2016 — 12 May: Thursday
Having just polished off Season #3 of "House of Cards" (US variant) I thought I'd get a jump start on tomorrow's ¬blog jotting1 by reporting disquieting signs of instability in the version of Ubuntu 16.04 that finally made it on to the i5 NUC. The sibling installation on Skylark has bedded down much more comfortably, it seems... I may have dodged a bullet, too. I've been sent a hint that installing from a USB2 stick on to a Skylake processor can end in tears. The trouble is, I think Junior has now managed to abscond with all my USB3 sticks.
The food cupboard...
... is once again in a parlous state of emptiness, so that will be Task #1 before my lunchdate. Preceded by sleep. Right now.
I struck up...
... a friendship (on holiday in Palma on Majorca, in 1967) with an ex-RAF chess-playing ex-pat into whose tiny bachelor flat had been squeezed the first decent hi-fi system I heard. It was a monophonic Quad valve-amp system with a single electrostatic curved panel loudspeaker, and had an extraordinary sound. I was by then familiar, courtesy of "Wireless World" magazine, with the general theory of operation of the things but they were way above my pocket money pay grade and I had never heard2 them in action before.
Fast forward half a century, and we can now find a valve amplifier atop a slice of Raspberry Pi:
It was Brian who spotted this aberration, so don't blame me!
My Skylark PC...
... has mildly disappointed me this morning. I'd added a second panel, along the left hand side, to its Ubuntu MATE desktop, to keep my application shortcuts on. But only two of these survived the overnight power-off. The first time this happened, none of my shortcuts survived into the next day, so this is (at a stretch) a small improvement. I've heard of software rot, but this is faintly ridiculous.
On the hardware rot front...
... I was very pleased to find — when I thought to examine more closely the storage at the far end of the garage (access to which is only possible when my little Mazda is out on the drive, of course) — an only slightly mouldy old Microsoft mechanical keyboard with the vital3 PS/2 connector that will (or should) enable me to break into the BIOS come what may. I shall drop my borrowed IBM variant back to Brian while en route to lunch later this morning. Meanwhile, Mrs Hubbard's cupboard has once again had its irritating echo muffled for a while.
I've just picked up...
... a piece of local news: my next-door neighbours are asking £389,000 for their house.4 Its initial occupants were Bob and Pat. (He was an ex-IBM Hursley typewriter repairman who for some years ran a PC shop in Otterbourne while Pat did typesetting work above the premises.) Next came a pair of Pakistani NHS doctors who were in the house long enough to develop the usual warm affection for Christa (though they also espoused a religious world view that was at odds with mine). At least one of the current occupants is again an IBMer, but again with views divergent from mine, so I just keep my head down.
Check mate
No matter how amusingly written, this is a depressing piece. Source and snippet:
There are surely fewer greater parental satisfactions than to see one's progeny doing well at something. But there is altogether different feeling — a sobering slap of pathos, a vague sense of alarm that some genie had been let out of a bottle — when they exceed you on the same task. When a person who still cannot always successfully tie her own shoes, who has yet to do long division, can beat me at the royal game. She was Big Blue, and I was the human race, being slowly outmoded.
I'm a little taken aback...
... by how easy it seems to be to crash the Caja File Manager on Skylark's Ubuntu system. But, to be honest, it was just as easy to crash the Windows File Explorer, and I got heartily sick of seeing the pretty rainbow spinning wheel that told me the OS-X "explorer" was, erm, hanging about, up to no good.
I've made one further attempt to define a second Panel, with my choice of applications "stuck" to it, taking care to save the Panel Layout at each step. It has — so far — survived two complete re-boot cycles and one invocation of "Force Quit" (which, by the way, neither forced, nor quit, the ailing Caja).
KBO