2016 — 21 June: Tuesday
Before the day gets much more battered I shall have to get a few more foody supplies in.1 Meanwhile, the tea is (too) hot, but the weather is not, and even hints at the possibility of further brickwork repairs. Two of the lads have just arrived, in fact. And others are due to deliver, and possibly start fitting, the plastic fascias and soffits. This is all goodness.
There's a walk pencilled in tomorrow (though last week we brought that forward out of fears of rain). I need to sort out a bunch of audio material ahead of that. I also notice there's something "different" about my rejuvenated atomic clock's display — beyond its pleasing jet blackness. But I can't put my finger on it. Tick, tock.
Comfort zone? Me?
Not proudly clutching my new, quite expensive, and rather posh-looking bottle of Aspall "apple balsamic vinegar". I don't think so. Should make a nice change from the clear paintstripper (aka distilled malt vinegar from Asda) I've nearly finished. Now that I stop to think about it, I'm almost sure I originally was advised to buy this for stainless steel sink cleaning purposes rather than for sprinkling on my salads.
On the audio front...
... and still in a pre-breakfast state, I'm currently fighting a losing battle against the mortar-grinding from the rear of the house, and the plastic soffit sawing and hammering from the front. Still, a guru having told me my memory is correct — "Cacharpaya" was indeed featured on the BBC's "The Flight of the Condor" (proof) — I've had an excuse to plumb my Denon tape deck back into the Rotel pre-amp...
Why so? Well, cassette "C198" claims to be the BBC soundtrack album, if I can believe my own irritatingly sparse (but, of course, beautifully typeset!) label. It seems I recorded this cassette from a Dolby B tape I must have been lent by someone (quite possibly, my late chum Colin as it was more his sort of music) in October 1985 — but where on earth did I get my one MP3 file of this particular track from? I have no recollection of lifting it from my ancient cassette, that's for sure. Listening again, 30 years on, I find the music to be very heavy on the use of the Pan Pipes that had been, among a few sad hi-fi obsessives in the 1970s, all the rage for demonstrating "phase distortion" in multi-loudspeaker arrays. Let's not go there.
It's no good, I need some food. I'm also trying the new (?) mini-newspaper recently recommended to me. It's called "i" and claims to be the UK's first and only concise quality newspaper. We shall see.
The road not taken
I found this an unsettling piece, though it certainly confirms some of the many reasons for my avoidance of journalism as a career! (Link.)
Seeking respite...
... from the poisonous UK political bear fight over Europe, one looks across the Pond, only to be confronted by even greater apparent insanity:
"Stop the world, I want to get off!"
I hadn't realised it was possible for someone to lie "profoundly". I live and unlearn. (Link.)
I'm an idiot!
There I was, upgrading my NUC's Ubuntu system, when it finally occurred to me to have a look through their current set of OCR program offerings.2 The first "hit" was for a KDE system. No thanks. But, wait, what's this "YAGF" tool? Only a graphic front end to Tesseract... which has a good reputation. I don't intend to do any OCR work on the NUC, but if I can get the same tool on Mint I shall certainly try it.
Back on BlackBeast, off I go a-hunting. Found it. Installed it. It knows about my Xsane plugin... so let's feed it a bit of text from a recent "Spectator" competition entry, imagining what "comically inappropriate" reviewers would have made of various books sent to them. Here's Alan Turing tackling "The Code of the Woosters"! I previewed and scanned the small column of text, using 360dpi and the customary Xsane control interface. The scanned image pops into YAGF's left hand window. So far, so good. But I already know Xsane works well. Now for the OCR.
One click on the "Recognise" icon — I'm working, so far, completely with the program's default settings — and plain text appears in the right hand window, with a spell-checker invoked ready for any tidying-up:
Very fast it was, too. I think I may just have found the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread. Magic!
I had to resort...
... to asking Mrs Google where the Grauniad had hidden the excellent "Long Read" that I enjoyed this morning before I could pass the link along to a Shakespeare fan I know who takes a keen interest in history. The Firefox browsing 'history' failed me.