waider dot i e

September 25

I've been tinkering with Emacs' lsp-mode at the prompting of a colleague but for the life of me I can't get the Python support to work in a way that makes sense to me and my setup. Part of the problem is, as ever, documentation: written by people who know what they're doing for people who know what they're doing. Diagnostics are no help: the server tells me it's auto-excluding the very directory I'm trying to force it to include, it seems to arbitrarily recognise some but not all of the modules installed in a given virtualenv, and periodically it is, as far as I can tell, responsible for my entire user environment running out of resources and taking down the session.

(I tried it in Visual Studio which is where the Python support derives from, and the configuration is equally opaque, so it's not specifically an Emacs problem.)

Huh, so that was the season finale of Vikings S3. Didn't actually realise. Ok, I guess we move on to Season 4, except I think maybe it's not available to us on Prime (see previous grumbling about availability of shows).

September 19

Picking our way through Vikings Season 3, wherein a major character is killed off. Ah well. I guess his contract expired.

September 17

TV listings said "Sudden Impact" was on, but what was actually on was The Enforcer, which was pretty good. Similar sort of state to the last Dirty Harry movie I watched: mostly it doesn't overtly suffer from being of its era.

September 10

Wrapped season 2 of Vikings, in which we learned that there is no honour among, well, pretty much anyone.

I watched Topkapi because I'd read the Eric Ambler novel; I can't recall much about the novel at this point but the movie was basically a farce, which is a shame because I'm pretty sure the novel was a straightforward heist. Ah well.

September 07

Successfully upgraded somewhat creaky old Raspberry Pi to the latest Raspbian stable release, live, over a SSH connection, which is always just a little hairy.

September 06

Digging around in backups and whatever else I can lay hands on, it looks like I don't have any copies of the EV charger data that got expired. That's annoying. I've a few more options to try but they're tedious...

September 04

Well, that's vaguely amusing; AWS says it doesn't support using macOS on-prem instances with SSM, but it's installed and running here... what I did:

install golang using homebrew
git clone the amazon-ssm-agent source
gofmt, because for some reason it wasn't happy about the checked-out code
make release (and wait a long time; this is a slow machine)
find the tarball it built and unpack it into dist
pkgbuild --root dist --identifier com.amazon.aws.ssm --version 3.1.0.0 amazon-ssm-agent.pkg (3.1.0.0 is the version; com.amazon.aws.ssm is what the inventory sweep expects to see - I got this wrong initially)
installer --pkg amazon-ssm-agent.pkg -target /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD
get the activation codes from the AWS console
do the command-line activation, same as it is for Linux
launchctl start -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.amazon.aws.ssm.plist
WAIT. (you can tail the logs and make clicky on the console if you're impatient)

September 03

Tsk. In which I discover that the API for my EV charger starts expiring logged data over 100 days old, after it had expired about a week of data; I'd been keeping some copies of this more-or-less accidentally but now that I want them I appear to have diligently cleaned them all up. Note, this is the raw data (site current at a particular timestamp); charging session data appears to be more persistent.

For extra delicious irony I deleted at least one copy of the data I'd already collected about four days before it got expired.

Started watching Labyrinth and after about ten minutes decided it was a little too "kids' movie", so switched to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Oh my. What an excellent movie. I think this is probably the best Spider-Man I've seen since Sam Raimi's first; compared to everything since, the acting is better, the story is better, the jokes are better, the balance of comedy, tragedy and action is better... the visuals are phenomenal.

Also I am totally there for a full-length Spider-Man Noir but only if they ham it up.

September 02

I don't quite recall if I'd ever watched Magnum Force before, but it was on the box tonight, so. Aside from Clint's last line there's a refreshing lack of sardonic post-homicide one-liners, and for a movie made in the 70s it's actually aged reasonably well over time.

August 27

Venom was an awful lot of fun. I liked that it was an "isolated" Marvel movie, with no (obvious) links to the MCU, so it wasn't staggering under the weight of epic continuity. Tom Hardy was surprisingly good as a comical loser, given the last thing I saw him doing was being grim in Mad Max: Fury Road, and the interplay between him and Venom was very well done. Brain candy, but good brain candy.