2016 — 30 August: Tuesday
Just barely time1 to report success with the latest round of "Videos list" report generation (from the Kodi DB now sitting replete with all my data over on Skylark) too:
Gotta dash! (I'm sure the broken Breadcrumb trail and missing links to IMDB are a SMOP!)
As I "asymptote"-ly approach...
... the end of Harari's "Sapiens" — my choice of reading for the hospital waiting area — today's dose yielded this snippet:
Earth's 7 billion Sapiens weigh about 300 million tons Domesticated farmyard animals weigh about 700 million tons Other surviving large wild animals? Less than 100 million tons
I think it therefore makes absolute sense to name the new geological epoch the Anthropocene. And (personally) to predict its very restricted future span, too. As Harari goes on to say, "perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid."
Not those of us who prefer the "explanations" contained in their precious (man-written) sacred texts, of course. (Or were they dictated by a burning bush? I'm hazy on the precise details.) As I remarked to my patient passenger this morning, viewing of the film "Agora" ought to be somewhere on the syllabus of every school (and two viewings [minimum] for any "faith-based" academies).
I've stepped gently back...
... from over-committing myself to using that cheap'n'cheerful Python built-in webserver. I discovered yesterday that having too much image material on a web page led to bits of the images being randomly chopped off on page reloads. Back to 'lighttpd' on my Pi2. And the same server running as a service on BlackBeast.
To live...
... is to need to eat, for which I need to do something about the state of Mrs Hubbard's damn' cupboard yet again. A housechap's work is never done, it seems.
[Pause]
Flipping to & fro...
... between the long-established Kodi system on BlackBeast and the juvenile facsimile of it on Skylark gives me ample opportunity to confirm that the "eating" of the mouse pointer is, indeed, an artefact of NoMachine's remote desktop. Since it's almost as easy to switch physically between the two PCs that's what I'm now doing. Not least, because I'm currently missing (on Skylark) some part of the Python environment2 I need to be able to run Brian's stub-generating "KodiPhy" tool.
As nearly as we can tell, Skylark's performance when chewing over (say) a 9,000 book data table in memory before sorting and formatting it into a series of HTML files is about twice as fast as BlackBeast Mk II (which Brian is now using). BlackBeast Mk III, by contrast, runs pretty nearly neck and neck with Skylark much of the time.
KodiPhy is now...
... up and running over on Skylark:
And, visually, in better shape under Mint 18 in fact. [Pause] Unlike the Kodi DB over there, which currently has the re-builders in, and hammering away. Next time Kodi asks me "Do you want to clean up?" I shall say no, and hopefully thus avoid wiping away the entire DB.
There's an amusing...
... Brexit-related piece by Paul Mason in today's printed "G2" section of the Grauniad. Yesterday's online version is subtly different, but I've now matched my snippet to that:
Until the delusion of the giant flounce-out is killed off — and until Liam Fox and David Davies are told to stop dreaming about it — those negotiating with Britain from the other side will have a massive incentive to force us into it. If they think it is our secret desire, or our plan B, for Britain to quit the single market cleanly, Europe will not take seriously any UK government demands for variations to single market rules, designed to keep us on the inside the market, though outside the EU itself.
You think?
Tax? We don't pay that!
Wired has updated its tax-avoidance infographic.