2016 — 24 April: Sunday

Big Bro suggests in his overnight reply that (in his opinion) I need to get out of my "comfort zone" on occasion.1 He's right, of course, though it's not my job to tell him that. I trust he'll be pleased, therefore, to know that I'm taking his advice right away this very morning — which was initially delightfully sunny and thus persuaded me to fling wide the patio door — promptly dropping the temperature in here to 19.9C but, hey, that's just the sort of mad-cap crazy thing we New Age pensioners get up to on occasion in the Northern Hemi-oblate-spheroid...

Here's another example

Having listened to a sample track I've just downloaded an MP3 album by Franck Vigroux and Matthew Bourne (of all people) that was described as a "thorough going-over" (in Max Reinhardt's exact words from the recent "Pancake Day" episode of Late Junction) of the now venerable Kraftwerk original "Radio-activity". It was one of the LPs I reviewed for Haymarket at the time. Quiet contemplation of each of the years that have elapsed since its release in 1975 is more than enough, surely, to boot anyone out of their "comfort zone"?

Or, at least, back into the kitchen to brew another soothing cuppa before digging out a woolly jumper? (I don't need pancakes; I had three thin ones for my supper yesterday with a drizzle of fresh lemon juice [courtesy of the penultimate fresh one the Young People had overlooked {among several other tasty things they had stowed away in my fridge} in their mad rush to depart several weeks ago] and bits of cold roast chicken leg sliced up and inserted into the mix. Delicious!)

Another...

... email from NZ just in (thanks, Ian) contained an interesting link. Your value of "interesting" may differ, but I certainly found plenty to divert me. Which is pretty much all I ask for these days. (Plus a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, etc etc.) Of course, it would be nice still to have Christa, too, but you can't have everything, can you?

Breakfast next, methinks.

Moon over Andromeda?

Our nearest neighbour (for the value "Our" = "Milky Way") is the M31 spiral galaxy in Andromeda, just 2,500,000 light-years away. It's part of the delightfully-named "local cluster" of galaxies. It's a bit bigger than the Milky Way, too. Sadly, it's not very bright so all you can see with the naked eye is a boring little fuzzy patch. (Or if, like me, you were a myopic child with uncorrected distance vision... not a sodding thing.)

Happily, NASA fixed that in one of their gorgeous "Picture of the Day" images a while back:

Moon over Andromeda

It's a cheated composite, giving a much longer time exposure to the galaxy to bring up its brightness, and then overlaying a view of our (slightly nearer!) neighbour, the Moon, at the same angular scale for a much easier comparison of their sizes in the sky. Cool!

Video "jiggery pokery" Part 2

I installed Handbrake on Skylark and then used it to convert the same HEVC video file I converted on BB Mk III yesterday — it averaged 223 hi-def frames per second. In other words, about 10% faster. The CPU usage graph was essentially identical. All 8 cores stayed above 80% throughout the process. Short of overclocking (not a game I intend to get into) that will be as fast as it goes. It took about six minutes to convert my 47-minute file.

  

Footnote

1  This sort of fancy New Age talk would tend to raise my hackles, if I only knew what they were and how to control them. What he means is, of course, "come down and visit us". I am as adept at reading between his lines as he is at ignoring what I write to him. 'Twas ever thus.