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Snapping
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Being The
Geekly Diary of Waider
(may
contain traces of drinking, movies, and sport)
- February 04
- One of my webscraping toys has suffered the fate of all
webscraping toys: the thing it was scraping has updated. Guess I
know what I'll be fiddling with this weekend.
- January 29
- Slightly weird behaviour observed on the server I dragged up to
Debian 11: about once a week it loses its default route. Nothing
immediately obvious leaps out from the config files I've looked
at, but on the other hand I'm more of a RedHat person so there's a
certain amount of "that looks right" going on
here. For now I've just stuck in a cron job which restores the
default route if it's missing.
The handy side-effects of writing your own software for something:
I had the car charger replaced because the original one had a red
LED on it for a bit that indicated there may be a fault. It did
revert back to normal operation, but I'm wary of anything that
horses around with high currents, so I figured a straight
within-warranty swap was not something to quibble with. Problem:
possibly because someone missed a step, I now have two chargers
registered to my account with the manufacturer, and their app -
not a great piece of software by any stretch of the imagination -
explicitly does not cope with that. HOWEVER. I had
reverse-engineered the protocols in use and built my own scripts;
one the initial hacky CLI thing, the second a MQTT-based doodad to
hook up to OpenHAB. The former needed a little tweaking to work
with the new charger because I'd hardcoded it to use the first
charger in the list returned by the API, same as I'm guessing the
app does. Once I made the script somewhat list-aware and added a
switch to select a specific charger, it worked almost perfectly. I
was more impressed with my MQTT doodad, though: it
automatically picked up the new charger and told OpenHAB about
it. I was missing one piece of detail to get the cloud-based
data, which I picked up this evening through the simple expedient
of plugging in the car and then using the CLI tool.
(yes, the API returns a list of chargers, and the app does not
know what to do with that.)
(the missing detail was what seems to be a charger-specific
session ID which isn't, as far as I can tell, any of the other
numbers I have lying around for the charger (serial number,
"address", etc.) and I'm not immediately clear on where it's
derived from or looked up, just that it seems to be different per
charger; however, once you're charging and you ask the charger,
"hey, what's going on right now?" it reports back with a bunch of
details including the session ID.)
- January 28
- Went to see The Fabelmans
in the cinema. Two and three quarter hours of fictionalised "Stephen
Spielberg Grows Up" and just at the point where I thought the movie
might actually start, it comes to an abrupt ending with a
visual gag based on the previous scene. This was like
amateur hour at the movies except with a budget of millions. You
know how a story's supposed to have a beginning, a middle, and an
end? This felt like it never got past the beginning. A biopic, in
order to appeal to the audience, needs to have a narrative that may
not reflect what happened with 100% accuracy; characters may
be merged, details may be dropped, things may be shifted around in
time. Otherwise you're making a documentary. This movie felt like it
should've actually leaned into the documentary style because there
was no narrative, and there were a bunch of characters who show up,
are somehow important, but disappear and are never seen
again, and who knows about the timeline thing. There's a bunch of
places where pithy wisdom is imparted, or
setups for later scenes are apparently being created, except the
payoff for those never shows up. It's like violating Chekov's
directive about guns in the first act, but doing that at every
possible opportunity. Probably the only part of this that I actually
enjoyed were the home movie sequences where you saw young
Stephen
Spielberg Sammy Fabelman capturing friends and family on camera,
then editing, then showing the finished result. The rest? One very,
very, very large "MEH".
- January 22
- Watched Clerks
for the first time in a very, very long time. It holds up
surprisingly well; the dialogue feels a lot more stilted and set
up for a stage (rather than screen) performance than I recall, and
it's at least as filthy as I recall. But there's a general lack of
punching down in the humour because, I guess, the characters are
all the people you'd punch down on, so the only way for them to
punch is up; there's also that vibe from High Fidelity
where Randall feels he's above his customers in the same way as
Dick, Barry, and to some extent Rob.
- January 21
- Harry Brown
was a good deal more of a movie than last night's fare. It was
also pretty grim, to be honest.
- January 20
- Well, that's mildly annoying: selecting a checklist in the Notes
app and pasting it into a textfile gives you a raw markdown
checklist. Selecting that markdown checklist and pasting it into
the Notes app gives you ... raw markdown.
Bulltet To Bejing
started out ok but kinda devolved into "you spent all your money
on Michael Caine and had none left for a script".
- January 15
- Season 2 of Mrs. Maisel and... we're in Paris? Ok, we're in
Paris.
- January 14
- Rush:
second time watching this and I spent more time this time
wondering (a) how much CGI vs. practical was involved in the race
sequences and (b) how much of the Hunt/Lauda rivalry was
overemphasised for the sake of the story. Good movie,
though.
- January 13
- Out for booze and a chat with a friend I've not seen in, erm,
several years.
- January 12
- Last episode of season 1 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
tonight. Great finale: I particularly like that it was written as
a potential series end - there isn't a giant TUNE IN NEXT
SEASON hook dangling from the episode, but at the same time
there's plenty room to continue the story. This is really good,
and we'll be watching more of it.
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