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Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

February 21: Kindle hackery continues apace. I now have two of the damned things working as bus timetable displays. I've got 'em timing out after two hours and going to sleep, which is about the amount of time we usefully need them to run in the morning, but I'm having trouble getting them to wake up by themselves (there's an RTC alarm available to me but the incantations required to make it work are ... obscure).

Watched the end of S4 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel tonight. That's all we can currently get on Prime, so we're stuck here until Season 5 is released. But hooray, Picard S3 just landed, so we have that.

February 17: After a good deal of mucking about, inspecting HTTP calls, trying things, guessing things, searching for docs, and of course swearing, I've resurrected someone's long-ago Ruby project, turned it into a Django project, and can now look at an updating list of nearby bus departures on an otherwise defunct Kindle. The only minor glitch in using this is that the battery on the Kindle is kinda shot, so after about two days of constant updates it's dead. I am scheming about how to improve on this without actually writing Kindle-based code.
February 13: Trying to resurrect an old piece of software without installing the entire world of dependencies to get it running. As you do. Why does gem install parse documentation as part of the install process? Shouldn't that be pre-parsed or something, so that every person who installs it doesn't needlessly burn cycles?

(I got it working only to discover it wasn't quite what I was looking for.)

February 9: Figured I'd put the data on the USB drive and then figure out the partition-frobbing later. And then went ahead and plugged it into a machine with rEFInd installed as-was, and booted, and ... it worked. So now my little old 2006 MacBook is running Linux off a live ISO. I'll fiddle around with this a bit before actually overwriting the OS disk with it, but it looks pretty neat.
February 8: I eventually had to reboot to get Safari back - I'm suspecting something had a bad disk encounter and got stuck. Anyway. Tonight's adventure was trying to create an EFI partition on a USB drive using the Mac; they sure don't make it easy. The fdisk tool in particular is a barrel of laughs.
February 5: Safari broke on me yesterday. I have no idea what's wrong with it, but it's refusing to load any pages. Logging is unhelpful unless you're an Apple engineer, I suspect.

February 4: One of my webscraping toys has suffered the fate of all webscraping toys: the thing it was scraping has updated. Guess I know what I'll be fiddling with this weekend.

Waider

Yay! Spring!