2016 — 26 March: Saturday
Today has inexorably turned into tomorrow without any significant AWS progress1 to report apart from my tidying up in readiness. But we did all three get to see the new Todd Haynes film "Carol", and at least one of us enjoyed it. Very much. More than "Far from Heaven" in fact, though I clearly recall seeing that with Christa in Harbour Lights many years ago now.
Jungle clearances...
... are now set to start in just a few hours...
[Pause, of a few hours]
The weather has turned...
... gloomy and moist. I have no idea yet of the effect this may have on any jungle work as the young people slumber on at the moment.
But in better news (and after a closer study of its thick 'manual', I admit) I have learned to use "Bypass" as the default setting on the Rotel when handling any analogue audio2 input. And separately confirmed the wisdom of connecting both NAD CD player and Humax Freesat PVR by analogue — thereby avoiding (in the Humax case) any HDCP-related crap as I switch to other sources and/or switch the Kuro screen on or off (necessarily, not capriciously). In both cases "Bypass" also avoids any conversion of the analogue audio into digital for completely unwanted DSP "shaping" of any sort in the Rotel. Instead:
The two front speakers receive pure analog stereo full-range signals with no subwoofer crossover, no delay, no level adjustments, and no parametric eq.
Can't say fairer than that. Despite the spelling of "analogue".
Setting up the NUC...
... to do its morning handshake routine of establishing 1920x1080 Full HD on the 34" Dell in a NoMachine Remote Desktop window before I switch off the Kuro, I'm once again struck by just how little "room" such a resolution seems to offer these days. Strikes me, too, I could now update this little graphic as my current 3440x1440 Dell isn't on it. I suspect I now know Inkscape well enough to match what I did with Xara on Windows:
Throughout my time in IBM I never had day-to-day access to screens of such high resolution, but I now regard "Full HD" as a barely-acceptable minimum. And yet I only had a VGA screen for much of the 13 years I was using Acorn RISC OS PCs here at home.
AWS progress...
... consists, so far, in having hauled my lackadaisical security and password processes3 into at least the early part of the 21st century. I'm now using both a decent password manager, and a multi-factor identification process that has been synchronised between my AWS account and my smartphone. This was all just for logging into the AWS console — something I will actually not need to do daily, I sincerely hope, as (a) it will only be necessary if something has gone awry with files I've uploaded to the AWS S3 "bucket", and (b) it means keeping my smartphone and its new "Authy" app within easy reach.
A side benefit of the struggle (what doesn't kill you makes you stronger!) to get all this tickety-boo was the realisation that Linux keeps two separate buffers knocking around for copy, cut, and paste purposes. But not all applications seem to know this. I was as taken aback by this little "gotcha" as my son was, but at least it does finally explain various inconsistencies I've noticed in the clipboard-behaviour of a variety of text editors and applications.
A brief Q&A session with Mrs Google, two further bits of installed software later... and all is now sweetly-synchronised for me between these buffers for future use. Plus I now have easy and selectable access to the contents of my clipboard from the system tray. Rather cool.
For the record...
... my new "publish to the world" command-line "spell" looks something like this:
aws s3 sync /home/david/webfiles/ s3://path to my molehole files on AWS/
Simple enough, methinks. By the way, if you can see this, the DNS change has propagated as far as your web browser. My email is also being migrated but may take a day or so.