Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

February 27

In "you had one job" territory: iTunes Apple Music has an option tucked away under "Get Info" to allow you to mark a track as something you don't want in a shuffle. You know, skit tracks, filler tracks, that stupid track 99 featuring the band drunk in the studio at 4am that noone needed to hear but the producer thought would be funny in the days of compact discs... Anyway. I was earlier listening to my playlist, "stuff you've not listened to in more than a year", and an MP3 of an interview started playing. And I thought, "hmm, I should mark that as not-for-shuffle". And because I was listening to the music via the Apple TV downstairs, I went upstairs to the laptop, launched Apple Music, found the track, popped open "Get Info", and... huh. Checkbox already checked. So much for that feature.

(Gerry Ryan interviewing Stephen J. Martin about his book, Superchick, containing among other things one of the best written descriptions I've ever read of the sort of, ah, verbal intercourse you get with a typical group of Irish drinkers.)

February 25

Watched Walk The Line again for no particular reason - it's a good movie, and the music's great - and then listened to about half of Andrew Hickey's podcast episode on Cash. Also good. Actually, Andrew's whole podcast is pretty awesome.

February 21

I'm inclined to set fire to these backups instead of trying to preserve them... After hitting 2.5TB the copy gave up because that's how big a sparsebundle I'd given them to play with. Investigating, I see that the "uniquesize" as output by tmutil for the original backups is tiny by comparison to the copies, which suggests it's not doing the right thing with hard-linked files, and yet the spot-checks I've done seem to confirm that it is. So I guess it's time for Plan D, which so far has involved a lot of head-scratching.

February 17

Well, that wasn't annoying at all: after ~18 days the backup-copying, slow and all as it was, seems to have spontaneously unmounted the destination disk and initial attempts to remount it were met with "what disk" and "what filesystem". Sigh.

Also weird: trying to use tmutil uniquesize on the source files - i.e. the ones Time Machine created - gives me an error about not being in a machine directory, but running it on the destination files - i.e. the ones I created by copying to the RAID unit - is happy to answer. WTF, etc.

Anyway. I've set it back in motion but I still need to figure out what it's doing "wrong" that means it's claiming that 7% of my 2TB backup needs 2.3TB of space.

February 15

React porting continues at a leisurely pace; mainly I'm resisting the urge to go fiddle with the other toys/projects and sticking mostly to this one. Plan C also continues; the Synology warned me the other day that only 20% of my drive's capacity remained, but that's almost 2TB so I'm not exactly concerned. Oh, and while I'm mostly not fiddling with other things I did make a bunch of stuff work with Python 3.8.

February 12

Recent versions of XCode have been shipping with Python 3.8, so I figured I'd start upgrading The Toys to use that. Little did I know that Apple did something funky with it that causes the mysqlclient build to fail, and the solutions suggested (in that thread, at least) amount to "Don't use XCode's Python 3.8; install your own" which, well, I have a learned fear of mucking about with vendor-provided interpreters... fortunately with a bit of patience and digging through system files I discovered that setting ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" turns off the attempt to build for ARM silicon and all is well.

(of course once I'd figured this out I was able to find a search result in seconds that confirmed it. Could I come up with a useful search for a solution before then? Hell no.)

February 11

North by Northwest was cheesy, but fun for all that. For some reason I knew about the plane-threatens-hero scene: no specifics, just knew of its existence. I have no idea why.

February 9

In which my ISP reminds me that they can and will randomly disconnect/reboot my router and if I dare call to ask what happened they'll just tell me to turn it off for a minute and turn it on again. (I did not call. The second outage is just a repeat occurence of, I guess, whatever the first one was. And no, there were no power issues: more likely a remote reboot.)

Performance graph to the right, router log excerpt below...

----------T--:--:--+--:-- Cable Modem Reboot -  due to power reset
2022-02-09T20:20:24+00:00 MIMO Event MIMO: Stored MIMO=-1 post cfg file MIMO=-1
----------T--:--:--+--:-- Cable Modem Reboot -  due to power reset
2022-02-09T20:45:54+00:00 REBOOTED (based on uptime of 0day(s)0h:23m:24s at 2022-02-09 21:09:18.044310+00:00)
2022-02-09T20:48:55+00:00 MIMO Event MIMO: Stored MIMO=-1 post cfg file MIMO=-1

February 8

Plan C is up to about 12 million files and somewhere between 9 and 10 of the 200+ backups it's copying, which suggests it's going to be going for another ... very long time. Wonder if the disks I'm copying from will last long enough?

I've moved another chunk of project work over to React with surprisingly little fuss. To be sure, there are likely better ways to do what I'm doing, but it works which is generally the main thing when you're talking about hobby code.

February 5

The Bourne Supremacy was on the box so I more-or-less watched it. Says here I watched it in March 2008 and April 2005 as well; let's see how it's aged: For both previous watchings, I thought that the story sucked. Yeah, it kinda still does. Definitely agree with my criticism from back then on the choice to kill off a major character in this movie causing an irreperable and damaging divergence from the books and also, I think, taking a bunch of interesting plotlines off the table. And some of the fight sequences and very definitely the climactic car-chase I think really suffer for their "gritty realism" aka "shaky hand-held filming that frequently obscures what's actually happened". I get it, it happened fast and it's a shock. But, ah, what actually happened? Anyway, I guess this is mostly not supposed to be a "thinking" movie (despite some comment by the director to that effect) so just go along for the ride.

February 4

Plan C is progressing a bit faster than my initial calculations suggested, which is great, but it still looks like it's taking about a day to shift a backup from the Drobo to the Synology, and there are ... in excess of 200 backups. Now, granted, these are approximately incremental backups so it will definitely be the case that some take less time than others, plus right now it's working its way through the sparse end of the collection so each backup is likely not sharing much data with its predecessor, resulting in long copy times. We shall see, I guess. I really hadn't planned on spending months waiting for this to copy.

February 2

Auntie Beeb hasn't been quite sure how to pitch this story:

12:05:02	Households to get £200 help to ease energy bill rise
14:05:03	Households to get help to ease energy bill rise
15:35:02	Households may get £200 as energy bills set to soar
16:35:02	Biggest rise in energy bills set to be announced
17:05:02	Households may get £200 but energy bills set to soar
17:35:02	Energy bills set to soar but households may get £200 cut
18:05:02	Energy bills set to soar but millions may get £200 help

Is this the "levelling up" thing?

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