2016 — 4 October: Tuesday
Although I told myself I wouldn't get back into this game again1 I have to admit I spent a couple of hours yesterday evening happily "curating" a small selection of favourite music tracks into a separate folder. Not very imaginatively-named...
... I admit, but already it's up to 68 tracks spanning half a century and plays for nearly five and a half hours.
What is "left" for...
... one to think if one wants to be "correct" these days? Source and snippet from a long (but interesting and amusing) essay:
Those who imagined, in 1989, that never again would an intellectual be caught defending the Leninist Party, or advocating the methods of Stalin, had reckoned without the overwhelming power of nonsense. In the urgent need to believe, to find a central mystery that is the true meaning of things and to which one's life can be dedicated, nonsense is much to be preferred to sense. For it builds a way of life around something that cannot be questioned. No reasoned assault is possible against what denies the possibility of a reasoned assault.
I see from...
... the latest Ubuntu newsletter that 16.10 (coming out the day before my birthday) offers both a MATE build at 1.16 and the 4.8 kernel, so I suspect it will be going on to my i5NUC. That is now my official "testbed" for such things. It will be interesting to see whether or not the kernel regression that wreaked a fair amount of havoc with my 34" Dell connected via DisplayPort has yet been nailed.
Uncle ERNIE is pushing a miniscule "Postal Order" my way this month. Ev'ry little helps!
Take your eyes off Intel for just a moment and there's another BIOS Update for my NUC. I flashed it last May, dagnabbit. [Pause] The same applies to Mrs Hubbard's cupboard, alas. Out I go again. Still, at least it's a nice, sunny morning.
Just before...
... I nipped out, Mr Postie thrust a Canadian Blu-ray into my hands:
The title of this 2007 film is as unwholesomely bowdlerised as the DVD of Francis Veber's glorious comedy "Le Dîner des Cons" that I picked up in 2002 on one of our trips over to the Calais hypermarket. I can promise you that "The Dinner Game" is not an accurate translation.
I've updated...
... my notes on Skylark now that the initial burst of, erm, "inveterate tinkering" has eased off.
There's more to 'molehole'...
... than meets the eye. A point that was driven home when I started moving its constituent parts around. As chief webmaster, cook, and bottlewasher, I only make a subset available on the web. The bits you can see are served out of an AWS storage bucket somewhere in Eire. The bits only I can see — in addition, of course — are all the files that never leave Technology Towers. All files are served locally by my Raspberry Pi2, but I copy only the visible subset across to AWS. I also index2 everything with the "Recoll" desktop search tool.
My ¬blog alone now accounts for more than 3,600 web pages (of dubious quality, I admit) or about 34MB of HTML files plus a further 344MB of pictures and artwork. My son assures me this is merely a few wisps of digital dust wafting around. Nonetheless, it all adds up. Just one example from the non-visible material: my email exchanges with Carol in New York. Twenty years ago I typeset, printed, and bound copies of the emails covering July 1983 to August 1996. That came to 690 pages of quite densely-packed A4. Since 1996, I've kept these emails (7MB so far) as HTML files — it's much less hassle.
I've just been making sure my partitioning of all 813MB of the 'molehole' web files that I index with "Recoll" works sensibly by amending a "Recoll" default to make sure it traverses two completely separate trees of material. That way, I can search for, and preview, stuff anywhere on 'molehole' without having to strain my brain.