2015 — 13 November: Friday

The road to Waitrose is paved with good intentions.1 It was initially bright sunshine, of course, while I was topping up the water softener to stop its irritating beeping. Having first found the irritating manual. And the torch with which to illuminate, for sleepy eyes, the button marked "Set". And pressed it several times to convince it I was serious...

There's a bit of...

... son-related topping-up I could do in case the pair of them actually materialise here tonight, rather than tomorrow morning, or at all — I gather "the situation at work" may yet intervene. And, on reflection over a soothing cuppa, I also find it's easier to understand some of dear Mama's attitudes better now, only after her death.2 Christa and I would arrange the next of our numerous visits in good faith (as it were) and then sometimes find we had to change or cancel pretty much at the last minute.

I think the technical term is "Life". As in "one of Life's little ironies".

The sun has peeped out again. TTFN

One of my...

... less successful epiphanies3 of recent times foundered on the rock of my lost WinAmp program (sunk, without trace, in the wake of the inglorious collapse of Win8.1 last February). With WinAmp, the fact that I'd randomly scattered my music around didn't matter in the least — meta-tags in the MP3 files ensured I could "rebuild" the original albums at the click of a button. Wonderful though Linux is, I've not so far been terribly impressed by any of the Linux analogues of WinAmp I've tried. Still, my epiphany wasn't completely unfruitful. And, in addition, I now have 26 subfolders crammed with rich mixtures of music by random sets of musicians. These make for remarkably enjoyable 'serendipity' listening when opened with Decibel and played in "shuffle" mode.

I actually "rescued"...

... almost all the compilation albums in their 'original' form from one of my backups earlier this year. But some compilations just weren't to be found. Anywhere. Hence, I've just re-ripped the two "Kill Bill" soundtrack CDs (using last Sunday's "Asunder"). I don't see why it creates both the MP3 format files I request, and a matching set of huge .WAV files I explicitly don't request, but the latter are easily disposed of. And the audible end result (using highest bit-rate VBR encoding) is every "bit" as good as that when using Poikosoft under Windows. This is a relief.

My next technological exploration...

... will be to fire up Kodi, enable its localhost webserver...

==> System ==> Services ==> Web Server
Select "Allow Remote Control via HTTP"

...and see what happens. It's entirely possible that I'll be able to browse my Kodi-fied collection of videos from my Android Tablet PC anywhere in Technology Towers.

TANSTAAFL

Today there is. I'm being treated to one at an Italian restaurant in Bishops Waltham. Ciao.

[Long pause]

Navigation to, ingestion of, and return home with, an internalised tasty Pizza Pollo is now complete (following a most informative Kodi-related chat and my dubious but equally tasty introduction to Lindt chocolate with Chilli in it).

Feeding movies data...

... into Kodi is pretty straightforward. Simplest case — the title is unique, and exists in "TheMovieDB" (from which Kodi scrapes its data) — all is sweetness and light. For duplicate film titles that clash, you need to add the year to disambiguate. For my two 1996 film versions of "Emma" I will need to work a bit harder...

Emma v Emma

Feeding TV Shows data...

... into Kodi is more complex, as they typically have both a Season number, and one or more differently-titled episodes within each Season. Happily, Len has demonstrated a way to "trick" Kodi into racing off and looking up all its TV Show data for you by simply feeding it a couple of carefully-named dummy .mkv files. (Kodi, it seems, is well-versed in the art of extracting useful information from a file name.)

Create a dummy .mkv file named S01 (for Season #1) followed by E01E02 etc. for however many individual episodes exist in Season #1.

For example, consider that wonderful comedy Northern Exposure. Season #1 has eight episodes, on two DVDs (which live in my CaseLogic folder system in slots E049 and E050 respectively).

So a suitable dummy .mkv filename for the first half of Season #1 would be S01E01E02E03E04.mkv ... and an equally simple second dummy .mkv file named CaseLogic_E049.mkv in the "Extras" directory can then be displayed by clicking on "Extras" whenever I want to revisit the start of Joel Fleischman's multi-year exile from New York to Cicely, Alaska, but need reminding where to find the DVD.

Humble Pie

Having just taken "Banshee" out for another stroll around the audio park, it's actually not so bad after all. To my mild horror, it is now wrangling 60,179 "songs" or 173.2 days of full-time listening.

Current choice? "Amnesia" from the 2012 album "Anastasis" by Dead Can Dance. I forget why! Actually, I'd noted its pending release back in July 2012 and, acting with my usual degree of sloth, even went on to buy their 2008 album "Within the Realm of a Dying Sun" a mere 15 months later. A title that inevitably reminds me of the pre-Narnian Queen Jadis and her own, ancient realm. Not to mention the late Jack Vance.

Tales of the Dying Earth

The comments in Earl Kemp's masterly "Who killed SF?" basically demanding the reprinting of Vance's "Tales of the Dying Earth" were, thankfully, answered.

I never realised...

... there's a "hidden" track on the album "Spinner" by Brian Eno and Jah Wobble. It's separated from the end of "Left where it fell" by several minutes of silence.

  

Footnotes

1  But is currently being thwarted by unenticing rain.
2  One of her oft-employed philosophical assertions I recall from my childhood was "You'll miss me when I'm gone!" which — I'm fairly confident — she, in turn, got from her own mother. Both ladies were right, but probably not for the reasons either of them thought.
3  The idiot notion that it could be a smart idea to disperse all my MP3 music files from compilation CDs throughout the vast set of subfolders that already held other music by each of the artists involved.