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Watching

The Blacklist (TV Series 2013– )
Snapping
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Being The
Geekly Diary of Waider
(may
contain traces of drinking, movies, and sport)
- June 26
- Finished up season 4 of The Blacklist tonight. As
season endings go, it was almost perfect; the only thing to mar it
was no sooner had they revealed the BIG SEEKRIT than Dembe
immediately undercut it. Come ON. Interestingly, with a few small
edits they could've made this the series finale - I wonder if they
were expecting their renewal not to come through? Anyway, roll on
Season 5.
Oh, and I note that tossing $PROTAGANIST off a bridge isn't
necessarily fatal, despite the lingering shot of a face-down body
floating in the water.
- June 22
- The Blacklist has indeed settled back down a bit. Still slightly
silly; Liz will periodically remember that she's disgusted with
Reddington and mouth off at him, before continuing to work with
him exactly as before, and more recently Navabi has taken to
randomly blowing up about stuff for no reason other than that I
guess the writers wanted to "develop her character"? I dunno if
painting her as Angry Impulsive Woman is the best approach
there...
After listening to Three Castles Burning's
Bloomsday piece, I decided to tackle Mr. Joyce's magnum opus once
again. I've had an ebook "Variorum Edition" knocking about for a
month or more without loading it onto the Kindle, so doing that
was the first job. Only after I'd started reading and mentally
tsk'd at some obvious typos in the text did I go and read the
notes on the edition: it's a compendium of five editions, the
early ones being reproduced warts and all which means the typos,
annoying as they are, are historically accurate
typos. I'm debating whether to read all five or to skip to one of
the later editions.
In any case, by sheer coincidence I was not only in Leopold
Bloom's neck of the woods today, I was on the very site of his
home. It's long gone, but there's a plaque to commemorate
it.
One of the things that didn't make the transition from my old
phone to my new phone was Signal. I don't really use it, nor do I
have much use for it, but three people have chosen to contact me
that way for whatever reason. So I've reinstalled the app and all,
but Signal's "migrate to new device" feature completely failed to
work so I just gave up on it. I have no idea if this impacts
people trying to get in touch - I'm assuming it might. If this is
you, the number you use to reach me on Signal is the same one you
can use to send me a SMS... and there's that email address I've
had since 1995, too.
(Wiping the old phone was a bit of a clown show as well - it
prompted me for my Apple ID password so it could turn off stuff,
and it locked up at that step. So I tried again, and this time it
kept cycling through the password prompt for Apple ID. So I went to
Settings and signed out of iCloud and ta-da, suddenly it
worked. This smells like multiple independent identity processes
failing to play nice with each other.)
- June 14
- So we're into season 4 of The Blacklist
and it's gotten kinda silly, with the whole "
Luke Liz I am
your father" shtick, and the purported reason for the show to
exist - the Blacklist - relegated more obviously to a means to
Red's ends instead of being front-and-centre with a little twist
at the end showing how Red benefitted. The last handful of
episodes in particular have been an irritating shell game of
trying to get Liz, Tom/Jacob/Whatever, and Precocious Newborn all
on the same side of the Red/Others dividing lines, ultimately all
coming unstuck due to some silly basic failing on the part of
people who are supposed to be good at this sort of
thing. Liz, in particular, is quite possibly the worst anticipator
of peoples' actions I've ever encountered, and she's supposed to
be a profiler.
I guess we'll grind on in the hope that they'll get over OMG LIZ
HAD A BABY AND BETRAYED EVERYONE and get back to previous form at
some point.
- June 06
- I did not get around to investigating the email-to-RSS idea. I
got distracted by some other things, including a
previously-mentioned-here reverse-engineering task which yesterday
fell down a rabbit hole of ".NET app compiled to be cross-platform
- iOS and Android - bundled up in Apple DRM" which is apparently a
thing people do.
- June 04
- Warren Ellis' thinking-out-loud-in-public site, LTD, has a piece
that approximates to why the site exists.
He links out to someone else's piece on the tools they use for their site
and that guy (Matt Webb) mentions using an email address to drop
stuff into his RSS reader, because email is a terrible place for
long reads. And that gave me a bit of an "A-ha!" moment, because
email is a terrible place for long reads, and a chunk of
my undisposed email consists of long reads that I've started into,
not finished, and neither returned to nor deleted. Given that my
RSS reader is a hand-crafted thing, it would be trivially easy for
me to wire it up with such a channel - an email address that gets
turned into reader entries - and I think I'm going to maybe fiddle
with that idea this weekend.
