A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
January 10
ZWave: struggling to understand how devices with new batteries
can report the battery level as 5% and 0% respectively. I mean, if
the battery level is 0% how is it reporting, exactly?
January 9
I recall seeing a sizeable marketing push for Molly's Game
when it was released but didn't watch it. The director uses his
trademark "more words in a minute than John Wick speaks in an
entire movie" and at times it's honestly a bit much, and the
Daughter Makes Peace With Dad bit feels kinda tacked-on, but aside
from those two minor quibbles this is an excellent
movie.
January 8
More Voyager: this time, Voyager Does Nazis. I suspect the cast
had a fine time hamming this up. It's an odd two-parter in as much
as you get not just a cold open but a whole chunk of the first
part where you're not really given much information about what's
going on and you have to figure it out as the episode
progresses.
January 7
Did a big clean-out today: fodder for the Ringsend bring centre
that's been accumulating for literal years. Didn't quite get
everything I wanted done, but enough to fill the car sufficiently
to not "waste" the €20 it cost.
Tonight's TV viewing was a couple of Voyager episodes, which could
loosely be characterised as "The Trouble with Seven". The "Star
Trek deals with the topic of Rape" episode was very
disappointing since they chose to go with the "what if the woman
is making it up" angle. Gah. If they wanted to riff on the whole
"innocent until proven guilty" thing they could've picked a better
topic to hang it on.
Fiddling with mbsync.
It's a bit of a bear to configure but once I got it working (and
worked around the assert-triggered crash...) it did its
job nicely.
January 6
Watched a couple of DS9s. I was expecting The Dominion to be
more dominant in the series from the way they'd been introduced
but it seems that's not the case. So far, anyway.
January 5
Mission: Impossible III, in which Tom Cruise's Nose (which does
all its own stunts, you know) chases a rabbit's foot. Which is
apparently a biochemical weapon until grand plot arcs several
movies later require it not to be, but anyway. Look, it's
bubblegum, it predates the "must show action sequence for 30
minutes before moving to the next one" that bloated the later
movies, introduces Simon Pegg to the fixed cast (we also briefly
get Oirish IMF agent Gormley who I don't recall if he ever
appears in the series again) and we have Michelle Monaghan as the
damsel in distress who turns out to be a crack shot with a Beretta
which she has never handled before. Good job, Miss.
Oh, and Philip Hoffman makes a truly menacing bad
guy.
January 4
Lost a couple of days there. I was probably watching DS9,
drinking various forms of booze, eating too much, occasionally
hacking on something, etc.
Blackberry
was billed by the TV station as comedy, and, well, it's sort
of funny, but closer to a documentary that's unintentionally
funny than it is an actual comedy. It's a dramatisation of the
story of the RIM Blackberry and from skimming the Internet it's
not a million miles from the real story. And it was kinda
fun.
January 1
And off we go again.
We've jumped back into our Trekking: at the end of 2025 we were
about half-way through Voyager and just done with Season
2 of Deep Space Nine. As of this evening we've added
another 4 DS9s; The Dominion has been introduced, but not pushed
hard as The Big Bad yet.
I'd found Andrew Hickey's review of Elvis
to be an interesting take on the stagecraft that went into making
the movie (among other things) but that review is currently
offline. I half-watched the movie: Andrew's 500 songs
podcast gave me far more detail about Presley than the movie, so I
knew the general arc of the story, plus I honestly couldn't take
Tom Hanks seriously - whether it's accurate or not, the
description of his accent in the movie as "Kentucky Fried
Goldmember" is pretty apt. Ultimately about two thirds of the way
through I wanted to shoot Parker, possibly from a cannon aimed at
the moon. It's a good movie and probably deserves better attention
than I gave it, but again, because I felt like I had sufficient
knowledge of the story I didn't get as drawn in as much as maybe I
would have otherwise.
Embarked on a nerdy rebuilding project I've been meaning to get
started for, oh, several years now. More details later,
maybe.