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Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

June 27
Watched Maria. Was disappointed. I think the movie's summed up by the hack from Le Figaro who shows up outside the theatre towards the end: he's basically the entire atmosphere of the thing.

June 26
Couch-to-5k progresses.

June 25
Tonight's episode of The Sweeney featured entirely gratuitous nudity, and the actress didn't even get a credit for her troubles. "Think of the exposure", I'm sure they told her. Exposure is right.

June 24
Well that was annoying: mac up and kernel-panicked.

Also annoying: a DVD with a handful of actual titles but 99 fake ones on it.

June 23
On-call this week at t'office. Pager went off 15 minutes before shift-end, which was not nice.

June 22
And another George Gently. Also still excellent.


June 21
Watched A Complete Unknown again. Still excellent.

June 20
Black Bag is an excellent piece of work. It feels like John Le Carré - it's about the gritty, almost boring side of the spy business, rather than the action and derring-do of the likes of Bond and Bourne. I'll put it this way: you could translate it directly to stage and lose nothing. Beautifully played by all involved, and if it's your thing, it has a pretty decent roll call as well.

Annoyingly, the IMDb trivia for this movie is basically someone pasting an interview / puff piece a paragraph at a time into the interface and frankly I hate that crap.

June 19
More Sweeney. The episodes seem longer somehow - there's an awful lot packed into the hour and it's not always clear, given the precedent of the first episode, what the outcome will actually be. I have to say the plot of this one kinda escalated into incredulity rather quickly towards the end.

June 18
Second episode of the season containing a bit of implied eye candy for The Boys. I guess this is what passed for ratings-gathering in the 70s.

June 17
Season 3 of The Sweeney kicks off with an atypical story where the boys - spoiler - lose out.

June 16
Churning away at the DVDs. I have not yet figured out how best to deal with bonus content on DVDs that I will likely never watch but I guess I've at least got to identify and name it.

June 15
Doing a little investigative maintenance on a robot vacuum. There's a video online for our species of robot where a guy shows you how to remove the covers, and it reminds me of a half-rememberd episode of Quincy, M.E. - which I used watch with my dad - where Quincy is obliged to do a demo autoopsy for a bunch of newbies but needs to be somewhere else, so he (more or less literally) rips into it such that they all get queasy and run off, freeing him up to do whatever he needs to do. Picture that, but the corpse is a robot vacuum, and Quincy is the guy who is pressed for time but you've asked him to show you how to open the casing. ZZZZZZZIP!


June 14
A Complete Unknown takes a couple of liberties particularly with the whole "controversial" move to electric instruments, but it's still an excellent movie. The leads, in particular, are astoundingly good. Even if you're not a fan of Dylan's music I think this works pretty well as a story.

June 13
We continue to watch Mr. Regan and Mr. Carter anyway. There's a funny TV advert from the 90s - for a car I used own, the Nissan Almera - featuring two guys done up to look convincingly like the boys from The Sweeney.

My usual way of working with things like the DVD ripping script is to have it do a bunch of work, fall on its face, and then I do a bunch more work on it. The current incarnaton is remarkably good at not falling on its face so I'm left with the slightly tedious work of identifying which episode of a TV show it's working on. I've been idly thinking about trying to get it to figure that out itself but I don't have a clear idea how to do that. One thing that occurred to me was dumping out subtitles and getting some species of local LLM to compare the results with a Wikipedia description of the episode list; simpler than that (slightly, maybe) is to see if I can pull the episode title out of the credits. The main difficulty with any of these approaches is that it'll definitely be more work than the manual slog.

June 12
Oh that's grating. If I go to Amazon.com I can find the Sweeney with all episodes for all seasons. Somehow the version that's available to me is shredded: season 2 consists of 5 of the 12 or 13 episodes.

June 11
I am back on the couch-to-5k merry-go-round. Tonight was Week 1, Day 2.

(DVD ripping continues)

June 10
Well, that was slightly embarassing: email to this site has been broken for a number of days due to a slightly full disk, caused by a certain cloud provider's management software downloading all possible versions of a component of itself into a non-standard location instead of, you know, using package maangement tools and repositories and what not. Anyway. Repaired. If you got some species of 4XX error when trying to send me mail it will eventually get to me.

June 9
Last episode of The Sweeney S1. Again, this being of its time, I guess there was a presumption that there'd be a S2 without any real need to do a cliffhanger; it's just a regular episode.

DVD ripping continues. Currently ploughing through Doctor Who (the Ecclestone year) and still finding bugs in my code.

June 8
Offline network actually looks to have been some fight between the mesh network and the macintoshes, since it affected my laptop as well as the jumpbox, and simply bouncing the network connection in some way fixed it.

Last of season 6 of George Gently. Another great story, beautifully made. I did note that all the period cars are in immacualte condition, even the delivery lorries, which you just know would've been battered hulks in reality.


June 7
Got a "internet is offline" alert overnight. Assumed it was down to the irregularly-scheduled mesh network update (over which I have limited control) and drove off to a location 200km away only to discover it's more likely that the jump box that I use to get into the home network, which is also the canary for "internet is offline", has likely crashed and of course I can't do anything about it until I drive back.

June 6
I could've sworn I'd seen Fracture before but no. And it's pretty damned excellent, with the minor plot hole around Why The Trick With The Gun Would Not Have Worked In Practice (IMDb nitpickers identify one reason, but I'm pretty sure there's an entirely other one as well). The other thing that nagged at me throughout was whether Crawford targeted Beachum for a reason or because he was a useful idiot; it seems like the latter, but it definitely felt like the former while watching. Oh, and Hopkins' accent was all over the place for some reason. Still, pretty damned excellent.

June 5
Invoked backchannels. Undoing The Thing may be less onerous than we thought.

June 4
Work stuff: we Did A Thing that shouldn't have been possible and now we need to Undo The Thing. The annoying part is that it's blocking some work that's been in flight for while. "For the want of a nail" territory.

June 3
Discovered that the ... fiends at Prime Video have stiffed us on individual episodes in The Sweeney, i.e. all four seasons are present but some episodes within the seasons are missing. Whyyyyyyyy.

June 2
DVD ripping resumes: I've now got a reasonable pile of crap to convert TV episodes into a series of mpeg files. Of course I'm still finding bugs.

June 1
Another excellent George Gently.

Found the SQLite problem I mentioned a couple of days back. It wasn't quite what I thought but is now fixed.

Also Doctor Who season finale. It was a bit ... all over the place, and the ending was unexpected, but ok, let's see what's next - I presume in December.

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Waider
Hurrah! Summer is here!
(for the next five minutes)