2016 — 19 October: Wednesday
The weather is looking perfectly OK (indeed, sunny at the moment) for today's treat1 though I noticed my radiators were all warm this morning so I shall layer up accordingly. I've already opted for my traditional 'winter' blanket on the bed. Brrr.
I was...
... scrolling through the Humax PVR's "Media Guide" a few minutes ago, in search of channel 122 (E4). I wanted to set a "Season Record" for the new Season #10 of "The Big Bang Theory" that I've been tipped off about. I was mildly amused to see that my previous "Season Record" had captured Season #3 of "The Bridge", in hi-def, without my even noticing. Besides, I bought it on BD in any case. So that's been sitting there for eleven months since I last switched the PVR from Radio to TV and peeked at its hard drive.
I'm going to assume it's clever enough to cope with the one-hour clock change rapidly heading our way as the joyless month of November approaches.
Politics makes...
... for strange bedfellows:
Then came the referendum, and the horror that some Tory liberals felt watching Eurosceptic colleagues cast off the robes of moderation and economic prudence to splash around in murky pools of xenophobic populism. The experience of fighting a campaign with most of Fleet Street lined up on the other side also gave pro-EU Conservatives a salutary taste of what it feels like to have reasonable arguments incinerated in flames of hysterical press partisanship (a familiar sensation on the left). A common purpose in rehabilitating evidence-based centrism was born.
"Evidence-based..." whoever heard of such a thing?
Looking around my house...
... I can't help noticing that it's a bit less rationally arranged than my /home...
Directly-connected external drives
I also have an inelegant sufficiency of further external drives, and can connect them via USB3 caddies to Skylark via a 7-port USB3 hub when I actually need them. These include — but, alas, are by no means limited to — a Seagate 3TB backup drive, a couple of WD 4TB drives, and a separate WD 2TB NAS drive that I was initially using both to host all my music files and to act as a very convenient shared "transfer station" between Skylark, the i5NUC, and BlackBeast while I've been moving stuff around.
Although I will admit to a number of system (and disk) crashes over the last 25 years I have not (so far) actually lost any significant user data. (I may not always be able to find it quickly, but it's all still there... somewhere!)
COPE
A new acronym, Contracted-out Pension Equivalent. It's the amount of State Pension foregone as a result of being a member of a contracted-out pension scheme at some time during your working life, and on retirement an equivalent benefit will be paid from your employer's pension plan. My ignorance remains profound in this arcane area. But I am heartened to read "Most people with many years on their NI record will find, when the State Pension paid by the government is added to their COPE amount, this will be at least the full amount of the new State Pension by the time they reach State Pension age." Here's 36 pages of guvmint gorp.
There's no mention of COPE in anything I've just had from the State Pension folk, and since I have been "awarded" the full amount — plus a teeny bit inherited from Christa — I shall continue to bury my head in the sand, and stick to my Wilkins Micawber budgetary system.
When I ran...
... Epson's scanner installation script yesterday, I failed to notice that it had indeed also given me a new Gimp plugin:
It's a little more user-friendly than the Xsane interface, though the end result is exactly the same. However, it doesn't 'unlock' the slide-scanning capability so I shall be investigating VueScan for Linux in due course.
Earth as a marble
Nice little 7-minute movie. (Link.)
Keeping...
... my local SSD storage trimmed:
