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I can see the snow from here
27 Dec 2020 10:19 pmMy new computer arrived last week but I saved setting it up for a weekend project - which I’m glad I did, as I’m not sure I had the mental fortitude to talk to a possible chat robot in support on Wednesday. (It turned out that it was a known error that has already been patched but because I was nosy about what needed updated already instead off just installing all updates, I got to go round in circles with the bug and then with chat support, before they handed me off to someone who could tell me how to bypass it and run the system update that needed to happen first. As I said to the chat support person, early adopter problems.) Anyway, having had a laptop for my entire adult life, I’ve finally moved over to a desktop and have ordered a proper desk for it. I decided to try out the corner with my existing desk - intended for my sewing machine! - to check that worked for me and it does. An unexpected side effect of all this is the new angle means I can see behind the blinds. Which meant that this evening I was aware of something out the corner of my eye out the window - I’m a floor up, there’s not normally much to see out that way - and it turned out it was snowing! Quite heavily! I didn’t expect it to lie, and I don’t expect it to last - I think it might have turned to sleet already - as it has been raining on and off for the last couple of days, but for the moment, all the cars in the car park and the pavements beyond it are all white with a tiny layer of snow. So that was a surreal accompaniment to my tech support adventures.
A note to self
6 Dec 2020 12:43 amI’m trying to get back in the habit of posting here more often and not just when I feel like I’ve got lots to say. So this is a reminder to myself to go back and watch the rest of I’m a Cyborg (And that’s OK) when it’s not half midnight.
For context my laptop had been on it’s last legs for ages and I’d been contemplating replacing it with a desktop as - since I no longer work freelance - the extra cost of a MacBook Pro was no longer worth it. I got a tablet back in the spring to see if that would fill the gap and concluded that yes it fulfilled all my portability needs I got change over to a desktop for my main computer. Of course then pandemic and my laptop died before i could make any final decisions and Apple were bringing out a new processor etc etc. Anyway I finally got round to speccing up what I wanted, a Mac mini, and already having a perfectly good external keyboard and mouse, I just got myself a nice compatible monitor in the sales and used the money i saved on the monitor to buy a DVD player. (For new readers, I don’t own a TV. I’ve never actually owned one. My parents had a TV in the living room but I never had one in my room as a kid, and just never bothered getting one as a student or afterwards. I was film student, I watched a lot of films on DVD on my laptop. I have several radios in the house, but what little TV I watch has been online for...well pretty much since the iPlayer became a thing.) It was surprisingly difficult to buy a DVD player that was just a DVD player. I don’t want any smart technology or for it also to be a free view box, or come with subscriptions to anything, nor do I need it to play Blue Rays as I don’t actually have any. I just wanted it to have a) HDMI connection and b) a remote. It also has proper audio ports so I can plug in decent speakers if I want, but realistically I live in a flat, if I’m watching something where the nuance of the sound detail is important I’m plugging in the good headphones to really immerse myself and enjoy it.
So anyway. The monitor and the DVD player arrived this week. As the Mac mini itself was getting extra RAM added - ProTools you still own my soul - won’t be here for a couple of weeks. I would however rather find out before then if any of the other parts of my set up weren’t working so this evening I set up the monitor and DVD player to check they both worked and connected up properly, and they do, it was a pleasingly straightforward setup too. Naturally I needed to actually but a DVD in to test it so I just grabbed the film from the top of my To Be Watched pile and put it in, tested all the relevant bits, it works perfectly. I’m a pleased Glinda, though I may need a bigger desk for it - my current computer desk was bought for my sewing machine at the start of lockdown and then got commandeered as a work station when I started having to work from home in earnest. However, I started playing the film to check the display ratio was set correctly - I thought it ought to be 16:9 but it was worth checking - discovered that I needed to boost my chair back quite a bit for comfortable watching - I went for one of the smaller options at 27” but that’s still pretty big! - and then continued to sit there for 20 minutes because the film is really compelling. It would also be much more enjoyable when I was properly awake so hence, the note to myself!
(Why was I doing the set up at midnight on a Saturday night, instead of this afternoon as I’d intended? Winter blues mostly. All plans were derailed in place of having a lazy self-care day of reading novellas, crafting, drinking pink gin, watching historical documentaries on the iPlayer and putting up my winter festival decorations! Mostly I had to put my tablet on charge before I could watch another episode and I thought it would be a quick task to do while i was waiting for it to have enough life again and things got away from me.)
