A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
December 31
I've been subscribed to Apple TV for a while now; I signed up to
watch Slow Horses and, eh, never cancelled because it's
like a fiver a month or thereabouts. Last night I was trying to
figure out how to filter on "things I get as part of my
subscription" and I eventually just gave up and watched the
satellite box instead. For an Apple product - and yes, some of you
may laugh heartily and knowingly at this - the UI is pretty
atrocious. It's very glossy, certainly, but trying to
separate out "can watch this 'for free'" vs. "can rent this"
vs. "sorry bucko, purchase only" just drove me to use a different
medium entirely.
I'm sure I can claim that some form of diminished responsibility
caused by side-effects of the COVID booster led me to watch the
rebootedKarate Kid;
it was almost entirely predictable and picked up a few beats from
the original, but I felt denied that we didn't get a
showdown between Jackie Chan and whoever the evil martial arts
instructor guy was.
Rounded out 2022 with a couple more Clint Eastwood numbers: Sudden Impact,
and The Dead Pool,
i.e. the last two Harry Callahan movies. These are so-so. Lots of
80s music and fashion, which is fine, except for the bit
where the editor decided to insert really frantic music with the
volume up during the climax of the first movie to the point where
it was distracting from what was going on. Jim (James!) Carrey and
Liam Neeson both making early career appearances in the second was
kinda funny, especially that Our Liam had an English accent. Also
Guns'N'Roses hanging around the funeral and later on the pirate
boat - hard to miss that it was Slash firing the harpoon even if
he kept his face hidden. The RC car chase was kinda funny, but the
ending was a bit flat. I think as a series of movies, it's best
that it stopped at this point before it got to the point of
self-parody.
Oh, and somewhere in there we finished season 2 of Slow
Horses, which was great; I am a little miffed, however, that
Spider appears to be hale and hearty for the third
series.
December 30
Another Christmas Classic, John Carpenter's The Thing.
One of those horror movies where the horror is so shlocky it's more
funny than scary.
December 29
Part four of the series covered a few things close to where I
grew up, but skipped the section of the river I'd've been most
familiar with. Mildly surprising as there was another Big House
there, property of a former MP. But I guess they had to pick and
choose what they covered.
December 28
Picking my way through Cois Móire,
a four-part series following the path of the River Blackwater from
its source in Kerry to its eventual outflow into the Youghal
Bay. It's a fascinating combination of history, geography, trivia,
community, and so forth. On a more personal level, part of my
ancestry seems to have followed this river back and forth from the
1800s onwards, so there are quite a few localities along the
route that I know from researching family history and it's
interesting to see them "in the flesh". The narration is largely
in Irish with English subtitles, and while I'm relying on the
subtitles I'm surprised at how much of the Irish I can
follow. It's also interesting and occasionally amusing where I can
follow the Irish as it diverges from the English; the subtitles
are a translation of intent rather than literal word-for-word, so
when the English subtitles say, "the money ran out" for an
ill-fated project, the speaker is, to the best of my knowledge,
literally saying, "the arse fell out of it". I've watched three of
the four parts and will be digging back in for the final part
tomorrow.
December 27
Seasonal acquisition: a ReMarkable 2
tablet. I had already noodled around with one enough to be
impressed with the tech but was curious whether I'd be able to
avoid having to use the official cloud syncing; turns out there's a
few options for that including a whole cloned sync server that
allows you to stand up your own syncing. So I'm tinkering with that
right now.
And yes, the Christmas Classic checks notes, Die Hard. Ho
ho ho!
December 26
Today's bubblegum: Goldfinger
and Bumblebee.
Goldfinger was fine: a bit silly, but not quite as silly as Bond
gets in later years. Bumblebee was, eh, I'm about three and a half
decades outside the target market, but it was ok.
December 25
An Inspector Calls:
I thought this was magnificent until we got to the final
act. A little light setup, and then David Thewlis shows up and
dismantles everything. It's a clockwork piece, sort of
like Martha - Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence; everything
gradually cranks into place to form a beautiful piece of
construction. But then the final act, and it sort of pulled the rug
out from under the whole thing, then shoved it back in again, sort
of, and, well, that was all sort of disapointing.
The final episode was ok. A bit flat, I think, but also they'd
sort of painted themselves into a corner with three storylines in
three different countries. I was most disappointed that Hvitserk
didn't get to fulfill his alleged destiny with respect to
Ivar. The "Ubbe Goes To America" storyline was probably the best
finish of the lot, with the two lads sitting on the beach talking
bollocks to each other while wrapped in blankets, watching the sun
go down. Kattegat, eh, weakest of the three - the whole arc of the
story just felt a bit lightweight. I guess this is the problem
with killing off all your main characters before the series winds
up: you're left with noone to carry the flag to the finale. Well,
except that one wild crazy guy.
