2016 — 25 September: Sunday
I think I'm finally ready — after an astonishing/leisurely six months! — to declare Skylark to be my main PC hereabouts (at least, until the next toy comes along). I'm certainly very happy with the Linux Mint 18 which is now installed on both Skylark and my i5NUC. My success yesterday1 in finally giving Skylark access to my Synology NAS RAID devices means I shall now go ahead and do the same for the i5NUC.
I've also decided it's time the NUC did some useful work. It can (very) easily stand the strain of being my main email handler so it's even now digesting a couple of overnight items. And will from now on sit "permanently" in a virtual/remote desktop on Skylark's system panel.
There is logic...
... in this. After all, my entire digital media "collection" lives on the NAS drives. I may yet succeed in hosting my local copy of all the AWS webfiles there, too. This opens up the possibility of "publishing" web pages from any of the PCs, though Junior has warned me of sync issues that can arise. For the moment, therefore, BlackBeast alone has that task. It, too, is now sitting "permanently" in a second virtual/remote desktop on Skylark's system panel.
I'm so well-organised I think I've already earned my second cuppa before my morning chauffeur arrives to whisk me off in search of the well-fired loaf.
[Pause]
Re-energised by a delicious slice of buttered, well-fired bread slathered in Sainsbury's finest reduced-sugar thick-cut orange marmalade and (inevitably) another cuppa I've just finished adding Synology NAS access to the i5NUC and will now look into VLC's media library capability — having just been tipped off to its existence minutes ago.
Coding is not 'fun'...
... asserts an Aeon essay. Source and snippet:
It doesn't help that Hollywood has cast the 'coder' as a socially challenged, type-first-think-later hacker, inevitably white and male, with the power to thwart the Nazis or penetrate the CIA.
Not that those are necessarily Bad Things. [Pause] Unlike this ghastly trend:
There were always two sorts of news: the serious news (which is currently very dark and bleak) and a light, trivial, supporting news that relieves the dark bleakness of everything else...
But there is a third sort of news, the peculiar modern sort, in which something hasn't so much happened as has been interpreted as having happened. There is a hall of mirrors in which someone says something on television, someone else says something about that on the internet
and the internet person's opinion of the TV person's opinion passes through journalists' opinion into news. There is no central thing. There is just noise around a thing.
I wasn't very impressed by VLC's Media Library. I'm very pleased with the interface and performance of Xplayer, however. Who knew that, in the time it takes to play William Russo's wonderful "Three pieces for blues band and orchestra" you can not only slice, dice, and stew an equally lovely mixture of Victoria plums, cranberries, blackcurrants, and redcurrants for your (my) breakfast cereal but also replenish the water softener's salt supply? Without spilling it, too.