Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

July 31

More Ballard. Harry shows up for more than a voiceover. This is a really well-made series, and we're enjoying it.

July 30

Engaging in the mildly tedious process of upgrading the python version in a virtual env I use for hacking about (which is therefore a poorly-maintained mishmash of package installations, some required, some not).

Wrapped Murderbot. It was good, but the season finale felt a little less smooth than the rest. I'll need to reread the book to see how much drift there was from source, but I suspect the ending may have had a little more focus-group massage than the rest of it.

Also, 30-minute episodes: very much not enough.

July 29

We are now, like, 80% through the first season of Murderbot and it continues to be stupidly good.

July 28

Realised that we're chewing through Murderbot so quickly because the episodes are only 30 minutes long. Nom nom nom.

DVD ripper project now validating the current set of files, which threw up some accumulated errors.

July 27

More Murderbot. This show is so good.

July 26

Watched the first two episodes of Murderbot and to be honest I wasn't sure from the trailer if they'd landed it but two epsiodes in and I wanted to binge the whole season so I guess that's a keeper.

July 25

Aaand there's a new season of Foundation as well. Nice.

July 24

Started on Ballard. Seems pretty good so far. Of course, I'm waiting for Harry to show up.

July 23

Last of The Sweeney. Not a dramatic ending: it just wound up, with a suggestion that Jack was done with the job and Haskins saying he was addicted to it.

More engineering works on the house today.

July 22

Slowly working my way around to getting the bits in place to continue with the DVD ripping project. Time saved by having Igor write code: large negative number.

July 21

Stuff worked at work. Pretty cool.

July 20

The final George Gently... banger of an episode with quite the shock ending.

July 19

I remember The Remains of the Day being in the cultural/entertainment news, but I never got around to actually watching it until today. It's excellent, but hard to describe: in some sense, nothing happens over the course of its runtime. Noone really develops from who they were at the outset, except as mentioned by a somewhat unreliable narrator. Perhaps that's the core tragedy of it - that despite the immense cognitive dissonance it must have created, the characters all stubbornly continue to be themselves.

July 18

Spent 15 to 20 minutes poking around on the idiot box for something to watch before deciding I'd go back to reading Rainbow's End.

July 17

One of the single most annoying aspects of local LLM tinkering is that every tool I've tried stores the (giant) models in a different place, requiring you to do symlink shenanigans if you want to avoid having the damn things all over your disk. Never mind excluding them from your backups.

July 16

It seems we won't get all of Season 4 of The Sweeney, either. I have no idea why random episodes are missing from it, especially when Prime US customers appear to have access to the entire thing..

July 15

Oh look, rain on Saint Swithin's Day. I'm sure there's no superstition associated with that.

July 14

Attempting to persuade the much bragged-about LLMs to do some of the fidgeting with the DVD rippping code that I've been putting off because frankly it's annoyingly dull. Results have been ... mixed. One notable thing is the massive power consumption these things incur; the laptop gets too hot to actually keep on my lap. And this is Apple silicon with all its wonderous low-heat features.

I am primarily using Aider, because I'm writing code, but I've also poked at LM Studio, llm (great job nabbing the namespace but, ah, not exactly searchable since "llm python" is not exactly a specific search), Ollama and mlx_lm - the latter two as servers for Aider. I think probably the most effective effort to date has been with the qwen3:8b model; it responds in a reasonable amount of time and gets small tasks right (ish) but has proved utterly useless at "fix the flake8 errors in this 2,500-line python script". Semantics are also, as expected, not a strong point: I see right now it's proposing to replace a if x in foo with if x not in foo in response to flake8 complaining that somewhere else needs if not x in foo should be written as if x not in foo.

July 13

And back to The Sweeney. "Stop Shouting!" "I can't!" has become a running gag Chez Waider at this point.

July 12

Second-last George Gently. Funny how the whole cameraderie at the end of the previous episode catches fire and disappears in this one... they've also dropped the "George has MS" story almost completely, to the point that I'm wondering why they bothered bringing it up. The episodes are still fantastic, mind you.

July 11

Some respite from the works today.

Hypnotic wasn't terrible, but they really could've done with less exposition. It felt like half the movie consisted of characters explaining the story, including the ending. Also there was no need for a stinger in the credits, particularly not the one they chose. Also it'd have been better if they just stuck with the plot of Firestarter because that's pretty much what I was thinking about once it got going.

But it wasn't terrible.

July 10

Day 4: in which some scaffolding is removed and we get our sunroom back. Some fit and finish still to do but that'll likely be next week.

July 9

Day 3: in which fibreglass is applied, and the entire house thereby smells of solvent. Whooooooooo.

July 8

Day 2 of people doing things to the house: remove defective sheets of glass. Wait for the new ones to arrive. Carry them upstairs - narrow stairs, large sheets of glass. Five people, some burly, to carry a sheet. Actually, they're not so much sheets as units. By the end of the day the gaping hole where the old glass was removed had been refitted with the new glass. Nice!

July 7

People came to our house, put down protective matting, put up scaffolding, and started sawing bits off the roof.

It's ok, we asked them to.

July 6

Moving on to Season 4 - the final season - of The Sweeney. Woo! New credits sequence!

July 5

Wrapped up season 7 of George Gently. Another good 'un. Only two left, apparently.

July 4

Mr. Eastwood presents, for your viewing pleasure, Juror #2. The setup is good, although don't watch the spoiler trailer if you want to get the full effect of the reveal. The movie on the whole keeps you guessing how it's going to work out. I think in the end Clint sort of cops out: there's a logical inference to be drawn from the last scene, but he doesn't actually go there. And there's a bit of fluff and padding after the verdict. And you don't get to find out how the jury actually got to their verdict. So a little let down by the ending, but not by much.

July 3

We have wrapped Season 3 of The Sweeney, or as much of it as Prime was willing to give us (episode 9 missing, for some reason). It's a good 'un, and all things considered a lot more balanced and uncringeworthy than you'd expect given when it was made.

July 2

More DVD script pokery. I would like to get this shoved past the current hurdle by the weekend, if I can.

July 1

Great leap forward in aforementioned project: identifying a bunch of things that need fixing concretely as opposed to poking around in the dark looking for the broken bits. That was gratifying.

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