2016 — 1 April: Friday — rabbits!
Lunch today is a moveable feast.1 But I shan't worry about that until after breakfast, at least.
Two gurus...
... each suggested I was living dangerously by switching a 4TB external USB3 drive between my two desktop PCs with the Kingston wonderbox. I risk corruption (so what's new?). I have now rewired my living room "system" along yesterday's epiphanic lines and can report that by far the trickiest bit is the selection of the correct input (three of its four are now in use) on the 34" Dell screen. I have not yet made the final connection (between Skylark and Rotel) lest the whole network turns into a weird mixture of AJ Deutsch's "A Subway named Moebius" or Fredric Brown's "The Answer". Both excellent stories, by the way.
The NUC now perches physically on a corner of my PC desk and is the audio-only gateway between the "PC" end of things and the "TV/hi-fi" end of things. So much for convergence.
Meanwhile...
... my last chunk of well-fired loaf has taken itself beyond the range of human dentition. And even beyond the range of my new breadknife. It was a mistake not to have had it sliced in the shop, I fear. I could then have frozen smaller portions of it and thus been able to increase the percentage I could consume.
"Wedge"?
Wasn't he a character in the original "Star Wars"?
The wedges-as-species comparison made it as far as Darwin's first edition of The Origin of Species, published in 1859. But at some point soon after Darwin abruptly removed it, and it never appeared again...
He never explained why he dropped it, but one possible reason is that he doubted people would like it. To those with no interest in rocks, such a metaphor would have seemed bleak and alien: An invisible hammer drives one wedge down, then another, with no obvious rationale. It's nature
as whack-a-mole, with humans as just another mole being whacked into — and perhaps one day out of — existence.
No "perhaps" about it, surely?
My lunchtime...
... probability wave-function has just been collapsed by a phone call, so I now have time to tidy up and simplify yesterday's freehand sketch of the Interconnections of my Silicon Lifeforms before I have to hit the road. Here it is:
All three PCs and the Oppo Blu-ray player have access to A/V files held on the NAS. But the only "contact" between the worlds of PC and TV is one stereo analogue audio cable. I defy HDCP to interfere with that!
Returning to yesterday's theme...
... and waiting my return this afternoon was a delightful duo:
Again, they complement that Xmas 1981 present from Christa — "The Art of Radio Times". Indeed, one of today's lunchtime topics (the quality of the art over the years in "Radio Times") found us all in agreement, too.
Big Bro made...
... a passing reference to my new Rotel pre-amp having glanced (I deduce) at its rear panel array of socketry. I've long ago given up trying to photograph my A/V kit as indoor shots of black-on-black require more patience in lighting set-up than I possess. Instead, I tend to download a PDF file of the User Manual, pick out the least cluttered diagram I can find, and snapshot it... as here:
Should your eyesight fail you, try clicking the pic. to reveal the "Zen" approach to user-friendly labelling.
Turning my attention...
... back to more webby matters, I have just drafted a set of notes that try to capture the sequence of steps involved in setting up a simple static HTML web site for hosting on Amazon's AWS out of a storage bucket "up in the cloud". I will be fascinated to see how much of it passes Junior's scrutiny.