August 2025 – Absolutely Baching

An Apology...

Posted on 30th August 2025 by hjr

I'd like to apologise for the fact that this website disappeared from the Internet for approximately 30 hours yesterday.

The fault, dear Brutus, lay not with any incompetence on my part, but with our friends at OpenReach, the UK's networking infrastructure people. One of their sub-contractors was performing maintenance at the manhole about 300 metres from our house and, at almost the stroke of 9AM Friday 29th August, managed to dislodge our fibre connection whilst doing whatever it was he was originally contracted to do. [...]

Debian 13 Released

Posted on 14th August 202514th August 2025 by hjr

The thumbnail at the left is of Giocoso running perfectly on a freshly-built Debian 13 system. Debian 13 was released on August 9th, 2025 so is brand new and the concern is always that the distro developers will update key libraries in ways that break my own software.

Happily, on this occasion, and as you can see, they didn't do that and Giocoso 3.31 installs and behaves entirely correctly without me having to tweak anything. [...]

Nearly there...

Posted on 8th August 2025 by hjr

The image at the left is today's Aggregate Statistics Report from Giocoso. It shows that of the 16,796 recordings in my collection, I've played 16,713 of them since I started using Giocoso (or its prototype) in 2021. Lots of recordings I've played more than once, though, which is why the report shows I've played 19,501 recordings in total.

The key bit, however, is which recordings I haven't played: the 83 unplayed ones are detailed in the bottom half of the report: 19 of them last up to 2 hours and 64 of them last longer than 2 hours (I suspect quite a bit of Wagner and Verdi lie therein!) Let's say there's an average length of the unplayed recordings of 3 hours, then: 83 × 3 = 249 hours of total play-time. I could polish the lot off in just ten days, then, if I were to prop my eyes open with matchsticks and forget to eat, drink, shop or take exercise! [...]