2016 — 9 August: Tuesday
Having my oldest PC (BlackBeast) still stumbling along "on" ancient Linux Mint 17.3 while both newer systems are now "on" shiny new Linux Mint 18 is actually causing me a lot less cognitive disruption1 than I expected/feared. A Good Thing. Particularly before breakfast.
De-cluttering?
Running both Skylark and the tiny i5 NUC on BlackBeast's desktop in spare Workspaces — via the excellent NoMachine remote desktop software — saves me from the inevitable high-entropy tangled mess of keyboard and mouse leads added to the piles of other domestic administrivia clutter. (My paper filing system lives up in the reading room, but paperwork is initially handled down here, of course. And doesn't always get handled in a very timely fashion.)
That said, it offends me to think of my presently-unused 27" Asus display screen just collecting dust. Perhaps I could squeeze it back on to my physical desk alongside the 34" Dell? Both screens have the same vertical pixel resolution (1440) and the duo would offer an interestingly-wide desktop space2 for Skylark if I ever needed a 6000x1440 playground!
Just a pre-breakfast thought.
Nice to hear Jessica Hynes. Must re-watch "Spaced"!
Just call me...
... "Mr. Frugal", it seems:
And, no, I do not want (or need) one of your pesky "smart meters"!
An unappealing...
... choice of stories for my 'lemonses' reading:
What a happy nation.
Is it hot in here?
That 297 kWh my (forgive the pun) current supplier told me about (after chewing on my meter readings for 17 minutes) is for July and equates to 3,600 (or so) kWh/year. Obviously my heating costs are minimal at this point of the annual trip around our nearest star. I first ran through their rather simplistic Energy Saving Toolkit:
I then asked Mrs Google about "average UK household energy consumption", and "Mr. Switch your Supplier" suggests I am barely twitching my supplier's meters. I shall continue not to worry about it.
Just as I suspected...
... there was, indeed, a bit of Marmite left in my old jar. I'd left it on the kitchen windowsill a while ago to give the stuff time to flow into the lid for easier removal. Then forgot about it as I generally keep the curtains drawn. Today, I popped some smoked salmon on that same, solar-heated, windowsill for a couple of minutes. Guess what I re-discovered?
Who knew it could escape? It looks like my very own Chernobyl.
Kodi meltdown
Brian uncovered a nice, subtle (but deadly) data error in the set of XML data stubs I generate for Movie and TV Show data by running his "KodiPhy" program. Said generated stubs go nicely into Kodi, which uses them to tag each of my films or shows with the all-important (to me, if nobody else) CaseLogic folder location so I have a fighting chance of finding the things.
All is well until one uses a USB stick (formatted FAT32, I suspect) as the transfer mechanism to get these same data stubs over to him for testing. FAT32 mangles filenames that happen to contain colons, replacing them with underscores. Or, at least, that's our hypothesis. It's being tested by my zipping up all the data stubs into a single tar.gz file and transferring them in a way that should therefore not perturb FAT32. Which is, I believe, a Microsoft file system. Just sayin'.
It belatedly occurs to me...
... that this idiosyncrasy could have explained some of the troubles I met with when slinging variously-named files around my mixed network of Windows, Ubuntu and OS-X PCs. A foible I put down, at the time, to network gremlins. There are distinct advantages to having just one operating system3 to fight with. Too late to test now, of course!
After several hours...
... of careful listening, I've decided Skylark has the edge over the i5 NUC for quality. Though I'm unsure how, or why, that should be:
- Digital stereo audio leaves the NUC on its HDMI connection, or leaves Skylark on its DisplayPort connection
- Those connections both plumb into the Dell4 screen
- The audio bitstream gets to BlackBeast via the Dell's USB3 connection
- BlackBeast's high-quality external USB Xonar U7 sound card outputs "IEC958 digital audio at 0.00 dB"
- The Xonar connects by optical fibre to the Rotel A/V control amp in the hi-fi stack
What part NoMachine plays in mediating all this is anyone's guess. I just set its audio transfer to be "highest" quality and enjoy my music. Black magic, if you ask me.