A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
October 31
Finally closed out Star Trek: TNG Season 5 & Season 6 by
watching the two-parter Time's Arrow. For some reason - maybe it
was the combination of one Metalman Equinox, one glass of
Faustino I rioja, and one shot of Green Spot - this was a
really engaging and entertaining feature-ish-length
episode. I mean, ok, a bunch of apparently clever people asking
the android, who tells you every second episode that he feels no
emotion, if he feels some fear or depression or other, you know,
emotion now that he knows he's going to die is completely
stupid no matter what way you try to slice it, and Irish
O'Landlady in 19th century San Francisco was almost as
cringeworthy as Paddy Mc Colonist and his Merry Men from whatever
episode it was, but I still really enjoyed this.
Scoreboard: We've got four episodes left; the first &
second from season 1, and episodes 4 & 5 from season
7. Horror Channel has just started on season 6, so we're going to
have to wait a few weeks to catch the episode 7 rerun, and then it
remains to be seen whether Horror loops back to the start again or
whether we'll just need to put a reminder somewhere to keep an eye
out for the first two from season 1.
October 28
After way too much effort I managed to get one of the
TRVs to show up in Apple's HomeKit app in full bidirectional mode
(read/write, as opposed to just a dumb thermostate which the rest
of them are appearing as). This is using OpenHAB plus the HomeKit
plugin for same plus, well, a python shell with requests
loaded, a terminal window for log monitoring, and a good deal of
swearing. I only needed to create a container for the two
parts of the TRV (Sensor and Setpoint), then add a dummy item for
the mode, then tag everything in exactly the right
way.
Going by experience to date, none of this will show up in the app
tomorrow.
October 26
House M.D. Season 3 ended with a bit of a bang, and season 4 so
far is basically MasterChef: Hospital Edition. I'm fuzzy on how
this pans out because the three principals from the first three
season are still getting credits and the occasional cameo, but I'm
pretty sure at least one of the MasterChefs winds up on the new
team as well. Oh, and Foreman's story arc is sort of Nelson Muntz
HA-HA material.
We have not watched an actual movie in ages.
October 19
Stupid toy of the weekend: something to scrape basic details of
a family tree out of ...a website... and turn it into a Cytoscape graph. Worked
nicely for about 120 people, failed to load for about 600. I may
consider using NetworkX. My
intent here is to figure out if two people in a tree have any
connection (since ...the website... allows disconnected trees),
but I've also got the makings of something that can sync my local
genealogy efforts with fiddlings online, something that's kinda
tedious to do manually. Oh, and I don't want to do the obvious
GEDCOM export/import thing because it's a lossy format plus I want
to gate exactly what gets synced, since my online efforts have a
tendency to be sloppy whereas my local efforts tend to be a bit
more based on actual sources.
October 18
So we saw the Star Trek:TNG finale - season 7 episodes 25 & 26,
or just 25 if you consider it as one giant episode - and it was
an ok wrap-up: bringing back a few characters, using time travel
to reference the first episode, etc. - but it also sort of felt
like it could've been just another two-part episode in the series
and we'd tune back in for season 8. Maybe it was planned that way,
with the second half being the first episode of the following
season, I dunno. Unlike the movies, they didn't destroy the
Enterprise - well, not really, and when it happened you knew it
wasn't going to stick - so you didn't really have that sense that
everything was coming to an end. And they kind of left the door
open for some sort of followup, but Picard - the nearest thing
I've watched to being that followup - seems to have ignored that
entirely and gone off to plough its own furrow. Anyway, as these
things go it wasn't bad.
Of course, we're not actually done with TNG: ironically,
we haven't actually seen the first two episodes, and we're missing
a handful of episodes from seasons 5, 6 and 7 thanks to Virgin
Media's shennaigans covered here previously. The Horror Channel is
currently on season 5, so we're picking up the missing episodes
there, but I've no idea when we'll get the first
two.
October 4
We've caught up on a couple of the missing episodes from ST:TNG
- oh look, there's Leonard Nimoy - as the Horror Channel (!) works
its way through Season 5, and meanwhile we've got the rest of
Season 7 from Pick channel captured and waiting. Pick has now
started into Deep Space 9, but we'll be skipping on that. At least
for now, anynway.