2016 — 16 September: Friday
I hadn't been expecting to see a condemnation of the guvmint's "go-ahead" for their latest large nuclear power toy in the UK's version of The People's Daily, but there it was.1 Yet there was electricity a-plenty blasting out of the sky last night. Free, too. And water.
Serious disquiet had been voiced over the offer to EDF of an index-linked strike price of £92.50 per megawatt hour of electricity generated — around double the current wholesale electricity price — and to guarantee that price for 35 years.
Efforts to portray this eye-watering sum as the going rate are indefensible in light of EDF acceptance of two-thirds this level of tariff for its development in France.
"Jeeves! Switch off all the lights, would you? There's a good fellow."
Trump's campaign has said their candidate now believes Obama was born in Hawaii after all, and is thus eligible to hold his present job. The BBC features this non-news on their classical music Radio 3 of all places. Who says the world is mad?
It's a ¬fine thing...
... when you only realise there's a new(ish) book by Hofstadter ("Surfaces and Essences") when you see it mentioned in a Chronicle essay on analogies.
Yesterday's unwelcome hazard...
... was a hornet I spotted in a chum's front garden, prompting me to leave the car windows fully shut while I was parked there after lunch. I still recall Christa insisted we evacuate our car when two flew in the back in Germany — and that was in 1977. Her clear (and very uncharacteristic) panic implied much more familiarity with them than I had at the time. Yesterday's looked like a body-building variant of a 'normal' wasp, but was more than twice2 the bulk.
Ways of skinning cats, Part (I forget)
I've been considering bumping up the level of the Linux kernel I run on the NUC in an attempt to restore some of its DisplayPort capability. Before I got to (or, in truth, anywhere near) that point, I first hooked up the NUC to the 27" Asus screen via its DP output to assure myself that all was well. Sure enough, from my NoMachine Remote Desktop on BlackBeast up pops a full height (that is, 1440 pixel deep) desktop that more nearly fills the 34" Dell and that mirrors what I see on the Asus. I then added in the HDMI connection from the NUC to the Rotel pre-amp. All remained well. I fired up NAS access on the NUC, selected some music, kicked it off, selected the Rotel input that receives digital audio from the NUC via HDMI and confirmed nice music.
At that point, I was clearly feeling over-confident. I switched off the Asus screen. Music played on.
Whoops! What just happened? Oh, now the music still plays on, but the NoMachine desktop has dropped to a mere "Full HD" display. Fair enough, I suppose. Unless I keep the Asus powered on, I am restricted to the smaller desktop that physically matches the resolution of the Kuro plasma screen the Rotel knows about. This may be an aspect of what Len has dubbed the DisplayPort of Death syndrome.
My next move is going to be to hook the NUC up to the Asus via HDMI and use the analogue audio from the NUC to the Rotel. I'm pretty sure the NUC's visual "behaviour" on loss of an HDMI-connected screen is rather more resilient than on loss of a DP-connected one. So I may still be able to get a higher-resolution remote desktop on the Dell. At the cost of analogue rather than digital audio out of the thing. Unless I re-introduce an HDMI pass-through and digital audio breakout box (and Tim has currently borrowed mine).
Or I could just shoot myself.
Blimey!
I haven't even lost digital audio from the NUC (I'd simply forgotten I get that over my LAN [courtesy of NoMachine] into BlackBeast). The HDMI video connection to the Asus yields a full (Asus) resolution display on NoMachine's remote desktop on BlackBeast. More importantly, everything carries on unperturbed when I switch off the Asus. (It may even be that I never actually need to switch on the Asus, just so long as I keep it on standby, and connected via HDMI to the NUC.)
Jeeves! Where's my lunch, dagnabbit? Oh, and lay out some glad-rags. I shall be toddling over to the Drones Club later this afternoon to see if they've lifted their ban. Failing that, I shall snaffle a tea'n'biccy with Roger and Eileen.
There's an interesting...
... piece ("Clueless in Syria") by Paul Wood — a BBC foreign correspondent — in a recent issue of the Spectator. Snippet:
Earlier this year, a thinktank produced a handy graphic designed to explain the Syrian conflict. Different coloured lines showed who's killing whom, who's arming which side, and whose money keeps the war ticking along. It looked like the world's most complicated cat's cradle; it was also reminiscent of a circular firing squad...