Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

May 31

Somehow we had not seen The Bourne Legacy so that was some bubblegum for the evening. There's an awful lot of setup in it for a movie that's fourth in a franchise, and our viewing was somehwat marred by the TV player (eir on Apple TV) deciding to skip forward about five minutes during a firefight thus missing out most of said firefight, but it was a pretty decent piece of bubblegum and nicely tied into the series. I understand the fifth movie makes no such concessions to continuity and basically ignores the existence of the fourth.

May 30

I had no idea what to expect from Alita: Battle Angel: and it was pretty much perfect. Ok, I wasn't super-keen on the dangling let's-have-a-sequel ending, but aside from that it was an excellent piece of work.

May 29

Team night at Zero Velocity wherein we kicked the Escape Room's ass (cleared with ten minutes left on the clock) and shot up a whole lot of xenomorph-sort-of-things as Space Marines. Much fun was had. I was Most Killed By Aliens on my team.

May 28

Back on the DVD ripping project. Something weird where it's supposed to be writing some metadata to a SQLite database and ... it's not. Given it's index zero in an array I suspect I have an inappropriate if not x somewhere that should be if x is not None.

May 27

That was a bit crap: some of the features on the car such as individual profiles have switched from "part of your purchase" to "subscribe! subscribe!", and when we subscribed, the existing profile I'd set up was wiped completely.

May 26

Taking stock of in-flight work... DVD ripping was stalled for a bit by other concerns, but I need to pick it back up again. The file format reverse-engineering I was doing most recently may have hit a rock: the source format is, as noted, something like MP4 with some blocking and checksumming added, but it looks like the audio in the source may not be the same as the audio generated by the closed-source app that does the conversion to MP4. I can tell it's done with FFmpeg libraries because the fingerprints are there but I'm not wholly sure what the data format is as yet.

Apparently I have almost 50 discs to fix in the ripping project. Pfft. Best get working.

May 25

Since we've run out of other things, we started watching The Sweeney, which turned out to be an excellent decision. Yes, it's of its time, but seeing John Thaw pre-Morse and Denis Waterman pre-Minder as tough-case cops in 1970s London is rather fun.

May 24

Also catching up on Doctor Who. Again, missing a recording. After a bit of poking around and a prompt from Mrs., we watched the second episode (we were away for two weekends, so two episodes recorded) and then magically the missing recording appeared, intact. So there's a bug in the Virgin Media recorder, it would appear.

May 23

Back on the George Gently merry-go-round. Excellent episode, but our Virgin Media box seems to have skipped a recording. Fortunately the epsiode was also available via On-Demand TV and was excellent.

May 22

Managed to more-or-less reset the body clock to local time. Still a bit off, though.

May 21

Back home. No idea what time it is, a condition I expect to continue for couple of days.

May 20

Commencing the epic journey home. On this trip we have taken taxis, planes, buses, trains - subway, commuter, and shinkansen, and a ferry. The journey home only involved a couple of flights, a couple of subways, a train ride, and a taxi.

Watched Bogart: Life Comes In Flashes on the KIX/AUD leg; a surprisingly funny and sweet biography of Humphrey Bogart.

Also spent some more time on my fileformat reverse engineering. Discovered a few more things but still haven't quite nailed it.

May 19

Last full day in Kyoto. Final bit of gift shopping, but mostly chilling out at this point.

May 18

Kyoto again. More shopping, more lounging around.

May 17

Back to Kyoto. On our own timetable now (previous was a guided tour) so much less zooming around and a bit more leisurly strolling.

We turned on the TV in the hotel room - first time we've looked at an idiot box since we arrived - and caught the tail end of The Magnificent Seven, and then the next thing up was a short film. We let it run. It was in English and subtitled in Japanse. We quickly noticed it had... Irish leanings both in look and dialogue. Then I recognised a scene as being shot in South Dublin, below Dalkey. Then I recognised my physio's clinic shopfront! Bizarre coincidece. Anyway, Burn It All was fun, and both very Irish and very universal.

May 16

Osaka, but with a side-order of the "floating" torii gate which we were somewhat bemused with at first as it looked a good deal smaller from the ferry than the advertising let on. It's a bit better once you take pics from the shore, though. Osaka was mainly arrive, ditch gear in hotel, speedy visit to a venue for drinks and snacks, then some actual food, then some beer, then ... zzzzz.

