Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- 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.
- December 29
- Aaand Mission: Impossible - Final Reckoning
was more of the same: too-long set pieces and excrucitating
technobabble. I mean, they did an in-world expository dialogue
thing with the diving that was largely accurate (and to some
extent kinda laughable; anyone who's done even basic SCUBA would
know that you don't hold your breath on ascent, so explaining it
to an experienced diver is a bit laughable, but of course that's
for the audience, not the experienced diver) but somehow the whole
computer thing has to get smeared with nonsensical jargon because
why exactly? Anyway, this is supposed to be the last of the Cruise
M:I movies so maybe the team he's put together by the end of the
movie will do a reboot or something.
- December 28
- Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning:
I think I sprained my eyes rolling them at the whole AI
nonsense. And this was before that phrase was being
overused for turbo autocomplete. The car chase in Rome is
way too long, which is a terrible thing for me, a lover
of a good car chase, to have to say. The same can be said for the
climactic train-vs-bridge incident, wherein the carriages just
keep. On. Coming. and I was wondering if it'd ever
stop. I'll watch the second one, of course. But this is not high
art. It's not even middle art.
- December 27
- More Indiana (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom),
and Snowpiercer
which I vaguely recall hearing was a good movie and, well,
no. Urgh. Not getting that two and a half hours back. At least I
had a beer.
The Indy movie, well. Kate Capshaw herself was critical of her
character so I don't feel so bad about echoing her
sentiments.
- December 26
- Wound up with some Bond (For Your Eyes Only)
and then there was the Jones Boys (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade)
and then when we'd kinda given up on the tellybox it threw up Oppenheimer
so that was that.
- December 25
- Christmas movie: The Holdovers.
So first I was expecting "The Dead Breakfast Club Poets Society",
and then when Pater showed up to take Jock and almost everyone
else home, I didn't know what to expect. It was excellent. I would
happily watch this again. It's not complicated or
overdone or really even terribly surprising, but it's well
done. Also the soundtrack is excellent.
Oh, we also watched Raiders while dinner was in the oven
because it was on and why not?
- December 24
- Watched (again) the last-ever Poirot, followed by Knives Out
(again) because it's apparently not possible to watch any
subsequent Benoit Blanc movies without signing up to Netflix, and
screw that.
- December 23
- A nice piece by Graham on the Sanctuary Runners' send-off for President Higgins
earlier this year.
Ballerina
is basically a John Wick movie, except it's got more of a
plot than any of the Wick movies. Which isn't saying much. It's
fun, and silly, and gratuitously messy, and we enjoyed
it.
Create database loader script for TSV files. Load databases. Work
on code to access databases. Puzzle over single-line results that
should be multi-line. Realise that my clever attempt to
automatically assign a primary key to each table resulted in
squashing a bunch of unique data into the last-loaded
entry. Oops. Time to call in Bobby Tables to clear things
up.
(actually it's a sqlite3 database so nuking the file is
faster/easier)
- December 22
- Somewhat gratifyingly, my DVD ripper is correctly identifying
and ignoring the dud tracks on this Scrubs DVD: it's got 99
tracks, but only 8 of them are actually episodes, the rest are -
as far as I can tell - anti-copying measures.
We've not watched a movie in ages. Tonight we watched James Gunn's
Superman
and... well, look. It was definitely a lot of fun, but it was also
Guardians of the Galactic Deadpool Superman,
somewhat. Taking the piss out of the genre, out of itself, mucking
with the storyline, etc. I am not precious about such
things but it was definitely a bit jarring. And yes, as I say, it
was fun.
- December 21
- I've been tinkering with a bunch of things to distract me from
Buddy's passing. Nothing of note, to be honest. The DVD ripping is
continuing slowly, I'm fiddling with some other IMDb-related
stuff, I got a Tapo camera which seems to periodically fall off
the network, the ZWave network continues to flake out, there's
also a new Kodak digital picture frame which is ... ok (but dear
god why did they feel the need to stick a Kodak logo in its bright
orange and yellow glory on the otherwise flawless white frame?)
and I bit the bullet on the Time Machine backups and just threw
away the oversized LLM-laden one and let the thing start over. I
tried navigating to the directory in the backup containing the
model files, but couldn't get there due to Apple deciding it knows
better, and no doubt if I'd managed to find them I'd not have been
able to delete them due to Apple deciding it knows
better.
Finished up S2 of Deep Space 9 tonight, wherein the Dominion is
properly introduced as the Big Bad.
- December 18
- Our beloved fatcat, Buddy, went for the long sleep tonight at
23:45 after a short illness. Goodbye, you lovable
disaster. You were a good cat.
- December 9
- Found a set of discs where I'd swapped disc 1 and disc 2 of a
season while ripping (i.e. ripped disc 1 as disc 2 and vice
versa). In the old days this would have been prevented, or caught,
or at least minimised by a CDDB lookup. My half-hearted attempts
to find a modern equivalent for DVDs that doesn't somehow involve
selling a kidney or its weight in PII have failed miserably, so I
am reduced to looking at the disc content. Of course, this means
I'm rewatching bits of shows I enjoyed enough to buy, so that's
not exactly hardship.
It would appear that the promised November 30th end-of-life for
the vendor API for my car charger has finally arrived, only a week
late. Someone's done a third-party hack that replaces the vendor
software with local management software; I'm halfway inclined to
set it up, but also cognisant of the fact that I've never really
used any of the API - I plug the car in, it charges, the
end. I guess I can at least make sure that the charger doesn't sit
there for all eternity trying to phone home only to get sucked
into a botnet at some point in the future when the vendor lets the
domain lapse, or goes out of business, or whatever.
It now occurs to me to wonder if they've remotely disabled the
charger's phone-home capability... ok, just tried poking the API
with the hacky client I made. It's definitely no longer a going
concern.
- December 8
- Slowly chomping my way through TV series DVDs while also
wandering around the house doing stuff, and also recovering from the
vaccinations. The last mostly involves not expecting my arms to go
as high as usual, because someone stuck a chunk of steel into each
shoulder and that causes trauma.
- 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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