Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

November 26

I know, I'll concatenate these two 500GB drives together to provide enough storage to restore the 500GB disk image I have.

Apparently not.

I know this is probably because the restore program is restoring everything, including long-deleted files, and populating them with whatever data it finds even if it's part of something else, but having waited several days to reach the conclusion that it's not going to fit on my home-made 1TB drive I'm a bit peeved. Will try some stupidity and then see if I've something bigger lying around (there's a 4TB SATA drive, but I don't think I've got a spare SATA enclosure to stick it in - it's intended to be a spare for the next time the Drobo does something silly).

November 25

"We're going to watch the chickiest chick-flick ever", which is how I wound up watching Sense and Sensibility. Which is hilarious, and frankly I have seen far more chicky chick-flicks - if that's the sort of thing that'd put you off - and really this is definitely worth watching. As usual with this sort of production it features about 99% of the British acting populace, so you'll keep seeing people who you saw in that one episode of Morse, or Poirot, or the like. Also a couple of big names, including one Mr. Rickman. Funny seeing that guy smile. It looks like it hurts.

November 22

More disk shennanigans: can't eject a disk because it's 100% full. Because the OS tries to write something into the filesystem, not the metadata? I don't know. In any case, rather daft.

November 21

TomTom released a new version of their TomTom HOME product. It still can't download my map update. AWESOME STUFF, GUYS.

Attempting to recover a Mac drive that I accidentally reformatted back in August 2013 and, at the time, figured I could do without. I've had a bit-level image of the drive sitting around since then, and I found a tool which purported to do the recovery with very little work from me. So I've been poking at it intermittently (as I do) for the last while, and am somewhat bemused that it's looking like it's going to need a larger drive to restore the data onto. I can think of reasons why this might be, but in any case, I'll see if I can wedge things into the current spare drive in the server, or if I have to go and do some silly disk shuffling to make enough room. Or, I dunno, restore it onto a NFS-mounted EBS disk or something.

Oh, and all I'll say about the rugby at the weekend is that that ball never once touched the ground, and the TMO should be called out on that.

November 20

sh-3.2# rm ../dspsrv.dmg
rm: ../dspsrv.dmg: No space left on device

...wait, what?

November 16

I've set up Signal for myself, so if you're thusly inclined let me know and I can add you.

Oh, also ran the allegedly failed backups through a manual fsck, and they're working again. Thanks, Apple.

November 13

Watched Sing Street again; last time was on a plane, so there were a couple of things that had been edited out of that version that were in the more... complete version. And one of 'em was quite the doozy: a single line from the female lead that made her story much darker. Still strongly recommending this, possibly more so.

November 12

Well that's a bit crap: the Mac Mini decided this week that it would be a gas to corrupt the Time Machine backups from both my laptop and the Mac Mini itself. Currently seeing if they're recoverable.

(I have offsite backups for the laptop, as that's where all the good stuff is, but this has not been an auspicious year for Mac Reliability chez Waider.)

November 5

I gave up on Instapaper a while back after... oh, I forget. Some fit of pique in response to a business decision or something. In any case, I'd exported my bookmarks and signed up to Pinboard with the intention of migrating everything there, and then, well, didn't. Finally today I got around to it, with the help of a small python script to turn Instapaper's CSV into a bog-standard "Netscape bookmarks file" (it's basically cruddy HTML circa 1995 or something) which Pinboard was happy to ingest. Code.

I've been rereading William Gibson lately - in order, except Burning Chrome isn't out on Kindle just yet - and this paragraph from Idoru seems curiously apt for the current climate:

Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

In particular, the implied equivalence of presidential elections to changing a TV channel.

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