Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

January 31

Still trawling through passwords. It's an interesting exercise in archaeology if nothing else: some of the sites I had passwords for are long gone, some have changed sufficiently that my login no longer works. At some point I turned on password history globally so I'm not wholly sure my list of outdated passwords is correct, but the threshold is now down to 180 days - which I think is a reasonable place to leave it - so it won't take too long for any I missed to shake out. Current count: 59 passwords needing attention; either the password needs changing or the detail in the safe is missing some information (such as a URL).

January 29

I've started learning how to write scripts for OpenHAB so I can do slightly clever things like "if this TRV is checking in every five minutes tell it to back off and save its battery".

January 27

Twitter two-factor auth presents me with a QR-code. I scan it with Google Authenticator, and get 4 identical accounts added to the Authenticator. Whose fault is that?

Interesting. When I change the battery in a TRV, not only does its temperature setpoint revert to 21°, it seems its default wake-up time resets to 5 minutes as well.

January 26

The Lincoln Lawyer seems like the sort of movie that should've turned into a franchise, or maybe it should have been made-for-TV so they could make a series out of it; the Lawyer in question is a nice mix of sleazy and heart-of-gold, the story is good, and the cast is pretty decent. Worth a look, especially if you've come across the book version of the character.

January 20

Password cleanup: everything in the safe is now a year old or less. This is good.

January 19

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation: look, it's entirely predictable, or near enough to that you won't be too surprised when the obvious mask gag happens. But it's generally well-done predictable, and a bit of fun for all that.

January 16

I got spam today in Irish. I was actually impressed.

(still fed it to my Junkmail system, though.)

X-Files: we've gotten to the end of Season 2, and I'm wondering how much of this I actually saw when it was on the air - I was never a follower, more I'd watch an episode if it happened to be on the box. The season 2 ending is a pretty full-on cliffhanger, and I have vague recollections of that railway boxcar, but in what context I have no idea. Roll on season 3!

January 13

Despicable Me 3: loved it. Some actual laugh-out-loud moments, plenty silly gags, a blast all round.

January 12

Rewatched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, since Mrs. hadn't seen it and I recently re-read the book. It's well-made, but I'm thinking Peter Guillam's live-in lover was a bit extraneous given the original story already had its implied other relationships that would have fit the bill, so to speak; that aside, it sticks pretty closely to the book, including making it difficult to figure out who the spy is until late in the game - and of course when it comes to it, they make a meal of the reveal. Good movie, worth a look, although oddly the first time I watched it I was terribly disappointed with it. I'd like to see the Alec Guinness version, mind you.

Actually, rereading my original comments on this I'm not sure why I was quite so put off by the movie. Certainly I'd made the same observation about Guillam, but I think the other things I disliked about it are actually things that make it a deeper, more engaging movie. (as opposed to the usual fluff I watch)

January 11

...and then there's a NEW urgent Mac exploit to patch. Apple, what's going on?

Reducing contact time for my collection of z-wave TRVs from 5 minutes to 15 minutes appears to be having a suitably impressive impact on battery lifetime.

January 9

All Macs patched and rebooted.

January 7

Celebrating the last day of my Christmas holidays by coming down with a cold. Feh.

January 6

Non-obvious learning of the day: if you have a password policy in pwSafe, and you select the last checkbox - generate pronouncable passwords - the only part of the policy that's actually observed is the password length. The response I got to a support request about this suggests that a fix may be in the works. (pwSafe is a password manager for iOS and macOS).

January 5

Password-changing spree: Google sent me a notification that my password had changed. To my gmail address. Which gmail filed as Junk. NICE JOB, GOOGLE.

I now have no passwords older than 1600 days (a bit over 4 years) except for the ones I couldn't change. I'm also deleting accounts where relevant, and scrubbing passwords out of Safari entirely since I read about sites sniffing your ID by generating hidden login fields.

How come noone told me I can link my DublinBikes account to my Leap card? (to be fair, I'm not subscribed to newsletters from either, so how else would I find this out other than by realising that my DublinBikes password is in the Must Change list?)

The Limehouse Golem is a nice little Victorian whodunnit, albeit a bit overcooked on the gore in places, and the coda is ... odd. I figured out (ish) whodunnit a little bit before the reveal, but that was close to the end of the movie. Well worth a look.

January 4

Scanning in a bunch of photographs and prints for the aforementioned genealogy backlog. I'd been using a network-connected scanner to scan previously, but because of the volume of stuff I need to go through I plugged the scanner straight into the laptop. I'd forgotten that the macOS Image Capture app had a bunch of nice features including "scan everything on this page, but as individual items saved to separate files".

January 3

Safe was on satellite, so I recorded it and watched it. Best described as "Jason Statham needs to pay the bills".

January 1

Happy New Year, etc.

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