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July 04: Started watching Three Pines, based on the novels by Louise Penny. I am mostly pleased with how this has turned out in the transition from book to screen; in particular, Ruth Zardo is perfect. I am sad that the unique Québécois swearing (Tabernak!) has gone missing, but I guess it'd need translation of some sort for a global audience; also, Agent Nichols is more of an outright klutz and not the more complex character portrayed in the book. The cadence of one book over two episodes is an interesting choice as it compresses the stories somewhat but I think it's done well enough that that's not a big complaint.
July 01: Came across this print today and was somewhat sad to discover it was a limited edition back in 20whenever. Looks like only 260 were made.

Watched the rest of The Escape Artist and came to the conclusion that the author came up with the ending first and then wrote the story into it. There's a criticial detail that should've been revealed early in the story (like, the first act, perhaps) that would've made this felt more cleverly constructed, but instead you get the clever bit in the second half and the first half seems to just be flailing around helplessly.
June 30: Jack Ryan S3: wrapped well enough. I was surprised that one of the main characters survived.

Silo: now, this is interesting. They wrapped it a bit before the end of the first book, and even though I've reread all three books since the TV series started, I can't quite recall how much was left in the book after the point at which the TV series wrapped, but it doesn't feel like a whole series. And there was a very definite break between book 1 and book 2, so making season 2 part of each doesn't work, I think. So are they going to put the rest of book 1 into Season 2? Given Season 2 was just announced, I guess we'll be waiting a year to find out.

Watched the first half of The Escape Artist and, well, lots of apparently smart people in this drama do very stupid things, some with consequences.
June 24: Replaced my older mb-connect plugin in OpenHAB with the MercedesMe plugin. Configuration is slightly less clunky, but still clunky, and I don't look forward to unpicking it if/when it loses contact as the mb-connect one did, but at least the OpenHAB UI will show it.

Noting in passing: OpenHAB wants to listen on port 8080 by default, and changing it is annoying. The OS httpd also wants to listen on 8080, and changing that is also annoying. Opting to change the latter since it's never again going to get an upgrade.

Took a road trip to the south coast in the EV recently, and inadvertently overstayed at an ESB fast charger. 45 minutes and out, or you pay €8 more than you intended...

Watching: wrapped Jack Ryan season 2, chewing through season 3. Trying to figure out how they're going to wrap Silo season 1 - I'm guessing the cleaning is gonna be the cliffhanger. If so, there's quite a bit to squeeze into the final episode. I don't much like that they've already overturned Lukas and it does indeed look like using Judical as the obvious Big Bad was a decoy.
June 11: This is a really neat tutorial for creating simple macOS menu-bar apps in Python. I used it to scrape together a few dozen lines of code to create a simple mDNS monitor for things on my local network advertising SSH access, something I'd been doing on and off using dns-sd in a terminal window. I've not gotten to the wrapper step yet - I'm still fiddling with the code - but I'm pretty impressed with how easy it is.

I got stuck on challenge 4 of The Big IAM Challenge: I think I've an idea how I'm supposed to get past it but my current attempts to do so are failing and the "this is fun" factor is rapidly being outweighed by the "this is kinda like work" factor.
June 10: Rewatch: Spectre. I gotta say I'm ultimately looking at the plotline and going, wait, sibling rivalry was the driver for the protaganist? Really? Did I miss some other nuance? Other than that, fun movie. The opening single-take shot (three takes or six takes combined if you read IMDb trivia; I'm preferring to believe it was a single take with some mad work behind the camera to unhook it from a crane and rehook it again, or maybe they hooked the cameraman up to the crane) is really nifty, too.
June 09: Silo has drifted from the book somewhat and I'm not sure where they're going with it. I can't help but feel they're setting up Judicial as the really obvious Big Bad in order to delay revealing who the real Big Bad is, but the longer it plays out without even a hint that this is what's going on, the more I'm kinda side-eyeing it becuase it plays with a lot of the fabric of the series.

Oh, and after a brief foray into The Mentalist (tl;dr: Sherlock Holmes light. Really light. Made by people who think their audience is composed of idiots.) we opted to watch Jack Ryan which has two things going for it: a production budget and a series arc that's in the process of closing out right now so we don't wind up stranded with an unfinished storyline. It's pretty impressive so far.
June 04: Ok, another round of "randomly delete files and then run tools and then reboot" and (a) raspi-config is willing to play ball and (b) wlan0 comes up on boot without further interference.
June 03: About a week or more ago I started live-upgrading another Raspberry Pi, the only one of the three I have that was still running Debian 10. At some point in the process the WiFi network disconnected and didn't come back, so I figured I'd eventually get around to plugging something into it to check what was going on. Tonight I plugged an ethernet cable in and lo and behold it was still in the upgrade, waiting for input, so I finished it off and then spent another hour trying to figure out what the upgrade had done to my network setup. Firstly, it had switched to "predictable" names, by which I mean wlan0 became wlx803f5d15a6cf, on top of which none of the tools to configure the network appeared able to do so. I turned off predictable names, which at least got me back to device names I recognised, but didn't attach an IP address to the wlan interface. A bit more fiddling led me to /etc/network where the interfaces file had been replaced with a blank one - probably my own doing - so now I'm trying to figure that out, and thinking maybe I should just fire up a GUI and figure out what needs configuring.

I'm kinda perplexed at raspi-config's failure to manage all this, but I guess it's looking for built-in WiFi, which this device doesn't have.

GUI didn't help, but realising that both systemd and ... something else were trying to control the wireless interface did. So now it's working. Well, sort of. For some reason the wireless interface is only coming up on IPv6 which seems to be causing other problems.
May 28: Chewing through the Silo books. I'm about a third into book 2 at this point. I'd actually forgotten a lot of the details.