A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
November 30
Did not manage to fix the TRV without it changing its name. More
annoyingly, the controller claims it's showing up as both its old
and new names; I don't think it actually is, I think the
controller's just trying to tell OpenHAB about this device that it
used know. Nostalgic z-wave devices, whatever next? I even went to
great lengths to find a means of poking at the controller directly
in an attempt to remove the record of the missing device, but the
tool that had previously allowed this apparently no longer works.
Finished Dracula. I was surprised at how much of the original
story made it into the 1992 movie, to be honest; a few details
squeezed out for time, Lucy... embellished somewhat, and the whole
Mina-being-a-reincarnation silliness notwithstanding it's actually
reasonably true to the original.
What else? We've been ploughing through House - now up to
Season 6, and House has sort of been mellowed a little
due to his little vacation at the start of the season, but he's
still an ass - and watching Season 2 of His Dark Materials, which is good but feels a little
slow. I mean, ok, it's been a while since I read the books, and
there's a lot to tell, but it feels like there's a lot of
filler going on as well.
November 20
Been reading Dracula as threatened. I'm at the point
where all the menfolk have told Mina to stay put while they do
manly things, and Mina is mysteriously and inexplicably
pale and oversleeping and not one person - not even the doctor who
attended her best friend - is apparently able to put two and two
together.
On Wednesday one of my TRVs disconnected from the network for no
apparent reason, and refuses to come back without a name
change. I'm sure I had a problem like this before but I can't
recall how I fixed it. It's rather annoying.
November 14
I'm reasonably certain I watched Dracula
in the cinema when it was released; I'm less sure if I've
rewatched it between then and now. Mrs. recently listened to the
audiobook so was kinda interested in seeing a movie version and
this was the one we watched (there was another on TV recently with
David Suchet as Van Helsing, but we didn't record it). Because I
knew more or less how things panned out I spent more time looking
at the visuals, I think. I don't recall paying much attention to
them before; there's a lot of cross-fade stuff going on - eyes in
the sky, faces, that sort of thing - and a recurring theme of
fading into or out of a circle. There's a lovely visual gag where
Vlad the Lad buys a newspaper while watching Mina; you see him
looking through a window, then it cuts to his PoV and the paper is
just floating there because he doesn't have a reflection. It's
completely understated, and I don't recall noticing it
before. Nicely done, Mr. Coppola. Oh yeah, Cary Elwes and Richard
E. Grant in what are essentially bit parts. On the whole, though,
I felt a little underwhelmed, and I think Mrs. felt that the
departures from the book were a little too
Hollywood.
November 7
Saturday, March 251st, 2020: (not my joke) House M.D.
season 4: well, ok, so they wrapped up the "choose your own
attendant" silliness mid-season, and not quite in a way I expected
(I figured for sure that Kutner would be out, but once they
removed the competition aspect he's actually growing into a
useful character). Chase is more entertaining now that he actually
appears to have grown a spine, although obviously part of that is
because he's no longer working for House. The two-part season
finale was seriously heavy on the drama and kinda pushed House
hard into being an actual human which was frankly odd;
I'm sure we'll come back for the next season and he'll be back to
his old self - we'll see, I guess.
Oh, I see "His Dark Materials" is starting up again on
BBC. Cool. Although it's disappointing that the author has been
making the occasional bid for membership of the
League
of Disappointing Authors. Being disparaged for behaving like
an ass is not censorship, it's social pressure to not be an
ass.
Someone keeps talking about an election, but they've been talking
about things on the brink and imminent results for the last four
days so I've no idea what that's about. Last I checked the
Guardian "live coverage" was making articles out of tweets and
descending into babbling incoherence.
HomeKit now has all the TRVs, and switches for the boiler and the
radio. Apparently I can set up an always-on iPad as a "hub" and
have it be "intelligent". Ho ho ho. Silly marketers. Statistical
analysis and a bunch of rules does not intelligence
make.
November 1
Once I managed to get one stable item into HomeKit, it
appears the app as a whole stabilised, or possibly it was one of
the other random things I did... anyway. All TRVs now present and
controllable in the Home app, along with the boiler booster
switches. For some reason OpenHAB isn't allowing me to add a tag
to the single smart socket on the network, which means I've not
been able to get that onboarded yet.
The HomeKit collection of devices is a little weird, to be honest,
and I don't know how much of that is HomeKit and how much is the
implementation of the OpenHab-to-HomeKit bridge. For example, all
my TRVs are battery-powered devices which have a setpoint (write),
a battery level (read) and a current temperature (read). This is a
HomeKit Thermostat object, except that also wants a read/write
"heating/cooling mode" selector and doesn't have a battery
channel; or it's a HomeKit TemperatureSensor object, except that's
a read-only device (and the battery channel is limited to a
"battery low" on/off signal); or it's a HomeKit HeaterCooler which
seems to overlap heavily with Thermostat and again, doesn't have a
battery channel. I will no doubt need to tinker with this some
more, the annoying part of which is that if I mess up, the bridge
withdraws the object from HomeKit, and when I add it back it's
lost whatever information it had about that object, like which
room it belongs to and whether it should appear in "Favourites" or
not.