waider dot i e

July 21

Ex Machina is an interesting piece of work: a limited cast and a "small" budget (a mere 15 million). The outdoor scenery - of which there isn't much - is gorgeous, and the rest of it is edited such that there's absolutely no waste in it - everything that happens has a purpose that may only become obvious later in the story. There were a few ways the plot could have twisted, and I think any of them would have worked; the one they chose was fine, although there's at least one minor problem with it. Ultimately, though, a decent movie.

July 15

I had Thank You For Smoking on the DVR from ages back; I'd seen it, but was holding it for Mrs. Waider. She also enjoyed it. However, I'm now confused about the ending, probably on account of having also read the book. Anyway, it's a fun movie.

Got a DNLA-capable radio recently. It works with an app - Undok - which allows you to fully remote control it. Trying to find something simliar for my desktop, because let's face it, I don't want to go looking for my phone to fiddle with the radio when I'm already sitting in front of a Thing With A Screen - has proven needlessly difficult. Even the roll-your-own option is somewhat stymied by the fact that the go-to Python module - Coherence - is apparently abandonware. I feel there may be some hacking required here, since at the very least I want a giant OFF button for the radio on my laptop.

Also in nerd news, I have been using OpenHAB with the Yahoo weather plug-in to keep a bead on outside temperature. For some reason it's been showing Dublin running over ~30° since about midnight last night. Did someone flip the Celsius/Farenheit switch?

July 12

2017-07-12 11:12:09	Iceberg bigger than Galway breaks off Antarctica
2017-07-12 13:48:30	Iceberg bigger than Mayo breaks off Antarctic ice shelf

Neither of these helps me much.

July 08

Spotlight is a fantastic movie about a fantastic piece of journalism. I don't know how much it deviates from the true story on which it's based, but Marty Baron comes across as a very, very ballsy guy - comes into an environment where he's being regarded with suspicion and makes a huge call on what turns out to be a huge story. And that gives everyone else the power to do the same, including Robinson who wants to go for the big prize rather than publish early. Even if this was 100% fiction it'd still be an excellent newsroom movie. Go watch it!

July 03

Chewing my way through Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch books. I have some minor quibbles (the Internet thing was ... painful; the first-person narrative did not work for me at all and I was glad when that ended; etc.) but I'm really enjoying them.

June 30

Kingsman: The Secret Service is an absolute riot. Colin Firth as an action hero? Surprisingly brilliant - Mr. Darcy Kicks Ass, basically. The storyline is nothing special, Samuel Jackson's lisp is a bit irritating, and the whole exploding heads in showers of colour is deeply silly, but overall this is an excellent piece of work and I'm looking forward to see what they do with a sequel.

June 29

Forgot to mention: we watched The Dark Crystal. Mainly it's a movie I wanted to see because I'd heard of it / about it, rather than anything else. It's... well, it's a hero's quest done with Muppets (actual Jim Henson Muppets, as opposed to Irish politicians) and it's everything good and bad that that implies. The story's fine, a straightforward hero's quest; the acting is a bunch of wire puppets done by a team who were masters of the art. Probably the most amusing thing for me was the opening narration ("Another world. Another time. ...") because this is also on the opening track of Vegas, a 1997 album by The Crystal Method. This is kinda one of those movies that maybe you want to see because of the Henson connection or something; it's not really something that I think stands well by itself.

June 25

Broke my waider.ie email for a bit - sorry if you got any bouncebacks... postgrey got stuck, so the server was soft-bouncing emails, then when I investigated I found a warning in the logfile (warning: do not list domain waider.ie in BOTH mydestination and virtual_alias_domains) which I "fixed", which caused the server to hard-bounce all email instead. Gah. Restored the config with the warning in it, so I can at least receive email.

June 23

John Wick: Chapter 2 is about what you'd expect: lots of shooting and fighting and not much by way of a storyline. There's even a completely gratuituous car sequence at the opening - the car gets more or less totalled and doesn't appear for the rest of the movie. Which is basically fine for Friday night bubblegum.

June 19

Z-Wave network appears to have settled down, albeit not 100% the way I'd expected. I've installed two repeaters - one's an actual smart switch - but I think the steel framing in the house extension is messing with the radio propagation.