2016 — 24 September: Saturday

Ever have one of those mornings when some idiot neighbour's car alarm triggers at about 5 a.m.? It turns out — speaking as a laid-back retiree hovering on the edge of waking up in any case — to be more amusing than annoying.1

Happy Days :-)

Yesterday's...

... executive decision to do some audio wrangling is now well under way (or should that, as a nautical term, be "weigh" — the anchor having been weighed?) I would consult Dr Maturin, but he wouldn't really be the one to ask, would he? Apart from being fictional.

It's also time to formalise my access (from Skylark) to my Synology NAS devices rather than "going in" through the Network Servers interface. In other words, add the entries for them to my /etc/fstab so they are readily available when wanted after booting. What could possibly go wrong? Particularly if I follow my own instructions?

While I let Skylark...

... loose on the digital audio "collection" I'm back over on BlackBeast. I must say, there's very little worth noting in the webbed world. No shortage of lunacy or worse, but when wasn't that the case?

A 3D printing pen

It seems to be for 3D doodling. I assume you can only "draw" an object of the same approx. volume as the quantity of resin in the cartridge? (Link.)

Curious

It's taken me a long time to start to begin to suspect that I may just have more than enough music to last me for the remainder of my life. Now there's a weird thought. No doubt my impending State Pensioner status has this effect. That... or just seeing it all digitally gathered in one space (as it were). Then there's my habit of repeat-playing a pretty small subset of the total in any case. Not helping.

Excluding classical CDs, I currently have 2,624 CDs salted away in the dining room in CaseLogic folders. This is in addition, of course, to the wealth of analogue stuff I've recorded to minidiscs from cassettes (made from my original vinyl), or "off-air", or latterly just digitally downloaded from the BBC using the "get_iplayer" tool.

Then there's all my Amazon MP3s, too. 8,444 "songs" as of this afternoon, though many of those duplicate the physical CDs that show up sooner or later after the "Auto-Ripping" process. (The earliest set of MP3s long predates my own CD ripping as I only started doing that after I bought a "standard" Windows XP PC in late 2002. Yet there in the Amazon Music Library "Cloud" are the Pretty Things and the album "S.F. Sorrow" which I only ever bought as a CD. At some point since December 2001 it's been Auto-Ripped for me without my asking.)

Tell me again...

... that joke about Linux PCs being Finite State Machines. I've just added to Skylark the /etc/fstab entries needed for Synology NAS access. Just as on BlackBeast. So, why, on stopping a test video clip playing from the NAS did the audio player Clementine not only start up, but start playing a piece of Wagner, and change the desktop icons? And cheekily fail to respond to a Force Quit? And only finally succumb to a Restart? That's a new wrinkle.

Clementine has been declared "Persona Program non grata" and extirpated on general principles.


Footnote

1  Besides, who doesn't enjoy an early morning cuppa, even when they have to make it themselves these days?