Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

September 30

Seems I have successfully recovered one of the missing DVD rips, and now moving on to "what's uniquely broken about the next one".

Tonight's Voyager was "is the hologram doctor a real person" again. I wonder if anyone's ever done, like, a table of which typoe of story each episode is, given there's a fairly limited selection of basic plots they work with?

September 29

The title/titleset confusion has me wondering if I've done a whole lot of ripping of the wrong thing, but it seems not as best I can tell. I did wedge in something to find the longest title on a disc at some point, and maybe that's worked out well for me.

September 28

Interesting. The DVD I am trying to figure out seems to have a bunch of NAVI packets that tccat is unhappy with pursuing, because once it hits the first one it stops even though it's only part-way through the title. It does correctly identify the duration of the title, though.

Aha, ok, that appears to have been pilot error with tccat. I think I've now persuaded it to extract the entire movie. I think tccat relies on libdvdnav; if that's the case then the problem is in ffmpeg's interface to the DVD libraries.

Ok, interesting. Explicitly telling ffmpeg to rip all the title chapters seems to override whatever's currently failing. Let's see if that's reliable!

Also the apparent confusion between "title" and "titleset" continously annoys me. I think some of the current mess is because of this.

September 27

Decided I've had enough of The Journal and dropped it from the RSS feeds. Sam from Dublin Inquirer wrote a great editorial piece a few years back about how you can report on things like facists and racists without actually giving them a platform, and The Journal fails miserably at that, being quite happy to provide ample column inches (so to speak) for such bigots to explain their "legitimate concerns" and other such bollocks. Pro tip: it does not show them in a ridiculous light. It does not do anything good in "the marketplace of ideas". You wiil not encourage a debate that will see these people get any sort of pushback on their fearmongering and scaremongering and general disregard for other humans. That aside, The Journal also tends towards clickbait headlines. So, off the feeds you go.

Met up with some colleagues for a bit of an Old Fart drinking session. We had 80+ years combined tenure at the table...

September 26

I read the book ages ago but didn't know there was a movie, and as far as I can recall the story, The Dry pretty much covers everything that was written and is a great piece of movie-making. I'll have to go check but I think even the physical appearance of the barman matched the book.

September 25

Ran the mplayer rip in debug mode, now going to see if I can get something similar out of tccat or ffmpeg. I might also see about updating libdvdnav/libdvdread as it looks like there may have been some recentish changes in these?

Hmm. Most of the recent changes seem to revolve around DVD Audio and changing the build system to some new tool.

September 24

Interesting. Several attempts on the ripper box, no dice. macOS can't even keep the disc inserted. Bluray player... plays the disc flawlessly. I can see what looks like some discolouration on the disc. I have one other device in the house I can try ripping this with before I give up on it.

Meanwhile moving onto the next disc, which seems to have all the bits but not in a way ffmpeg likes.

ffmpeg: rips a few minutes and then stops. tccat: rips even less, then stops. mplayer -dumpstream: seems to rip the whole thing, but previous experience with this is that it loses some metadata along the way.

September 23

OK. looks like I may definitely have a corrupted disc in my collection. The Rock, if you must know. I'll try it in an actual DVD (actually Bluray) player and see what it does; I figure if it's playable, there's gotta be a way for me to rip the bits.

(annoyingly, promotional material on the disc seems to be fine - it's the main feature that's inaccessible.)

September 22

An episode of Voyager in which Janeway concludes with an "I told you so" which I'm sure the assembled team loved.

September 21

My work anniversary led to me reading through some old entries in this diary. Ah, nostalgia.

DVD Ripping! Currently the script is churning through what I've already ripped trying to verify if the result is plausible, e.g. if it's a movie, is it longer than about 20 minutes? This is taking a while because getting the actual length of an MPEG2 file, as opposed to what the header says is the length, while pulling the file over a wireless link from an AFP share, is not a speedy process.

September 20

I think I'd been avoiding Django Unchained on account of Tarantino being a colossal horse's ass, but you know, it wasn't a bad movie.

