2016 — 17 March: Thursday
Yesterday's installation of the Kensington "box of (USB switching) tricks" has already proved its high utility. It may yet rise to the level of "utterly indispensible" offering, as it does, four simple rocker switches that between them allow me to associate one keyboard, one mouse, one printer/scanner, and one 4TB external hard drive effortlessly between the two Mighty Machines. The fact that the Mini Machine can also be summoned by spells into a remote desktop session on the same screen (with same keyboard and mouse) is just extra gravy on the icing on the cake.
Throw in a few...
... Virtualboxes1 and what more could a neophyte Linux geek possibly lack for? I must say, computing has become fun once again in a way it never was in the wacky world of Windows. As I (still) await the arrival of the missing M2 SSD's tiny screw and stand-off I can now contemplate, in no particular order, some breakfast, a morning supplies run, and a spot of hi-fi kit refreshment that's been on the back burner since I first spotted it last November.
Listen to this space :-)
Today's...
... post-lunch chat should be particularly interesting as the guru involved has just passed along his final progress report:
I can now use RSA-key authorisation to access the NAS at the command-line level so now all my linux devices are connected by 4kbit key RSA encrypted channels. sshfs works from my linux VM to both the NUC and to the cygwin SSH server on Cthulhu. This is actually surprisingly useful as getting access to real disks from within a VirtualBox VM is surprisingly non-trivial.
Cthulhu is his newest, largest, fastest (etc) Windows PC that both his two large furry cats can now comfortably sleep atop, since that's precisely where the water cooling system exhaust fans gently vent. I have already suggested adapting and adopting anti-pigeon measures.
Meanwhile...
... overnight emails (Subject of one: "Phew it was hot over there!") from Big Bro with photos of the impossibly clear blue sky above Perth suggest a plausible reason for his recent lack of news. He and Lis have clearly been visiting the far-Western bits of NZ's large neighbour wherein can be found niece #3 these days.
This time last year...
... I was comparing the nVIDIA GTX970 I'd bought (for use with my ill-fated Philips 40" 4K monitor) against the fanless Radeon R7 250 that currently lives inside BlackBeast Mk III:
Now let's do the same with the somewhat less extreme nVIDIA GTX950 that I've just treated Skylark to:
"Performance" is an...
... unpleasantly memorable piece of film-making. Litvinoff worked briefly on it:
Presumably Litvinoff advised on the head-shaving scene, which involves rubber gloves and acid retorts.
Pim has a thorough knowledge of his subject and his milieu and is painstaking in his research, which involved interviewing many survivors of the 1960s. There are a few too many over-populated paragraphs but I enjoyed this footnote: "'Mad' Teddy Smith should not be confused with 'Mad'
Frankie Fraser, 'Mad' Freddie Rondel, Frank 'the Mad Axeman' Mitchell, 'Mad' Reg King, 'Mad' Cyril or Ronnie Kray, whom no one ever called mad to his face".
I was able to intercept...
... Mr Postie just before I set off for lunch, so now (some six hours later) I've just properly secured the 512 GB SSD in Skylark, and can now perform the same surgery on the NUC (whose screw I had "borrowed").
I also took advice on possible alternatives to UltraEdit since my major use case is now "merely" HTML files. My guru seriously suggested Vi and even lent me his copy of Dan Sonnenschein's 1987 guide. I poked around for GUI-based variants since I have a sneaking suspicion things may have moved on just a tiny bit in three decades. I installed, tried, got absolutely nowhere with, and removed with extreme prejudice, the two likeliest candidates2 I found in Mint's repository. And wondered what on earth people thought they were doing bothering to claim that these "almost" GUI-ised versions of Vi add anything to the common weal.
My chums in Audio-T (one of my nearest toy shops) are holding out hope of having a toy for me to collect at some point tomorrow. "Bring it on", say I.
I also swung by...
... the DVD discount shelves in Asda on my way home...
I live in hope of seeing a good film made from Ursula K Le Guin's "Earthsea" books. Judging by the harsh comments I've now read on IMDB and the fact that Le Guin essentially disowned the adaptation, I suspect this is very probably not it. But, at £3, I can take that risk. "Happy Valley" at least picked up a BAFTA. How bad can it be?
I've been playing around...
... with text editors3 seeing how well they deal with HTML tags. "Pluma" (aka "Gedit") isn't all that bad, actually. Though I don't understand why it doesn't honour the "paste" on a middle button click since I've become very used to that behaviour.
Unless I've mis-read the emails I got when I bought my licence for Ultraedit last April, the thing only runs for one year. I don't like it quite well enough to fork out another £50 or so for the next year. Meanwhile, my musical accompaniment is courtesy of the NUC, but controlled by a NoMachine session running here at the 34" Dell. I've also established that NoMachine had "mute" selected by default for audio on the server, which explained the puzzling initial lack of music. I haven't quite wrapped my head around which is the server and which the client where NoMachine is concerned.
Each end can take either rôle, it seems. That way lies madness. Add it to the ever-growing list of things only partially understood.