2016 — 31 March: Thursday

Having been "forced" to guzzle both my bits of roast chicken yesterday1 my next food-shelf-filling exercise looms rather nearer. This has been an oddly-structured week, somehow. I blame religion.

Beyond the grocer?

Gimme a chance to sup my first cup first!

That nice Mr Trump...

... has opened his mouth and pushed both his feet in yet again. Not sure I understand how you can both "not change your position" and yet "fully recant" earlier statements. I shudder to think what goes on between his ears. The phrase "opportunistic prat" seems apt. (Link.)

Who knew...

... linguistics could be so violent? Talk about "culture clash"! Source and snippet:

... having a language disappear because all the speakers got massacred is actually really rare. There are a couple of examples where all the speakers of some language got wiped out by a volcanic eruption on an island. And there are a couple of examples, at least one in this country, where almost everybody was wiped out by smallpox and then the remainder was lynched by a mob...

Ryan Bradley in Paris Review


I shall send a "messagerie électronique" immediately.

This made me smile:

The bathyspheric deep-dive of Trentmann's research, incidentally, has brought up some curious fish. Here is the only survey of global consumption in which, at the end of a page-long consideration of the Finnish obsession with tango music, you will learn of "the fusion of hybrid styles [in] post-punk Suomi-reggae, with the inimitable hit: 'Hän haluaa huussin' ('He wants a Dry Toilet')". I was glad of discovering that Swedish advertisements of the late 1920s "praised the banana as the ideal quiet snack during radio hours".

Sam Leith, reviewing Frank Trentmann's "Empire of Things" in TLS


I'm so pig-ignorant I had no idea that Abraham Maslow was now a "well-bayoneted straw man of economic theory". Is nothing I learned still true, I wonder? But then, is anything in economic theory ever true in the first place?

I must add bananas to my non-existent shopping list.

Not wanting...

... to overtax Junior at the weekend, I've deferred (until now) the question of how I can duplicate the new 'molehole' web page publishing régime to AWS. He set it up for me on BlackBeast Mk III but I'd also like to be able to do exactly the same on my new Skylark PC.

With my shopping concluded more speedily, and frugally, than normal2 I am now therefore sifting gently though the "hidden" bash_history file that lives in /home and winkling out of it all the salient bits of his sequence of command-line spells. That's to say both what he installed, and also just as important how he then interacted with it.

My goal is a forensic re-construction of the steps. I shall duplicate these on Skylark and see if I can successfully publish pages just as easily from that PC. What could possibly go wrong? Watch this space.

First things first

Starting with my lunch date.

Awaiting my return...

... was this delightful delivery:

Radio Times covers

It complements my much older (an Xmas 1981 present from Christa, in fact!) "The Art of Radio Times".

[Long, appreciative pause]

Very nice it is, too. Right! Time to make an evening meal, methinks.

Convergence of PC and TV in the living room?

Following recent chats I seem to have a way around the issue of dodgy support on the 34" Dell of Intel on-chip graphics (as in my i5 Skylake NUC):

Life in the Living Room

Providing the NUC is physically connected to a real display screen before I establish a Remote Desktop session to it with NoMachine I should be able to get a full 3440x1440 display on its desktop. And by only "converging" these two warring technologies across a simple analogue audio connection, what could possibly go wrong? (You're not supposed to notice that HDMI connection from Skylark to the Rotel.)

:-)

  

Footnotes

1  Part of my perpetual campaign to avoid food waste in the face of entropic decay.
2  It's not my fault that the Waitrose scan-as-you-go system is broken. But the truth is the "running total and checklist" that you can inspect on the hand-held scanner comfortably exceeds the amount of neural buffer space and personal CPU capacity I'm prepared to allocate to my food shopping subroutines, so I exited as soon as I estimated I'd got enough "stuff" to tide me over for another day or so.