2016 — 3 June: Friday
Odd to think that, if I keep this ¬blog ticking over for its next 3,500 days1 I will then be over 74 years old! Chance would be a fine thing. Perhaps by then I will have enabled speech input and can save myself some keyboarding.
The deniable joys...
... of having two ostensibly identical builds of Ubuntu 16.04 on two different PCs — cue spooky music — one gets offered an update to the Libre Office suite this morning, the other doesn't. Though quite why I want Libre Office on my little NUC beats me...
I shall probably squeeze in a few more foody supplies before my roof consultant turns up and starts clambering around photographing my tiles. Busy, busy.
Easy mistake...
... to make, perhaps? Source and snippet:
Mollusk expert Pierre Denys de Montfort's iconic pen-and-wash drawing of 1801 shows a giant octopus rising from the ocean, its arms twisting in great loops all the way to the top of a schooner's three masts. He claimed the existence of at least two kinds of giant octopus, one of which, he concluded, was surely responsible for the disappearance of no less than ten British warships that mysteriously vanished one night in 1782. (To Montfort's public embarrassment, a survivor later revealed that they were really lost in a hurricane.)
That reminds me to reconsider a Hokusai print, and to listen to tomorrow's second half of "The Kraken Wakes". Will Phyllis be dragged out of the window to her doom?
Not to mention the sad saga of Harold the pet octopus, and the spade...
My splendid Uncle ERNIE...
... has again flung a little something in my direction this month:
Should I alert the media?
What...?
... he asks rhetorically, "allows the NUC to display its Grub menu on the Kuro plasma screen, but nothing after that?" It's almost as if that famed living room convergence 'twixt TV and PC has a few glitches still. Good job I'm only interested in using it for audio, says he, supping his wine-made-from-sour-grapes. It would be funny, if it were funny. The display of the NUC's desktop is unperturbed on BlackBeast in the NoMachine Remote Desktop window, of course.
With luck...
... my "can't really put it off any longer" roofing repairs may begin this coming Monday. Ridge tiles along the top of each roof section are in dire need of some TLC, the various channels running diagonally down between sections are full of debris and assorted botanical wonders. The gutters need replacing. Concrete on the edge tiles is very tired, too. I shall take this opportunity to remove the long-unused FM and UHF roof aerials that now do nothing but provide defecation perches for pigeons.
The bill? Much like the one I had for the complete CH system six years ago. Last year's windfall from dear Mama2 will help. Happily, the internal domestic upheaval will be negligible. No need to pack away literally thousands of books into cartons and then shift them to the self-storage warehouse. In my eyes, that alone is almost worth the cost!
Time to restore...
... just a little order to the chaos that is my still-growing CD collection. I generally put this off until the piles (of, to be honest, piles) reach a literal tipping point. Then I sort them into CaseLogic folders, while trying to make sure I've first ripped them to MP3 if necessary. The plus side of having them on a NAS for (almost) immediate access is balanced by the minus side of having them necessarily physically separated from their artwork. Of course, digging them out of the folders to play is also a lot less convenient.
The NUC's latest trick this afternoon has just been to repeat a one-second burst of music while freezing out the NoMachine Remote Desktop window from doing anything but drop the connection. The looped "music" continued until I physically held down the power switch for long enough to persuade the pea-brained device to give up. I'm now starting to wonder about the wisdom of that recent BIOS flash update! Clementine plays the same music from the same NAS on BlackBeast without this aggravation.
AFAICS...
... both Ubuntu machines are now again fully (software) updated. And both shut down cleanly from their respective NoMachine sessions on BlackBeast. I've filed away just over 2,600 CDs sprawling across 13 CaseLogic folders. I've yet to tackle any significant number of my classical CDs, but visible progress has occurred, which is always nice. It's 21:09 and I need a change of activity. Or, failing that, a cuppa.