September 19

Where it started:

June 9th, 2005: Interviewed with Amazon today. I wasn't really happy with the interview; I was unprepared for questions such as "describe a project you've been involved in in the last five years that you're really proud of" largely because I've never asked it before, and while I'd like to think I'm a good sysadmin and know at least some of the way around kernel debugging, the interviewer seemed to keep picking things that I had either never heard of or knew very little about. Gah. I keep thinking of things I could've added to my answers to mitigate the bits I didn't know, but that's no good right now.

Where it's at:

September 18

DVD ripping: I am at the point where I am starting to rip the discs that I either didn't rip previously or somehow ripped incorrectly.

I'm sure this'd all be so much easier if I couldn't code. I'd probably just accept someone else's crappy software for doing this instead of writing my own crappy software.

September 17

One more annoyance with getting music from Qobuz: Apple Music recognises it sufficiently well that it's picked up by Music Match, but it then decides I don't actually have the right country/region on my phone to listen to it. Thanks, Apple.

Investigating the extent of this fileshare jankiness, it looks like trying to copy a movie-sized file from my laptop to the fileshare is not possible. Bizarre. Time to go tinker with the Advanced Settings, I guess. This feels like something that should Just Work, does it not?

Because I'm too lazy to do it right, I flipped a bunch of likely-looking things and now it seems it's working better... or not. I feel like I should go back to AFP despite the fact that Apple's been pushing SMB for some years now.

Turned off Cloud Music sync. Did a manual over-the-cable sync instead. "Warning, this will overwrite songs synced by <machine that hasn't been turned on in several years>". This works, obviously, but I lose over-the-air sync. So, per some random guy on the Internet, I'll try turning the Cloud Music sync back on and see if magic occurs. I guess I can always convert the raw bits into an ISO9660 image and feed it in as a CD... but no, magic appears to have occurred!

Unmounted the duff share and remounted with AFP. No problems since. Go figure.

September 16

Had a bit of a sicky, still getting over it. Not COVID, according to the test, just my irregularly-scheduled Man 'Flu. I used some of the sleepless hours to demolish Mick Herron's latest and... it's a banger, but I don't like that he's killed someone off that may be a significant character and what is maybe supposed to be the deciding hint to reveal all just seems to further the ambiguity. The "kill characters you think are unkillable" thing has limited value, and I think Herron's gotten away with it by not actually killing the major ones - he tends to focus more on the ones that only showed up a book or so ago, if even that. If he's killed off an actual Slough-House-since-day-one character, that's a bit naff.

Additional fileshare jankiness: not only am I getting phantom desktop mounts, I also notice that if my little DVD-ripping script tries to do its working reading from and writing to the SMB share, like as not it'll have a write failure and error out. No such issue if I drop the writing locally.

September 15

Someone pointed me at Qobuz for music a while back. Just tried it out, and first impressions: losing track of what I'm buying when I go through the registration workflow is a bit of an own goal. Bigger own goal is requiring me to use some cruddy downloader app if I don't want to download individual files; why not just let me pull down a zip file like those nice Public Enemy boys did? Buying at "hi-res" gives FLAC files, which is mildly annoying because iTunes Music doesn't support them, but converting to WAV files is a quick lap through FFmpeg so that's ok. Importing to Music naively gives me a bunch of Unknown Track/Unknown Album with no artwork so I guess I gotta figure out a better plan there, and Music tells me it can't do track lookups if I didn't import from a CD, which is also broken (if you've got the raw CD bits in WAV format, you should have enough info to do a CDDB lookup, or at least that's how I recall CDDB working back when I was interested). I guess I could look at converting to AAC instead and see if that does any better.

September 14

Watched the Irish Women's Rugby Team come so close to beating France, only for things to just not quite fall into place. Alas.

Sequence of events: noticed that Voyager isn't showing up on my scraped-and-processed TV listings thingy; reviewed the available data from my service provider and discovered they don't provide listings for the channel hosting the show; found a site that does; built an addendum to my scraper to incorporate these listings; discovered that one of my other scrapers has been broken for an indeterminate period of time and I didn't notice; noticed that the newly-added scraped doesn't show the episode that's on tomorrow; checked the source and discovered that the site I'm scraping lists Star Trek: TNG on in that timeslot. Oh well, I have at least a somewhat functional thing and I fixed a bug that was hiding stuff from my listings scraper.