For the curious (all two of you): this site is entirely
hand-written, but tool-assisted. I use a modified version of jwz-html-mode
to write HTML generally, with a specific pile of junk attached to
it for writing "diary entries" (I hate the word "blog" and make
disproprtionate efforts to avoid it) which uses simple templates
to create new files each month and somewhat automatically links
one month to the next. There are a few additional hooks in there,
such as one which allows me to look up IMDb entries from the text
I'm editing rather than flipping to a browser window, finding the
relevant movie, copying the link, inserting the title text,
etc. and another that's supposed to allow me to consistently link
words to posts but which is broken in some way I've never bothered
to figure out since I noticed it wasn't reliable.
Everything is written locally on my laptop, and then there's one
of those evolved shellscripts that does the actual site update -
updating the movies and books links, checking the entire site for
broken internal links, and checking the format of the entire diary
before using rsync to upload any changes to the public-facing
server. Off the top of my head, this mess encompasses Emacs Lisp,
Bash script, Perl, Python, and awk. I've occasionally migrated
bits of it from one language to another but for the most part it's
one of those terrible things that isn't sufficiently horrible to
replace.
(somewhere online there's a good quote from a former coworker
along those lines. Damned if I can find it and for some reason
it's not in the quotes
file.)
- May 31
- A recently-acquired electrical device has been successfully
reverse-engineered to provide data which can be plugged into home
monitoring system. I used MQTT to do the plugging, and now want to
use MQTT for everything.
- May 29
- Nothing like spending an hour slavishly copying headers before
realising you made a basic mistake in header
content. Pfft. The trials and tribulations of
webscraping.
- May 28
- Back from a proper outing with the car - took it on a trip to
the southwest. Stopped at an Ionity rapid charge station on the
way to refuel; I'm not sure how close we'd've gotten to our
destination without doing so but we likely wouldn't quite
have made it. The first half of the drive was pretty much entirely
motorway, while the second was much more, uh, entertaining due to
what constitutes a national route in that part of the country: to
quote an observation, if it's the only route it kinda has to be
the national route regardless of the state it's in.
Finished up season one of Bosch: Legacy
by yelling at the TV somewhat because they left it on a godawful
cliffhanger. Like, incomplete cases cliffhanger. That's just
nonsense for a show like this: wrap up the cases in a season or go
home. Leave the suspense for the characters, dammit. Oh well, now
we get to wait for the next season to show up. I mean, we were
going to watch it anyway.
- May 22
- Hacking on my GoPro again. Can't recall where I'd gotten with
this before or why I gave up, but apparently I left
cross-compiling tools lying around... however, trying to get an
interactive networking shell up and running is proving a little
beyond me at present.
Also tinkering with Homekit again. After much faffing and poking I
managed to get all the TRVs to show up in the Apple Home app; one
proved particularly recalcitrant until I slavishly copied a bunch
of unrelated config from a working TRV and ... magically things
were ok. I am still faced with an annoying physics problem,
though: previously two, and now three of the TRVs are exhibiting
problems that look like the valve body is toast. You can turn it
on and off, but no settings between seem to exist.
- May 16
- Toys, toys, toys. So last Thursday we replaced our long-serving
(7 years!) petrol-engined car with a fully-electric car. Driving
it so far has proven to be fun, at least as much for discovering
seven years of upgrades to the state of the art as anything else.
Arrived today in the post: a chip-reading cat feeder. One of our
cats has an eating problem - he likes to, and a lot - and the
other is a grazer. The eater wound up with a bit of a weight
problem, so we've had him on a diet for a while, and part of the
diet enforcement protocol is putting the grazer's food where the
glutton can't reach it. Alas, the newly svelte and definitely
hungry piglet has discovered his inner ninja and is now able to
jump to the previously safe perch. So, electronics to the
rescue. Insert food into feeder; insert cat into feeder to program
the chip-reader; go through tedious acclimatisation programme to
get cat to use the feeder. Or, in Bonzo's case, wait a few hours
while she figures it out and gets used to it. It wasn't cheap, but
it's definitely working quite well and we (so far) haven't had to
engage the Thieving Cat Defence or the Shut Lid Quickly
feature: LardCat is simply freaked out by the thing and eyes it
suspiciously from a safe distance.
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