A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
April 13
I'd reply with this in the comments
but jwz's pretty clear on what he's looking for so I'll drop this
here: back in the summer of, uh. 1989? I worked at a local
amusement arcade. On my lunch break I'd spend some time playing
Outrun, Thunderblade, or Twin
Cobra. Got to the point where I could always finish
Outrun, sometimes finish Thuderblade, and be a
permanent high-score occupant on Twin Cobra. The Twin
Cobra cabinet developed a glitch over time: you'd be playing
away, pounding the gun button for all you were worth while yanking
the joystick all over the place, and suddenly the foreground
graphics would drop out. You were left with backgrounds and
shadows. The good player might last a few seconds on this with
fast reflexes. The really good player might last a bit
longer through fast reflexes and knowing the game patterns. The
guy who worked there... I knew that when this happened you could
fix it by hitting the console in between the 1UP and 2UP
joysticks. So I'm playing the game, and I've drawn a small crowd
because I'm up to, like, 7 bonus lives and levels some people
haven't seen before, and whoosh there goes the glitch. I keep on
whacking the gun button and yanking the joystick and then a
split-second pause and THUMP right in the middle of the console
and the graphics recover and I continue on. The crowd, as Billy
Connolly put it, went wild. Ok, they didn't quite go wild, but
there was a bit of "woah!" and "cool!". And then I had to go back
to work, so I passed the controls to one of the observers who lost
the entire backlog of bonus lives within a minute or
two.
I had one other fine moment with this game: I was in Dublin in
1992 visiting JC, and we wandered into a dimly lit arcade on
Batcherlor's Walk. There was a Twin Cobra cab. I hadn't
played the game in years - probably not since that summer - but
even now I know the optimal placement for the helicopter the whole
way through the first level and I can hum along with the music as
I play it, so I guess I kinda wore a few neuron paths in well with
the thing. Anyway, we wander over to the cab, I put in my credits,
and have a go. Bit of a crash and burn, and some locals seeing
this are kinda sniggering at my poor showing on the game. So I pop
in some more credits, and game two is where it all comes back, and
before we leave I'm on the high-score chart and the locals are no
longer sniggering, they've been watching the gameplay for ten or
fifteen minutes as I carved through the
levels. Nice.
April 12
An episode of Inspector George, and once again it's just so well
made and doesn't shy away from the hard stories with the difficult
endings.
April 11
I have been urged by a South American colleage to watch Kneecap
and my only regret is that I didn't do so sooner. An excellent
movie with excellent cinematography. I can see why it picked up a
shit-ton of awards.
April 10
Ah, the inevitable hacker montage. Was that a raspberry pi she
picked up at some point?
April 9
DVD ripping project: I've got a half-assed manual process for
filtering out but not naming the episodes from a TV series
disc. Interesting to note that one of the discs offering a menu
option to watch all the episodes in a row does so by vending a
single video that consists of all episodes back-to-back; I've not
checked to see if this is done by chaining episode references
together somehow, or if it's actually stored as its own track on
the disc.
April 8
Reading Shacklton's South! at the moment. I was pretty
familiar with the Endurance story, having read Lansing's book
about twenty years ago, but the notes from the diaries of the men
involved adds a lot of colour that I don't recall from the more
polished version of the story. I've just started into the Ross
Sea part of the story, which I didn't previously know
about.
April 7
Back to watching Timeless. It's kinda hapless, but sufficiently
bubblegum to while away the evening.
April 6
I can't actually tell from my
comment in July 2015 if I'd actually seen all of
Safe House
before or not. I definitely watched the whole thing this time, and
given the intervening ten years I didn't remember who the inside
leak was but I guessed correctly fairly early on. It's ok, but
very much by-the-numbers.
DVD ripping project: wrestling with TV discs - I've enough of them
to make it worthwhile figuring out some sort of
automation rather than hand-working each one. Of course the first
one throws up an immediate puzzle: four titles on the disc, but
the DVD menus only offer two. Solution: one of the extra titles is just
the menu loop, so it's only 12 seconds long, and the other extra
title is a bit-for-bit copy of one of the episodes. Code to detect
this is done, but not exactly efficient.
April 5
We had a Gently recorded, and it was good.
April 4
Late working again, goal achieved. Celebrated by watching the
first episode of the last series of Bosch: Legacy.
This show is really tight, so I wonder if they just
didn't get renewed, or if some of the principals decided to park
it, or what. I do note in the "coming soon in this season" there's
what looks to be a giant hook for another of Michael Connolly's
characters so maybe that's where it's all headed.
I am somewhat confused as to the state of the patch I submitted to
ffmpeg: it got a LGTM from one of the people who seems to be
active in development, but hasn't been merged, and attempts to
nudge for a status (reject or accept) have elicited no response. I
guess I can rebase it and fling it into the workshop for anyone
who wants it... here you go.
April 3
Late working for reasons. I don't like to do this, but needs
must right now.
April 2
The thing I use to scrape TV listings for myself now alerts me
when the next unwatched episode of a show is on the listings,
which is handy.
April 1
Don't even think about an April Fools' prank today.