2015 — 19 November: Thursday
Today's treat1 will be waiting for me after a spot of supplies top-up.
Meanwhile, having submitted...
... my first trio of bug reports in the wake of yesterday evening's burst of pre-Kodi data entry — which took me as far as the letter "C" — it turns out I've exposed just one actual program bug. A Unicode failure that was triggered by an accent...
... on the title of that wondrous strange (and sadly truncated) HBO series "Carnivàle".
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 12: ordinal not in range(128)
Fair enough. Then there was an oversight involving not auto-appending the year to a title before performing each data lookup (a trick to assist disambiguation). Plus one data deficiency2 actually in the online DB that was being scraped for its data content. Although Brian's Python found artwork for the scabrous series "Action" the list of 13 episodes (only six of which were actually transmitted before the USA network chickened out) was unhelpfully null and void.
[Pause] while I collect the ingredients for my next crockpot masterpiece. It's somewhat drizzly out there with lots more to come, I gather.
I have already received a "new, improved" code drop. And an offer of (low-paid, long hours) employment as a system tester.
My ISP...
... thinks I'm willing to put the Adobe Flash player plugin on my system just "to maximize my viewing experience" while I read his Residential newsletter "flipbook". Well, that ain't gonna happen. They offer a simplified HTML version that is badly broken. Not what I expect from Zen. Damn' poor show.
Lunch lunched...
... and chat chatted, I've raced home ahead of the gathering gloom of impending Ragnarok. I shall be fine until there's a power cut.
Kodi is...
... undeniably the greatest HTPC and Media Player software system since sliced bread. Obviously. But the funny thing is, I don't recall ever giving it permission to render my Creative X-Fi PCI soundcard not only inaudible, but invisible, and worse, unselectable (at least until I kick Kodi into the long grass and reboot Linux to get back "my" audio each time). The first time this happened, I was content to assume it was just me being, and/or doing, something stupid. (Occam's Razor, right?)
On all subsequent occasions I've decided to blame Kodi. For reasons best known to itself it resets my default audio device to PulseAudio, and expects digital audio to be delivered via the HDMI output from the motherboard. But, since there's nothing connected to that HDMI output (and I even went to some trouble to disable motherboard audio in the BIOS to stop precisely this from happening) silence reigns. Yet — until I re-boot — audio is available — from, for example an MP3 file being played by VLC — but is delivered via DisplayPort on my graphics card, and unhelpfully (in hi-fi terms) to the tinny little speakers baked into my widescreen Dell monitor.
Kodi is no more aware of the existence of my graphics card and its DisplayPort output (as a Great Writer once observed) than a tea-leaf knows the history of the East India Company. Or so I deduce, having inspected what Kodi thinks it knows on the basis of its reported System, Audio output, settings. And, now that I've rebooted and confirmed that Linux audio is once again set back to my X-Fi card, Kodi can select and play any of my music material... but silently, which isn't exactly how audio players are supposed to work, is it?
Klever Kodi, klearly. Since I don't actually have any wish to use it as a media player (but am merely subverting its SQLite DB for my own nefarious purposes in weeks to come) I'm not that bothered. And, reading the Kodi tutorial material here...
... suggests that Kodi's audio settings can be, erm, dubious. That "Step 2", for example, is predicated on your desired audio output device actually appearing in the list!
A chap's new...
... audio best friend (allegedly). Say "Hi" to pavucontrol aka "Pulse Audio Volume Control":
