A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
April 28
Oof, long time no update. So, let's see.
Last things first: the ongoing question over whether Twitter will
become Muskville caused me to spend a bit more time on Mastodon
where I've had an account for a few years largely lying
dormant. @waider@octodon.social if such is your thing. Given that
there are a number of accounts I follow / support on Twitter that
are only on Twitter, I won't be deleting my account there
any time soon, it'll just be a bit less noisy.
Related, a day or so after I returned to my Mastondon account, the
iOS client I was using for it (Amaroq) started crashing on
launch. Turns out the author EOL'd it
about ten months ago, and it looks like it's just broken. Weird
coincidence - maybe the increased traffic to the site I use
resulted in them changing something that Amaroq can't deal
with. Anyway, there's an official Mastodon client which isn't
great but works well enough for my uses.
Picard Season 2 continues to be excellent, as does Slow Horses.
We started into The Blacklist
as something to watch during the week (criteria: must hold our
interest, episodes must be an hour or thereabouts, and it'd be
great if it wasn't a series that got cancelled with unresolved
plotlines) and it's ... not bad. It's a bit bumpy in places, and
James Spader's mannerisms are all sorts of odd (the way he
constantly angles his head left or right for no apparent reason,
for example). A recent episode had us pretty much yelling at the
TV because everyone in the episode was picking the most stupid
available course of action ("I'm on my own at a dangerous location
where there's a pile of guns and evidence of very recent
occupation by someone I suspect to be a killer... how about I just
walk on in by myself and not tell anyone at all where I am") so
hopefully that's not a continuing trend; on the plus side, it's
apparently still in production but I've slightly
spoilered myself for a recent season because I accidentally read
the season synopsis. I guess we've a few dozen episodes before
that crops up, so it probably doesn't matter.
Started reading "The Science Officer" series. Dropped it after a
couple of books because of the protagonist's constant references
to a female character's physical characteristics. Pick a different
running joke, dude. (of course it's a dude). Ate my way through
Stephenson's "Termination Shock": that was honestly one of those
books where I'd have been happy for it to continue, and not
because of everyone's favourite hobby horse, that Stephenson can't
stick the landing; it was just good. Also devoured Caoimh
McDonnell's latest. Then I picked up Becky Chambers' "Monk and
Robot", which I liked, and was fun, but oh GOD another "book 1 in
an ongoing series that hasn't been completed" - when will I learn?
And finally: Ulysses. I'm not reading it, but I've found the
e-book equivalent of buying it and then leaving it unread on your
shelf; I picked up an ebook made from when it was (briefly) out of
copyright, and have left it uninstalled on my reader.
Nerdery: the aforementioned React fix isn't quite right, but it's
working well enough for now. I will admit to mild annoyance that
parity with equivalent JQuery/JQuery-UI functionality isn't high
on someone's list of boxes to tick, and of course using React
means engaging at least partially with the whole world of hurt
that is NPM, even if you're not actually using any of the NPM
stuff "for real" (I've used a kludgy combination of
create-react-app and some scripting to turn my React code into a
Webpack-whatever-it-is bundle that gets served to all and sundry
by my somehwat creaky Django-based system).
Phew. That's enough for now.
April 19
I've made no progress on the React porting for the last month
due to getting stuck on a problem, halfway solving it, and then
being somewhat disheartened with the fact that I couldn't complete
it. I dug up an alternative solution this evening and wired it up
and, wow, I think I've just completed the thing I was stuck
on!
April 16
The Actors:
saw this in 2005, thought it was pretty good. Watched it tonight,
nearly hurt myself laughing. It really is such a great movie. I
mean, Michael Gambon as a toupee'd small-time Dublin
criminal (and owner of what I believe to be a made-over
PorterHouse? I think I'd previously thought it was a bar in D8
that I no longer recall the name of) who drives a beat-up Toyota
Hiace? How can you not immediately want to watch
this?
April 15
I spoke a little too soon: restoring to a sparsebundle appeared
to work but crapped out at the "verify" stage. No matter, I've at
least cloned the data off to an external drive and started
stripping the Drobo.
April 12
Plan E looks like it might actually be the one. tl;dr: Apple's
Disk Utility can "restore" one volume over another without
requiring a memory-hungry scan of the entire source (which the
other imaging attempts I made wanted to do) and much to
my surprise it accepted a sparsebundle as a destination for the
volume copy. I have no idea if this will actually result
in a working backup drive, but that's ok: it will at least allow
me to put the bits somewhere other than the Drobo, which will in
turn allow me to strip the Drobo for disks to load up into the
Synology. And it only took me several months to accomplish!
April 8
What are we up to now, plan E? Anyway. After spending a week or
more resizing the backup disk to something under 2TB, I am now
attempting to use Disk Utility to do a block-level copy to an
outboard 2TB drive. This should allow me to shuffle
things around a bit and maybe start actualyl dismantling the
Drobo.
April 4
Converted an old, old script to something a little more modern:
it's now using Python 3 and Boto 3.
April 2
Slow Horses turns out also to be excellent, sufficiently so that
if I don't bother using a €5-a-month subscription to Apple TV
for anything else, I won't consider it a waste. Gary Oldman is
even better than I'd anticipated as Lamb.