And lo, this is now a decent length post, and I also might as well have watched the rest of that film given the time now but never mind!
For context my laptop had been on it’s last legs for ages and I’d been contemplating replacing it with a desktop as - since I no longer work freelance - the extra cost of a MacBook Pro was no longer worth it. I got a tablet back in the spring to see if that would fill the gap and concluded that yes it fulfilled all my portability needs I got change over to a desktop for my main computer. Of course then pandemic and my laptop died before i could make any final decisions and Apple were bringing out a new processor etc etc. Anyway I finally got round to speccing up what I wanted, a Mac mini, and already having a perfectly good external keyboard and mouse, I just got myself a nice compatible monitor in the sales and used the money i saved on the monitor to buy a DVD player. (For new readers, I don’t own a TV. I’ve never actually owned one. My parents had a TV in the living room but I never had one in my room as a kid, and just never bothered getting one as a student or afterwards. I was film student, I watched a lot of films on DVD on my laptop. I have several radios in the house, but what little TV I watch has been online for...well pretty much since the iPlayer became a thing.) It was surprisingly difficult to buy a DVD player that was just a DVD player. I don’t want any smart technology or for it also to be a free view box, or come with subscriptions to anything, nor do I need it to play Blue Rays as I don’t actually have any. I just wanted it to have a) HDMI connection and b) a remote. It also has proper audio ports so I can plug in decent speakers if I want, but realistically I live in a flat, if I’m watching something where the nuance of the sound detail is important I’m plugging in the good headphones to really immerse myself and enjoy it.
So anyway. The monitor and the DVD player arrived this week. As the Mac mini itself was getting extra RAM added - ProTools you still own my soul - won’t be here for a couple of weeks. I would however rather find out before then if any of the other parts of my set up weren’t working so this evening I set up the monitor and DVD player to check they both worked and connected up properly, and they do, it was a pleasingly straightforward setup too. Naturally I needed to actually but a DVD in to test it so I just grabbed the film from the top of my To Be Watched pile and put it in, tested all the relevant bits, it works perfectly. I’m a pleased Glinda, though I may need a bigger desk for it - my current computer desk was bought for my sewing machine at the start of lockdown and then got commandeered as a work station when I started having to work from home in earnest. However, I started playing the film to check the display ratio was set correctly - I thought it ought to be 16:9 but it was worth checking - discovered that I needed to boost my chair back quite a bit for comfortable watching - I went for one of the smaller options at 27” but that’s still pretty big! - and then continued to sit there for 20 minutes because the film is really compelling. It would also be much more enjoyable when I was properly awake so hence, the note to myself!
(Why was I doing the set up at midnight on a Saturday night, instead of this afternoon as I’d intended? Winter blues mostly. All plans were derailed in place of having a lazy self-care day of reading novellas, crafting, drinking pink gin, watching historical documentaries on the iPlayer and putting up my winter festival decorations! Mostly I had to put my tablet on charge before I could watch another episode and I thought it would be a quick task to do while i was waiting for it to have enough life again and things got away from me.)
And lo, this is now a decent length post, and I also might as well have watched the rest of that film given the time now but never mind!
Small Adventures
7 Nov 2019 11:55 amI decided to take advantage of being on holiday and having no plans for yesterday and took myself off to Aberdeen for the day. Partly because I'll need to replace my laptop soon and I wanted to talk to a human being about processor speeds and RAM and how much my old laptop might be worth in trade-in - £80 if you wondered, which isn't a lot, but as the lassie in the store said, that'd cover an external disc drive for it. (Though I can't decide if I actually need one, or if I should just bite the bullet and buy a DVD player after all this time.) Also because I wanted a new outfit for my annual works night out and the options here were a bit disappointing, though the options in Inverness were not much more exciting. (Everything is sequins this year, all I can think about is how difficult they'll be to wash without damaging. I preferred when we were having the whole crushed velvet/velour revival, I suited that much better. Jewel tones and lovely textures.) I did however get delicious Japanese food from Wagamama and some suitably pagan seasonal decorations from Paperchase. The train journey out was lovely with crafting and podcasts and table to myself, the journey back was a ridiculous cramped squash - two carriages is not enough between Aberdeen and Inverness regardless of the time of day and certainly not for the last off peak train of the afternoon!
What I've Finished Reading/Listening To
I finally finished The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, which despite my initial impression, I think I actually liked much better than The Three Body Problem. I suspect reading some of Cixin Liu's short fiction in between helped me get a better feel for (and affection for) his prose style. I'll need to seek out the third part of the trilogy now, though honestly the end of this one feels like a pretty good ending point for the story.
