2016 — 22 March: Tuesday

If one has to use an alarm clock1 then this morning's little staccato bursts from a local "Woody Woodpecker" would certainly be my choice. I was actually asleep when he started rapping, having been sufficiently tired last night to be in bed by about 22:30 (which is very early for me). In fact, I very nearly fell asleep listening to the lovely performance of Stravinsky's "Symphony in three movements" live from the Barbican, which shows just how tired I was.

I was certainly too tired to continue my ongoing series of experiments as I examine what does — and at the moment more often does not — actually go on inside a system boundary encompassing the A/V stuff at one end of my living room and the PC stuff at the other. There's an irritating discrepancy at the moment between what I think should happen, what does happen, and whether or not I can work around these "foibles".2

I left my NUC...

... running overnight as I wished to test out a couple of hypotheses about its behaviour. My objective is to run it headless, controlling it by logging into its desktop using NoMachine's rather wondrous Remote Desktop facilities (largely new to me as I am a Bear of but Little Brain in these arcane matters). To begin with, and now that I have a more-than-capable HDMI-centric A/V box of clever tricks, I'm currently focusing on the various ways in which the NUC can perceive the "loss" of its 60" Kuro plasma screen.3

I want to make sure I fully understand the effects such "loss" has on (a) its Prime Directive (namely, the supposedly simple initial task of reliably serving up my music on demand, 24x7 if I wish) and (b) my ability to control the perisher. I use inverted commas because this "loss" can occur through any combination of physical and software-mediated actions:

  1. switching off the Rotel A/V pre-amp,
  2. switching the Rotel to another input,
  3. powering off the Kuro,
  4. physically disconnecting the NUC's HDMI lead from Video input #6 of the Rotel,
  5. physically disconnecting the HDMI lead between BlackBeast Mk III and Video input #3 of the Rotel, and
  6. disabling in software the video connection between BlackBeast Mk III and the Rotel.

Plenty of controllable variables with which to experiment! But not before breakfast and another cuppa on this lovely sunny morning.

BTW, despite the unhealthy...

... (or is it morbid?) interest I have in these experiments I predict I will give up trying to use the Kuro from BlackBeast or Skylark, and just dedicate the NUC to it. That way, I can likewise dedicate just the one Rotel input to "PC duty" and keep all the rest for pure A/V kit. Convergence? Pah!

Things that go bang

An excellent article. Source and snippet:

In the US we're accustomed to believing we're "exceptional;" that our battered democracy should be a model for all other cultures; that invading Iraq twice was a necessary and good idea for the Iraqis; that President Obama has sold the country down the river simply by providing healthcare for vast numbers of our citizens. There are a lot of these "truths". These are just some of the less zany ones.
About guns, the real truth's even harder to sort out. The NRA argues it's best to arm everybody, including infants, because Americans are always in jeopardy of having our rights and weapons taken away, Charles II-style, so we need guns to defend ourselves...

Richard Ford in FT


Having topped up...

... the Mazda's tyres on my return from the metrollops I shall now top up me. It's 14:42 and still rather gloriously sunny.

I've been tipped off that when I watch "Carol" I will get a glimpse of the door of the building that now houses the ex-proprietor of "Pinpoint Music". It would help if he'd given me a timecode. I'm equally pleased to discover that, on powering back on the Rotel twins with Video input #6 still selected, the desktop on the NUC, as relayed by NoMachine to the Dell, has retained its Full HD resolution — though it noticed, and remarked on, the disabling of the Kuro.

I think that means my morning music régime simply means switching on the Kuro for just long enough for it to be seen by the NUC while it boots. After that, I should be able to switch the Kuro off again for the rest of the day. And still control music playback on the NUC via the NoMachine desktop on one or other of the Black Gang PCs (for those of you old enough to recall Sapper).

Rats!

And not ordinary ones, at that. Big black flea-ridden Yersinia pestis carrying ones. Having confirmed I could still see the NUC's desktop on the Dell — and thus obviously I would still be able to re-connect to the NAS and set some soothing airs playing — I didn't actually try playing any music until I'd first scratched together a few stale crusts and a humble cheese rind or two, and nibbled my lunch.

Now for some music [Pause] Hang on, why's there no music?

