A little catchup...

My first experiment with ownCloud included the use of an ancient 55 GB external USB drive as cloud storage. In effect, that gave me about the equivalent of what Dropbox offers for about $100 per year. As impressive as that might (or might not) be, that amount of disk space can get eaten up pretty fast. So after clearing files from a not-so-ancient and larger-capacity USB drive, I found myself trying to get it to work in my setup, which was not an easy goal to achieve. In fact, by the time the "fog of code" cleared last night, it was actually one in the morning.

For one thing, formatting the disk so that it would work in Linux was not easy. The system running on the Raspberry Pi does not appear to be very good at it, and while I was able to format the drive straightforwardly enough on my Ubuntu laptop, attempting to mount the drive on the Pi triggered the Disk Check From Hell™ this morning. The second time I formatted the disk on my laptop, I formatted the drive real estate for the ext3 file system instead of ext4, and eventually, things got to running.

* * *There was a pause last evening, during which Galina and I watched The Hunger Games, the beginning story line of which reminded me very strongly of a Japanese film from about ten years ago that I found while browsing Netflix. The plot of the Japanese film started out with the authorities, using a fairly flimsy pretense, making an apparently randomly selected school class of teenagers fight to the death to leave a single victor. I stopped watching that film at about the time the students were being issued rucksacks on their way out into the "combat arena" that, if memory serves, was an island or something, the description of which did not sound much different from the arena in THG. The one major difference that I can recall involved each student wearing an explosive collar that would go off if its wearer tampered with it or stayed in any one place for too long.

The other difference between that film and THG is that I watched all of the latter. It was an entertaining enough watch-once film, though I have to admit I was not quite mentally agile enough to catch on to the intrigue going on between the character played by Donald Sutherland and the fellow with the intricately trimmed facial hair.

Apropos of film franchises, I let my guard down a few weeks ago and watched what is apparently the first of I-don't-know-how-many films being shot to tell Tolkien's story of The Hobbit. As penance, I think I shall go back and read the book, and not bother with any subsequent films.

Cheers...