Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

March 31

I think I'm done with the DVD backup part of the project, in as much as I now have just short of 300 discs in the store.

March 30

TIL: you can't (easily) alter a SQLite schema to add a UNIQUE constraint. How I discovered this: my DVD ripping somehow created a duplicate entry and I thought, "hmm, the database should stop that from happening".

March 29

J. Edgar: well, you certainly couldn't accuse this of being a sympathetic portrayal of the man. Funny that some of the cast here also showed up in last night's fare.

Note, we wound up watching this because the Virgin Media box was supposed to record something for us, but chose instead to crash. Quality stuff for which we pay a not insignificant amount of money monthly.

March 28

Zodiac was an excellent piece of work that seems to have stuck closely to some version of reality. I think I had some vague idea about this story - I certainly recall the breaking news about the DNA testing in the 2000s, but didn't remember how it had come out. Was the DNA trawl for this guy the one that turned up an unrelated serial killer? I can't recall.

March 27

Last episode of the current season of Reacher. Chekov's gun was indeed fired. Also Chekov's riptide, and a few other props. The climactic Reacher/Paulie fight was a bit silly, particularly when it got into "he's definitely dead" "no he's not" territory, and the finish was ... kinda stupid. Still, it was fun while it lasted, and now we get to trawl for more supplemental eye-bubblegum to cleanse the palate of the Timeless episodes.

March 26

Down to maybe five or six discs to rip. Still contemplating how to handle the TV ones. It's a shame DNLA is so limited in its presentation mode.

March 25

After a bit of noodling around I have the ripper comparing the video durations rather than the file sizes. Funny thing, the first video I applied it to has a smaller file size but a fractionally longer duration... next thing to deal with will be TV Series discs, wherein it's insufficient to rip whatever the longest track is, since a TV series disc typically will have one 20-minute/30-minute/50-minute track per episode, but may also have other noise of similar duration, like behind-the-scenes stuff. Given a finite collection there may be some manual work here.

March 24

Starting on the exceptions while there's still a tiny handful of ripping left to do. It seems like either the code or the command-line switches I'm using may result in a slightly smaller file size than previously, which is something I'd been using as a validation check on the ripped files (since it's easy to check). Replacing that with something that looks at the actual movie duration should improve things and hopefully knock a bunch of exceptions into the "done" pile.

March 23

DVD ripping project almost done with the (re)ripping part: 271 discs backed up to the Synology and probably another dozen or so to do. Then I get to figure out how best to handle the 50 or so discs that didn't succumb to a straightforward ffmpeg transcoding. Some of these are TV series for which I haven't got a coherent automation plan just yet.

Rooting around in the attic for some failed electrics, noted I still have a Mac Cube parked up there in a box. I contrived to install OS X on this back when it was running.

March 22

Doing some pruning on the RSS collection, not least after recently learning some details of the ownership of EuroNews which I had added as a European news source a few months back and then never really read much of.

Random movie selection for the evening was Predestination, and I loved it. The whole "Unmarried Mother"'s story in the bar would have made a compelling movie all by itself, and was only part of the whole thing. Really funny that we tried to guess the possible twists and, well, we were right about all of them. But you'd need to see the movie to understand that that didn't help...

March 21

Rewatched Go. Funnier than I recalled, and there were some story details I'd forgotten. Glad I bought this: it's a keeper.

March 20

Yay, new Reacher episode! Boo, it's the second-last one of the season!

March 19

Timeless rumbles on: intrigue has been introduced. Sort of.

March 18

Durrr. So the reason I was getting choppy data from the car charger was that one of the eeros had gone offline, and it's the one closest to the charger, so without that the charger generally can't get online. Perhaps I should monitor these things.

We started watching Timeless while we wait for the next Reacher to show up. It's... not great. It has, going for it, that there are a mere two seasons, they're complete, and it seems from Wikipedia that they actually concluded the story somehow. Beyond that, though, it's like Baby's First Time Travel Show. Oh, I know, let's go back in time without thinking too hard about consequences, then show up in the Olde Times with one person of three who will be a problem due to their ethnicity, one who sort of knows enough to fake it, and one carrying a modern weapon that will inevitably cause all manner of trouble. Hey, episode two, let's do it all again. Also, "we can place you anywhere in time but we must do it quickly for reasons that are not explained". (they sort of gestured in the direction of "we can't appear in a situation where we might meet ourselves" but they didn't, as best I can tell, account for why, if the bad guy is targeting 9:52am, they can't target 9:50am and grab him when he shows up two minutes later.)

March 17

Ripping: backed up over 100 discs. Thought I was doing well until I discovered that's less than half the collection, so there was an ensuing rooting through cupboards to find the rest.

March 16

New lsp-mode problem: aside from the processor-hungry node invocation, something disconnected and now a timer I can't find is spamming the Messages buffer, and it looks like my only option is to kill the entire editor and start over. (this suggested some alternative approaches I can try, none of which worked.)

Reripping DVDs... 68 discs done, of which 8 need further attention. Issues found so far: discs with "bad blocks" aka cheap copy protection; at least one disc with multiple feature-length titles, only one of which is the actual feature, the rest all having error blocks injected into them which blows up the ripper; and one disc (so far) which appears to have a timestamp discontinuity in it that throws off ffmpeg but not mplayer. So far I only have one disc that's balking at the "rip bytes to NAS" phase.

Conclave was excellent. I would make a movie comparison about the final twist but it'd give the game away.

March 15

More rugby sadness. Ireland did what they needed to do - just about, and with more errors than seemed appropriate for a team ranked as highly as they are - but the other games ran mostly along predicted lines and that was that for the Men's Six Nations 2025.

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?

previous month | current month| next month