2016 — 3 August: Wednesday
While hanging around1 yesterday afternoon I carved another 100-page chunk out of Harari's "Sapiens" — it's ideal lightweight reading for such places. A BBC news report today of North Korea's provocative missile "test" perfectly exemplified its section on what you could call "arms race conditions" (thank you for that image, Tomi Ungerer!) between countries that could better devote such unproductive military resources to areas like education and health.
Today?
I'm currently predicting (inter alia) a walk, some Kodi consulting (possibly skin-related), and probably some supplies shopping. An uncrowded life, perhaps, but it beats batting around like a mad man. Now, how about a cuppa?
Were I at all interested in Agatha Christie, then this might float my boat. Oddly, I've never felt the slightest impulse to read her work. (Too many books; not enough time!)
Speaking of Time...
... this is now the time of year when I find it particularly difficult to look back on my life in 2007 as it became ever clearer that Christa and I were running out of road together. But these things happen in even the best-regulated households. Something I understand now in ways I was pretty clueless about back then.
Doesn't mean I've changed my low opinion of cancer, which unkindly took out Big Bro's brother-in-law (another David) one year ago today.
Here he was, flanked by my earlier self and his wife, back in August 2008.
Time I was elsewhere! Toot, toot.
Following the predicted...
... Kodi consultation (during the walk), I have much to think about — far more interesting than either lunch or laundry, though both those have had to take priority, I fear. [Pause] I've now spent 30 minutes2 or so familiarising myself with a much more attractive 'skin' (Black Glass Nova) than Kodi's simple Confluence default:
Brian's given me ideas about better ways of wrangling my video collection that will make it simple to view defined subsets of it, and is now modifying his "KodiPhy" tool to generate appropriate XML stubs and .nfo files. Meanwhile, I also now have a new batch of Python code to test, too. It's for producing 'molehole'-compliant lists of my books, and my videos, sorted every which way. That's going to eat further into my limited supply of loafing-around time.
Unwicked Uncle ERNIE...
... is sending me a very welcome £50 prize this month. That's six weeks of petrol money for my modest motoring sorted.
Moving /home?
I have itchy distro feet. I also have a bigger, faster, quieter, spiffy new PC, too. Sitting largely unused to one side of my desk. That won't do, will it? So I'm currently making sure I understand exactly what's involved in migrating from my current Linux Mint 17.3 system (on my BlackBeast PC) to whatever Linux system I end up choosing to put on my Skylark PC. Sounds like a plan to me.
Ubuntu's Partitioning/Home/Moving guidance is sure to be very helpful. Of course, I shall probably just end up running Linux Mint 18. We shall see. Meanwhile, I have also to decide about my Intel i5 Skylake NUC. I was using it3 as my audio player yesterday when it got into some sort of hardware death spiral that needed a hard power off. Not behaviour I'm happy to tolerate long-term. And certainly not what I expect from Linux. Time to check if there have been any recent BIOS updates, perhaps? [Pause] There was a new level of BIOS released dated 27 May, though its Release Notes shed precious little light.