2016 — 11 May: Wednesday
Last time I had three1 desktop PCs all just for me hereabouts was in early 2007 when I (briefly) added the iMac alongside my pair of XP machines. Let's ignore how unwell that all turned out.
I'm hoping...
... the combination of yesterday's neat little hardware acquisition2 and the finally-successful installation of Ubuntu 16.04 MATE on my two Skylake processor PCs will now usher in a new era of peace and technological stability. But is it progress?
BlackBeast (an all-SSD SATA system with a quad-core Intel i7 4790K, Radeon graphics card, and 1600MHz DDR3 memory) will stay on Mint 17.3 until the situation regarding the open source driver for its graphics card clarifies. Ubuntu 16.04 has removed Radeon's proprietary drivers, so it wouldn't be quite so suitable. Since Mint 18 is based on Ubuntu 16.04 I shall first assess how well I like (or hate) Ubuntu relative to Mint and then decide what to do to/with BlackBeast once Mint 18 arrives. I predict I will be perfectly content with Ubuntu, and happy to relegate BlackBeast to the perfectly honourable status of "First Reserve" (as I believe our sports chums put it).
Skylark (also an all-SSD system [using the even faster PCi interface] with a quad-core Intel i7 6700K, nVidia GTX 950 graphics card, and 2400MHz DDR4 memory) is well-served by its corresponding proprietary driver.
The less said about the Intel graphics buried somewhere inside the tiny i5 NUC the better, but it's of lesser concern.
I can't help feeling...
... that education (and its apparently all-important assessment) is far too important to be left to teachers, let alone politicians!
But what do I know? I'm only a parent, after all.
Time speeds along
I published this little "postcard" image map exactly eight years ago:
And I still find myself muttering "Unbelievable" from time to time.
I've been falling behind...
... with my medical studies. Disgraceful! But, try as I might, I find there to be only 24 hours in the average day, and a set of those is spent slumbering. Anyway, I copied this image...
... via the new NAS from Skylark, which is where I scanned and rescaled it. I was using Skylark while downloading and successfully installing my second copy of the frightfully useful UltraEdit text editor. However, a 30-day "trial clock" is now ticking on that copy (my registration failed with "Unknown Error 100" when I plumbed in what I thought / hoped were my details). I have an email query on its way to their support folk.
I also have Season #6 of "Nurse Jackie" on order, to be watched first. But it's yet to arrive.
[Pause]
To my delight, a helpful email reply soon arrived and I now have UltraEdit up, running, and registered, on Skylark. And — just as a proof of concept — I'm making these edits on a copy of the web page actually on the shared NAS but using UE on Skylark. This won't be my long-term modus operandi of course, but is just for the fun of it. I have to observe, however, that the code page has reverted to the undesirable ISO8859-1. I shall fix that now... Have fixed that now. Let's see if it survives the hyperspatial jump back to BlackBeast.
[Pause]
It did, but I also notice it put a 'tab' character on the start of each line of text to indent my paragraphs. Still, nothing's perfect. I just need to re-find the particular setting and bend it back to my evil will. And, in any case, the web browser's page rendering engine simply ignores what it regards as "superfluous white space" unless you turn off formatting between <pre> and </pre> tags.
Or it certainly should. That's how things have worked for over two decades, after all.
It's always interesting...
... to see what other people — a perfesser of "Humanistic Studies", in this case — get out of their Austen reading. (Personally, I still find "Northanger Abbey" unscaleable.) Source and snippet:
Much better, thinks Fanny, to read books or work on her embroidery than make smart conversation or try out a new style of hat. Nobody in the story knows it (least of all Fanny), but she is a gem. But everyone reading the story knows it, and this being Austen — and not, say, Edith Wharton — we can hotly anticipate the comeuppance of everyone who's overlooked or mistreated her, especially her busybody aunt and stuck-up cousins... As a cynical, clear-eyed adult, I see them not as nostalgic fantasies, but as finely wrought vignettes of unacknowledged suffering.
Dear Mama enjoyed embroidery for a while :-)