A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
October 26
Voted. It's disappointing to see the scale of support for Casey
in the exit polls; interested to see the actual figures at the end
of the day. If you voted for Casey you are a bad person and should
feel bad. He's a disgrace as a person and as a prospective
politician.
Solo: A Star Wars Story
was a whole lotta fun. I liked the bits of fanservice I recognised
- the dice being the obvious one, but also the blaster, the Kessel
Run, the card game for the Millennium Falcon, and a few others -
but I see from IMDb trivia that there was a whole lot more for
people who'd read the books, watched various other bits of the
Star Wars universe, or even played some of the games. The movie
doesn't buckle under the weight of this, however; it's nicely
paced and has a decent plot to carry things along. I did have a
slight headscratch at the initial big heist, but I can't really
expand on it without spoilers, so let's just say I didn't wholly
buy Val's actions if her motivation is supposed to be to get
Beckett out of his debt to Vos. But that's a small thing, and I'd
happily watch this again.
(also still amused at people tying themselves in knots to explain
the Kessel Run "12 parsecs" thing rather than accepting that hey,
George Lucas maybe thought a parsec was a measure of time and
noone challenged him on it until after it was canon...)
My RSS Toy has been complaining for, uh, months about one of the
feeds containing an invalid UTF8 character. This is coming from
the binary portion of the database driver, i.e. outside the python
code that makes up the RSS Toy. I've been trying various things to
understand this and eventually concluded that the driver is
actually broken, because the character (a wineglass: 🍷)
is perfectly valid. I've tried MySQL-python, mysqlclient, and
(most recently) PyMySQL, and all are showing the same problem, so
I guess at this point I should just consider throwing away the
database entirely (since maybe it's the database that's generating
the error?) and use something else.
October 24
Return flight movie-watching: watched Ronin,
an otherwise decent movie spoiled by De Niro basically repeating
half his lines. Maybe he was hoping to get paid double or
something.
Flying was to Oz for work and play.
October 11
Airplane movie-watching: I skipped a huge chunk of
Baby Driver, in search of bits featuring driving. Disappointingly
few given that the movie's ostensibly about a virtuoso
driver. Glad I didn't pay for this; the only thing I'll note about
the movie itself is that Our Hero went remarkably quickly from
reluctant participant in crimes to, well, killer.
The Green Hell
was a little difficult to watch as the audio was in
German and the subtitles weren't great, but it's a fascinating
combination of historical footage, interviews, and the occasional
voiceover piece; the focus is on Niki Lauda and his infamous
Nürburgring accident, but it also touches on more general issues
of F1 safety.
And I watched a bunch of Preacher episodes. Still awesome, still
funny, although to be honest the season finale felt a bit more
like "we ran out of time" than an actual finale.
October 6
Updating 2FA stuff to no longer use Google Authenticator; I've
switched to Authy instead. Old phone came back to life
sufficiently for me to help with this process, but I no longer
trust it to actually remain running. I'll factory wipe it while I
still can and investigate if it's worth repairing (it'll need a
new battery regardless of what else is up with it) or if it's now
recycler fodder.
TouchID on the new phone is scarily improved over the old phone
(to be fair, I've skipped from a 6 to an 8). I tried it briefly on
the old phone and gave up in frustration; new phone actually makes
it seem like a viable option, although I'm balking at enabling
TouchID for my password safe.
I'm bemused that Google's own spam algorithms chose to classify
their own security alert emails as spam. But then, when you enable
2FA, they default to "on" the checkbox that says "don't use 2FA on
this browser" which I think somewhat defeats the purpose of
enabling it. Let people think about the risks involved, rather
than allowing EULA-driven mindless clicking of "Next" buttons to
turn off the security feature they've just enabled.
My shiny Bose headphones, a gift for my birthday, have stopped
working. This is annoying, more so because it appears to be some
sort of known fault going by the prevalence of similar symptoms on
the Bose message boards. I am awaiting a return contact from their
customer service to tell me what happens now.
October 4
My phone woke me up this morning with its alarm, and then keeled
over and died - it looks like the battery has reached
MAX_CYCLE_COUNT or some such as it's no longer charging. This is
... inconvenient.
And now I have an iPhone 8. I'll still need to go visit an Apple
dealer with the old one because I can't turn it on to factory-wipe
it.