waider dot i e

September 11

More fun with our TV provider:

me: "search for Endeavour"
tv: "ok! I found Endeavour"
me: "show me"
tv: "S1E1 is on next Saturday, and S7E1 is available on replay-tv."
me: "what about S7E2?"
tv: "nope!"
me: "ok, lemme check the TV guide."
guide: "S7E2 is on this Sunday"
me: "..."
tv: "no idea what it's talking about"

Note, the search function and the TV Guide are part of the same piece of software. I've set it to season recording, but who knows what that'll do.

I also discovered that the "remote recording" feature, whereby you can use the provider's website to set recordings on your settop box, doesn't notice if you subsequently delete the recording from the settop box, and doesn't list anything you're recording that wasn't booked through the settop box. Cunning.

September 09

Star Trek: TNG: Season 4 complete.

September 08

Since several office tools support Markdown, I'm finally sufficiently familiar with the basics that I've started using it for scratch-building HTML pages. I'm using Python-Markdown which has some nice extensions (like arbitrary attributes, and tables), but I've not actually looked at the HTML it outputs yet to see how clean it is.

September 01

So we chugged through most of ST:TNG Season 6 without losing an episode, and rolled over to season 7, and just because I stopped paying attention our beloved service provider decided to do whatever they do that makes Season Recording stop recognising that you've enabled it for, you know, a season, so we lost a few of Season 7. On the plus side, the "sweeper" channel is just picking up the hole in season 4 from when we had to replace the digibox.

We pay for this wonderful service, you know.

August 22

Not a huge amount going on here at Waide Towers. We've mostly done with Star Trek:TNG Season 6, despite the Virgin Media box trying to sabotage our recordings by (a) having the TV listings not set up correctly and (b) the box itself crashing. We've also binged our way through House M.D. Season 1 and have made some inroads on Season 2.

Missed anniversary: this particular pile of text was commenced on August 1st, 2000, so it's now just over two decades old. It's reduced in frequency, sporting events, drinking events, and nerdery, so I guess at this point it's just my ramblings... wait, it was always that, wasn't it.

August 09

I've been intermittently annoyed by a timezone-offset bug in OpenHAB which started when I was moving stuff from the old Mac Mini to the ... less-old ... Mac Mini. After much poking about I figured I'd ask the community; two people tried to help but I eventually figured it out myself. The short version is "EVERYONE STOP TRYING TO DO ANYTHNG WITH TIMEZONES EVER". The slightly longer version, well, yeah. You can read the link. The significantly annoying part of this right now is that while it's fixed, I'm still unclear on what actually triggered it since all the relevant configuration files were copied exactly from one Mac to the other, and this behaviour should definitely have been occurring on the old system.

(Not mentioned in the community post, but if MySQL didn't try to do its own thing with timezones this wouldn't have been a problem; I'm not clear on why, when presented with a system timezone of "Europe/Dublin" it renders it internally as "IST" (well, at this time of the year) instead of preserving the unambiguous timezone name. I'm equally unclear on why it wants me to maintain a timezone database when it's got access to a perfectly good system-level instance of same which the MySQL people have already built a parser / convertor for. Bottom line: run your database in UTC and avoid all this hassle, I guess.)

August 06

Not yet found: the Logitech Webcam I'd picked up for... a catcam, if I recall correctly. I have a vague idea where it might be, though.

August 04

Spare keys for the house have been missing for an indeterminate period of time (because of COVID we've basically had no visitors since we moved back in December other than The Brother, and normally the only way the keys go temporarily AWOL is by being given to visitors) and now we have a new puzzle: how the hell did they get where we found them this evening? I suspect it's one we'll never solve.

Also found: my OpenHAB-connected remote controlled power socket.

August 01

Filled in the gaps on ST:TNG season 3, so now:

Season 1	92%
Season 2	100%
Season 3	100%
Season 4	85%
Season 5	73%
Season 6	3.8%
Season 7	0.0%

Pick started season 6 at episode 2, or the DVR failed to record due to the constant faffing with the schedule. Either way, S5E26 and S6E1 are a pair so probably as well that we wound up with neither of them. So now we wait for Horror Channel (!) to work its way around to the bits of Seasons 4 & 5 while Pick does... whatever it does with Seasons 6 & 7. Oh, and there's a Heisenberg season of Endeavour coming up: the DVR's TV guide says season 7 starts on ITV3 on Monday, the online guide says it's a rerun of season 6.

July 28

"Is this the end of the Celebrity?", asks BBC, during a weekend-imposed break on its daily coverage of a celebrity trial. Betteridge's Law alive and well.