2016 — 29 August: Monday
A change of style and pace for yesterday's late afternoon and evening entertainments.1 Could have done without the stubbed toe, but you can't have everything, can you?
Tea is ready, and the sun is shining through the overall cloud cover. What Bank Holiday adventures await, I wonder, after breakfast?
The world...
... is considerably weirder than anything I can imagine.
In fact, I exchanged thoughts on our opinions of social media with Carol just hours ago. She's a lot more active in local politics than I am, so — at their urging — she's reluctantly signed up to be able to "like" the Dems' local propaganda posts.
I am bombarded with messages, and if you don't look for six hours, Facebook resends its notice. The creepy thing is all these folks who are recommended to you as potential friends... I don't want to insult anyone, but I don't want to see pictures of their second cousin (twice-removed)'s new baby either.
Got it in a nutshell, I thought.
Having thoroughly browsed...
... the world of USB switchers (as opposed to hubs) I found nothing remotely affordable that comes close to the utility of my Dell screen's keyboard and mouse "sharing" between the two HDMI inputs I've nominated. The world of KVMs largely tops out at 1200p, too. Nor have I found an affordable 4K display with the same peripheral switching capability. If there's a market niche I'm guessing it's unattractively small.
Dismal science
The Bank of England has a chief economist. He does not have a credit card. He does have a clarity of expression that politicians appear to lack:
As I've long maintained, it's all smoke and mirrors, and spinning plates on top of poles. In a dark room.
I have some...
... experimental code to try out, and will do so — ab initio — on Skylark. Start, as they say, how you mean to go on. [Pause] Looking good, so far:
Interrupted only by...
... the imperative need to brush aside a call from "Mark" (heavy Indian accent) from "Microsoft Technical Department" (I doubt that, somehow) wanting to talk to me "about your Windows computer" (which, in the immortal words of Henry Reed, "I 'ave not got!"), here's the first few lines of one of these lists, showing the new, visually-lighter, style:
And also showing, of course, that I've yet to add the last few books I've bought into my SQLite DB. But when was that ever not the case?
FTFY
As they say in comments on El Reg...
Right!
Time to get Kodi — which is already up and running on Skylark — stuffed full of all those laboriously-produced XML stubs of my Movies and TV Shows. [Pause] I would find it a lot easier to "drive" Kodi if the main window stopped insisting on "eating" my mouse pointer.2 All the titles seem to be onboard, and it's now scraping the TV Shows, having done that already for the Movies. As far as I can tell.
And suddenly I have my mouse pointer back. That's better. (The "advice" on the Kodi Wiki was basically "Don't need a pointer; don't use a pointer.") Very helpful, that.