2016 — 2 April: Saturday
Let's start with my magnificent new, hand-turned, American Ash saucer, shall we? The over-warm muted glow that is all I allow in through the curtains at this time of day doesn't do justice to the beautiful light colour of the polished wood, but this will give you the general idea:
You can just see a hint, too, of the edges of a plastic non-slip base stuck very neatly to the underneath. This renders the saucer ("saucer" hardly seems an appropriately respectful term, does it?) at least as stable as the Rock of Gibraltar — a vital consideration on a desktop as cluttered as mine is all too easily capable of becoming. As he writes in the accompanying Eeyore card: "If the cup fits..." Thank you very much indeed, Christopher!
As I kick the NUC...
... into music-playing duty this morning, it occurs to me I still have a couple of display screen tricks left up my sleeve untried. They may / should solve my current (very) minor-league1 issue if I insist on controlling the NUC via a NoMachine Remote Desktop instead of just switching the Dell screen's input temporarily over to HDMI and seeing the NUC display in its full 3440x1440 pixel glory...
When I fire up the NUC and then control it from BlackBeast Mk III (say) in a NoMachine session, instead of the previous situation — where the NUC's desktop maxed out at Full HD (nowhere near enough for Dell) — I'm now left with the opposite problem: the edges of the NUC's desktop now "don't quite fit" on the Dell because, dagnabbit, said desktop is being squeezed into the NoMachine window on BlackBeast.
How can I retrieve those missing pixels?!
For starters, the bottom panel from BlackBeast's desktop isn't currently auto-hiding out of the way. So that's about 36 I can rescue vertically for display purposes. But (of course) the NUC desktop also overflows the left and right edges given the left and right window edges nibbling away at the available display width. Terrible!
Once or twice...
... I've managed to stumble across a "full screen" NoMachine setting that "eats" all the window edges. "Stumble" being the operative term. I could also try defining a "custom resolution" for the NoMachine session to use, making it just smaller enough for it to fit neatly "above" the bottom panel and "inside" the NoMachine window on BlackBeast. But I don't want to do that if it compromises the present crispness of my full resolution display. I generally dislike scaling effects. And am apparently over-prone to notice them. Bite me.
Meanwhile...
... Junior has scrutinised my AWS notes and is OK with them after a tiny bit of path and session obfuscation, for now at least. And it's well past time for breakfast, too.
Not being...
... quite the focused geek as some among my acquaintance would claim (whether of themselves or of me I shall say nowt) I was delighted to learn — as opposed to already knowing — that the theme tune used on "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (namely "Journey of the Sorceror" by the Eagles) was for 'rights' reasons re-recorded for the TV version by Tim Souster.
And I learned from one of my recent books of BBC Radio Times artwork that Adams himself, shortly before his death, had requested that his version of "Hitchhiker's" (without the hyphen) be used in any future programme listing.
Oops!
It's American Oak, not Ash, Gill tells me. My bad. And me such a fan of Acorn, too.