2015 — 4 December: Friday
As seems to be the case slightly more often than the strict laws of statistical chance ought to permit1 my beneficent Uncle ERNIE has smiled at dear Mama, but again chosen to ignore me, in his latest monthly "handout". Ev'ry little £25 helps, I suppose. Still, who knows? Perhaps he will change his tune after all her Bonds time out in a couple of months from now...
Having such...
... a vastly different A/V system in place, just for a few days, has given me a chance to appreciate anew just how good my earlier system actually is now that I've fully re-instated it. A change is clearly as good as a rest. I admit I had to tweak the Kuro plasma display now that it's being fed from the Audiolab rather than directly-coupled to the Blu-ray player. But that could just as easily have been mandated by my change of HDMI input, and gave me a chance to reset the (interacting) contrast and brightness settings to regain my 'PLUGE'. A chap should always keep hold of his 'PLUGE' — for fear of finding something worse — should he not?
Today's venture...
... into Arthur Ransome's "Great Northern" unknown territory will take me along my beaten track as far as "Four Marks" (scene of many an Acorn RISC-related purchase in former times) but then off up a previously-never-driven road in search of Medstead's "Castle of Comfort" for a one o'clock lunch rendezvous. Should I pack my portable igloo-making kit? By this time in several previous years snow has lain thickly around. If it can stay away until after next Monday, that would be good. I'm off up to Northampton on Sunday for another little family gathering. Learning how to tame the new Dominatrix that lives in the Mazda's GPS will be my task for Saturday, methinks.
It's a Linux system. How hard can it be? :-)
Given its ownership...
... by one of the planet's leading cultural vandals, there's a certain irony, I feel, to be reading a review (of yet another study of the meaning and purpose of libraries) in the weekly "web freebie" put out by the Times Literary Supplement. Interesting to see Manguel taking a different tack2 from Gershon Legman's many years ago, too, on censorship and banning:
But books such as those by Dickens himself (as John Sutherland notes in his amusing chapter) were regarded by the public library's custodians "as something dangerous to the working-class mind â too exciting". Excitement was considered unhealthy: Samuel Smiles, in his popular Self-Help (1859), hinted at a poisonous relationship between reading novels and self-abuse. But such restrictions were not, of course, particular to the Victorian age. Sutherland suggests that all libraries across all ages suffer from some form of book-banning, a strain that persists, he says, "in [their] DNA". The history of censorship has always run intertwined with that of reading, and the bonfires of the censors have long lit our library stacks.
Yesterday's one-line config fix
... doesn't stave off a crash; it's less dramatic than that. It merely ensures alsamixer can start. (And thus be used to normalise volumes, if necessary.) I stand corrected. The Xonar soundcard, meanwhile, is now on its way here.
Is it just me, or is there something endearingly "retro" about this display?
While I remember
Next time I wish to unmute sound from Kodi, the magic function key to toggle audio on and off is F8. And one of my gurus has just suggested I try connecting the graphics card's HDMI output to the HDMI input on the back of the Oppo Blu-ray player. I think that's about the one thing I've not yet tried... I shall feel very foolish indeed if it works perfectly. But feeling foolish, besides being my normal state in the Linux world, would be a very acceptable price to pay.
Today's lunchtime excursion...
... had an 'alarum' — beeps from the tyre pressure warning system. I was on a quiet country lane into Medstead so I put the thing in 'Park', and nipped out to eyeball the four heavy-duty balloons. Then I carried on to the pub, parking alongside my chums' Honda, and leaving the Mazda to settle (if it was going to) on one or more punctures while we enjoyed our meal. Then came the ritual kicking of each tyre in turn. They all looked and felt OK. So we hooked up a portable inflator.
36 psi at the back? Erm, no, 30. And 33 psi at the front? Nope, also a bit low. A burst of inflation killed the warning symbol. So I set off, avoiding any Friday motorway madness. And I've now put a "Halfords portable inflator" on my Xmas list...
In a welcome piece of...
... Karmic balancing, getting hi-def video and audio from BlackBeast onto the Kuro plasma took about two minutes. Hook up the HDMI lead. Switch on the Kuro. Switch on the Oppo. Select its "front input". Switch the Audiolab to HDMI #1. Start up Monitor preferences:
Stop the default mirroring. Give the Dell back its full ration of 3440x1440 pixels. And take the audio from the soundcard, not the graphics card, which means switching the Audiolab back to "DTV" (the SP/DIF input I use for the soundcard). I could have done this a week ago. Idiot!