A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
April 30
And here we go, finale part one. They seem to be setting up a
bunch of dominoes, funnily enough.
DVD ripping project temporarily on hold because I was distracted
by having to reboot for an OS upgrade, which means all my context
is lost. I'll get back to it.
April 29
Killing a major cast character? In this economy? Oh
yeah. It was actually the 2018 economy. I'm sure it seemed like a
good idea at the time.
April 28
Inching towards the end of Timeless; it's gotten really good in
the second season, but I guess Line Didn't Go Up Enough. At least
they get to wrap the show.
April 27
Learning a bit about GraphQL for my hackery. I kinda wish they'd
formatted the queries as JSON instead of almost JSON.
April 26
Aaaand an Inspector George, in which Bacchus finally shows some
initiative and some spine.
Rugby sadness, although on the upside the Irish team finished
third on the table which was I guess what they were aiming for as
a baseline.
April 25
Inching our way through Bosch: Legacy. I was not expecting the
twist at the end of the current episode.
April 24
Fun game with Timeless is trying to guess from the opener what
event they're going back to. Which I guess is
intentional.
April 23
Timeless season 2 is definitely much better than the first, to
the point where it's moved from "this is not bad enough not to
watch, but it's not exactly high art either" to "shame they only
made two seasons of this".
April 22
One of the more interesting sides of this DVD ripping
project saga is learning how DVDs are put together, and how
various tools cope with that. For example, my Scrubs boxed set
has, from the UI side of things, a "show all episodes on this disc
without a break" option, which in reality appears to be a single
title with all the episodes jammed into it back to back. I'll
assume they're doing pointers rather than copies of. VLC looks at
this and gives you the duration of whatever episode you're
watching right now - so it ticks down to the end of the first
episode, then resets and starts ticking down to the end of the
second, and so on.
April 21
Bosch: Legacy continues to be excellent. That is all.
April 20
It seems the anti-malware problem was a combination of trying to
scan the entire series of updates being downloaded as they were
being downloaded and then scanning the entire machine top to
bottom, back to front after the updates were installed. I was in
the process of trying to figure out if the anti-malware executable
was actually the anti-malware executable or three viruses in a
trenchcoat when it cranked down from "All your CPU plus 10%" to
"Just Sittin' There". A delightful experience.
Gladiator 2:
not exactly a movie I thought needed to be made, indeed I only
heard about it at all because there was some fuss over the lead
appearing at the Dublin premiere. Distracted by said lead's accent
for a good chunk of the movie until I realised he was basically
doing a Russell Crowe imitation, and occasionally dropping it -
there was at least one spot where an Irish brogue was in
evidence. Overall this was kinda ok: I don't think Ridley Scott
can make an actual bad movie at this point, but this
wasn't exactly must-see stuff either. If I'm gonna be picky there
were a couple of continuity issues with camera cuts, where
someone's looking at a different angle from one cut to the next,
and I guess if I'm noticing details like that then maybe the
movie's not quite commanding my attention.
(also: "I'm not gonna give a speech. Now here's a speech."
giant eyeroll)
April 19
Trying to do something with a slighly creaky windows laptop and
it's maxing out the CPU with ... the anti-malware protection
thingy.
April 18
Oh hey, new season of Doctor Who. Ncuti Gatwa is still a little
too exuberant for my liking but I did like a story that called out
incels and coercive control, so good job there.
April 17
Because reasons I am experimenting somewhat with some
LLM tools in the day job. So far, I'm reasonably impressed with
the "understanding" of the instructions being given, but less so
with the actual handling of those instructions. The tools seem
better at abstract tasks like "summarise" and "correlate" than
they are at specific tasks like "maybe don't delete the entire
script you just created when trying to patch a single function
into it".
April 16
DVD ripping: spent the last few days identifying episodes and it
looks like my beloved scripting may not actually have saved any of
it. Dammit.
Experimenting with ways of dealing with this without going through
all that effort again but it's probably more work to
automate it than it is to jsut redo it. (Ideas include dumping
various stills and using them to prompt myself, or dumping the
entire dialogue - subtitles, remember! - and using that to match
up to a story synopsis.)
April 15
Timeless S2... in which things that were upset in the finale are
quickly restored to normality so we can get back to the
compelling story.
April 14
In which we wrap season one of Timeless. Sigh. Unresolved but obviously trending
relationship. Miserable doofus may have a heart, or maybe is just
pulling an extra con. Shocking reveal! Weird glitchy thing with
... several interpretations, not unlike the bit in whichever
Matrix where Neo can somehow access the cyber without any
equipment (that never did make sense to me, but I think we can
agree the franchise had far bigger problems). Anyway. It's all set
up for season 2, so let's see what they do with it.
