Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

August 30

Scanned available movies, eventually got tired of looking and opted for Automata. Which turned out to be surprisngly good, both in story and visuals. I mean, sure, some minor quibbles with the story, but yeah.

August 25

OpenHAB box spontaneously wedged itself some time after midnight. (a) this is why my home automation forays are still a hobby, rather than something I depend on (b) I wonder if I have any hope of finding out what happened (c) I guess I should've hooked this box up to a screen so I'd at least have seen its last words to the console.

Cursory inspection reveals some MMC access issues and there's also a logged kernel reboot around 00:17 but I've reason to believe that's actually the 08:00 reboot when I powercycled the thing, just that it came up with a bad clock time. The only potential trigger I can see is a periodic refresh of package data which ran just before the system stopped responding.

August 24

Since I mentioned it a while back: Rizzoli and Isles is our current "TV" and it's... not bad. Homicide procedural, buddy show, no real continuity, some background story fluff, and typically everything is solved in a matter of minutes towards the end of the episode.

All I can really say about Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose is that it felt like it should've been funnier.

August 23

Ugh, well, Stephen King's Cell is definitely not worth your time. It could possibly have redeemed itself marginally without the fake ending, but it was pretty far gone at that point. Samuel L. Jackson and John Cusack, you have betrayed my trust.

August 18

Spent a few days in the Kingdom, i.e. County Kerry. Notable incidents included a parkrun, a tasting menu, and Operation Mincemeat which is a pretty decent dramatic telling of the story of the WWII caper of the same name, although certain aspects are amped up a bit in the interests of what we shall call Dramatic Effect.

August 10

Given last night's enterainment has not one but two sequels we figured we'd try them out. Alas, no. 2 seems to have disappeared into BBC's memory hole as noone seems to have it for rent or streaming or what have you, which is a bit nonsense, because no. 3 is widely available. So we watched Salting the Battlefield, which was good and didn't suffer too much from us missing the intervening movie (there's a little bit of continuity but you can easily fill in the gaps sufficiently to keep the story straight) but it wasn't quite as good as the first one, and the end was a bit... I dunno. Felt like it could've moved a few different ways, I guess.

August 9

Page Eight: once again, Bill Nighy is a National Treasure. Excellent movie - it comes across in places more like a play - and about the only thing that didn't quite land for me was the idea that some of the people involved could have morals, or principles.

DVD subtitle quest: shaving yaks. Many yaks. Large, stinky, hairy yaks.

August 5

Mastodon notice: I've moved from octodon.social to mastodon.ie as the former will be shutting down. The move process is ... a little lumpy, to be honest, but it looks like follows/followers is correctly updated.

Prime Video (Ireland) is finally offering Rent/Buy options on things that aren't part of your subscription. Which means, unfortunatly, it's now a good deal more difficult to find things that are in your subscription: the entire home page yesterday was Rent/Buy options, including things that a week or two ago were "free". Also, the metadata quality has not improved in any discernable way, so I'm still finding movies directed by "N/A" (to pick a random example).

August 4

Since my online grocery has stopped providing paper receipts and instead sends me an email full of terrible HTML, I wanted to turn that terrible HTML into something we could use as a checklist when groceries arrive. The obvious easy candidate for this is to chuck it all into a note in the Notes app as a checklist, since that does nice things like "move item to the bottom when checked" and, if necessary, the note can be shared or otherwise moved around. Turns out, though, that you really need CloudKit for this, as best I can tell: interfacing via AppleScript (or, as I'm doing, PyObjC's scripting bridge) allows you to update the content to something that looks right - a HTML doc with the items as an unnumbered list - but it's missing whatever magic Notes uses in the back-end to render this as a checklist. Oh well; close but no cigar.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage was fun, but not as much fun as the first one was. Also I think Woody Harrelson stopped aging about ten years ago.

August 3

Nice bit of foot-shooting there: a z-wave-controlled power socket spontaneously (as best I can tell) switched itself off. It was powering a number of things, including the Raspberry Pi that runs the z-wave network. So I have no actual record of what happened.

I watched Layer Cake years ago (19, according to this website) and somehow had assumed it was a Guy Ritchie movie. It's not, but he was apparently lined up to direct and had to pull out. It's a nice piece of work, similar in tone and feel to Ritchie's, although the ending isn't for everyone.

August 1

Happy Birthday to this li'l diary thing, 24 today. 24. I work with people younger than that. Let's not talk about how old the website is, shall we?

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