2016 — 16 March: Wednesday
Remembering to put out the "glass crate" made me over-confident yesterday, clearly. Today's "green bin" has just been wheeled out for the lads using my more-conventional OJIT system. The "O" standing for "Only", of course.
Today, I await...
... the promised snailmail delivery of my missing tiddly little screw and stand-off spacer. With them, I can secure Skylark's main system disk properly in its tiny PCI socket and safely parallel to the motherboard. Of course, this minor but vital bit of surgery will mean temporarily removing the newly-installed graphics card first. (Although there's plenty of "air" inside this wondrous new PC case, all the usual bits and gubbins in the engine department are perforce [lovely word] still in close physical proximity1 to the equally wondrous new facility-packed motherboard.)
I'm particularly taken with the set of red LEDs that glow and fade with a regular pulsing sequence. Although I can't actually see this happening unless I have the side of the case off, it irresistibly reminds me of a little gadget I built thirty years ago2 and have just unearthed:
Keeping the home fires glowing!
I embedded the LEDs in a cube of clear acrylic resin having wired them up in such a way that their flashing rates were all different. I had it in mind as a night-light for Peter's room, and was hoping to emulate a flickering fire. I still recall how entrancing I found the glowing embers of our domestic fires we had in lieu of central heating in our first Wilmslow house in the 1950s.
Who could forget the ritual of the newspaper crumpling in preparation for their use as firestarters? The clearing of the overnight ashes? The occasional but exciting visits of the chimney sweepers? Ditto, the coal delivery process? The thick yellow choking smog?
"Happy Days!"
Even the longest journey...
... begins with but a single step. Discounting the several thousand steps3 involved in this morning's enjoyable chattering ramble I am now enjoying "instant" switching of mouse, keyboard, HP printer/scanner and one of those terribly nice-to-have-around 4TB USB external hard drives back and forth between BB Mk III and Skylark at the touch of four buttons on a magic "Kensington" device gratefully received from Brian. Switching the 34" Dell monitor between the two PCs remains a matter of choosing HDMI or DisplayPort with its little OSD (now that I've mastered it).
So the NUC gets its keyboard and mouse back. And my physical desktop becomes that much less cluttered.
When I last tried to share devices in this way — near as dammit eight years ago — the attempts foundered largely because my scanner could never make the transition without switching it off and back on. This made it a whole lot slower than simply plugging and unplugging one USB cable.
Having been advised...
... by two different chums, 12 hours apart, to watch "The Night Manager" I snaffled the first four episodes off iPlayer (with a little help from get_iplayer, of course) and have just watched the first one. I note it's directed by Susanne Bier, who made the Danish film Brødre a decade ago. That got re-made, of course... She also made the superb "Love is all you need" (but that's another story).
Before I re-attached the keyboard and mouse to the NUC, it occurred to me that I can still drive it "headless" by using NoMachine running on BB Mk III or Skylark. So I've just done so "because I could". It works well. My next experiment — having reset the 34" Dell to use DisplayPort 1.1 instead of 1.2 — will be to try Skylark's DisplayPort output into the Dell. This decidedly counter-intuitive fix reportedly overcomes problems with it... Link