2016 — 22 August: Monday
A minor change in my morning routine1 as the sun streams in, and overnight moisture vanishes.
More excitingly, I discovered only yesterday — shamefully late — that, when using the BBC's web interface to "Listen Live" to radio, you can — in the popup window — also pause the programme, and even wind it back to hear it from the start. I can, of course, do that with all my recorded music but somehow it enchants me to realise that radio is now more than just sounds flung ephemerally into the ether. Everyone else probably already knows this. I did not. This is a Good Thing.
I used it...
...yesterday evening — and highly recommend "World Beats". The Moth radio "hour" was good, too.
I lead a...
... sheltered life, clearly. I was unaware of this splendid chap, who sounds a remarkable character — using that adjective in the same way it might be applied, say, to J Edgar Hoover. Or Ray Cohn. Or Richard Nixon (for whom he worked as media consultant).
I'm browsing through the 'history' of my life with Linux to see what tips and wrinkles I've noted, and what software I've overlooked. I must say, with the i5 NUC no longer coupled to the Dell screen, life (and USB switching) between the two core i7 PCs is a whole lot more straightforward. The sun shines on, the patio door is wide open to let in all the chainsaw excitement from somewhere nearby, and the living space has settled on 23.5C which is more than tolerable.
I realise it's purely...
... coincidental, but having read the El Reg piece about systemd extending its scope to handle the filesystem mounting and safe (?) unmounting of things like USB drives... I just started seeing a series of error pop-ups from both Skylark and BlackBeast (neither of which currently boasts a kernel anywhere near as recent as the one Lennart Poettering is, erm, improving) regarding the "failure to stop" my 4TB external USB3 drive as I flip between PCs courtesy of the Dell screen's switching of its two assigned USB ports.
Simplest way round that is to power the thing down, then stop trying to share it, and instead just use the more easily-shared — though obviously slower, what with it hanging off a network electric string — 2TB "My Cloud" NAS drive. Saves me having to remember to keep unmounting Mr 4TB first whenever I switch screen inputs.
Done. And, here's my first web page edit from Skylark, too. Furthermore, if I now use the spare USB input on the Dell screen for my Epson scanner instead... it automatically gets a "wake up" call on (or do I mean from?) whichever PC I switch to. I already know from past experience with the Kensington USB hub switcher that this is no Bad Thing.
I could (almost)...
... see myself singing this! :-)
It's been asserted...
... and, after gulping down my hastily-assembled lunch, I shall certainly be testing the proposition... that were I to connect one (or maybe even both) of my 4TB external USB3 drives to the pair of USB3 sockets on the back of Synology #2... I might well get a pleasantly-effortless shared drive(s) experience next time I look at it. That's a hint well worth following up.
I can even untangle the growing web2 (or is that a rats' nest?) of wall warts and their trailing power leads in the vicinity while I'm at it.
Two years before...
... the Brexit referendum, the (ever so slightly Right Wing) Heritage Foundation published an interesting paper, bits of which made quite a lot of sense. Though I still have to boggle at the idea of chaps with PhDs working for, let alone directing, an entity calling itself the "Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom". Could just be me, of course. (Link.)
I didn't realise...
... the Kathryn Williams album "Hypoxia" was all inspired by Sylvia Plath. I carried this verse from my favourite Plath poem in my wallet for several decades:
Last time...
... I allowed the EFF to probe my web browser, they suggested I was dribbling an estimated 22.29 bits of identifying information in the wake of my web browsing. I've just repeated their revised test with some signs of improvement:
Am I wrong...
... in thinking that some part, at least, of the 2nd movement of Shostakovich's 10th Symphony turned up in that 1987 film "The Untouchables"? IMDB fails to clarify the matter beyond naming Ennio Morricone.
Oh dear. The "YAGF" front end to the Tesseract OCR engine that works so well on my Mint 17.3 system has been improved to the point where dropping a scanned image of text into its window under Mint 18 blows the program away, instantly. Not good.
Success!
I've yet to work out all the ins and outs of sharing and accessing the media files held on my two external 4TB drives — both drives are now attached to Synology #2 box — from my PC. But my Oppo BD player, with no intervention from me, has no difficulty at all discovering its network path to any of these files on either drive. The drives show up on its list of network devices as usb_share1 and usb_share2 (or something like that). And I can play audio files from them on the hi-fi and see video files played back on the Kuro plasma.
Weird (but handy) are the ways of DLNA.