2016 — 1 March: Tuesday — rabbits!
In a minor-league triumph1 it seems the Great and the Good whom it pleases to think run our lives for us have just concluded that the UK system of Freedom of Information requests introduced by Tony Bliar...
... is "working well" and there is (therefore?) no need to start making us pay money when submitting such gentle probes. I conclude we must (therefore?) no longer need news media or investigators. Though I wonder vaguely why I still feel so uniformly well-uninformed about so many things.
One such being...
... the inner workings of the Linux boot process, and the X-server display subsystem that presents a GUI to those phobics (like me) who would generally prefer not to wreak unintended havoc by issuing a malformed command in a terminal session, thereby turning a terminal session into a terminal event.
Last night my guru proposed a "cunning plan" that will allow my NUC to slip the Bonds of BlackBeast that tether it to the Dell 34" screen. "All I have to do" is grub around in the GRUB startup menu to disable the starting of the GUI and thus bring up a text-only system (initially). Quoth the guru: "If you edit the file /etc/default/grub you can prevent the X-server from starting even if there is a display connected."
I'm pretty sure if I edit that file2 I shall be able to stop the whole NUC dead in the water but, heh, where's my pre-breakfast sense of adventure?
His next plan...
... arrived in time for me to bin his scarier one — it's actually an excellent wheeze, but I prefer this simpler variation, which basically turns the Dell screen into an All-In-One Linux PC:
... the best place for the NUC is fastened to the back of the Dell with the supplied VESA mounting plate and connected to the screen by HDMI. Failover then consists of moving the keyboard and mouse connections and switching the Dell input to HDMI.
I can thus continue to use the NoMachine solution since the NUC is connected to the Dell. Why do I feel as if I have just had a narrow escape? [Pause] Time for my next cuppa, methinks, on this rather dismal and drizzly morning. That should give me time to work out where the VESA mounting plate ended up.
So there I was...
... stuck (as usual) with my nose in a book when I realised I was thinking "Senegal?" as the unfamiliar music being played on "Essential Classics" percolated into my otherwise-engaged consciousness. I got to a web browser to see what was playing: "Les Bras de Mer" by Trio Trad. Meant nothing, but sounded great. So I've just downloaded...
... a lovely album by Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita, and also found a live performance of the track.
Issue #106...
... of Full Circle magazine has a piece on precisely my model of Skylake i5 NUC which (naturally) I devoured with considerable interest. Who would have thought there could possibly be any Intel driver bugs for Skylake graphics?!
Coming up next?
Another round of supplies (if I want fresh food) and a little bit of PC ferrying from hither to yon — not (for a change) involving Technology Towers. It will give me a chance to grab some fresh air while I'm at it.
It's amazing...
... what turns up in the dustier corners of long-neglected mass storage devices. Yes, Seagate 3TB external drive, I'm thinking of you. I wasn't after anything in particular; it was more of an experimental fossicking session, partly to remind myself of what I did actually still have that should be, erm, more systematically arranged in a more, erm, logical set of nested subfolders. I have it in mind to clean up the Synology NAS boxes, and also relocate them where there's a much better chance of my spotting the dust build-up and dealing with it.
Though I'm very unimpressed with the replacement battery that Mr Dyson charged me over £50 for to fit in the mini-sucker... which is (to my befuddlement) just past its ninth birthday. That means I have been retired for over nine years too. Probably just as well, given the rate at which former colleagues continue to be expelled from IBM.