DS9: definitely a deeper, grittier Trek. And it's only epiosde three!

September 13

Stale-mount-on-desktop is solved by restarting Finder. Ugh, but OK.

Another nice surprise: The Amateur is rather excellent, even if I did guess a few twists that didn't happen.

September 12

Aaand Foundation S3 wraps up. And, eh. OK, I guess we'll watch S4 when it turns up.

And then a pleasant surprise: The Man from Rome, based on an Arturo Pérez-Reverte novel I read years ago. It's quite a good movie, and it's long enough since I read the book that I couldn't remember most of the plot. Which of course also means I can't tell where it drifts. I do know that they made a point of mentioning that "mass must happen on every Thursday" and then did nothing with it; I seem to recall in the book that that was a minor plot point that did get resolved, and mentioning it in the movie makes it seem like they'd planned on doing something with it, decided not to, and forgot to clean up. Anyway, a bit of fun. Also, amusingly, one of the Vatican Nerds is credited as "Father Geek".

September 11

Chugging through Voyager S2. It's fine.

Got the DVD ripping code cleanup down to an acceptable minimum and promptly broke it. Then the Mac did its thing where it loses contact with the fileserver and instead of, you know, unmounting the filesystem or whatever, it just leaves an unusable icon on the desktop. Thanks, Tim C, I'm sure Steve J would've loved this.

Tried to buy a book from bookshop.org; it didn't look like it failed, but no book, nothing listed on my orders, and my library page continues to display an infinite spinner (I have no books). So used ebooks.com instead which has been reliable. You get one chance to make a first impression and all that.

September 10

Work team launched a thing. Go us!

September 9

We had some painting done in the house today, so it's a bit ... whiffy.

September 8

More DVD ripping code cleanup. It's slightly embarrassing how much dead code there is now that I've cleaned up a bunch of things.

September 7

I figured I'd spend 20 minutes on something. After spending 10 minutes waiting for an IntelliJ update to get its shit together, I decided I had more important things to do, such as "drinking tea" and "cooking".

Stripping out all the corrective stuff in the DVD ripping project aka the stuff I wrote to homogenise the accumulated nonsense from the previous stuff I wrote.

September 6

Sweeney! was kinda fun. A bit silly, a bit late '70s, but kinda fun all the same.

I watched about 15-20 minutes of the Ireland/Hungary match. My main takeaway is that soccer is still a game where pretending to be hurt is a key skill.

September 5

Foundation winding up towards some sort of season finale. At this point I'm watching more out of curiosity as to how the threads wrap up.

We also started in on Star Trek: Deep Space 9. It's obvious from the first episode that this a very different series to those that came before it; it's not obvious how something so heavily dialogue-laden and ... philosophical in the pilot episode was passed by studio execs. I mean, I'm keen to see more, but I found it a bit belaboured around about the fifth time the wormhole entities were expressing their complete ignorance of "linear time". Anyway. I think this'll do for Foundation filler for now, although we may have to binge-watch a bit to free up space on the DVR.

September 4

Updating OpenHAB pursuant to yesterday's observation. One of my TRVs has apparently lost its mind, alas.

Batteries replaced in two Popp TRVs which silently fall off the network, claim still to be present (or maybe that's the controller or controller driver) and need to go through the node replacement process to get them back in operation.

And one TRV fiddled, finagled, and forced until it agreed that it was in fact working.

September 3

The pitch for home automation: "save money! smart home! automate all the things!" The reality: "what's lost its battery / network connection / ability to function now?"

September 2

One of the many problems with having something generate code is trying to understand what the model behind the code is when it doesn't work.

I've added The Journal to my RSS feed. Jury is out so far. They definitely engage in click-baiting headlines, which is not a showstopper for me but definitely an annoyance.

September 1

Voyager S2E1 does indeed feel like it could've been an end-of-show finale if required.

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