A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
April 26
Home automation buffs: z-wave is finicky. Or maybe it's
just that these are kinda first cousins of IoT devices and as we
all know, the "Q" in IoT stands for "Quality". I have one device
which steadfastly refused to reengage with the network after an
initial beacon until I resorted to pulling its batteries out,
putting them back in, noting the display failed to light up,
pulling the batteries out again and replacing them, then doing so
a third time, and eventually it lit up and got back on the network
properly. I have another device that seems to be only sending out
a selection of the data it was previously sending out, and not
only has nothing changed, but I don't even see a way to change
things to make this happen.
Season 2 finale of Goliath
was terrible. Aside from the complete bummer of an ending
to the story (I don't really care if this is supposed to be a hook
for the following season; it just came across as a downer) the
whole episode is filled with timewasting flashbacks and shots of
Billy looking melancholy. It's like, yeah, we get it, Billy is sad
he backed the wrong horse, so to speak, and everyhing got
terrible. Fine. Can we accept that we've established this as fact
and move on to the story? You will note in IMDb that this
episode did significantly worse than its siblings, so maybe I'm
not alone in my sense that this kinda sucked.
April 22
End-of-season Picard was a bit... I dunno. It felt like they
spent ten minutes wrapping up the story (which made no reference
whatsoever to the previous season, which was annoying) and then
spend the rest of the time doing laps of honour for the old TNG
crew. It was ok, I guess, and I'm not sure what else they could've
done with it.
Goliath S2 is ... darker. Definitely darker. However, every single
bad guy in it is a detestable character, which feels a little
lazy. Like, never mind that they're criminals or whatever, they're
also just not people you'd want to hang out with for any longer
than you had to. How they can stand each others' company is a
mystery.
April 20
Charlie Wilson's War
is a movie I watched long enough ago that I'd forgotten most of
it. Which is fine, because it's a great movie and rediscovering
that was huge fun. Strongly recommend.
April 18
End of season one of Goliath,
and very pleased with it. Good show, interesting story,
well-written characters. Bit of situational humour. We'll be
watching more of this.
April 15
The Double
was a bit of a random shot in the dark that turned out to be quite
a good movie. I did not see the big twist coming.
April 11
Significant Birthday.
Finally got the cross-compiler working: Raspberry Pi4 (the Pi2
didn't have enough muscle) running a non-parallelised build for ten
hours, with the sources and installs on a loop-mounted ext4 disk
image shared from a Synology NAS via NFS. It's not so much that I
needed to make it this complicated, it's just the pieces I had
lying around... anyway. This allowed me to get back to the thing I
was testing which it turns out is a bust, which is somewhat
disappointing after all that effort (tl;dr trying to enable RTC
wakeups on a device which may or may not support
same).
Actually, the Pi2 may have had enough muscle if I'd
figured out then how to stop the toolkit from doing a parallel
build of binutils, which really seemed to break
things.
April 9
Bit of catch-up... Cross-compiler continues to be problematic
even after changing to a slightly more capable platform. It
possibly doesn't help that I'm trying to build for an old, old
piece of hardware, but anyway.
Carnival Row
wound up really nicely: we'd completely overlooked one of the
characters who might be The Big Bad in disguise, so that was a
nice surprise, and the ending was perfectly balanced between "we
could end here" and "we could do a few more seasons". Alas, it
would appear that the latter is the case, so we need something new
to watch.
Picard
is fully into its "We're getting the band back together" phase,
and it's fun, but I keep feeling like I'm missing something
because of the volume of negative sentiment I keep reading about
it. Ultimately, I guess: if you like something, like it. Don't
second-guess your own enjoyment.
And our new thing: Goliath.
We watched two episodes of this last night, and it looks like a
keeper so far.
Cross-compiler saga ran for several hours and then ... ran out of
disk in what looked like the final steps. Dammit.
April 2
Still vaguely attempting to solve the cross-compiler
problem. Really I should just give up on doing this on macOS and
run up a docker container or something with the tools in it. I'm
mostly annoyed by the fact that I even have to do this at all:
there has to be a significiantly non-zero number of people who
have systems sufficiently similar to mine that I should just be
able to grab a pre-built binary somewhere and use
that.
April 1
Any Which Way You Can
was another kinda goofy, kinda WTF Clint Eastwood
number. Apparently this was quite popular when released.