What I'm Currently Reading/Listening To
My daytrip to Aberdeentoday yesterday also resulted in me having some quality podcast listening time. It turned out that I'd completely forgotten to update my little iPod with current podcasts, so my options were somewhat circumscribed. However, what was on there was Starship Iris and I ended up listening to three episodes and really enjoyed them. There's just the right amount of plot and peril to keep me interested and on the edge of my seat without getting overwhelmed. I do however feel that the entire crew, not just Brian, could really do with a good night's sleep at this point. (For those of you who've already listened to this show, I've just finished episode 6 - The Carmen Gambit.)
What I'm Reading/Listening to Next
The only target I set myself for this year's November Group Read was to read A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth but I'll need something more portable for reading between screenings at the film festival. Non-fiction usually works quite well for that so I'm thinking either Off the Map by Alastair Bonnett or On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky. I would have rather read something that has been on my shelf rather longer - I treated myself to both of these books a couple of weeks ago when I spotted them in the 2 for £5 section in HMV - but the majority of long-standing non-fiction books on my shelves are either doorstops or film theory and as I'm after a break from the film festival in my reading that seems counter-intuative.
Listening-wise most of consumption is likely to be focused on stuff to be written up for Nablopomo, so there's some New Creatives audio dramas and a couple of interesting sounding sound projects that I'd like to write about.
What I've Finished Reading/Listening To
I finally finished The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, which despite my initial impression, I think I actually liked much better than The Three Body Problem. I suspect reading some of Cixin Liu's short fiction in between helped me get a better feel for (and affection for) his prose style. I'll need to seek out the third part of the trilogy now, though honestly the end of this one feels like a pretty good ending point for the story.
What I'm Currently Reading/Listening To
My daytrip to Aberdeen
What I'm Reading/Listening to Next
The only target I set myself for this year's November Group Read was to read A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth but I'll need something more portable for reading between screenings at the film festival. Non-fiction usually works quite well for that so I'm thinking either Off the Map by Alastair Bonnett or On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky. I would have rather read something that has been on my shelf rather longer - I treated myself to both of these books a couple of weeks ago when I spotted them in the 2 for £5 section in HMV - but the majority of long-standing non-fiction books on my shelves are either doorstops or film theory and as I'm after a break from the film festival in my reading that seems counter-intuative.
Listening-wise most of consumption is likely to be focused on stuff to be written up for Nablopomo, so there's some New Creatives audio dramas and a couple of interesting sounding sound projects that I'd like to write about.
Odd Question
15 Aug 2019 10:30 amNormally I have the site skin set to Tropospherical Purple, but it seems to have randomly reset itself to the default red version. I've manually changed it back, but I just wondered if anyone else had encountered that recently...it seems a really unlikely back end bug?
Gratuitous Layout Post!
I really liked my old layout but it was less than ideal for mobile reading, something that had been a small annoyance, became a major source of grief over the 3 weeks my laptop was out of commission for.
I'm one of those people for whom vast expanses of clean white space (so common to so much of the internet these days), small fonts and black text indicates sore eyes and headaches rather than minimalist design. So I appreciate that my colour scheme, while deeply soothing to me may be difficult for others - adding "?style=light" or "?style=mine" to the end of the url when you're commenting and that should give you something less atuned to my eyes!
Anyway! New layout! With stars again! Because space is my most consistant fandom!
I really liked my old layout but it was less than ideal for mobile reading, something that had been a small annoyance, became a major source of grief over the 3 weeks my laptop was out of commission for.
I'm one of those people for whom vast expanses of clean white space (so common to so much of the internet these days), small fonts and black text indicates sore eyes and headaches rather than minimalist design. So I appreciate that my colour scheme, while deeply soothing to me may be difficult for others - adding "?style=light" or "?style=mine" to the end of the url when you're commenting and that should give you something less atuned to my eyes!
Anyway! New layout! With stars again! Because space is my most consistant fandom!
Longer term readers of this blog may recall that I requested info on external hard-drives some time ago*, I finally bought one on Friday. 500gb of space all for me. Also its amazing how removing 18gb of sound design projects from one's hard-drive will make it work faster...Though given the asthmatic noises its fan is making, I suspect taking a hoover to its vents might work better...
*For those of you reading on dw who can't see, for some time read nearly 3 years...
*For those of you reading on dw who can't see, for some time read nearly 3 years...
