Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

December 7

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 6

Got COVID and Flu shots. I am now incapable.

December 5

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 1

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.

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