waider dot i e

April 16: Drobo FINALLY completed its juggling some time before 11:00 this morning, so I am no longer in fear of random power outages. I still need to go figure out (a) whether all the crap I'm storing on the Drobo needs storing and (b) whether maybe it's time I invested in something that's not dependent on a Firewire 800 connection for shipping data on/off. And maybe (c) do I need a UPS and (d) should there be an offsite copy of any of this in addition to the current offsite stuff.
April 14: Still finding a few sharp edges from the OpenHAB upgrade, such as autostarting not working, and discovering that the act of creating things in the semantic model leaves me with a duplicate set of items OH WELL I had nothing better to do than figure out how to clean that all up without breaking all the things.
April 13: Upgraded the home automation software (OpenHAB) to the newest release, which was only slightly terrifying (my overriding principle for home automation thus far has been "if it breaks, that shouldn't be a problem"). Had to manually reinstall MySQL drivers and couldn't find any indication that this would be the case; couple of other things needed kicking but it eventually stood up and worked. I'm a bit disappointed that some more of the new features aren't auto-configured; in particular, the sitemap seems like a great place to import a default model from. Oh well.
April 12: 93 hours remaining. That's a bit under four days. Woo!

Trundling through Ripper Street Season 5. Kinda interesting that at this point they've abandoned all trace of the original "murder-of-the-week" approach in favour of what's essentially a six-part movie about the (presumably) Salvation of Edmund Reid.
April 09: Ripper Street Season 4 concluded, in which a major character is more definitively killed off than previous attempts to do similar might allow. Short season: only six episodes, and we had a four-day week. Only Season 5 remains, so that'll be for next week.

158 hours remaining. What, you expected a progress bar with linear progression?

We also watched Grosse Point Blank, a movie which I have on VHS for some reason (but don't ask me where the VCR is, and the tape's probably degraded anyway). Parts of the movie feel ad-libbed, and are more real for that. I also love the running joke about noone taking Martin's job seriously. "Do you get dental?", "It's a growth industry." etc. And of course The Music. There's so much of it, and so good, that it's practically a character in the movie by itself.
April 08: 153 hours remaining.

So yesterday's fun and raspberry pi games: I got a USB WiFi dongle and wanted to have it active and connected on boot. I started out with a Raspberry Pi 2 (B? +?) which I'd installed some version of Raspbian on and upgraded to the latest of latests a few weeks ago.

This was probably my first mistake, since I'm sure the upgrade probably left a bunch of dangling legacy crap lying around.

I booted the Pi with the dongle plugged in, and then spent the next several hours arguing with wpa_supplicant, wicd, wpa_cli, wpa_gui, and a handful of other things that I can't recall. Files were added and deleted. Python was poked at. Eventually I decided that wicd is a piece of junk (that's the thing that was prompting me to select one of 15 or so types of WiFi encryption) and removed all evidence that it had ever existed. The system tray had a network thing in it that showed me that the ethernet interface was up and connected, but alternately suggested that either the wifi interface didn't exist or wasn't associated, even when both those statements were patently false. I can't actually figure out what piece of software presents this information so I'm stuck with it. I eventually manged to kick things sufficiently that wlan0 came up, linked to my AP, and got itself an IP address, but when I rebooted I discovered that systemd had attempted to bring up both a generic wpa_supplicant and a copy of same attached specifically to wlan0, and no amount of systemctl disable would persuade it not to bring up the generic one on reboot, and apparently running both caused the whole thing to Just Not Work. I eventually resorted to sysctl mask wpa_supplicant which I understand is about one step removed from forcibly removing the thing, and finally I got to the point I wanted to get to, viz. rebooting the device causes it to come up connected to my WiFi network. Needlessly, annoyingly difficult.

I am doing some local history research again. It would appear that New Wapping Street is in fact New; from looking at maps which I'd looked at before but not payed close enough attention to, it looks like "old" Wapping Street ran next to one of the railway lines and met up with Abercorn Road, while New Wapping Street came into being some time in the mid-1930s. Interestingly enough, it would appear that this is correctly shown on OpenStreetMap.
April 07: 164 hours remaining.

I picked up a USB WiFi dongle to put in one of the Raspberry Pis, and I'm trying to configure it using the supplied software. It is incomprehensible in the finest traditions of "Linux is ready for the desktop". Instead of asking me for the WiFi password, like every other piece of hardware and software I've ever dealt with, it wants me to know that it's turning on encryption (WARNING!), and it wants me to tell it which of about a dozen different types of wireless encryption the AP uses (hint: ASK THE AP), and then it generates a config file somewhere I can't see and of course that config file doesn't work, and because I don't know where it is I can't figure out what it's done wrong. Brilliant.
April 05: 204 hours remaining. I'm not bothering to see if this is actually on track, just noting it here as it proceeds.

And so we launched into Ripper Street Season 4. The opener was a 2-hour epic thanks to being on a streaming service rather than broadcast - I understand it was broadcast in two parts. The grim finality of the previous season's end is somewhat alleviated, there are a few more historical nods thrown in, and was that Howth Head in the bac... oh, never mind that bit. Really enjoying this, although the propensity for certain people to willingly put themselves in positions that will cause them trouble in the not-too-distant future is mildly annoying.
April 04: 239 hours remaining.
April 03: Ripper Street Season 3 finale: wow, they sort of cleaned house, didn't they? May have decided they weren't getting another season until after the thing was made. Reid: retired. Abberline: retired. Jackson: unclear, but possibly under arrest for obstruction of justice. Drake: hinted that he's moving to parts other with new wife Rose (and Rose's former bethrothed just sort of ... disappeared). Susan: under arrest and presumably bound for the noose. Now I'm really curious to see how they spin two more seasons out of this.