A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
March 29
Shiny new macOS. Same old out-of-date SSL support in Perl and
Python. BOO.
Also shiny new iOS, which seems to have decided that in spite of
my specifying an IMAP prefix, it should index my entire home
directory on a server that has rather a lot of files in it. BOO.
(The second item may yet be related to server-side changes, but
since it appears to have happened on two unrelated servers, I'm
not 100% sure)
More fun: couldn't ssh to various things. Debugged, said my key
type wasn't listed. Scratched my head as at least one target
doesn't even have the option to configure key types. Eventually
figured out that it was a client-side error: Apple's
/etc/ssh/ssh_config now has restrictions on what sort of SSH keys
it'll allow the client to use, never mind what the server
supports.
March 26
Have been meaning to scrape content out of my rather defunct
LiveJournal account and rehome it here (or something like
that). ljgrabber.pl
looked like a good bet as it also allows me to lock all the
postings on LJ so that noone adds more content to them. However as
currently posted, two caveats: the code to retrieve your session
cookie from Safari's cookie cache is written for an older version
of Safari, and, more importantly, if you use the --debug
flag it doesn't actually save anything to disk. Which I would have
known if I'd read the comment at the head of the file carefully,
instead of chasing through the code...
March 21
Wrangling some non-trivial quantity of images on the laptop at
the moment - about twenty years of accumulated digital photographs
plus a bunch of scanned documents and what not related to family
history - and finding that the default Apple tools, iPhoto and
Photos, are not only not up to the task, but almost belligerently
opposed to it. I found a third-party doodad that purports to split
your iPhoto library up into smaller libraries; I'm inferring that
its operation is that it uses Applescript to control iPhoto and
open the correct library, remove duplicates, etc. In practice I'm
finding that things that were supposedly removed from, say, Family
History are still there, while Family History things are showing
up in Photos of Waider, Drunk or what have you.
(The latter, obviously, being a huge archive...)
I may have to go shell out for something actually
capable.
March 17
Unfortunate dance of stupidity to get SpamAssassin to recognise
my desire to consider the raft of French-language email I'm
getting as spam. Eventually figured out that the setting that
enables it (or more specifically, that defines the
UNWANTED_LANGUAGE_BODY rule) is loaded sufficiently early that my
attempt to turn it on in local.cf was happening too
late. This sort of defeats the purpose of havinglocal.cf somewhat.
March 16
Back from a few days in the Algarve. Weather was just turning
as we left, so it was a nicely-timed break.
Solomon Kane: wow, that was pretty
bad. Not outright terrible; I've seen a good deal worse, but
really, if I'd not been braindead from travel I probably wouldn't
have stuck the entire thing.
March 15
eBay sent me an email about how they were going to close my
account because I hadn't used it so long, unless I signed in in
the next 30 days. The email was poorly formatted (text/plain
encoding, but included HTML; the HTML was bizarrely just a couple
of P tags used to wrap a line of underscores). Links were included
to such pages as "how to detect fake (spoof) emails".
Phishing, right?
Actually not: this is a legitimate email. Apparently noone in the
approvals chain for this messaging at eBay has the slightest
familiarity with Ten Things That Will Make Your Email Look Fake
or similar OpSec guidelines. Bizarre.
(The fact that my account has been dormant long enough to be
flagged for deletion probably tells me I don't actually need an
account anyway.)
March 14
Set up a local ad-blocking proxy using SquidMan and a
little config hacking.
March 12
Binge-watched episodes 6 through 10 of season 2 of The Man in the High Castle. Kinda like Preacher, there was a slow
"middle bit" where you're waiting for things to happen,
but it wraps up nicely by the time you get to season's end in such a
way that they could conceiveably walk away without a third season,
while at the same time leaving enough openings for a followup. And
since Amazon Studios have confirmed that there will indeed be a
third season, I'm looking at all the potential twists they could now
introduce. Was Smith planning this all along? Was he planning it as
the role he plays, or as a Fifth Columnist? Did Frank survive? Joe?
Will the various protagonists reunite at any point? Interesting to
see also that so much of the story revolves around a strong female
character; although to be fair this much is a direct carry-over from
the book. Equally interesting is the very obvious science-fiction
angle the adaptation has taken - the book was straightforward
alternative fiction, with our own timeline imagined by an author,
while the adaptation is not only messing about with alternate
timelines, but going so far as to have them interact in signficiant
ways. Anyway, I'm looking forward to S3, whenever that shows
up.
I recently reread Charlie Stross' original Laundry Files novel,
The Atrocity Archive (named, it would appear, for a
single scene deep in the book that doesn't have a huge bearing on
the plot outside that scene; it's more thematic background than
anything else) and in the afterword Stross pretty much lionised
Len Deighton as the genius of the Cold War spy novel. Dad had a
bunch of Len Deighton lying around when I was a kid, but I don't
ever recall reading any - I was much more inclined towards his
Robert Ludlum books, in so far as I can recall sticking to a
single author for any length of time. So I've been picking up
Deighton's back catalogue at $6-$7 per on Kindle and reading
them. So far, I can't say I'm impressed. Ipcress File was a
reasonable debut, but it seemed to grow vague as you got
to the point where you expected all to be revealed. Horse Under
Water was better and tighter, but still wandered a bit. Billion
Dollar Brain was definitely a downturn: I really didn't like the
way two of the main characters, Harvey and Signe, seemed to change
moods and attitudes from one paragraph to the next. I mean, sure,
keep your readers guessing, but try to maintain a bit of
consistency as well. In any case, I'm persevering with my quest,
having just picked up a bundle of the next four novels. We'll see
if Mr. Deighton gets to a point where I actually enjoy the book
cover to cover.
March 11
Updates here have gotten a little sparse for a couple of
reasons: I'm not doing as much goggle-boxing nor as much
concentrated hacking as previously, and what I've been hacking on
has been slow, sporadic, and not really interesting.
Anyway. I've started mucking about with home automation:
specifically, I'm now in possession of a Z-wave USB doodad, and
two Z-wave radiator valves, and what I've found most interesting
so far is graphing the room temperature as provided by those
valves. I'm using OpenHAB as
the driver, and the docs are generally a bit ropey but I've
managed to piece together enough to allow me to do said
graphing. I don't have a boiler controller installed just yet; I'm
going to bolt on a bunch more TRVs first, and consider what else
might be of use before I go for the heavy stuff. And I'm building
this out of parts rather than a kit because all the kits I've
looked at require that your connection between the physical toys
and your laptop is mediated by Someone Else's Webserver - which
means allowing said server access to your network in some
undefined and - as seems to be generally the case, poorly-secured
- way, and also leaving you at the mercy of a functioning Internet
connection for the operation of your heating system. No, I have my
Mac Mini server with the USB doodad, and the thermostatic valves
are all autonomous and operable without the networking goop if
need be, and the whole thing stays inside my own LAN and if I need
to access it from outside there's a perfectly good VPN
available.