Long story short. I'm getting perfect audio. From the NUC. But not via its direct HDMI connection into the Rotel's Video input #6. Oh no, that would be perversely simple by the Rules of Physics as they obtain in Technology Towers. No, this dastardly batch of binary digits is hitching a ride from the NUC on the back of the Remote Desktop stream coming across the LAN carried by NoMachine, into BlackBeast. Here, it gets decoded by the external USB Xonar sound card, and thence converted into modulated photons and squirted back to the Rotel along the optical fibre into Rotel digital audio Input #3. And thence to my loudspeakers, and my lugholes.

It's on days like this I wish I'd listened to my mother.
Why? What did she say?
I don't know. I never listened.

One minor consolation

As I was typing the above I got an email from my chum with a NUC. He is in much the same boat — which prompts me to recall that I read earlier today that "a boat is just a device looking for somewhere to sink" — but let that pass:

I am going to admit defeat.

If I power down the Onkyo and the connected TV (to avoid issues with suspend-mode passthru on the Onkyo) then I end up in the same situation as you, ie with an unchangeable 1024x768 res. Fit to window allows bitwise rescaling on the client but does not alter the actual resolution. The option which should allow server side resolution changes does not work, apparently because the server side is not offering any supported resolutions to switch to. I am sure I have seen the thing scale with the window but I can no longer make it do that.

Turning on the Onkyo (not even using the NUC input) immediately gives me a disabled HDMI display on the NUC. If I then enable this I can get 1920x1080 resolution. If at this point I turn off Onkyo and TV, the headless desktop on the NUC happily continues to run at 1920x1080 and this resolution cannot be changed by either the display dialog or xrandr. If I then turn the Onkyo and screen back on I am left with a disabled display on the NUC which cannot be re-enabled with the display dialog but can be re-enabled with xrandr. This is not a tester's corner-case, it is some Lovecraftian nightmare angle which leads into the chaotic realm of the Great Old Ones. Venture here at your own peril.

Restarting the NUC with the Onkyo pointing at the NUC's HDMI connection works fine, provided the HDMI was enabled before reboot. If you disable HDMI from xrandr then you lose the picture on the screen and the nomachine session hangs. xrandr reports HDMI is still connected but that the resolution is 320x200. Restarting nomachine appears to confirm this — if you thought a 1024x768 window was a bit small you should see 320x200!! Rebooting the system at this point gave me what appeared to be a bit of the login splash screen, scaled I suspect in the ratio of 320x200 to 1920x1080. Unfortunately there were no scroll bars. Some clicking and hammering of keys later and I found the login prompt and the resolution appeared to have returned to something sensible. Once I had logged in all was calm.

I think I will go and watch some snooker. It is less stressful.

Date: Today


No patience at all, some people. Still, I'm mildly relieved to see that it's not just me.

Back when...

... the world was younger, and I was innocenter, I was in the habit of generating and hosting all my DVD cover artwork hereabouts. I used a fairly labour-intensive Java-based photo gallery called JAlbum. It accounted for a distressingly large percentage of my web traffic and bandwidth, so when we closed down our little in-house Celeron server after seven years of continuous operation (and we did that back in August 2007) I simply took down the facility. I had a great many more pressing issues to contend with, mostly involving my nursing of Christa through the end stages of her terminal cancer.

To this day, it amuses me to see that a variety of people and processes still regularly drop by 'molehole' looking in vain for missing images. Anyhowsoever, I've just been reading all about fgallery. I must say, it sounds almost simple enough for a computer klutz like me to use "out of the box":

fgallery

In fact, it's giving me some ideas... I've also been reading about the rapid development of the Atom editor and may well take that out for another test drive. All I generally need these days is a simple HTML and text editor, after all.

  

Footnotes

1  I don't, of course, having now been out of thrall to "the Man" for nearly a decade :-)
2  Whichever Bright Spark came up with the idea that "the convergence of the PC and the TV in the living room" is easy should be taken out and shot.
3  Without a screen physically attached when NoMachine starts doing its magical stuff, the size of the NUC's desktop as presented here on the 34" Dell is inconveniently small. With the Kuro attached, I can get a Full HD desktop to work within.