2016 — 13 March: Sunday
I went unhappily to bed last night1 facing my own version of the "dark matter" or "missing mass" problem. The Novatech elf2 who assembled the innards of BlackBeast Mk IV has chosen a sensible way (of failing) to solve the problem: pass it along for me to solve. I face not so much a "screw loose" as a "screw missing" problem.3
But I woke a few hours later with two viable experiments in mind to test my sort-of hypothesis for a possible solution. One will (if successful) also provide the quantum tunnelling that may actually be necessary; the other will only work if that isn't necessary.
I only express it...
... in quantum physics terms because, this morning, moments before getting up to make my next much-needed cuppa I'd just read in a single paragraph of Lee Smolin's book the clearest explanation so far of the galactic-scale variant of my dilemma. My experiments, although not involving Large Hadron Colliders or a budget larger than a Third World country, will nonetheless both have to wait until the young people have been sent on their way in an hour or so. I don't wish to expose them to the vituperative language that will inevitably accompany any failure.
As more neural capacity...
... comes online in the (excuse the pun) "wake" of a delicious croissant and a second cuppa, it occurs to me that the smaller-capacity, slower, SATA III SSD I bought a week ago may actually do just fine as the System disk — certainly for the time being — as it would generally be more useful to keep the much-faster device for relatively heavier data-lifting duties.
[Pause]
They've been gone for 40 minutes, and my problem will shortly be a Thing of the Past too. I've lazily filched the equivalent screw from the NUC, re-secured its SSD (exactly the same Samsung device) with an inelegant slice of electrical masking tape, re-assembled it, and just proved it still works fine. So I'm now about to re-use the liberated tiny screw in the much larger surroundings of BB Mk IV — assuming I don't drop the thing first. It's really tiny. Then I hope to persuade BB to boot from my Mint 17.3 MATE USB stick and thus be able to install and set it up to my liking.
"I may be gone for a while."
I'm ashamed to admit...
... I don't have a clue who Zippy and Bungle are:
... my amused affection for the concept of a royal family is entirely based on how removed, tangential and oddly "other" they are. The whole point is that they live in a world where crowns are hats, where loos smell of fresh paint, where foreigners perform topless dances of welcome, where dogs are effectively people and toothpaste is applied to brushes by valets; a world where there are moats and bowing, and swans are pets. How can our own views possibly be affected by what the Queen thinks of free trade with Luxembourg? It's like wanting to know what Zippy and Bungle think.
In a break...
... from tradition, the new build4 (which is behaving itself generally pretty well) currently identifies on the network as "Skylark". I thought I was being clever by specifying the new 250GB SSD as "/backup" and mounting it at boot time. Sadly, no. It's now stubbornly only available to 'root' so I shall have to (metaphorically) take it out and thrash it soundly "for its own good" before I (physically) re-fit it — in a clever hidden location on the other side of the case behind the motherboard that I literally didn't even suspect existed. There's space for two such SSDs to be tucked away there, in fact.
"This is Linux, David. You can do anything on Linux."
But, annoyingly, Intel's on-chip graphics just simply cannot deal with the 34" Dell via the DisplayPort connection. I've now seen this misbehaviour on two models of Skylake processor and on a NUC of slightly older vintage. No matter. Since I can get the full resolution (albeit 'only' at 50 Hz) with an HDMI connection, that makes things easier in terms of running the two latest builds with the one screen, keyboard, and mouse courtesy of the Dell's USB "hubbiness". (With luck.)
[Pause]
Proof of concept: this next paragraph comes to you via Pluma on Skylark, Filezilla, and (as it were) all the usual suspects. Worth my next cuppa, methinks.