April 13
I'd reply with this in the comments
but jwz's pretty clear on what he's looking for so I'll drop this
here: back in the summer of, uh. 1989? I worked at a local
amusement arcade. On my lunch break I'd spend some time playing
Outrun, Thunderblade, or Twin
Cobra. Got to the point where I could always finish
Outrun, sometimes finish Thunderblade, and be a
permanent high-score occupant on Twin Cobra. The Twin
Cobra cabinet developed a glitch over time: you'd be playing
away, pounding the gun button for all you were worth while yanking
the joystick all over the place, and suddenly the foreground
graphics would drop out. You were left with backgrounds and
shadows. The good player might last a few seconds on this with
fast reflexes. The really good player might last a bit
longer through fast reflexes and knowing the game patterns. The
guy who worked there... I knew that when this happened you could
fix it by hitting the console in between the 1UP and 2UP
joysticks. So I'm playing the game, and I've drawn a small crowd
because I'm up to, like, 7 bonus lives and levels some people
haven't seen before, and whoosh there goes the glitch. I keep on
whacking the gun button and yanking the joystick and then a
split-second pause and THUMP right in the middle of the console
and the graphics recover and I continue on. The crowd, as Billy
Connolly put it, went wild. Ok, they didn't quite go wild, but
there was a bit of "woah!" and "cool!". And then I had to go back
to work, so I passed the controls to one of the observers who lost
the entire backlog of bonus lives within a minute or
two.
I had one other fine moment with this game: I was in Dublin in
1992 visiting JC, and we wandered into a dimly lit arcade on
Batcherlor's Walk. There was a Twin Cobra cab. I hadn't
played the game in years - probably not since that summer - but
even now I know the optimal placement for the helicopter the whole
way through the first level and I can hum along with the music as
I play it, so I guess I kinda wore a few neuron paths in well with
the thing. Anyway, we wander over to the cab, I put in my credits,
and have a go. Bit of a crash and burn, and some locals seeing
this are kinda sniggering at my poor showing on the game. So I pop
in some more credits, and game two is where it all comes back, and
before we leave I'm on the high-score chart and the locals are no
longer sniggering, they've been watching the gameplay for ten or
fifteen minutes as I carved through the
levels. Nice.
April 12
An episode of Inspector George, and once again it's just so well
made and doesn't shy away from the hard stories with the difficult
endings.
April 11
I have been urged by a South American colleage to watch Kneecap
and my only regret is that I didn't do so sooner. An excellent
movie with excellent cinematography. I can see why it picked up a
shit-ton of awards.
April 10
Ah, the inevitable hacker montage. Was that a raspberry pi she
picked up at some point?
April 9
DVD ripping project: I've got a half-assed manual process for
filtering out but not naming the episodes from a TV series
disc. Interesting to note that one of the discs offering a menu
option to watch all the episodes in a row does so by vending a
single video that consists of all episodes back-to-back; I've not
checked to see if this is done by chaining episode references
together somehow, or if it's actually stored as its own track on
the disc.
April 8
Reading Shacklton's South! at the moment. I was pretty
familiar with the Endurance story, having read Lansing's book
about twenty years ago, but the notes from the diaries of the men
involved adds a lot of colour that I don't recall from the more
polished version of the story. I've just started into the Ross
Sea part of the story, which I didn't previously know
about.
April 7
Back to watching Timeless. It's kinda hapless, but sufficiently
bubblegum to while away the evening.
April 6
I can't actually tell from my
comment in July 2015 if I'd actually seen all of
Safe House
before or not. I definitely watched the whole thing this time, and
given the intervening ten years I didn't remember who the inside
leak was but I guessed correctly fairly early on. It's ok, but
very much by-the-numbers.
DVD ripping project: wrestling with TV discs - I've enough of them
to make it worthwhile figuring out some sort of
automation rather than hand-working each one. Of course the first
one throws up an immediate puzzle: four titles on the disc, but
the DVD menus only offer two. Solution: one of the extra titles is just
the menu loop, so it's only 12 seconds long, and the other extra
title is a bit-for-bit copy of one of the episodes. Code to detect
this is done, but not exactly efficient.
April 5
We had a Gently recorded, and it was good.
April 4
Late working again, goal achieved. Celebrated by watching the
first episode of the last series of Bosch: Legacy.
This show is really tight, so I wonder if they just
didn't get renewed, or if some of the principals decided to park
it, or what. I do note in the "coming soon in this season" there's
what looks to be a giant hook for another of Michael Connolly's
characters so maybe that's where it's all headed.
I am somewhat confused as to the state of the patch I submitted to
ffmpeg: it got a LGTM from one of the people who seems to be
active in development, but hasn't been merged, and attempts to
nudge for a status (reject or accept) have elicited no response. I
guess I can rebase it and fling it into the workshop for anyone
who wants it... here you go.
April 3
Late working for reasons. I don't like to do this, but needs
must right now.
April 2
The thing I use to scrape TV listings for myself now alerts me
when the next unwatched episode of a show is on the listings,
which is handy.
April 1
Don't even think about an April Fools' prank today.