December 18
The constant appearance of "What Elon Did Next" stories on
alleged news sources (BBC, RTÉ) may be the thing that
drives me to implement article-level filtering in my RSS
reader.
December 17
Rewatched Le Mans '66
which was as much fun the second time as it was the first
time. I note with some amusement that one of the goofs called out
on the IMDb page (twice!) is about how Matt Damon wore his cowboy
hat as Carroll Shelby. (insert eyeroll here...)
Also recent watching: Electric Dreams
which is a bit hit-and-miss but mostly enjoyable, and the second
season of Slow Horses
wherein Gary Oldman continues to wallow in the role of
Jackson Lambe.
December 11
I had heard all manner of good things about Everything Everywhere All At Once,
but to be honest it felt like it was really heavily front-loaded
with expository dialogue to the point where it'd almost have been
worth doing an intro title or a voiceover or something, instead of
having this drawn-out explanation for what was going on. Once it
got going it was certainly a bit more entertaining but honestly I
think I could have spent that two hours a little more
usefully.
December 9
Whee, new season of Slow Horses
and it's awesome. Totally cracked up when Lamb pulled Cartwright's
"going away present" out of the drawer...
The Mac once again experienced that peculiar failure mode where
something crashes, and the desktop session no longer has
access to any credentials. I've had strong suspicions that my
fiddling about with lsp-mode on Emacs is at least linked
to this, if not entirely responsible, and to be honest I've
neither quite gotten it fully configured nor stopped it from
periodically being more of an intrusive annoyance than a help, so
I've decided it's time to junk it.
Ah yes, and Vikings. The mid-season finale in season six was,
well, disappointing. I mean, obviously they're trying to do
different things with how they shoot epic battles - including not
shooting them at all, for Ælle's fight with the sons of
Ragnar - but this was, I dunno. It felt like they planned
something more, but then ran out of time, or money, or just gave
up. The whole bit with Ivar and his crew going around the back
way, climbing the cliff, etc. seemed to come to nothing, and then
suddenly we have Ivar facing Bjorn in the middle of a pitched
battle that I can hardly see Ivar making his way through on his
crutch, much less then getting the drop on Bjorn. It just felt
like a massive anticlimax. Of course, Bjorn gets his big heroic
exit at the start of the second half of the season, but that
alleged finale just left a sour taste.
December 2
So, er, that's it for season one of The Peripheral,
is it? I was trying to figure out how they'd wind down to a finale
and the answer appears to be "let's set up Season 2" which is,
quote, actively in production, although we'll see if that survives
the current economic climate. It's been quite enjoyable, even
though it's departed fairly dramatically from the source material
at this point; it's still roughly in the spirit of the source, at
least, which is what you want from an adaptation. And the
production is excellent. Ah well, just in time for the second
season of Slough House to kick off...
We're still watching Vikings: into the final season at this point,
and approaching the mid-season finale. Enjoying it, still, but it
also feels a bit like they ran out of ideas so I'm gonna assume
there will be a couple more heroic battles shot in the artistic
style of whoever's directing, someone will eventually
give Ivar what he's deserved for many episodes, Harald will fall
from a great height on his head due to his own stupidity,
etc.
I've been tinkering with using AWS SSM to manage "on-prem"
hardware, i.e. a crusty old macOS machine and a Raspberry Pi, and
I gotta say trying to debug failed Run Commands is a bit of an
adventure. I've currently taken to cloning the official commands,
patching them locally, and inspecting the results of the scheduled
runs to figure out what's going on.
December 1
macOS Ventura: it's crashing less. It's still crashing, and the
problem still smells like something going awry with Thunderbolt,
and the fact that it's segfaulting seems... problematic
to say the least, but in any case I'm struggling on while I wait
for a 13.0.2 release.
Vikings: tonight's episode killed off the longest-running cast
member. Oh well. Sorry to see her go but I guess the, ah, Gods had
decided it from the outset.
Having an odd but irritatingly familiar ZWave issue at the moment,
whereby a TRV is reporting its current temperature, but nothing
else. It should have readouts for valve open percentage, battery
level, and a few other things, but no, I'm getting temperatures
and that's it. Which is annoying because I'm trying to understand
its current behaviour and this isn't helping.