Mean Green Machines

Green is the colour of the beautiful new Mint 19 flat theme & also the default colour of openSUSE. I run a double vertical full HD (4k? Pah!) monitor C2D micro ATX battle stationed Minty setup in my man cave, with a double battery Lenovo X250 ThinkPad running all the openSUSE goodness.

Mint has the long familiar Ubuntu base (itself based on Debian) with Cinnamon running atop. This strikes a nice middle ground between GNOME & KDE. (I run KDE Plasma on my openSUSE box.) With Ubuntu comes the familiarity of apt & PPAs. My openSUSE install always used to eventually break with zypper dup. This is before I discovered the –no-allow-vendor-change switch, now the default behaviour. PPAs on the other hand rarely caused problems. Both are more than 99% of the way there to the ultimate Windows replacement for the casual & even the odd professional use case. The last mile being polish, often a graphical glitch. Things have certainly come a long way since the Hardy Heron & can only improve.

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An Ode to OSMAnd

Open door, open data, hit the trail, see you later…

Open Street Map is a real boon! Whether navigating the Quantocks or Tenerife, handy is understated. The ability to flag way points, GPX track & tell you which way you are walking (without onboard compass) is barely scratching the surface!

Get hiking!

Digital Disc Jockey Interface

My first attempt at beat matching, that I’ve always wanted to pull off since hearing on radio, is a mashup between Chevelle Franklyn feat Beanie Man (Dancehall Queen) acapella vinyl & The Notorious B.I.G. (Hypnotize) instrumental MP3. Turns out it’s awful tricky especially as the beat needs to sync perfectly throughout the full length of both tracks. I think it may’ve been a Goldfinger special back in the day.

Walkies

Hi

My Nike Air ACG branded Gortex hiking boots which I was prepared to get a lifetimes use out off, suffered glue failure. My Snowboard boots are also showing there age. I would certainly just use some flexible glue, make do & mend. But unfortunately the whole grip/sole was left somewhere up the Quantocks! Nike still make hiking boots but a cursory Google search showed the ACG branding and Gortex are both disbanded. Went with Addidas in the end, these boots are as light as a pair of trainers, somewhat disconcerting compared with more traditional sturdiness I’d come to expect from a walking shoe. But hey? Technology. Sizing lasts are consistent across Adidas making me an size eight. Two year old black & grey two tone model, size 7 with discount, proved too cramped around toe box especially with some 1000 mile socks. Anyways! Size eight promptly ordered & delivered tomorrow. I will certainly put them to good use & maybe make another blog post if at all.

 

Android P

Peanut butter jelly time!!!

Peanut butter jelly time!!!

Peanut jelly jelly time!!!

Peanut butter jelly!

Peanut butter jelly!

Peanut butter jelly with a baseball bat…

Audigy Aural Action

By troubleshooting with an old PCI sound card, Windows had sound but also showed same sonic squelch as Linux. Unplugging the secondary upper monitor cured the problem. Unbeknownst to me I had routed one line out through a Monoprice component to VGA box (PlayStation II.) This box had all but died whilst causing gross distortion. One new PCI Express Audigy sound card later & Behringer BCD3000 is now working a treat with Mixxx & Traktor LE respectively. Having a creative outlet is proving essential!

G41M-COMBO

So…

Win 10 Pro, extensive troubleshooting, no sound! Bang goes Traktor (silently.) OK, a little butt hurt but Linux has a crazy arsed reverb! Cannot win with this esoteric hardware?!?

My low-fi is not going super 8 anytime soon.