Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

June 30

Kingsman: The Secret Service is an absolute riot. Colin Firth as an action hero? Surprisingly brilliant - Mr. Darcy Kicks Ass, basically. The storyline is nothing special, Samuel Jackson's lisp is a bit irritating, and the whole exploding heads in showers of colour is deeply silly, but overall this is an excellent piece of work and I'm looking forward to see what they do with a sequel.

June 29

Forgot to mention: we watched The Dark Crystal. Mainly it's a movie I wanted to see because I'd heard of it / about it, rather than anything else. It's... well, it's a hero's quest done with Muppets (actual Jim Henson Muppets, as opposed to Irish politicians) and it's everything good and bad that that implies. The story's fine, a straightforward hero's quest; the acting is a bunch of wire puppets done by a team who were masters of the art. Probably the most amusing thing for me was the opening narration ("Another world. Another time. ...") because this is also on the opening track of Vegas, a 1997 album by The Crystal Method. This is kinda one of those movies that maybe you want to see because of the Henson connection or something; it's not really something that I think stands well by itself.

June 25

Broke my waider.ie email for a bit - sorry if you got any bouncebacks... postgrey got stuck, so the server was soft-bouncing emails, then when I investigated I found a warning in the logfile (warning: do not list domain waider.ie in BOTH mydestination and virtual_alias_domains) which I "fixed", which caused the server to hard-bounce all email instead. Gah. Restored the config with the warning in it, so I can at least receive email.

June 23

John Wick: Chapter 2 is about what you'd expect: lots of shooting and fighting and not much by way of a storyline. There's even a completely gratuituous car sequence at the opening - the car gets more or less totalled and doesn't appear for the rest of the movie. Which is basically fine for Friday night bubblegum.

June 19

Z-Wave network appears to have settled down, albeit not 100% the way I'd expected. I've installed two repeaters - one's an actual smart switch - but I think the steel framing in the house extension is messing with the radio propagation.

June 9

I think I watched Top Secret in the cinema, although given I'd have been 10 or 11 maybe I'm misremembering. In any case, it's not quite Airplane! levels of fun, but it does stick to the classic ZAZ recipe of "if you didn't like that joke there'll be another one along in a minute". And the background gags - like Nick, in the restaurant, being told he'll need to wear a jacket and tie, and they can provide one, and then the scene switches to Ms. Flammond in the foreground, and over her shoulder you can see Nick stripped to his underwear being measured up for a suit which a hotel staffer proceeds to stitch on a machine for him. It's not brilliant, but it is a lighthearted bit of fun.

June 5

In the last 30 minutes, my work mac has kernel panicked and my personal mac has had Terminal spontaneously die (taking all its open windows with it). Is this something triggered by WWDC to persuade me I need a new Mac?

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