2016 — 9 January: Saturday
Nearly seven years have somehow whizzed by since I first spotted this now-ubiquitous poster.1
The Grauniad digs just a little deeper into its "sinister message". It's an interesting tale.
One of...
... the comments to an El Reg story on Roy Batty's "birthday" simply made me smile:
But another more usefully pointed me to this interesting paper Elephants don't play chess by Rodney Brooks. (PDF file.)
It was satirically suggested to me yesterday that this YouTube video shows what might be my next toy! $30,000?
Although...
... Mr Amazon is due to deliver a new CD today I actually heard quite a lot of it — a new, Russian voices, version of Stravinsky's "Les Noces" — on BBC Radio 3 late this morning while I was driving out on an unscheduled errand to rendezvous with Iris and then accompany her in my car as she drove her ailing Toyota Auris Hybrid to its garage in Hedge End for fixing whatever is, 'scuse the pun, currently draining her battery. Not the stonking great hybrid one, happily, but a small, conventional 12V one.
She then bribed me treated me to an equally unscheduled lunch at the Fishers Pond, after which I took her home (via a spot of needed shopping, since she's now carless) and set to work sorting out her accumulated set of Win10 security niggles and unintuitive behaviours and display habits. I also read the letter she's received from Southern Electricity regarding these stupid "smart" meters that benefit nobody and will end up costing (according to "El Reg") about £19,000,000,000 to roll out across the Benighted Kingdom.
Win10 is one incredibly snoopy OS
Literally everything that could be set to "On" by way of monitoring everything she does, everything she types, etc. and allowing all her Apps access to every scrap of data they could hoover up about her was indeed set to "On" by default, as described in a set of pages from a recent "Which?" feature. They are now all "Off". I had already disabled all the more egregious telemetry "phoning home" behaviour during her recent migration from Win8.1 when I was finalising her Win10 settings. But that was just the basic OS. I hadn't realised the ghastly propensity of every single one of these "modern" Apps to go rummaging around all over her system and data files on a 24x7 basis.
Driving home while listening to some lovely "Jazz Record Requests" I had to remind myself it's a Bad Thing to tap the accelerator pedal in time to Tubby Hayes. My freshly-made cuppa was, of course, now stone cold when I got to it.
And still no CD so far :-)
It showed up just as I was about to tuck into my simple supper...
... and I'm looking forward to the Tchaikovsky. Ms Kopatchinskaja is a helluva violinist.
I was both delighted...
... and amused to be reminded by the review here of the wonderful book by David R Palmer:
I was equally pleased to see the reviewer (Russ Allbery) also "gets" Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" — a long-time (1970) favourite of mine.
Change is coming...
... to my little molehole, which is (once again) shortly to be on the move. Junior — who (bless 'im) has paid the Texan ISP fees for the last decade — wants me to transform "molehole-the-website" into a fully static2 set of web pages. And he wants them hosted in, and served from, a storage "bucket" on Amazon's AWS3 within the next three months. He says it's sensible to keep my SSIs, but to write a script that would 'expunge' them en route to the server, and re-inject them on the way back from the server. That way, I could still easily make quick global changes to the site. If he writes and debugs the script I'm cool with that.
A couple of...
... email exchanges have served only to highlight the continuing disarray of my music lists. That will be Kodi's next task, I suspect. Where are the Culture's AIs when you need them?