2016 — 24 February: Wednesday
An early power cut1 is a remarkably peaceful way to greet the new day. I disconnected my two NAS boxes and my little Raspberry Pi2 webserver until it seemed likely that the resumption of juice flow at 07:27 wasn't just a transient dying gasp of an overloaded Grid.
But kicking off with a grapefruit instead of a cuppa is a helluva (non-electric) shock to the system.
Last night's...
... test-drive of Xubuntu 15.10 threw up no nasty surprises, so it's moved towards the top of the contender's list if I actually decide to move off Mint. Now, where's that cuppa?
I read a...
... neat comment a while back made by Roger Kimball...
I suppose the contemporary version of that déformation professionelle is the person who wanders around with a computer perpetually linked to Google and who therefore believes he knows everything. It reminds one of the old complaint about students at the elite French universities: They know everything, it was said; unfortunately that is all they know.
I presume there's an English equivalent?
Gasp!
I wonder where BoJo the mayor of our Fair City was educated?
A few years ago, London's government was spraying a de-icer around to "glue" pollution to the road, in tiny areas sometimes right by EU air monitoring stations, a process likened by one Labour MP to strapping an oxygen mask on to the canary down the mine. Last month a monitor in polluted Oxford Street went offline, and another — covered — device seized up from water damage shortly before the Olympics. No doubt accidents can explain these things...
Remind me who runs the Dept. of Dirty Tricks these days.
After today's walk...
... Brian (captured here at a performance of the Rocky Horror Show last night, by the way)...
... very kindly helped me decode the mysteries of the audio volume control deeply "buried" within the menu system of the Asus 27" screen I'm using with the NUC. So now I can transport audio (analogue or digital, as I choose) from the NUC, via that neat little HDMI break-out box, to the Audiolab pre-amp without also having to hear it, rather tinnily, on the screen's own built-in squeakers.
Seeing things?
I was reading about Charles Bonnet syndrome in Eagleman's book ("Incognito") just the other day. Now it's on BBC Radio 4, so it must be real! (It was first described in the 1700s, as an accompaniment in some 10% of cases to failing eyesight.) Amazing what the brain can conjure up. Now they're talking about what used to be called "distalgesic" — I got through a bottle of that at the time of a shingles attack combined with an infected tooth filling one memorable weekend just before Peter was born. Yuk.
Being an incorrigible...
... tinkerer, I decided to have another "go" with my fancy Xonar external USB audio card. Although the Intel HD audio baked into the Skylake chip is perfectly satisfactory I paid good money for the Xonar, so I wanted to see if Mint 17.3 has made any erm, audible progress at supporting it. Revisiting my December attempts to get decent analogue audio levels out of the thing took two minutes:
- Add the extra line to the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf just in case it's still necessary to stop alsamixer from failing to start
- Fire up alsamixer, select the Xonar sound card, note its default setting of "50" on the "Front" setting, and wind the wick up to "99"
Audible bliss. I couldn't be bothered to switch my audio cables around — or fiddle around the back of the pre-amp to locate my one spare co-ax digital audio socket — but, given the quality of the analogue audio I'm now getting from the NUC, I see little need to find out whether the bug in "pulseaudio" that stopped it recognising the Xonar's SP/DIF output has been fixed. I shall doubtless succumb to the temptation in due course.