Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- August 26
- Logan was really enjoyable, with the
minor niggle that the dynamic range of the audio meant that I
missed some of the dialogue (including Logan's last line in the
movie, dammit). It's a thoughtful story, with an awful lot going
on in it. Interestingly it's chosen to not really build on any of
the existing X-Men world, other than to use some of its
characters; everything in terms of backstory is contained in the
movie, and not via someone giving expository speeches, either -
Xavier's backstory is given in a radio report, for example. I
think you could also have played Johnny Cash's Hurt cover
for the entire movie, because it'd be fitting at all
times.
- August 20
- BBC works on their reporting:
| 2017-08-19 18:07:01 | Boston march against alt-right rally draws thousands |
|---|
| 2017-08-19 18:44:33 | Boston march against right-wing rally draws thousands |
|---|
RTÉ on the other hand, nails it first time:
| 2017-08-19 20:29:50 | Thousands march in Boston against far-right rally |
|---|
- August 18
- Celebrating that time we both said, "I do".
I definitely enjoyed how Collateral Beauty started
out, and when Time got his initial lines I wanted to hug the
scriptwriter, but then when it got to the boardroom confrontation
I was a little iffy on the path the movie took. And then
the whole bit with Melanie confused me further, and the closing
scene in Central Park just kinda annoyed me. I think there were a
few ways to take this idea - the concepts are "real" and
hoodwinking everyone, the concepts are just the actors being put
up to it, the concepts are, in fact, how Howard sees each friend,
and so on - but instead it seems like the scriptwriters couldn't
quite decide which option to go for and the result is less
impactful for that. And the Melanie angle just seems... tacked
on. It jars. This is a lovely movie, but it could have been so
much better.
- August 13
- Watching the Waterford/Cork hurling semifinal. Funny to watch
these guys shrugging off the sort of physical tackle that'd have a
Premier League coach calling for a stretcher, and smaller things
like playing the sideline cut from the point the linesman marks,
not ten meters closer to the opposition's goal.
- August 12
- Eye in the Sky is an interesting
movie in that the basic premise is of fairly limited scope to base
a 100-minute movie on. Once the setup is gotten out of the way,
it's basically that whole "lives of the few/lives of the
many" scenario, and to be honest I don't think it really
manages to pull it off. Which is a shame, because there's an
excellent cast (including Alan Rickman in his final role);
ultimately I found myself waiting to see which option the
filmmakers would go for - hard-ass "collateral dammage is
inevitable" or something more "every life
counts", rather than being particularly engaged with how they
got there.
- August 9
- Bought a YubiKey, somewhat
as a thing to play with and somewhat as a thing I might actually
use. First problem: can't use it to lock my password safe if I
expect to use my password safe on iOS, since Yubi don't play
there.
Second problem: configuring my screensaver to require at least one
of password, YubiKey, but not both. I've managed to get it to
allow you to fail the password but succeed with the YubiKey
challenge, so far; also, if you use the YubiKey, the keychain is
still locked. Being cautious about this so I don't accidentally
lock myself out of my laptop!
Broken emacs turned out to be an unescaped "<" which
for some reason caused the search page to return a
404.
- August 4
- And here we are in August already. Where has the year gone?
Thor: The Dark World was a
perfectly servicable movie but at the same time pretty forgettable
- it feels like the middle book in a long series that just serves
to advance a few plot lines or hit a few beats without being
anything in and of itself. I don't think it was quite as bad as
some of the IMDb reviews made out, but it's also not the sort of
movie you'd really want to watch unless you've already seen a few
others in the Marvel franchise.
Noting in passing that the ugly old chunk of Emacs lisp I use to link movies
mentioned here to IMDb seems to have stopped working, so I had to
go and look up the link above manually and reformat it into the
appropriate HTML myself like an animal.
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Waider
Still seeking summer.