2016 — 15 February: Monday
One day in gedit's company is enough to be going on with, and I'm now back with UltraEdit. I am so used to having the contents of the clipboard under my 'middle' mouse button / scroll wheel ready for instant pasting that gedit's lack is irritating. As was its reversion to a non UTF-8 setting and a rather basic set of other editing facilities. "You pays your money and you takes your choice", as Dad used to say.
However, my initial intended use of the NUC1 is as a fun little testbed toy on which to further my Linux education and taste a few other flavours besides Mint. The fact that it will also serve as a miniature "hot standby" system — against the day of BlackBeast's (next, inevitable) collapse — is extra goodness. Having a spare, working system ready to take over always seems to encourage the basic system to carry on working beautifully.
Meanwhile...
... my web browser takes a dim view of a potential cross-site scripting attempt from my online bank this morning. The NoScript InjectionChecker "sanitized" this suspicious request — a spot of "doubleclick" activity tracking related to any browsing I might do on the bank's exit page. Erm, that would be precisely none.
The barometer...
... has shot up, but it's a cool -1C on my front porch at the moment. All expotitions are on "hold" at least until after breakfast. And more tea, of course. It struck me last night it's been a while since my last jaunt into Soton. (Last November, in fact.)
Currently on...
... the iPlayer is the first-ever "Horizon" programme, from 1964, devoted to Buckminster Fuller. Cool! Here's what he had to say at the "Vision 65" address at about that time:
But, in my memory humans, of the same origins as those of any Southern Illinois University student, who dared to speak a well-formed sentence were whistled at and treated as being some kind of sexual deviates... When I was young going from a little town seven miles outside of Boston into Boston through Dorchester, or Roxbury, I saw that all the children in the streets were in rags. No exceptions. People on the trolley really stank. Women of twenty-six years were hags with half their yellow teeth out...
I bought my copy of "Utopia or Oblivion" (a collection of his essays) in June 1979. It's pretty heavyweight stuff. The 'Spectator' advised it to be taken slowly.
Here endeth...
... Year One as a full-time Penguinista!
So there I was...
... a'diggin' this hole, hole in the ground, so big and sort of round it was...
I've been keeping my head down, but carefully noting, the advice being lobbed overhead by Len and Brian (I assume that's why I'm being copied) as they exchange thoughts on an ideal new Linux installation. So far, the take-away messages include:
- partitioning the drive so you have a separate home partition that does not change or get formatted over future installs
- have two small partitions (c. 20GB) for your / system on which your Linux flavour de jour lives
- make as few OS changes as needed, or get scripts/Python commands in /home that can be run on install to perform the changes for you
They both think I would be mad to move off Mint. (If I interpret "Gawd knows why" correctly.)