Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- April 30
- In addition to The Expanse, we're also working our way
through Midsomer Murders
which like several other things we watch is one of those shows
we've sort of haphazardly consumed when it's on without taking
note of series or episode since every episode is a self-contained
thing. We're midway into Season 5 at this point, and my programmed
recordings stopped at Season 6, and currently the various channels
which broadcast this are off in the high double-digits somewhere
(there are at least 21 seasons of it). It's satisfying brain
candy, despite this small, fictional region of England having a
higher rate of murder than your average city and, typically, an
oversexed / drugged / cross-bred population as well (some part of
which inevitably turns out to be the root cause of the
deaths). The only thing against it, per se, is that the episodes
are two hours long, so it's not really made for mid-week viewing.
I had a bunch of other random stuff captured on the DVR, so I
watched The Heroes of Telemark,
staring Kirk "Spartacus" Douglas and Richard "Dumbledore"
Harris. The latter's haircut and general demeanour
made him look like an outcast from a Beatles movie, which was
slightly distracting. The movie wasn't great, to be honest. It
sticks surprisingly close to reality, since it's based on actual
events, but in at least one case this seemed to be used as an
excuse to inject a moment of slapstick in the middle of a sabotage
raid (the guy who can't find his glasses) and it was just
jarring. The constant presence of bullet ricochet effects every
time there was shooting was distracting - it was like the sound
designer had this one track of bullet noises they kept reusing
over and over. And, y'know, if you've got one guy on your
team who knows where to plant the explosives, do you
really have him lead the entire group into enemy
territory? I'm no military strategist, but it seems like
you'd keep him back from action until it's time to set the
bombs... Anyway. It's not terrible, but mainly I only
watched it because I'd heard about the last surviving member of
the raid dying (in 2018, I believe) and some time after that
noticed that the movie was coming up.
Backup completed, then spent a day or two telling me it was
"cleaning up", which means that for the dozen or so failed backups
it had created some directories full of files, all of which are
basically duplicates, and it had to go and delete them. After the
aforementioned "day or two" I got tired of waiting for it and told
it to skip the cleanup, which means it'll probably wedge it on to
the end of the next backup. As noted on other media the
progress bar and progress logs for the backup process make no
sense at all (unless, I supposed, you work at Apple) so it's hard
to tell at any given point how long the backup has left to
complete.
- April 28
- Casting about for something new to watch since we ran out of
Ripper Street: we've decided to give The Expanse
a spin to
provide artificial gravity see how it works
out. One episode in and: (a) I'm a bit confused as there's a lot
of set-up going on; (b) they've put a lot of effort into
their set design, and very definitely want to show off a lot of
that, even if a goodly chunk of it is post-production greenscreen
fills. Jury currently out due to insufficient data.
Mucking around with one of my stupid toys I was stupidly pleased
to be able to knock together a macOS-like notification inline in a
web page as part of a Tampermonkey script, so I don't have to pop
open the console to see what it's doing. The notifications even
fade in and out, although I stopped short of trying to capture the
"slides in from left, then slides back out again"
effect.
More on the nerd front: since I fixed the RAID unit and
the random laptop crashes caused by a faulty battery, I turned
Time Machine backups back on. This led to the discovery
(rediscovery) of a NEW problem, which is that the Airport Extreme
5GHz WiFi channel spontaneously keels over after a certain amount
of traffic has passed. Or time, I'm not sure which. It comes back
again, but by the time it does, Time Machine has gotten upset and
dropped its disk mount. After a couple of rounds of this I
switched the laptop over to the 2.4GHz channel and it's been
stable for the, uh, week or so it's been catching up on several
months of not doing backups.
And in weird nerd tech: an email in my gmail account
appears to have spontaneously deleted itself twice. Not
in the spam bucket or otherwise pending deletion; simply Was No
Longer There when I went looking for it. Didn't even show up in
the trash the second time, but I was able to recover it by logging
into the GMail web UI. I have no idea.
- April 16
- Drobo FINALLY completed its juggling some time before 11:00 this
morning, so I am no longer in fear of random power outages. I
still need to go figure out (a) whether all the crap I'm storing
on the Drobo needs storing and (b) whether maybe it's time I
invested in something that's not dependent on a Firewire 800
connection for shipping data on/off. And maybe (c) do I need a UPS
and (d) should there be an offsite copy of any of this in addition
to the current offsite stuff.
Wow. The final episode of Ripper Street was a bit of a
stinker. Basically, everything they needed to do was
wrapped up in the first 20 minutes or so, and then they just
faffed around for anothr 40 minutes for no apparent reason. There
were a bunch of flashback scenes which gave them an excuse to show
a recreation of the Ripper's final victim, albeit only flashed on
screen twice. There was the needless and pointless death of a
character who had already been written out of the storyline. And,
in the end, they just ran out of things to do, I guess. The whole
thing felt like a massively wasted opportunity to go out with a
bang.
- April 14
- Still finding a few sharp edges from the OpenHAB upgrade, such
as autostarting not working, and discovering that the act of
creating things in the semantic model leaves me with a duplicate set
of items OH WELL I had nothing better to do than figure out how to
clean that all up without breaking all the things.
