hjr – Page 8 – Absolutely Baching

First Impressions

Posted on 17th April 202230th April 2022 by hjr

I've now been using my "new" (i.e., second-hand and thus old!) Mac Mini for about a week, and it has been very much an enjoyable learning experience! There is much about it (and macOS) that I like a lot; there has also been much that has been mystifying or infuriating 🙂 I thought I would keep a sort-of 'diary' of things I've come across, as I came across them, so that any other Windows or Linux users out there even considering moving to the world of Apple will have at least a taste of what might be in store for them. I should emphasise that what follows is what a complete Mac neophyte (with about 40 years of Windows, Linux and Unix familiarity) is experiencing: I did once touch a G4 Mac back in about 2009, for around 20 minutes. I also once ran a drawing program for about an hour on the original Apple Mac back in 1985. Apart from those two brief brushes with the world of Apple, however, I had precisely zero familiarity with or understanding of macOS... so I came to this completely and utterly 'blind'. Long-term Mac users are probably, therefore, going to be tearing their hair out in despair at my clutzy approach to things, for which I apologise in advance: hold on to those hair follicles!

I should also perhaps explain that I have a very functional Linux PC at hand: my goal was, as far as possible, to match that experience on the Mac Mini, program for program. There may well be better programs available for the Mac than for either Windows or Linux -but learning what they are and how they work is a problem for another day. My present purposes simply require that what I do on my Linux PC I should be able to do equivalently on the Mac. Spoiler alert, however: there are already Mac-specific programs I prefer using to the open source options I've been using for years on Linux and Windows. For example, Apple Mail seems a perfectly decent alternative to Thunderbird; and Safari is a nice-enough browser that I've really cut back on the occasions when I'm running Firefox. There are probably other instances of the same sort of thing that will become apparent as I ramble on... [...]

Further Tentative Steps...

Posted on 15th April 202215th April 2022 by hjr

Continuing the theme from my last post, I thought I'd share the following screenshot with you:

That's a picture of Giocoso running on my physical macOS Sierrra Mac Mini (which arrived rather earlier than I was expecting, as you can gather!) [...]

Tentative Steps...

Posted on 12th April 2022 by hjr

As regular readers will probably know, I'm a bit of a Linux fan: I first installed it in about 1997, with horrible results (no mouse, no network, no graphics, no printer... pretty typical for the time, I think!) I was using Red Hat 8 and 9 (the last desktop distros produced by that company, not the Enterprise Server version they make today) in around 1999/2000. My main laptop was using Fedora 18 or so in 2012. My main desktop used to oscillate back-and-forth between Windows and assorted Linux distros on a monotonously regular basis -but, around 2015, with the advent of Windows 8, I decided to ditch Windows completely. I then did the usual distro hop around the likes of Ubuntu, Fedora and Mint before finally settling down with Manjaro KDE, which (with occasional lapses in other directions) I've been with for years now.

I still maintain Windows virtual machines -and, indeed, the Other Half's PC is resolutely Windows 10 to this day, since there appears to be a general reluctance to ditch the likes of Adobe Photoshop for photograph management from that direction! [...]

More Pi(e)!

Posted on 29th March 202229th March 2022 by hjr

Giocoso has had its version number bumped again, this time to Version 1.13. The new version is not needed for anyone with an existing functioning version, but includes new software detection code allowing Giocoso to be successfully installed on the Raspberry Pi when it's running Manjaro. Giocoso was previously tested as working correctly on Raspbian (basically, Debian on Raspberry Pi and sometimes called Raspberry Pi OS), but not on the many other distros and operating systems that can be run on the Pi. I don't have the time (nor the inclination!) to test all those OS/Distro/Pi combinations, but I do run Manjaro as my main desktop (on an Intel processor), so I was naturally curious about how it would run on the Pi (OK, as it turns out!) and thus discovered by accident that Giocoso's detection of ImageMagick on that platform was faulty.

Anyway, it's fixed now. [...]

Spring Cleaning

Posted on 13th March 202214th March 2022 by hjr

A glance at my software downloads page will tell you that it wasn't just Giocoso which had lately developed a problem with accented characters on Manjaro+KDE. In fact, every piece of software I've written which uses the metaflac utility to read FLAC metadata tags suffered from the same problem. Accordingly, all needed to be fixed and all now have been fixed; each utility can therefore be updated whenever you're ready, using the utility name plus the --checkver run-time switch.

In other words, if you wanted to bump AES to its latest version, you'd type aes --checkver. If you needed to upgrade Niente, it would be niente --checkver. And so on. [...]

