2016 — 25 May: Wednesday
I found another round tuit lying around, earlier this morning.1 As a result of which, there are now finally some notes on my i5 NUC. The PC in question plays on, courtesy of Clementine. However, I think I shall now put Kodi on it, and just let it loose on my music library. Could be amusing.
How about...
... some breakfast? Man cannot live by tea and one toasted Hot Cross Bun alone, surely? I shall defer the question of another supplies run until those grey clouds have made up their mind what they intend to do with all the rain they clearly hold.
Note to self
Next time you install and launch Kodi — on the NUC, I mean, under Ubuntu — do try to remember to go into "System" immediately to set the thing to "Windowed" rather than the default "Full Screen". (I wonder why the "\" key didn't do its normal toggling thing?) Still, at least it had no trouble finding the music directory I fed it from the 2TB NAS, and I got audio "right out of the box".
Now, if I only had a clue what these doubtless universally-understood (by everyone but me, that is) icons mean, or do, or control:
Do I dare...
... refresh the NUC's BIOS to '44' and thus "unlock" the full speed of the M2 SSD? I gather, at the moment, it's restricted to a mere 1600MB/s! (Link.)
Steve Bell sometimes makes me hoot helplessly. (Example.)
My occasional...
... cat caller is on my back steps at the moment, intent on something deep within a pile of adjacent garden waste, probably in the rodent line of business. Cycle of life, and all that. I, too, need a little something to prepare for the Great BIOS Flash Adventure. I don't know quite how, but it's already gone 18:30 — I admit I've had my nose in a Bujold that, for a change, isn't a Vorkosigan. I dug Peter's copy of "The Curse of Chalion" off his shelves to try.
Phew!
I've successfully and painlessly nudged my NUC's BIOS up from revision '28' (mid-November 2015) to '44' (a mere 13 days old!) and now Ubuntu pops cheerfully up, just as before. From the Forum chatter, it seems I've dodged a nasty set of bullets while many customers have been having to send the things back for total replacement. A string of BIOS updates have (Intel assures us) finally fixed a hardware voltage regulation problem that could otherwise slowly but surely brick the unit. It should now be OK.
I have no idea if the M2 SSD is up to full-speed, but that wasn't my major concern once I'd found out about this voltage problem. This is the first time I've had to flash a motherboard since my unlamented iMac which needed a firmware fix almost as soon as it arrived in Technology Towers. (And that was in early 2007.)