- April 13
- Upgraded the home automation software (OpenHAB)
to the newest release,
which was only slightly terrifying (my overriding principle
for home automation thus far has been "if it breaks, that shouldn't
be a problem"). Had to manually reinstall MySQL drivers and couldn't
find any indication that this would be the case; couple of other
things needed kicking but it eventually stood up and worked. I'm a
bit disappointed that some more of the new features aren't
auto-configured; in particular, the sitemap seems like a great place
to import a default model from. Oh well.
- April 12
- 93 hours remaining. That's a bit under four days. Woo!
Trundling through Ripper Street
Season 5. Kinda interesting that at this point they've abandoned
all trace of the original "murder-of-the-week" approach in favour
of what's essentially a six-part movie about the (presumably)
Salvation of Edmund Reid.
- April 9
- Ripper Street
Season 4 concluded, in which a major character is more
definitively killed off than previous attempts to do similar might
allow. Short season: only six episodes, and we had a four-day
week. Only Season 5 remains, so that'll be for next
week.
158 hours remaining. What, you expected a progress bar with linear
progression?
We also watched Grosse Point Blank,
a movie which I have on VHS for some reason (but don't
ask me where the VCR is, and the tape's probably degraded
anyway). Parts of the movie feel ad-libbed, and are more real for
that. I also love the running joke about noone taking Martin's job
seriously. "Do you get dental?", "It's a growth industry."
etc. And of course The Music. There's so much of it, and
so good, that it's practically a character in the movie by
itself.
- April 8
- 153 hours remaining.
So yesterday's fun and raspberry pi games: I got a USB WiFi dongle
and wanted to have it active and connected on boot. I started out
with a Raspberry Pi 2 (B? +?) which I'd installed some version of
Raspbian on and upgraded to the latest of latests a few weeks ago.
This was probably my first mistake, since I'm sure the upgrade
probably left a bunch of dangling legacy crap lying around.
I booted the Pi with the dongle plugged in, and then spent the
next several hours arguing with wpa_supplicant, wicd, wpa_cli,
wpa_gui, and a handful of other things that I can't recall. Files
were added and deleted. Python was poked at. Eventually I decided
that wicd is a piece of junk (that's the thing that was prompting
me to select one of 15 or so types of WiFi encryption) and removed
all evidence that it had ever existed. The system tray had a
network thing in it that showed me that the ethernet interface was
up and connected, but alternately suggested that either the wifi
interface didn't exist or wasn't associated, even when both those
statements were patently false. I can't actually figure out what
piece of software presents this information so I'm stuck with
it. I eventually manged to kick things sufficiently that wlan0
came up, linked to my AP, and got itself an IP address, but when I
rebooted I discovered that systemd had attempted to bring up both
a generic wpa_supplicant and a copy of same attached
specifically to wlan0, and no amount of systemctl disable would
persuade it not to bring up the generic one on reboot, and
apparently running both caused the whole thing to Just Not Work. I
eventually resorted to sysctl mask wpa_supplicant which I
understand is about one step removed from forcibly removing the
thing, and finally I got to the point I wanted to get to,
viz. rebooting the device causes it to come up connected to my
WiFi network. Needlessly, annoyingly difficult.
I am doing some local history research again. It would appear that
New Wapping Street is in fact New; from looking at maps
which I'd looked at before but not payed close enough attention
to, it looks like "old" Wapping Street ran next to one of the
railway lines and met up with Abercorn Road, while New Wapping
Street came into being some time in the mid-1930s. Interestingly
enough, it would appear that this is correctly shown on
OpenStreetMap.
- April 7
- 164 hours remaining.
I picked up a USB WiFi dongle to put in one of the Raspberry Pis,
and I'm trying to configure it using the supplied software. It is
incomprehensible in the finest traditions of "Linux is ready for
the desktop". Instead of asking me for the WiFi password, like
every other piece of hardware and software I've ever dealt with,
it wants me to know that it's turning on encryption (WARNING!),
and it wants me to tell it which of about a dozen different types
of wireless encryption the AP uses (hint: ASK THE AP), and then it
generates a config file somewhere I can't see and of
course that config file doesn't work, and because I don't
know where it is I can't figure out what it's done
wrong. Brilliant.
- April 5
- 204 hours remaining. I'm not bothering to see if this is
actually on track, just noting it here as it proceeds.
And so we launched into Ripper Street
Season 4. The opener was a 2-hour epic thanks to being on a
streaming service rather than broadcast - I understand it was
broadcast in two parts. The grim finality of the previous
season's end is somewhat alleviated, there are a few more
historical nods thrown in, and was that Howth Head in the bac...
oh, never mind that bit. Really enjoying
this, although the propensity for certain people to
willingly put themselves in positions that will cause them
trouble in the not-too-distant future is mildly
annoying.
- April 4
- 239 hours remaining.
- April 3
- Ripper Street
Season 3 finale: wow, they sort of cleaned house, didn't they? May
have decided they weren't getting another season until after the
thing was made. Reid: retired. Abberline: retired. Jackson:
unclear, but possibly under arrest for obstruction of
justice. Drake: hinted that he's moving to parts other with new
wife Rose (and Rose's former bethrothed just sort of
... disappeared). Susan: under arrest and presumably bound for the
noose. Now I'm really curious to see how they spin two
more seasons out of this.
- April 1
- 306 hours remaining.
Getting on for the end of Ripper Street Season 3. Several laugh-out-loud moments this evening -
it really feels like it's gotten into its stride.
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