Tiny, but useful...

Posted on 9th March 20229th March 2022 by hjr

I mentioned last time that the new Giocoso version 1.12 also contained a very small new enhancement that had been intended to be released as version 1.11. That feature is... (drum roll, please)... early termination of playback.

Yeah. Wow. 🙂 [...]

Foreign Character Woes...

Posted on 8th March 202228th March 2022 by hjr

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, I recently re-installed Manjaro on a new small form factor Lenovo PC. All has been running well, except that in the last couple of days I noticed that Giocoso had developed a strange habit of not displaying "accented characters" properly: that is, Giocoso suddenly didn't seem able to display letters with their correct diacritic marks, such as é, ê, ß, ö, ç and so on.

For example, this is what Giocoso displayed this morning: [...]

Geoblocking Enabled

Posted on 1st March 20221st March 2022 by hjr

Not that it makes much difference in the great scheme of things, but just in case you use a VPN service that has servers in either Russia or Belarus: I've blocked visitors from both those countries from accessing this website, until further notice.

Of course, any Russian or Belarusian citizen will be able to VPN their way around such a block, fairly trivially, in their turn... but maybe every little helps. [...]

Giocoso 1.10 Released ... And Ukraine Invaded

Posted on 24th February 202225th February 2022 by hjr

Well, it seems a bit superfluous to release a slightly-modified version of Giocoso on the day Russia decided to invade Ukraine, on zero rational, reasonable pretext.

But I'm going to do it anyway, albeit briefly: version 1.10 is out, with a new --autocolor (or --autocolour) option. This simply applies the Monopoly™ colour combinations mentioned in the post announcing version 1.09 in a sequential manner, depending on what day of the week it is. If it's a Monday, you'll get Old Kent Road colours; if it's a Tuesday, it'll be the light blues of the Angel Islington; Wednesdays will be Pall Mall purple; Thursdays will be Vine Street Orange; Fridays the scarlet of the Strand; and Saturdays will be the bright yellows of Piccadilly. Finally, on Sundays, you'll get the rich green of Bond Street. All the colours occur in sequence, as though you were traveling around the Monopoly™ board progressively. Unfortunately, because Monopoly™ has 8 colour sets and there are only 7 days in a week, the Park Lane/Mayfair colours would never ordinarily be used by the autocolor option, but I've added an extra bit of calculation: if it's the first day of a month, regardless of what day of the week it is, those Mayfair colours will be used anyway. [...]

PC Change... One More Time!

Posted on 19th February 202223rd February 2022 by hjr

Four months in, and for some unknown reason, my Minisforum UM250 running Kubuntu decided to go all graphical-glitchy on me, as it had previously done in Manjaro and Arch. It then seemed to get better after a while, before going all wonky once more. Currently, it's in an 'OK' phase, but who knows how long that will last! I assume some software got updated somewhere along the line -maybe a driver of some sort- and this introduced instabilities where there were none before. But, frankly, at this point I don't care any more: the Minisforum is destined to be retired from desktop duties and instead will be translated to the loft, where it can run something 'server-like' that doesn't require a GUI nor day-to-day interaction with it. I haven't thought what, precisely, it might end up doing, but I'm sure I'll think of something before too long!

It's a shame (not least, because it wasn't cheap!), but I can't be having my daily driver desktop doing random things at random times. [...]

A Touch of Monopoly®

Posted on 12th February 202212th February 2022 by hjr

Another month, another little update to Giocoso.

This time, the version number is bumped to 1.09 because I've found that picking appropriate colours for the album art caption bar is harder than it should be! That is to say, when Giocoso starts playing a new piece of music, if album art is being displayed, it will try to display the composer and composition name in a coloured bar underneath the actual album art embedded in the FLAC file being played. [...]

Emby Episode 4

Posted on 1st February 202212th February 2022 by hjr

To recap the story so far: I organise my music on disk in a Composer/Genre/Composition hierarchy. I sometimes play music via the Emby Media Server. Emby does not, however, really support a Composer/Genre/Composition hierarchy, tending to go directly from Composer to Composition. Fortunately, if you use Folders view, Emby will mirror your physical layout of files and folders on disk exactly. But -and this is the point we reached in the last post- Composer artwork you may have applied to Emby's Artist View doesn't display in the Folders view... but, if you arrange for JPGs of each composer to be present in each composer folder, named precisely the same as the folder, it will display composer artwork in Folders view automatically.

This gets us 90% of the way to a usable Emby interface -but, unfortunately, it leaves us with some fairly ugly display screens to wade through on the way to finding a particular piece of music to play. [...]