waider dot i e

May 16

This broadcast comes to you from our new digs on the west side of Dublin, since the regular spot is undergoing a bit of surgery that will make it somewhat uninhabitable. We actually moved in here last Friday, but it's taken a while to get things sufficiently settled, and we decided tonight should be a night off from moving / packing / unpacking.

The move weekend itself was a barrel of laughs:

Friday: I spend the day moving enough stuff to facilitate at least one night at the new digs.
Saturday, 3am: We both get up and drive to Phoenix Park for Darkness into Light 5k walk; back home about 5:30am.
Saturday, 8am: I get up again and go to the no-longer-local parkrun to marshall, followed by coffee with the Sanctuary Runners who I normally run with.
Saturday afternoon: We both do some more housemoving stuff.
Sunday, 8:30am: We both get up and drive to Terenure where I'm running in the Sportsworld Terenure 5-Mile Race in the Sanctuary Runners colours (my first race in several years, and I managed just over 37 minutes)
Sunday afternoon: We both do some more housemoving stuff.
Monday: ditto.
Tuesday: I'm on housemoving duty again during the day, and we both do some more in the evening.
Wednesday I'm back at work, but we do a bit more housemoving in the evening.

So that's why we're on a night off tonight.

May 05

Windows machine insisting that files suffixed ".pdf" are of type "Chrome HTML File (pdf)". None of the obvious tricks to change this to something sane - such as, say, "PDF file" - seem to have any effect. They're definitely PDF files, though. My understanding of this is that Chrome has, very much in the fashion of every other piece of Windows software, attempted to lay claim to the Default Application space in every area it can, and has done so in a way that sneaks beneath the standard control panel. The simple act of opening Adobe Acrobat seems to have changed the default app for opening these files to Acrobat, but they're still labeled as Chrome HTML files. What a pile of junk.

May 03

Keeping, somewhat, with the recent theme of Movies About Iconic English Queens: if it hadn't been in the credits, I'd have had a hard time believing that Martin Scorsese directed The Young Victoria. I mean, nobody gets bloodily dismembered at any point (there is a shooting, but only wounding and all very much shot in a way that emphasises the drama, not the blood). The story is funny, it's cute, it's romantic, it's believable, and apparently it mostly sticks to the facts - I suspect there's probably a good deal more historical accuracy going on in the set-dressing, scenery and backgrounds than the scant bits mentioned on the IMDb Trivia page.

April 27

Hacking about with the GoPro; there's a slightly abandoned Python module for interfacing with it, and with a small amount of kicking I got it working (needs python3, also doesn't recognise my firmware as being a HERO+). Then for some reason the "gpMediaList" API call (list all media) wasn't working, so I hacked around that to fetch all the data off the camera; then the next time I connected to it the gpMediaList worked just fine. I think there's a bit of latent flakiness around this that I've also seen on the USB interface where it was unable to retrieve files from the camera using the desktop app, but was fine with the phone app. And because it's a four-year-old model I'm not expecting firmware updates to patch the glitches any time soon.

April 26

Gradually reeling in the Marvel Comic Universe: Doctor Strange is fun and thoughtful and visually mind-bending. Cumberbatch does a nice job of both arrogant surgeon and somewhat hapless accidental hero. Rachel McAdams is a bit wasted in this; her role seems to mainly to be a prop for Cumberbatch and someone for him to be dismissive of - would have been nice to see her given a little more to do with the role. But, as the movie says, it's not about you, or something. Anyway. Good flick, worth a look. We're one short of being able to watch Infinity War and I see from the BBC's coverage of Very Important Things that there's another Avengers movie to catch after that. I'm sure we'll catch up eventually.

April 21

The long-running saga with the failing TimeMachine backups was eventually resolved by moving the disk array from the creaky old Mac Mini (2009 era) to the slightly less creaky Mac Mini (2011? 2013? can't recall). There were a few epic backups while the system caught up with everything, and there was an unscheduled "Drobo is protecting your disk so don't do anything with it for the next ten days" but now I'm back to hourly backups that complete within the hour they're running in. I'm still faced with having something like 1TB of backups for this laptop that really should be thinned out a bit, a process that TimeMAchine doesn't support particularly well.

April 19

Having watched the first Elizabeth movie last week we figured we'd watch the second one (Elizabeth: The Golden Age) this week. This is definitely more or less as I remember (although I'd missed the minor detail with Babington's pistol) and again, it takes some historical liberties in the interests of presenting a more pleasing story with less characters - ironically enough, Rhys Ifans' character is an invention to compensate for the fact that the real person in his place (approximately) had been killed off in the previous movie. Anyway. Good movie, but maybe use it as a springboard for your new-found interest into Elizabethan history rather than a core reference.

April 16

Did a slightly hard cutover to Python3.6 on a bunch of stuff running on this server. I'd done a lot of work some time back to make it compatible with both Python 2.7 and 3.6, but given 3.6 is end-of-life this year I figured I'd just switch that big ol' lever over to the new version. Turns out everything wasn't quite ready, and a bunch of stuff I'm sure I'd fixed and tested under both interpreters was suddenly not working, but it all looks ok now.

minor explosion followed by some dull thuds in the distance.

Mostly ok.

April 13

"Let's get a bunch of has-been action movie heroes and make an ensemble movie! How could it possibly go wrong?" Answer: The Expendables. I think the problem is evident in the credits when you see that Stallone has writing and directing on this. And the thing is, it's not a terrible movie that you wind up mocking for being so terrible; it's just a bad movie. It has no rhythm, it doesn't do the running gag (Stallone and Statham's knife vs. gun routine) properly, the dialogue is terrible (particularly Dolph Ludgren's) and in a movie with a name like this, it turns out none of them actually is expendable, including the guy you thought they killed off. (Sorry if that spoiled anything for you. You shouldn't have watched this movie.) Mrs. fell asleep while it was on, and I think that was a better use of the running time.

April 12

Someone (well, probably everyone) told me that Inside Out was worth seeing, and they were not wrong. There's a hint of a setup for a sequel, which I'm currently hoping they don't make, but this is an absolute gem of a movie.