2016 — 25 March: Friday
This is merely a placeholder.1 Good Friday is certainly an entirely appropriate day for the trans-migration of the soul of 'molehole' into the maw of AWS. Wish me luck!
The chap who...
... lives inside my head (and it isn't me! — if you recall the Pink Floyd lyric) and tells me what to do (when I let him! — on the assumption that Quantum Reality allows such a thing as Free Will2) has suggested (while we share and sup together our second wake-us-up cuppa) that...
- ... perhaps it would make a nice change if (for once) instead of tediously yammering on about our failures (and the rare success) in wrangling the combination of the new Linux NUC, the wonderful NoMachine Remote Desktop software, the gorgeous Rotel A/V pre-amp (with its wholly new philosophical approach to "playing nice" with HDMI inputs compared to its venerable Audiolab predecessor) burbling away in the background, the not always well-behaved but lovely 34" Dell 3440x1440 monitor, the newest Linux Skylark PC, and so on, and so on...
- ... perhaps it might be more useful, while awaiting the arrival of Junior and his g/f, to do some last-minute fix-up of some of the web pages that I'm about to unleash upon the world from AWS?
He's not wrong, dagnabbit.
My goal is to make...
... what you see on 'molehole' from its new static HTML launchpad on AWS look and behave exactly the same as the present rag, tag, and bobtail collection of random lumps of SHTML scattered around 'molehole'. It's fair to say there's been a steady accumulation of cruft over the years. This is a chance to shake that off.
One beneficial side-effect (for me) is that by only putting on AWS precisely what I choose to put there in the first place it renders the continuous efforts of J Arthur Hacker3 more fruitless than ever without my really having to think about it. ("Virtual, Case 4", should you need a reminder.)
Visible molehole material...
... has always been only the tip of my little web iceberg. That said, this online ¬blog (for example) has been both great fun as a retirement hobby and often truly therapeutic as a way of slowly helping me come to terms with the horror of Christa's very premature disappearance from my life.
Breakfast also helps, I've found. But news of the death of Gary Shandling doesn't. (R.I.P. "Larry Sanders".)
Energetics
I really love these sort of essays. Source and snippet:
... our brains use energy at a rate of about 20 watts. If you wanted to upload yourself intact into a machine using current computing technology, you'd need a power supply roughly the same as that generated by the Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric plant in China, the biggest in the world. To take our species, all 7.3 billion living minds, to machine form would require an energy flow of at least 140,000 petawatts. That's about 800 times the total solar power hitting the top of Earth's atmosphere. Clearly human transcendence might be a way off.
Just you try telling that to the exponents of "Hollywood physics" :-)
This just in...
... proving, once again, that TANSTAAFL:
It looks like 3 separate accidents and snarls on our route, so probably best if you have lunch and we'll arrive mid-late afternoon or so. We'll have keys.
What is it about that subtle use of the future tense that makes me suspect they had not actually departed before noon in any case?
This just out...
... proving, once again, that there's more to setting up the Rotel than meets the (my) eye. I proved incapable of force-feeding it analogue stereo from the Audiolab CD player so have just reverted to optical SP/DIF. I harbour a few dark suspicions4 as to the reason.
It's been asserted...
... that you can prove anything with statistics. Make of this what you will:
Public 'molehole': 11,507 files, approx. 396.9MB Private 'molehole': 20,158 files, approx 1.7GB
See passing reference to "cruft" above!
If I interpret...
... this correctly (and that's a bit of a long shot)...
... it suggests I was at least looking in the right neck of the (aerial) woods when searching in vain for my lost NPR satellite radio reception the other day. Hot Bird 13E rings a distinct bell.
On the other hand, there's also the option of getting a 'smart' radio. Much as I loathe the idea of DAB, a simple interface to Internet Radio would perhaps be fun. For all I know, VLC can already manage this for me. The difficulty is more likely to be finding something worth listening to among 20,000 or so radio stations. Quality would also be an issue, I fear.