May 15

Hiroshima. The thing that made me most agitated about this was when someone asked me "why was Hiroshima targeted" and I went and read up on the answer and... look, it's basically people being awful.

We did karaoke. I mean, why not? I discovered that contrary to the expectations of my singing in my head, I do not have the vocal range of Chester Bennington or Bono. I did ok with The Beatles and Blur, but they were both joint efforts. Some local late teens/early 20s came in and racked up 90%+ scores for a Japanese ballad and checks notes theme music from One Piece. For calibration, I think the best our motely crew managed was high 80s for one of my performances.

May 14

Kyoto day two. Visited a metric tonne of Shrinery, including one where there are literally hundreds of torii gates.

May 13

Kyoto Nishiki market. Food stalls: many. Vendors of freshly-squeezed juice: not so many, but we found one.

May 12

Off to Nikko. Bought a sweatshirt because it was colder than expected. Wound up on the shop's Instagram...

May 11

Wandering through Meiji Shrine which looked vaguely familar and then very familiar as I was there in 1999.

May 10

Eventful travels. We got to Tokyo, followed instructions and were immediatly derailed by a machine advising us that it didn't accept most foreign cards and a ticket counter that only took cash, of which we had none. After some headscratching I threw caution to the wind and tried the machine and behold, it worked. We then had a nice long train ride followed by a fairly rough time negotiating two suitcases through the Tokyo commuter system before arriving at our hotel with 90 minutes to spare before our tour group meet-up.

May 9

Missed-flight breakfast and lunch were both epic and more than made up for the lack of dinner last night. We're still in transit mode and have the bare minimum luggage so we opted to mooch around the hotel rather than seeing the sights of the city; given we're in what seems to be the embassy district I'm not entirely clear on what the local sights might actually be in any case.

Cracked a bit more of the file format by realising a field seemed to be incrementing then wrapping at 0x3b00 which waitasec that 0x3b is 59 which means it's probably a timestamp... checked the file and some surrounding context and sure enough, timestamp field identified.

May 8

Vacation started off with a flight delay which went from "this is mildly annoying" to "this is threatening our transfer time" to "guess we're staying the night in Abu Dhabi". Arrived at the hotel to discover the kitchen had closed so the only food available was a hastily assembled sandwich (choices: sandwich or no sandwich), but to be honest it wasn't terrible and besides my digestive system has no idea what time it is.

Nerdery: reverse-engineering a file format. I have been interested in doing this sort of thing for almost as long as I've been interested in computers; my first notable achievement in this regard being figuring out that the ZX Spectrum's user-defined graphics were binary representations of an 8x8 grid. Obvious when you know it, not quite so much when you're an 8-year-old kid who doesn't know what binary is... this one's a modified video format that appears to be "MP4 but with the file split into blocks which are headered and checksummed". I've managed to peel apart enough of it to identify the blocks but I'm slightly hampered by not knowing much about the structure of MP4 files so I may be spending time reverse-engineering things that are already known quantities.

May 7

Packing up for a vacation. Watched nothing.

May 6

Watched, of all things, a series of programmes on Dublin Port. Interesting mix of history, current operations, and future plans.

May 5

Forgot we had a couple of episodes of Doctor Who to catch up on, so we did that. The second was a little odd; a Doctor Who episode mostly without the titular character.

May 4

Bosch: sigh, yes. Last episode was a highly-compressed open-and-shut that seems to be explicitly intended to tease the new not-Harry series.

Wound up following the above with some vintage Hammer Horror: Dracula, Prince of Darkness with none other than Christopher Lee, and The Plague of the Zombies. They are what they are: special effects to laugh at, somewhat clunky scripts, and more ham than a pig farm.

May 3

Bosch: seems like the case wrapped rather abruptly. Kinda hope they're not saving the last episode as a teaser for Ballard.

May 2

Bosch: Legacy: yes yes we'd already sussed that Jimmy's shooting was questionable. Still enjoying it, thought.

May 1

And finale. The issue of how they managed to cross their own timelines was not resolved. They made a big deal about one last trip but the other last trip wasn't even referred to. Flynn got a raw deal. "Hurrah you're a hero, but noone will ever know". Giant act of destruction completely offscreen, since I guess maybe they didn't have the budget to convcingly blow something up? Nitpickery, to be honest. They did a reasonable job of sticking the landing.

Right, now what? Oh yeah. We have some episodes of Bosch: Legacy.

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