2016 — 7 May: Saturday

It's been many Saturdays since I last checked in with Brian Matthew's "Sounds of the Sixties".1 I'm listening to it now, while pondering where best to site my Intel i5 NUC. I drive the NUC "headlessly" to use as my audio player so it doesn't matter where it sits. But if I put it next to the 34" Dell screen I have to use the HDMI connection. I literally cannot use a DisplayPort connection thanks to very unpleasant reactions between Intel's Skylake motherboard graphics drivers and an as-yet unfixed Linux kernel regression in the NUC's Mint 17.3 build.

Until last week, the NUC was using an HDMI connection2 to the Rotel pre-amp at the other end of the living room. When Skylark's irritating collapse took it out of the game, I put the NUC back on my PC desk and connected it to the Dell via the HDMI input that Skylark had been using — thus retrieving all those missing pixels.

(Not) any (Display)Port...

... in a storm. BlackBeast Mk III and Skylark both have graphics cards that can drive the Dell via DisplayPort at its full resolution. So, now that Skylark is once more up and running, I will switch it over from its HDMI connection to use instead the Dell's second DisplayPort input. A cunning plan that leaves the Dell's HDMI input available for the NUC. So I will keep the NUC on my PC desk and see how well (or not) all three PCs get on sharing the Dell.

And how well (or not) I get on fiddling with the awkward touch-sensitive input switching panel on the Dell.

Speaking (obliquely)...

... of touch-sensitivity, this was a story new to me:

For decades, the novelists Paul and Jane Bowles presided in Tangier, which Jack Kerouac was to call a "sinister international hive of queens". William Burroughs arrived in 1954 with a teenage Spaniard named Kiki who, Woods writes, "was, famously, the boy who would blow smoke into his pubic hair and say 'Abracadabra' as his hardening cock emerged from the cloud". Tangier was to figure in Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch as a phantasmagoric, rubbery walled sex market called the Interzone.

Caleb Crain, reviewing "Homintern" by Gregory Woods in Grauniad (Or, perhaps, "Groiniad"?)


I fear I found Burroughs' prose largely, erm, impenetrable.

Today's little...

... mission of mercy — conveying one of my chums to and from Soton General for eyes to be poked and prodded (and left too dilated for safe driving for a while) — gave me 90 minutes or so of pleasant "wandering about" time during which I found a book I browsed, and will now order. Plus a Kronos Quartet CD of some previously unrecorded Terry Riley music. But that wasn't all.

My expotition also gave me an opportunity to leave Skylark up and running (Ubuntu), but with the USB switcher "pointing" at BlackBeast. When I got back I would be able to see what sort of knots Skylark had managed to tie itself into. It's been altogether too keen to drop into a "persistent vegetative state" when left alone for too long3 without interaction. I don't mind these things suspending or hibernating if I go out. I do mind if they remain comatose after I'm back.

So on my return this afternoon I had not only worked up a healthy appetite, but was delighted to see that on switching the mouse and keyboard "back" to Skylark the merest twitch of the mouse brought it back to life with everything tickety-boo. No need, therefore, to SSH into it from BlackBeast and do a sudo restart, or quickly chalk a protective pentacle and chant any 'randr' demon-summoning restart incantations. Score? Ubuntu: 1, Mint: 0, in this respect.

Confirmation of a...

... plausible explanation for my initial difficulty in getting Ubuntu to install on my (Asus motherboard) Skylark PC is contained in a related tale of woe with some lesser OS. It was, as I suspected, related to UEFI Secure Boot — now sometimes the default option on new motherboards. If you don't spot this, and disable it in the BIOS settings, the installation process can fail. Mine certainly did, at the point where I saw a mysterious prompt for a pair of temporary passwords with which to authenticate my permission for the system to disable Secure Boot for just long enough to install some proprietary hardware drivers. (Link.)

The jury...

... is still out considering whether the verdict is "tulip" on this one:

Hybrid tulip???

No such doubt with this one:

Definitely a tulip

And this is but one of three variants I have of "bluebells", colourwise:

Definitely bluebells, too

Here endeth the (botanical) lesson.

  

Footnotes

1  I will later be reverting to either BBC Radio 3 or my own music collection. Those focused enthusiasms :-)
2  This limited its screen resolution to the 1920x1080 of the 60" Kuro plasma screen — undeniably 'impoverished' given the 34" Dell screen's native resolution of 3440x1440 pixels. I want my missing pixels!
3  This gave me a nasty shock when it first happened, as I tried to work out what wasn't going on (as it were) and how to work around it.