2016 — 2 February: Tuesday
The current (local) signs of wintry ghastliness remain subdued, and pose no threat to my lunchtime rendezvous.
The latest...
... Ubuntu newsletter1 first introduces me to the concept of Docker, and then tells me that IBM's LinuxONE Emperor mainframe-by-another-name can support one million of the things. I suppose that's impressive, but what would I want with one million virtualised applications? I generally manage with [pause, to count them] a dozen or so of the Real Things. And I suspect I barely use 10% of their total facilities.
Cashing in
Meanwhile, the latest "Full Circle" reminds me of the existence of GnuCash. Blimey, to think of the time I've wasted tracking expenditure and endlessly failing to reconcile what I thought I'd spent with what the bank thought I'd spent (generally less, oddly). And if you can't trust your bank to get it right, who do you turn to? Tony Soprano?
And the faintly appalling appealing prospect of "adapt". Putting any package from any release into any version sounds fairly chaotic.
I suppose dear Mama's final...
... Premium Bond draw this month could yet make the custodian of her virtual ashes (me!) a virtual millionaire. If it does, perhaps we shall see about buying a real BlackBeast Mk IV! But only if there's enough left over after splitting it down the middle with Big Bro, of course. I wonder what my bank charges for transmitting £500,000 to NZ these days? (Which reminds me, I didn't finish watching that odd Jacques Peretti documentary "Inside Cayman". Nor did get_iplayer succeed in downloading a hi-def copy, so I had to settle for SD.)
Oops!
Having heard a beautiful guitar and violin duet between Stephane Grapelli and Martin Taylor yesterday morning, I went looking for the 1983 EMI album from which it had come. No luck. I ended up settling for a Martin Taylor "sort-of duets" album in which he plays guitar improvisations against a recording of him playing the basic tunes:
And, having been distracted by other duties, promptly forgot I'd downloaded the thing until mere moments ago... Very nice it is, too. I had never even heard of Mr Taylor!
I keep no data...
... on my Android SHIELD Tablet PC that can't be easily reconstituted. Which is why, last night, I allowed the upgrade to Android 6.0 to go ahead and re-format the "little" 64GB microSD card to make (as far as I could tell from the cryptic message) its data space all available to the basic system — I eventually left the thing running overnight as I was tired and valued sleep more highly than watching a non-moving progress bar. I was fully aware that my gallery of DVD artwork would be "vanished" if and when the process ever completed. It did, and it was. Saves me the trouble of combing through to cull just the images of DVDs that have also been culled.
The File Explorer App still makes a valiant attempt to load the non-existent files, and QuickPic ultimately barfs (as expected). But, this time, I think I shall load Kodi and browse my collection a bit more usefully. I now have 135 Apps on that little PC. Do I need Docker yet?
Today's...
... perfectly polite, but slightly odd, request wondered if I'd mind hosting a link to an Infographic on a ¬blog page that's now nearly five years old. On examining that page, I spotted and fixed a silly typo on it. That put me in a charitable frame of mind, so here's a link to the Infographic! It's basically about the impact of the construction industry worldwide.
Having thwarted...
... my over-eager dominatrix at more or less every turn on the drive to lunch (glossing over the fact that I first called in at "The Greyhound on the Test" — thus making myself a few minutes late for the agreed rendezvous at "The Greyhound not on the Test") I let her have her evil way with me on the way back, and was fed a nice, twisty, sort-of-more-direct route through Mottisfont and Kimbridge, including two opportunities to stall on a railway level crossing. Bits of road I first recall driving along in late October 2007 when I was still using training wheels.