Waider's Geek Diary

Waider's Geek Diary http://www.waider.ie/hacks/hacking.html A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently. en-ie Copyright 1995 - 2017, Waider Mon, 09 Oct 2017 20:48:30 IST Mon, 9 Oct 2017 20:48:00 +0100 waider@waider.ie waider@waider.ie Waider http://www.waider.ie/images/people/waider/newlj.png http://www.waider.ie/hacks/hacking.html October 7 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/october.html#7 Dinner and a show! How novel! Dinner was at the recently-opened Eddie Rockets branch at Point Village; there's another restaurant beside it advertising that it's opening in October, but it looks a little ... static so I wonder about that. In any case, I think I first visited a Rocket's in 1992 and I've been back periodically in the interim without ever having a bad experience. It's not haute cuisine, but they do what they do well. The only slight niggle was that the music was (ha ha, old man Waider) a bit on the loud side. As in, "let's shout across the table at each other to converse" volume. Hopefully they'll sort that out because I'll happily go back. As it was we chose to decamp to the nearby Costa for post-dinner coffee and chocolate. From there, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1856101/combined" title="Blade Runner 2049 (2017)">Blade Runner 2049</a> in the iSense screen at Odeon Point Village. I don't think I've been in the iSense screen before, and it was totally the right thing for this movie. First take: incredibly good movie. It's beautifully filmed, it respects the original without cannibalising it in the way that The Force Awakens did to A New Hope (and hey, I liked TFA!) and the cast does a stellar job of conveying the whole thing. Yes, it's not perfect: for some reason the design team felt that Las Vegas wasn't gaudy enough as-was, and what it was really missing was a bunch of giant statues of naked women; likewise, there were bits of gratuituous titilation elsewhere in the movie that could have as easily been omitted with no loss to the atmosphere or plot. Then the music: for the most part, it worked, and it echoed Vangelis' original, but there were a few spots where it was hard to tell whether Sudden Loud Noise was the foley or Hans Zimmer dropping an anvil on a stack of Korg equipment. And I'm still turning one tiny plot point over in my mind with dissatisfaction (basically the whole bit with K/Joe being lo-jacked) but for a movie of this scale I think that's a pretty short list. Given that I'd skipped almost all the pre-movie faff (I watched the two trailers, and that was it), I'm gonna go back now and watch the mini-features and wait for the inevitable taking of sides over whether it's a worthy sequel or some sort of huge mistake driven by a desire to strip us rubes of our cash. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/october.html#7 Sat, 07 Oct 2017 23:59:59 IST October 4 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/october.html#4 Errrrr... (BBC, as ever) <table border="1"> <tr><td>2017-10-03 23:12:02</td><td>America's gun culture in eight charts</td></tr> <tr><td>2017-10-03 23:12:02</td><td>America's gun culture in seven charts</td></tr> <tr><td>2017-10-03 23:12:02</td><td>America's gun culture in nine charts</td></tr> <tr><td>2017-10-04 18:15:45</td><td>America's gun culture in 10 charts</td></tr> </table> (timestamps are BBC's; actual timestamps are more like 2am, 6am, 5pm and 6pm on October 4th) http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/october.html#4 Wed, 04 Oct 2017 23:59:59 IST October 2 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/october.html#2 My upgrade to "High Sierra" seems to have been fairly straightforward, although I notice ClamAV crashed on startup. About the only thing I've checked so far is if they've upgraded the version of OpenSSL, and yes, they have, so now my various SSL-scraping Perl and python scripts are once more functional. Oh, and I need to figure out what types of keys MacOS (macOS, whatever) allows by default because I keep having to fix the client-side "can't use that key" setting every time I upgrade. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/october.html#2 Mon, 02 Oct 2017 23:59:59 IST September 8 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/september.html#8 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3896198/combined" title="Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)">Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2</a> was an absolute barrel of fun. Drax gets all the best lines, of course. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/september.html#8 Fri, 08 Sep 2017 23:59:59 IST August 26 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#26 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3315342/combined" title="Logan (2017)">Logan</a> was really enjoyable, with the minor niggle that the dynamic range of the audio meant that I missed some of the dialogue (including Logan's last line in the movie, dammit). It's a thoughtful story, with an awful lot going on in it. Interestingly it's chosen to not really build on any of the existing X-Men world, other than to use some of its characters; everything in terms of backstory is contained in the movie, and not via someone giving expository speeches, either - Xavier's backstory is given in a radio report, for example. I think you could also have played Johnny Cash's Hurt cover for the entire movie, because it'd be fitting at all times. