2016 — 17 April: Sunday
The current blast of chill1 that came in when I opened the blinds suggests that, despite the brilliant sunshine, it may have been a frosty night. It's now +4C.
I shall be...
... off in search of a well-fired loaf this morning. And I will be Chauffeur-driven, too. [Pause] I've just been comparing the "news" as filtered by the Grauniad and by the Beirut Daily Star. I find I still have to agree with the view expressed by the "me" of earlier times (and shared by Heinlein's Jubal Harshaw character).
Money money money
I've enjoyed the opinions of Sarah Dunant in times past. This is (I assume) her latest. I find an "elegant sufficiency" is usually just about enough of the stuff. I wouldn't like less, but wouldn't have a clue what to do with more.
[Pause]
Well, the little money I have...
... stretched far enough for the two nicely-sliced well-fired loaves that are now neatly stowed in my freezer compartment for days yet to come. A swift lunch, and then it was time for a spot of surgery on Skylark. Len had showed me the 'correct' way to use the two SSD slots tucked away on the Dark Side of the motherboard, so I tried one. I don't have a surfeit of devices to tuck out of the way, so I don't "need" to use this slot. Just as well — the power lead I'd been using wouldn't stretch to even the nearer of the two slots, and I certainly wasn't going to unleash another cable from its neat bundle just for the hell of it. So I reverted to the previous state.
I did, however, replace the more conventional vertical tower of eight empty disk slots and also tidied up the power lead to the nVIDIA graphics card. My Fractal Design case is a joy to work "in" compared to the standard Novatech gaming case that houses BlackBeast Mk III. (And even that was better than BB Mk II's case.) I've paid less attention than I should to PC cases, but have learned my lesson.
My goal remains...
... to replace BlackBeast Mk III by Skylark as my primary PC. But it occurs to me that the next Ubuntu LTS release is now very nearly upon us. Before simply turning Skylark into a more powerful version of its relative I'm now tempted to hang on for long enough to take Ubuntu 16.04 out for a trial run. I didn't much like Unity in its first incarnation, but I'm sure it will have improved. And that should give Clem and his merry band time to polish Mint 18 for its release slightly downstream of Ubuntu.
[Pause]
Humpty Dumpty is back up and running (sprinting, actually, by comparison with BB Mk III) but has now once again been taken offline lest I leave BB Mk III on (but quiescent for long enough for it to get its DisplayPort output into a mess). Len has a theory that this will happen; I, on the other hand, wonder if the Radeon graphics card might not be just a bit better-behaved than the nVIDIA in this (dis)respect. Though I have no great interest in finding out it isn't the hard way. The NUC, meanwhile, ticks steadily along playing "Late Junction" programmes to me from the NAS.
And it's nearly time for an evening meal. It has remained pleasantly sunny and dry but I've "had my nose stuck in a book" so have scarcely noticed. That's my kind of Sunday!
I've even been working up an appetite...
... by clambering up into the loft to check, and drain, my little rain-catching apparatus and then chuck down a set of four cartons whose original (technology) contents have, erm, evaporated (one way or another) in the past few years:
- The Panasonic BD player (Peter now has that),
- The DVDO Edge scaler (surplus to requirements in this all-digital Brave New World — I have no legacy analogue video kit to contend with),
- The Netgear "Digital Entertainer Express" (supplanted first by the smaller "WD Live TV HD", and then by the network capability of the current Oppo BD player), and
- The Novatech box for the Laptop PC.
Such good fun not having Christa around any more... either to collect things as I hand them down, or to hand things down to me. The hatch is quite a tight squeeze for all of me, the ladder, and "stuff". And there are, I fear, a great many more cartons stashed away up there in the Land of the Dead Toys.