2016 — 29 February: Monday
I'm pleased to see that "Spotlight" won the 'best picture' award1 but I'm more interested, at the moment, in the possibility of "running" my SHIELD Android Tablet PC's screen on BlackBeast courtesy of yesterday's new favourite toy: NoMachine. My Raspberry Pi2 webserver is another candidate, though I may just leave it purring away at its main task.
It irritates me...
... every time I am exhorted (gently, but repetitively) by BBC radio 3 continuity announcers and programme hosts to "catch up" on all the stuff I have missed, or wish to hear again. There are — in my world (at least) — only 18 hours of consciousness in any one day, even a Leap Day.
I found this...
... book review beautifully-written and distastefully fascinating all the way to the surprisingly bitter end. Could this really be how Orwell croaked, like one of Aristophanes' frogs!? Talk about having to read between the lines! Source and snippet:
Down the gloomy corridors of University College Hospital comes a white-coated "nurse", avoiding any eye-to-eye contact. He silently enters Orwell's private room and places a pillow over the face of the man in the bed — too weak, by now, to struggle. It's nonsense. But what one can conclude is that networks, some of them sinister, were being woven at Eton, and the college Etonians went to; which Eric Blair — thanks to Andrew Gow — did not.
Let's not dwell on the undue influence of Eton and Oxbridge (still) in our green and peasant gland :-)
Slate is...
... kind enough to reveal precisely where I've been going wrong all my life, so far:
Big talk, weird talk, deep talk, smart talk — pick your preferred opposite-of-small talk, and there's room for plenty of it in the conversational repertoire. When it happens serendipitously, it's one of life's great joys, and certainly more memorable than how's-the-weatherisms. But small talk will always be with us, because it's the solid ground of shared culture
I foresee little likelihood of my changing, too.
My old-fashioned...
... treat for today's "lemonses" — quite late, as it's already 12:30 — is one slice of freshly-well-fired loaf from Sainsburys in Badger Farm before I consign the rest to frozen storage for treats yet to come. News of today's Raspberry Pi3 is equally tasty.
Today's little...
... hardware adventure will be to replace the soundcard I've been lent that's been living inside BlackBeast and delivering digital audio across to the hi-fi system. I have a small set of magic incantations that ought to enable my as-yet largely unused external USB Xonar card to do the same thing. We shall hear...
As I slurp and munch...
... my overdue lunch — I've been corralling the latest accumulation of Boopsie's "dust bunnies" — it struck me that there's no reason at all to keep my NUC tethered anywhere near BlackBeast. Good theory. So while both PCs were switched off I re-positioned the NUC at the other end of the living room, to be nearer the hi-fi. Plugged it back into my LAN. Fed it some volts. Then I fired everything up again, to re-establish the two-way connection.
[Quel horreur! aka Oops]
My guru tells me that if the NUC isn't physically connected to a display device at the time the connection is established, it basically "makes one up" and sets it to a nominal 1024x768 resolution. It's crisp, clear, and...
... really really tiny on my 34" Dell! [Pause] Try as I might, I've been unable to find a configuration setting or active control to persuade Mr NoMachine to change his stubborn mind. They are jolly well hidden.
And so it came to pass...
... that the NUC is once again back sitting close enough to the Dell to re-connect by an (unused) HDMI lead, and (of course) everything is now back to glorious 3440x1440 on both NUC and BlackBeast without so much as a quivering lip.
So finally! I can once again shut everything down — this time to perform the audio hardware surgery that was actually all I had in mind for today. Thus pass Quiet Days in Technology Towers, to borrow from Henry Miller.
[Hushed pause]
We have what Decca...
... used to call "ffss" once again on (my choice of) co-ax or optical SP/DIF from the Xonar. I've just earned an evening meal, methinks.