Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

March 14

Venom: The Last Dance: bubblegum. Not much to strain the brain in this. There's a very thinly-veiled "some immigrants are on our side" message but of course that's completely buried in the flag-waving narcissism - case in point, the mention of a "grateful nation" at the end to a guy who saved the world. It's ok as long as you don't treat it as anything serious.

March 13

Another somewhat inevitable event and, dammit, we've now caught up. I thought this was in binge-watch territory but no, we're waiting a week for the next episode and another week for the conclusion.

Oh hey the heavy calibre checkov's gun from the first episode, reminded of in some later episode, finally got to be fired and frankly it was unimpressive.

March 12

Inevitable event occurred in Reacher, quickly dealt with in the same episode.

March 11

Reacher: also there's a certain amount of Obvious Setup going on and part of me is just waiting for particular wheels to turn, as they inevitably must.

Problem: editing from emacs over a SSH session on raspberrypi, and lsp-mode isn't working.
Solution: make sure the remote path is the same as the local path through judicious application of symlinks.
New problem: lsp-mode is running a node instance at 101% CPU
Solution: give up.

March 10

Reacher season 3 is quite entertaining, but will of course be far too short.

March 9

A weekend of Sad Rugby Face.

March 8

Watched The Depahted again. In the 18 years since I first saw it, I don't think I've rewatched it, so I can be forgiven for forgetting a few of the details. It's still too long, and I still don't like how it wraps up.

March 7

Given the recent demise of M. Hackman it seemed appropriate to watch The Conversation which, well, look, it's a film of the 1970s which means it's slow and takes a while to get anywhere, but it's pretty good and the twist is nicely done.

Oh, there's a beautiful shot at one point of Hackman standing on a hotel balcony: this wall of linear lines and boxes and in the middle of it all just a single person. A real artistic flex that you can't help but notice.

March 6

Started on S3 of Reacher. The bait-and-switch in the first episode is excellent.

March 5

Last episode of Foundation S2. Everyone's dead. Oh wait, no they're not. It's a little bit tedious, to be honest. The setup for S3 is ok; I hope it works out.

March 4

I've been spending some time cleaning up my Calibre library as well, because NO REASON. I heartily dislike the Calibre UI, mind you: why is it that there are 16 different ways to get to the preferences panel, but the standard macOS textfield editing keys don't work? It's also fairly consistent at doing the most surprising thing when I aribtrarily double-click on things.

March 3

Now that I've fixed my subtitles I need to re-transcode a whole lot of DVDs. So I'm trying to see if there's anything else I should be doing at the same time.

March 2

Woot, looks like the patch has been accepted. Not sure what the process is - one person has given it a vote but I don't know if they're core staff or a fellow hacker.

macOS-to-Synology fileserver connection seems arbitrarily flaky, in as much as when I tried doing a transcode from/to the server (i.e. source file and destination file both on the server) the share disconnected at some point in the middle of the process. Happened again just now on a straightforward cp. Not Great.

March 1

Spent an inordinate amount of time trying to understand how to send a patch to the ffmpeg-devel list. The upshot is that if you use git format-patch to generate a .eml file and then use Apple Mail plus Send Again to send it, it will damage the patch such that the ffmpeg automation won't be able to ingest it. I eventually capitulated and put my email password into a plain-text file in my home directory. I wonder if anyone's got a version of git-credentials that's integrated with the keychain?

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