waider dot i e

December 07

Thinking about the DVD Rip project. There are a couple of drivers behind automating something. First, for me, there's the fun of solving the puzzle, "how do I make a computer do this thing for me". This is particularly interesting where there's an implicit or unrecognised human factor - for example, how do I match the tracks on this disc with the episodes listed on something like IMDb. Second, there's the avoidance of tedium: ripping discs is slow, repetitive work and having something do as much as possible of it for you is really useful - particularly if, say, you're tinkering with filesystem layouts, codecs, etc. and need to redo a bunch of already-complete work. And then somewhere out there, for personal projects, is the dim prospect of maybe sharing this with someone else who might find it useful. For the DVD Rip project I think I've convinced myself that that's sufficiently unlikely at this point that beyond the odd snippet here (or the odd patch to FFmpeg!) much of what I'm doing is for me only, and therefore doesn't need to be generic, or clean, or even wholly logically sound. It's also ok to one-off bodge things if the code can't otherwise cope.

For the record I've now got it figuring out which titles on a TV-series disc are likely episodes, then presenting me with a static web page that embeds the ripped title (i.e. the actual video, playable in browser) under review along with a list (from IMDb) of the candidate titles, and I get to tell it which one it is. So, human factor being covered by ... a human.

John Wick: Parabellum was on the box, so we watched it. Neither of us could remember most of it from the last time we watched it, which I think is the nature of the John Wick movies.

December 06

Got COVID and Flu shots. I am now incapable.

December 05

Having a few days off work, which means pottering around my hard drive (and house) for a bit. Epic cleanup of some scraping stuff I use for TV listings means I got to fix a bunch of long-standing bugs. Focusing my attention on the DVD ripper now which I've more or less got into some sort of shape to handle the TV series discs, although in doing so I seem to have screwed up some of the metadata so I'm winding my way back to making that work.

December 01

Brief note on the watching: We're onto S4 of Voyager, wherein we lose Kes and acquire Seven, and S2 of DS9, wherein the Dominion is hinted at, and I think we must be getting close to the end of Cemetary Road which is just too damned well-made for its own good.

In other media: I finished On The Road out of sheer bloody-mindedness; I did not enjoy that book and fail to see how it's a classic of any sort. I've been reefing through backlogs of unread side-loaded material on the Kindle, and given I stopped buying from the primary source I'll be doing a deal more of side-loading going forward, I imagine. Music: not unlike last year's discovery that Linkin Park had about 20 years of My Kind Of Music that I wasn't aware of, I stumbled across VNV Nation. I've been aware of their existence for a while but had no idea what kind of music they make. Turns out it is also My Kind Of Music, although I'm finding it doesn't quite hit me with the same consistency as Linkin Park. Still, two albums off Qobuz along with a few other bits and pieces including Something Happens!' debut album which I think I only ever had on a cassette copied from a friend. I definitely had their second album on CD because it's up in the attic with the rest of my CDs.

November 29

Work stuff: done, or sufficiently so that I'm a bit less fried than I have been for the last ... while.

I am continuing to have fun with Qobuz vs. ~~iTunes~~Music. Just now I figured I'd delete a download of one of the albums which has been matched and let iTunes repopulate it. It ... doesn't repoulate it. It doesn't give an error. If I try to play a track, it does nothing: doesn't error, doesn't play the track, doesn't loop until it finds a track it can play. I dunno, Apple used be good at this stuff.

Meantime I am using a bit of hackery involving the Python mutagen library to handle the FLAC downloads from Qobuz: use the Mac's native afconvert tool to convert to ALAC, then use mutagen to map the metadata from the FLAC to the ALAC. It's not perfect yet, but it's doing the job sufficiently to allow me to import a new purchase and have iTunes almost get it right.

On the positive side, "ripping" the FLAC files to ALAC seems to bypass the whole nonsense with Music on the phone telling me the tracks aren't available in my country. At least, it did for one album. I'll need to check more.

Did another round of poking the zwave network. I'm trying to move things from the OpenHAB native zwave support to the zwave-ui-js thingy, but the instructions on doing so are sparse and zwave is as opaque as ever. Why is my range extender offline? Why does it not respond to attempts to factory-reset it? Why has it spontaneously come back online overnight while half the healthy nodes have decided to fall off the network? I can't believe people actually use this thing for security components like doorlocks and alarm sensors.

Also OpenHAB appears to be chattering about temperatures in degrees Kelvin, and the UI is showing a different set of devices offline to what the API is showing. I have no idea.

November 14

A bit of catch-up:

One definitely dead DVD. The Rock. There's some discoloration on the surface that's probably some sort of delamination or other physical degradation, and while I think the BluRay player may be able to work with it I don't have a computer-attached drive in the house capable of reading it.
Finished the current season of Slow Horses; for some reason I lost track of which episode we were on, and thought it was wrapping up rather quickly for a show with an episode to go... d'oh.
Down Cemetery Road is proving to be rather excellent.
DS9 season 2 opened with a three-parter, which was fairly epic. It's still oddly cheap in its sets and effects, but I guess this was still a bit before various booms and nostalgia jags and, well, cheap computer-generated effects that don't look like cheap computer-generated effects. Still, it's a far more plot-driven show than other Star Trek franchises I've seen, so they could have an entire episode in a bare-walled room and it wouldn't really matter.
Voyager, by contrast, is happy to indulge in the silly at the drop of a hat. Kes travels backwards in time! The doctor develops a Mr. Hyde side personality! Harry is an alien! It's fine, we're not watching it for deep intellectual stimulation.

With all this serial stuff to watch, we haven't watched a movie in ages.

November 13

I am exceedingly busy. Updates may resume soon, or not.

November 02

Last of DS9 Season 1 and... it's not really a season finale, it's just the last show of Season 1. And Kira's being a bit mutinous again. Really now.

November 01

Took in a couple of DS9s, so we're almost done with Season 1. It continues to be generally excellent, although right after the "No more mutinies, Major Kira!" there was another minor Major Kira incident...

October 30

On-call for the weekend (mostly) so a lot of sitting about reading and what not and hoping the pager stays quiet.

Slow Horses ticking along nicely. We also watched the first episode of Down Cemetery Road, another Mick Herron piece. Very nice so far.