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#26 Sat, 26 Aug 2017 23:59:59 IST August 20 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#20 BBC works on their reporting: <table border="1"> <tr><th>2017-08-19 18:07:01</th><td>Boston march against alt-right rally draws thousands</td></tr> <tr><th>2017-08-19 18:44:33</th><td>Boston march against right-wing rally draws thousands</td></tr> </table> RTÉ on the other hand, nails it first time: <table border="1"> <tr><th>2017-08-19 20:29:50</th><td>Thousands march in Boston against far-right rally</td></tr> </table> http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#20 Sun, 20 Aug 2017 23:59:59 IST August 18 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#18 Celebrating that time we both said, "I do". I definitely enjoyed how <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4682786/combined" title="Collateral Beauty (2016)">Collateral Beauty</a> started out, and when Time got his initial lines I wanted to hug the scriptwriter, but then when it got to the boardroom confrontation I was a little iffy on the path the movie took. And then the whole bit with Melanie confused me further, and the closing scene in Central Park just kinda annoyed me. I think there were a few ways to take this idea - the concepts are "real" and hoodwinking everyone, the concepts are just the actors being put up to it, the concepts are, in fact, how Howard sees each friend, and so on - but instead it seems like the scriptwriters couldn't quite decide which option to go for and the result is less impactful for that. And the Melanie angle just seems... tacked on. It jars. This is a lovely movie, but it could have been so much better. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#18 Fri, 18 Aug 2017 23:59:59 IST August 13 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#13 Watching the Waterford/Cork hurling semifinal. Funny to watch these guys shrugging off the sort of physical tackle that'd have a Premier League coach calling for a stretcher, and smaller things like playing the sideline cut from the point the linesman marks, not ten meters closer to the opposition's goal. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#13 Sun, 13 Aug 2017 23:59:59 IST August 12 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#12 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2057392/combined" title="Eye in the Sky (2015)">Eye in the Sky</a> is an interesting movie in that the basic premise is of fairly limited scope to base a 100-minute movie on. Once the setup is gotten out of the way, it's basically that whole "lives of the few/lives of the many" scenario, and to be honest I don't think it really manages to pull it off. Which is a shame, because there's an excellent cast (including Alan Rickman in his final role); ultimately I found myself waiting to see which option the filmmakers would go for - hard-ass "collateral dammage is inevitable" or something more "every life counts", rather than being particularly engaged with how they got there. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#12 Sat, 12 Aug 2017 23:59:59 IST August 9 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#9 Bought a <a href="http://www.yubico.com/">YubiKey</a>, somewhat as a thing to play with and somewhat as a thing I might actually use. First problem: can't use it to lock my password safe if I expect to use my password safe on iOS, since Yubi don't play there. Second problem: configuring my screensaver to require at least one of password, YubiKey, but not both. I've managed to get it to allow you to fail the password but succeed with the YubiKey challenge, so far; also, if you use the YubiKey, the keychain is still locked. Being cautious about this so I don't accidentally lock myself out of my laptop! Broken emacs turned out to be an unescaped "<" which for some reason caused the search page to return a 404. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#9 Wed, 09 Aug 2017 23:59:59 IST August 4 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#4 And here we are in August already. Where has the year gone? <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1981115/combined" title="Thor: The Dark World (2013)">Thor: The Dark World</a> was a perfectly servicable movie but at the same time pretty forgettable - it feels like the middle book in a long series that just serves to advance a few plot lines or hit a few beats without being anything in and of itself. I don't think it was quite as bad as some of the IMDb reviews made out, but it's also not the sort of movie you'd really want to watch unless you've already seen a few others in the Marvel franchise. Noting in passing that the ugly old chunk of <a href="http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/../../emacs/index.html">Emacs</a> lisp I use to link movies mentioned here to IMDb seems to have stopped working, so I had to go and look up the link above manually and reformat it into the appropriate HTML myself like an animal. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/august.html#4 Fri, 04 Aug 2017 23:59:59 IST July 29 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/july.html#29 I went to add a <a href="http://blog.plover.com/">Dominus</a> quote to <a href="http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/../../../misc/quotes.txt">my quotes file</a>, only to discover it was already there. Go figure. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/july.html#29 Sat, 29 Jul 2017 23:59:59 IST July 23 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/july.html#23 Found a thingy that allows me to enable ssh access to my Airport Express. Turned it on, logged in... er, now what can I possibly do with this? http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/july.html#23 Sun, 23 Jul 2017 23:59:59 IST July 21 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/july.html#21 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/combined" title="Ex Machina (2014)">Ex Machina</a> 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. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2017/july.html#21 Fri, 21 Jul 2017 23:59:59 IST