Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

January 16

I still don't quite understand where my shiny Mac M2 gets all the bass from. I mean, it's not like it has a big resonant space to play with, but there's some omph in there somewhere.

January 15

Done and planned for 2025 so far: 1 x-ray, 2 MRIs, a court cause, and a "trauma clinic". Hopefully this isn't a bellwether for the year.

January 14

Character evolution for Ms. Rizzoli seems to have landed on "let's make her behave like a two-year-old who demands things her way regardless of conseuqences." It's rather grating, and I can't imagine the actress was particularly happy with it, except she was probably getting a large sack of cash to deal with the trauma...

January 13

Two lessons from my constant fiddling with OpenHAB: Firstly, if you're gonna have home automation of any sort, make sure you have a goal in mind. I've a z-wave network of (mostly) TRVs that is largely a hacker's toy. Secondly, the idea of home automation is far more attractive than the reality. After all, the reality is brought to you by the same process that brought you, "it's not working? try power-cycling it and see if the same thing happens".

January 12

Back on our regular Rizzoli and Isles fodder. One of the most jarring things about this show is that the Rizzoli of the title has shot numerous perpetrators - pretty much all fatally, as far as I can recall - with zero consequences. Her brother, on the other hand, had a whole episode dedicated to "maybe he shot someone he shouldn't have?" but of course in the end it worked out: hurrah, he killed the right person. There was a brief flirtation with non-lethal weaponry a couple of episodes back but that seems to have gone straight out the window as tonight's was back to shoot first, ask questions later on the off chance that the lead donation recipient survives.

January 11

Final season of Vera! Ever! Hope it's a good one... wait, what, only two episodes? Sheesh... hardly a season, is it? But ok, the final episode was well done.

January 10

Silo: almost complete and I'm still not sure what they're going to do in the final episode. Not to bang a drum repeatedly but it looks like introducing the Judicial subplot has complicated things that need to be resolved.

January 9

The Z-Wave adventures continue: at 02:45 this morning, the controller attempted to process messages from three devices that aren't in the house. I think it just made up some node IDs.

January 8

Running the Z-Wave binding in trace mode and looking at what it's doing. I am thinking it could do with posting a good deal of this information in places other than a trace log; some of this would be useful as bridge data (akin to the current packet counters) and some would be useful as Thing data e.g. last time we heard from this Thing, last time we sent a packet to this Thing, latency, etc.

January 7

Not making much progress on the Z-Wave query. I mean, ok, it's open source and I'm getting exactly as much support as I paid for...

January 6

So, two things about my OpenHAB setup: I am so sorry I bought a single Danfoss/Devolo/Popp TRV, because they are nothing but trouble (they eat batteries. they fall off the network. they lose their configuration and need to be re-integrated. they periodically, as best I can tell, report the temperature as being 1000 times what it actually is - I do enjoy my rooms being a toasty 2,100 °C) and more generally I am peeved with the opacity and apparent fragility of Z-Wave in general. The latter may be unfair to Z-Wave since, to be fair, I've only ever used OpenHAB to talk to it, and I know that there are other tools out there which may do a better job.

All this because I'm trying, yet again, to see if there's a way to get OpenHAB to pick these stupid TRVs back up after they've fallen on their faces. At this point, having trawled the code a bit, looked at the corresponding Open Z-Wave code, and tried a few things, I've given up in favour of posting a request to the OpenHAB forums. Meanwhile, my Z-Wave logs are scrolling by here, showing devices falling off the network and climbing back onto it for no reason I can determine other than that they felt like it. Meanwhile, the actual devices I'm trying to recover insist they're online even though they've been dead for a couple of days. Oh, and that one TRV that is of the more reliable and expensive kind is still insisting that it hasn't woken up since August, despite happily posting temperature updates on a regular basis.

January 5

Episode 8 of Silo Season 2 and I'm wondering just how far the last two episodes are going to go. I read the plot outline on Wikipedia to remind myself of how the book wraps up and on one hand there's two hours left to fill in the gaps, but on the other hand given the pace to date I'm not sure there's enough time to cover this, particularly with the complications introduced with the whole Judicial side-plot.

January 4

Still marshalling at Parkrun. Over 250 people showed up this morning and I applauded every single one of them!

State of Play was pretty good throughout but did get a little messy at the end. Curious to see it's based on a BBC series - I'd noticed Working Title in the opening credits and wondered what the cross-channel connection might be. Anyway. Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren, Robin Wright Penn, Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Jeff Bridges all turning in pretty decent performances. Oh, and that weaselly guy from The Man In The High Castle who I'm sure is a perfectly nice person but that series kinda ruined him for me.

Spent some time trying to reacquaint myself with some stuff I'd done with React over a year ago. I'm sure it all needs updating but it's frankly exhausting to deal with.

So it seems like the spurious git behaviour I've been seeing (files being inconsistently reported as tracked or modified) may be down to the precomposeunicode and ignorecase settings, but to be honest none of the verbiage written about this online seems to provide a helpful guide to establish if this is actually the problem I'm encountering. Guess I'll have to experiment.

January 3

Absolute Power is surprisingly lumpy in places (questionable cuts, bad lining up between two angles on the same scene, the whole "who actually is that" towards the end of the movie when someone's face down on their desk) for a Clint Eastwood flick. It's ok, though. It's lightweight enough that you can kinda forgive the lumpiness for the most part.

That git thing I fixed? A file vanished, possibly due to an rsync. and git claims there is no difference in the state of the directory containing the file. Django was somewhat less sanguine when it went looking for the same file, though. I am not entirely clear on what happened here, but it's definitely very annoying.

January 2

Weird streaming glitch. Our evening's entertainment attempted to reset us to the season 5 finale of Rizz and Izz, and also insisted there were only 5 and a half seasons when I was sure there were seven. We shrugged, watched an episode, then I went poking at the UI and lo and behold there are two Rizz and Izz shows, identical except that one has less seasons than the other. The metadata quality on this streaming platform continues to be appalling.

Trying to get my head around OpenHAB's page/component construction. It's sort of making a bit of sense to me, but it's not helped by the fact that the UI seems to be fairly picky about when and how it offers autocomplete, and the default behaviour if you make a mistake is "don't render anything at all" which is understandable but not exactly user-friendly. Oh, and all the documentation I've encountered so far just describes UI components, i.e. there are no pictures of what you're fiddling with.

Also weird: git on one of my machines was in some unspecified way out of sync and no amount of git pull --rebase and what not would fix it. Had to resort to a fetch and a hard reset in the end (having of course verified that nothing would get lost in the process).

January 1

Happy New Year!

Started the year's viewing with ... well, we're still working our way through Rizzoli & Isles. It'll never be awesome, but it's not terrible, and we've a season and a bit left in it.

Nerdery: digging through a bunch of to-do lists to try and scrub some semi-abandoned projects. I was tinkering with OpenHAB's web page stuff a bit trying to make auto-updating charts without resorting to an actual charting engine like Grafana. Not quite there yet, though. I also spent a bit of time cleaning up some of the data. For reasons best known to Past Waider, the database uses local time instead of UTC, but I somehow posted ambiguous datapoints in there during daylight savings; also, the cheaper Danfoss/POPP/Devloo TRVs occasionally claim the temperature doesn't have a decimal point so it's 2048 degrees rather than 20.48, and none of the ensuing processing catches this so it duly winds up in the database. ALL CLEAN NOW.

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