Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

April 26

Ok, it's been long enough. Time to pick up the DVD ripping again. First problem: why did I leave so many bits of script lying around with no indication of which were going concerns?

April 24

I had never seen Scent of a Woman, which I am informed was Pacino's only Oscar-winning performance. I'm surprised at this: he has seemed equally qualified for the little gold man in other roles but I guess it depends on who he was up against for the award. Anyway, the movie was a little slow to get going but quite a bit of fun when it did. The inevitable rousing speech / old guy stands up for young guy he pretends to look down on thing happened, of course, and it was kinda lumpy, and overall I felt the movie itself wasn't sure if it wanted to lean into the "stand with your colleagues even if they're dicks" bit or the "it's not wrong to tell the truth, you muppet" bit which meant that the lumpiness extended to that whole scene. The Ferrari bit was funny, though. Overall, not a bad movie, but not exactly great either.

April 22

We've just rolled into Season 7 of Voyager. The scrap with Borgy was interesting but there's so much "how come noone else in the Federation ever tried/managed this?" going on that it gets a bit into improbable territory at times. Which, for a sci-fi show, is a good trick.

April 17

We started watching Outcome but oh boy what a stinker. I have no idea what this movie was aiming for but we gave up on it after 30 minutes or less and that was being generous. Instead, we watched The Gorge, which was all sorts of fun and the horror component never really got that horrific, to be honest.

April 13

Not one but two scrapers appear to have broken over the weekend. I've more or less recovered one but the other needs a bit of work. It'd be so much easier for all concerned if this was just a bunch of static data: I wouldn't need to whang the web server with a repeating stick, and they'd wouldn't have to deal with someone whanging the web server with a repeating stick.

(my view may be biased.)

April 11

Upgraded? Sidegraded? the satellite PVR... put a custom firmware on it that I've been menaing to play with for ages and aside from the usual terrifying moments of "is my firmware update supposed to do nothing for 30 seconds?" it seems to have worked. Now to tinker. time passes.... Ok, that's interesting, but if I want to do anything more than tinker with it I'll likely need a cross-compiler and a complete disregard for anything else I was tinkering with so for now this goes on the back-burner.

I did not quite expect to enjoy Song Sung Blue as much as I did. I am not a Neil Diamnond fan, although like everyone else - even a bar full of bikers - I know a bunch of his music, and I'm not generally a fan of musicals, although musician biopics are a weird species of not-really-musical, and I'm generally in the market for escapism more than I am for gritty drama, but this really pulled me in. Now, I do think it was dragged out unnecessarily, particularly given that once you know Jackman's character has A Medical Issue He's Ignoring, it hangs over the rest of the movie like Damocles' Sword and you can't help but wonder when it's going to drop. I think maybe there should be a screenwriter's school thing that says "not every third-act event needs a first-act setup" or something. Call it "Disarming Checkov"? Anyway. The musical performances, given they were done by Jackman and Hudson, are bloody impressive, and the rest of the male characters seem to have been chosen as much for their quirky look as anything else. I also spent a chunk of the movie not recognising Michael Imperioli and wondering if it was Rick Beato... anyway. Too long, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

April 10

Surprisingly, Straight Outta Compton was not completely full of gratuitous nudity, nines, AKs, and 40s. There are apparently some grumblings about details left out, portrayals, etc. but I have to say they really sold the camaraderie in NWA early on and overall I really enjoyed this. I did think their Dre was too skinny, though.

April 7

Looks like I've managed to get the Postfix thing sorted out. Not 100% clear on which specific thing / things did the trick, but possibly leaving "permit" off the smtpd_sender_restrictions completely, and adding smtpd_relay_restrictions and smtpd_sender_login_maps may be key.

April 6

Hurrah, some new version of OpenHAB has implenented an actions menu for Z-Wave devices that provides access to network tools like "Ping" and "Is Node Dead?" but alas they've prematurely gated them on "can't do this to a battery device" which, my friends, may be true if you follow the specs, but the other tool I have for this has no problem with engaging in such activities.

April 3

We'd planned on watching The Lovely Bones but it turned out to be a purchase, not a rental, so we cast about for something else and landed on Mercy which, if you strip off the AI nonsense was actually a pretty decent whodunnit. I did correctly identify the perpetrator early on, but believed their alibi and the misdirection provided; I very much correctly identified the use for the missing chemical way before the plot got to it, and I wasn't taken in by the misdirection on that. And I mostly identified the motive, although didn't catch a minor Chekov's Gun that would've given me the last bit of the puzzle.

(Checkov's Gun seems not quite the right phrase to use here, but essentially, a piece of information was provided almost in passing that was both more or less irrelevant to the story being told and highly relevant to the ending; the only reason to introduce it was so that the attentive viewer would say, "hang on a sec" at the appropriate moment.)

Anyway. Yes, the panopticon is shitty, the "courtroom" visual effects are cute but stupid, and the premise is somewhat laughable (although you never know these days), but the actual puzzle was fun.

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