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Being The Geekly Diary of Waider
(may contain traces of drinking, movies, and sport)
January 10
ZWave: struggling to understand how devices with new batteries can report the battery level as 5% and 0% respectively. I mean, if the battery level is 0% how is it reporting, exactly?

January 09
I recall seeing a sizeable marketing push for Molly's Game when it was released but didn't watch it. The director uses his trademark "more words in a minute than John Wick speaks in an entire movie" and at times it's honestly a bit much, and the Daughter Makes Peace With Dad bit feels kinda tacked-on, but aside from those two minor quibbles this is an excellent movie.

January 08
More Voyager: this time, Voyager Does Nazis. I suspect the cast had a fine time hamming this up. It's an odd two-parter in as much as you get not just a cold open but a whole chunk of the first part where you're not really given much information about what's going on and you have to figure it out as the episode progresses.

January 07
Did a big clean-out today: fodder for the Ringsend bring centre that's been accumulating for literal years. Didn't quite get everything I wanted done, but enough to fill the car sufficiently to not "waste" the €20 it cost.

Tonight's TV viewing was a couple of Voyager episodes, which could loosely be characterised as "The Trouble with Seven". The "Star Trek deals with the topic of Rape" episode was very disappointing since they chose to go with the "what if the woman is making it up" angle. Gah. If they wanted to riff on the whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing they could've picked a better topic to hang it on.

Fiddling with mbsync. It's a bit of a bear to configure but once I got it working (and worked around the assert-triggered crash...) it did its job nicely.

January 06
Watched a couple of DS9s. I was expecting The Dominion to be more dominant in the series from the way they'd been introduced but it seems that's not the case. So far, anyway.

January 05
Mission: Impossible III, in which Tom Cruise's Nose (which does all its own stunts, you know) chases a rabbit's foot. Which is apparently a biochemical weapon until grand plot arcs several movies later require it not to be, but anyway. Look, it's bubblegum, it predates the "must show action sequence for 30 minutes before moving to the next one" that bloated the later movies, introduces Simon Pegg to the fixed cast (we also briefly get Oirish IMF agent Gormley who I don't recall if he ever appears in the series again) and we have Michelle Monaghan as the damsel in distress who turns out to be a crack shot with a Beretta which she has never handled before. Good job, Miss.

Oh, and Philip Hoffman makes a truly menacing bad guy.

January 04
Lost a couple of days there. I was probably watching DS9, drinking various forms of booze, eating too much, occasionally hacking on something, etc.

Blackberry was billed by the TV station as comedy, and, well, it's sort of funny, but closer to a documentary that's unintentionally funny than it is an actual comedy. It's a dramatisation of the story of the RIM Blackberry and from skimming the Internet it's not a million miles from the real story. And it was kinda fun.

January 01
And off we go again.

We've jumped back into our Trekking: at the end of 2025 we were about half-way through Voyager and just done with Season 2 of Deep Space Nine. As of this evening we've added another 4 DS9s; The Dominion has been introduced, but not pushed hard as The Big Bad yet.

I'd found Andrew Hickey's review of Elvis to be an interesting take on the stagecraft that went into making the movie (among other things) but that review is currently offline. I half-watched the movie: Andrew's 500 songs podcast gave me far more detail about Presley than the movie, so I knew the general arc of the story, plus I honestly couldn't take Tom Hanks seriously - whether it's accurate or not, the description of his accent in the movie as "Kentucky Fried Goldmember" is pretty apt. Ultimately about two thirds of the way through I wanted to shoot Parker, possibly from a cannon aimed at the moon. It's a good movie and probably deserves better attention than I gave it, but again, because I felt like I had sufficient knowledge of the story I didn't get as drawn in as much as maybe I would have otherwise.

Embarked on a nerdy rebuilding project I've been meaning to get started for, oh, several years now. More details later, maybe.

December 31
Wow. The Naked Gun is possibly the worst movie I've ever seen. It's like they threw away all the funny stuff and kept in the jokes that didn't work.

Then we found Mission: Impossible on the box, so that whiled away the time until midnight (along with an excellent Graham Norton show and a bit of Jools Holland).

December 30
Doing some hardware spring-cleaning; my pre-M2 MacBook Pro got a wipe and reinstall, which is how I discovered that you have a choice between MacOS Catalina being up-to-date or TrustedPeersHelper crashing constantly and causing CrashReporter to busy out your system. Or, I guess from reading around, disconnecting your up-to-date Catalina install from any iCloud accounts you may have thought it would work with. I dunno, this seems like something either needlessly broken or needlessly obscure (or both) and really should be flagged a little more clearly than the usual bottom of stairs, no light, beware of the leopard etc. setup. So: launchctl bootout user/NNN/com.apple.TrustedPeersHelper for the moment.



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