hear the Tom Lehrer song "Alma" again. Could I find it? Well, yes, eventually, but it certainly wasn't in the first of several archives I searched. Among the 5,265 items in the 33.9GB folder of "Spoken" material is a subfolder "Comedy" in which nestle my MP3s ripped from the classic Tom Lehrer albums. "Alma" features on his "That was the year that was" album. It's now safely restored to the appropriate NAS.

But I need a more nearly foolproof system. Obviously. (My present one having been designed by me.)

Speaking of foolproof...

... I confess this made me wince:

Win 10

Gotta love that "interesting learnings". I hope their code is better-written, but (to be honest) "Who cares?" asks the chap as he sucks his Mint (17.2 system). I'm not saying it's better. An OS is, for me, just the route I have to take to arrive at an application destination. But Linux is a very refreshing change.

Carl Nielson...

... was given a Renault car in 1924, "after his doctor had told him to give up horse riding because of a heart condition... He was very soon tearing around the countryside... Once, with his daughter as a passenger, he asked her to have a look and tell him what seemed to be running across the field alongside them. It turned out to be one of the car's wheels." So said Donald Macleod yesterday, as he kicked off his "Composer of the Week" programme. It's just taken an unimpressive 30 minutes to download the 58-minute episode.

It would have been far quicker to enable Flash and then just play the first couple of minutes, dagnabbit.

On recent walks...

... one topic has been my "videos" data and, in particular, how to improve what I do with it here. Kodi offers ways around the "loss" of my access to DVD Profiler (Windows only). Although I can't currently run DVD Profiler "here", that doesn't mean it can't be run "there", where "there" is on BlackBeast Mk II, which now lives a couple of miles away and runs a Win 10 system safely inside a Linux Mint Virtual Box. So I've supplied both my ASCII videos tab-separated data file and access to my DVD Profiler data2 to my Python guru for him to play with. My end goal is to use Kodi to generate web lists of my films and TV programmes for uploading to the external 'molehole' web server in Texas just like my "books" data pages.3

I bought two books...

... by Charles Fort in June 1971: the 1919 "Book of the Damned" and the 1931 "Lo!". Eric Frank Russell's fault, needless to say. He, too, had a "thing" about us all being cosmic property. For a Fortean column in "New Statesman" Mat Coward looked at "Fortean Times" to set the scene:

Every great thinker (with the exception of a few po-faced old Krauts like Charlie Marx) has, at some stage, come to the conclusion that life is a big joke, that the whole of existence is some sort of cosmic comedy; sometimes the humour is dark, sometimes it has the unbelievable neatness of a bad sitcom, sometimes it is farcical, as if conducted by a celestial Brian Rix; metaphysics as monkey business. Just as it is impossible to think, and still believe in a god, so it is impossible to collect anomalies and still keep a straight face.

Date: 1 February 1991


I recall seeing "Big bad mouse" with 'Professor' Jimmy Edwards and Eric Sykes, produced by Brian Rix. I don't recall laughing much.

  

Footnotes

1  By the blank Dell screen 36 hours ago.
2  The greater "richness" of the DVD Profiler data makes it far more expedient to use as a starting point for Kodi's input (after suitable processing) than my simple-minded file.
3  The visitor to 'molehole' just sees pages as usual. None of the back-end processing is being done either on the web server or in the visitor's web browser. The only "visible" end result is new static pages. I will generate those pages whenever it suits me to update them.