2016 — 17 October: Monday
Yesterday afternoon's entertainment, by the way — after a nice meal in "The Rockstone" in Bevois Valley — included a very pleasant couple of hours1 browsing in Waterstone's and actually reading one of the small pile of seven books I'd selected (thus saving any 'need' to acquire it):
Which explains its absence from my cover scans above. It was the sometimes-silly set of answers by leading scientists and thinkers to the 2014 "Edge" question about which ideas, paradigms, what-have-you, had reached their "Sell by" date and ought thus perhaps to be junked. (String theory being merely one of the candidates.)
And the evening?
Well, once I had my house back to myself, I indulged in two of the four CDs contained herein:
I remain the only keen listener to this particular genre of music now to be found hereabouts. (Christa just didn't like it at all.)
The dilemma...
... that keeps on giving the Tory party — if not the entire sodding Untied Kingdom — a severe headache:
Or could our revered new Prime Minister actually be, erm, a tiny bit daft? Just a thought! And, yes, I've read BoJo the Clown's "alternative" column on reasons for staying in the EU.
For the avoidance...
... of any future brainache, here are my steps to getting my new SSD NAS...
... up and running with NFS file-sharing across my network (not that it has to be SSD-based, of course).
Buy a dinky one-bay Synology, and stuff in a 500GB SSD. Connect it to the LAN, and see what IP address (in my case, "192.168.1.141") it's been assigned. Set the router to keep this address, as the last thing I want is a NAS device going walkabout. Create a couple of shared folders (I defined "molehole" and "internal") from the Synology's Control Panel and define their NFS permissions, then select "Enable NFS" under "File Services". These folders will contain my web files (public and private). Edit these details into /etc/fstab so they are mounted at boot time... but don't remount your drives yet:
# NFS shares for Synology SSD Nas Three (500GB white 1-bay) 192.168.1.141:/volume1/molehole /NAS/NAS_SSD/molehole nfs defaults,noatime 0 0 192.168.1.141:/volume1/internal /NAS/NAS_SSD/internal nfs defaults,noatime 0 0
Next, add a folder (I used "NAS_SSD") alongside the two existing NAS mount points under /NAS and similarly add a folder to /home into which I can place symbolic links to my NAS SSD's shared folders. Create the links. This one places a clickable link called "nonpublic" in "NAS_SSD" and points to the contents of the NAS SSD tree at "internal":
ln -s /NAS/NAS_SSD/internal/remainder nonpublic
Et voilà!
Growing insanity
A snippet from Craig Murray's excellent blog:
The spectacular and continuing fall in the value of the pound will add over £50 billion to the cost of Trident. Yes, bits of steel are being welded together in the UK, but the steel is imported and so is the missile technology...
Of course, it would be wonderful if all this led to both Trident and Hinkley Point being cancelled, but sadly politicians are wed to nuclear projects, both civil and military, as both symbol and source of vast central power for them and their paymasters. But the implications of
paying for them with Mickey Mouse currency are going to bite the Tory loons hard in coming months.
He was dead chuffed, I notice, by the 'shout-out' he got from Alan Bennett — revealed in a snippet from that fine youngster's latest batch of Diaries at the weekend. Good for him, say I.
[Pause]
A reader advised me to add the "noatime" to the NFS access — which I did while noshing on my delicious chicken, sticky plum sauce, and rice'n'peas lunch — to cut down on wear and tear on the SSD drive. Ta!
I resent...
... having to strip down an expensive NAD CD player — for the second time since buying it — just to retrieve a CD trapped2 inside it. Mr NAD is thus now back on the naughty step, and has been replaced in the living room system by my slightly newer, and slightly costlier, Audiolab CD player. Though since I no longer have an audio system upstairs, and mostly listen to my CDs in ripped MP3 form, it's not a big deal to make the swap.
50+ minutes of...
... the latest Adam Curtis film is enough for one evening, I feel.
The rich...
... might as well live on a different planet:
"The economic system is, basically, that the rich and the powerful exited long ago from the messy business of paying tax," Harding told an audience of academics and research students. "They don't pay tax anymore, and they haven't paid tax for quite a long time. We pay tax, but they don't pay tax. The burden of taxation has moved inexorably away from multinational companies and rich people to ordinary people."