Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

May 31

Went to Howth and had a mediocre brunch at a too-hip, too-expensive spot on the main street. Feh.

Since we'd watched some old Jack Ryan previously, we opted for The Sum of All Fears this evening. For a Belfast lad, Ciarán Hinds makes a pretty convincing Russian... this was again a lot of fun, but not too much for the deep thought. Like, Our Hero Jack the smart analyst commandeers a pickup truck (from a guy who just stands there and lets him take it) and goes driving around a locale that's both on fire and radioactively hot with no ill efects for the purpose of getting to a shipping warehouse which the local police are evidently plenty capable of getting to, in force, by themselves. Well done, Jack. Anyway, it's a good yarn for all that, and even though you pretty much know how it will work out they do a good job of cranking up the tension at the end.

May 29

Patriot Games! We were remarking on the almost complete lack of Irish actors playing the parts of, well, Irish people leaving us to the tender mercies of various attempts at the accents, and it turns out a bunch of 'em turned down the casting calls because of the portrayal of The Troubles in the story. I mean, ok, but also it's fairly tangentially about that and more about a personal vendetta, and there's an awful lot of close-enough-to-the-truth in it. But sure what do I know etc. etc. This is a movie of its time and you can see the plot coming a mile away but for all that we enjoyed it.

The power meter that the car charger uses to measure the house's total current draw got knocked out of alignment somehow when our regular meter was replaced with a smart meter. And at some point I had picked up an Aeotec z-wave mains meter. So I figured I'd install the Aeotec this weekend and see how far out of alignment the car charger was, so I could compensate somehow. The results of about an hour of swearing and fiddling around in the cupboard where the meter is stashed:

• I now have a much greater understanding of why the installer spent two hours on a replacement that was supposed to take 45 minutes, and why that installation was accompanied by swearing in an accent that was a truly comical mix of Northside Dublin and Welsh. Due to the way the mains feed comes into the house and where the meter is fitted, the installer had to fit a pair of 64-amp-capable whips running in a "long S" shape from the top of the main fuse into the bottom of the meter, and then secure them in place sufficient that they wouldn't spring loose either from their own basic desire to not be bent into an S or from the incautious attentions of someone doing other electrical work in the space. It's really one of those "I wouldn't start from here" jobs, but he got it done.
• I am puzzled by the Aeotec unit. Nominally it works: it's able to get both a voltage and a power (Watts) reading, but somehow cannot deliver amps, which is the value I was interested in. I can certainly compute this, but the damned thing is supposed to do it itself and even has an output channel for it (actually three channels, for handwaving reasons) which remains steadfastly at NULL.
• I found where the car charger's induction clamp was, having never previously seen it because it's right at the bottom of a cupboard that you really need to stand on a ladder to see inside of. Having found where it was, I removed it, studied it, figured it was installed back-to-front, possibly on the wrong wire, and without properly closing the loop. Once I'd addressed all of this, it worked perfectly - no compensating required.

May 24

DVDRipper: finally got around to saving a very wasteful and expensive computation that I was doing over and over again because I'm LAZY when it comes to personal hacks and tend to stop at "it works; isn't that enough?"

May 23

Got a standing desk for the home office, which meant given I was going to have to haul out a bunch of wiring and hardware anyway I finally moved all the things over to the UPS I've had sitting around doing nothing for the last several months. I even hooked it up to the NAS so the NAS will know when the power goes out. Nice.

May 22

Jack Ryan: Ghost Wars was a good, solid thriller with pretty much zero waste and a nice "we made a mess, now we will have to clean it up" protaganist instead - as I recently read about one of last year's nostalgia-fest blockbusters - of cheerleading the current warmongering admin in $country. Also I love Mike Kelly's character.

May 18

Well, so much for the Airport idea. It did the thing it used do when it was my primary gateway: somehow contrived to disrupt the powerline network, taking both itself and everything hanging off that particular plug offline. I've plugged it into the back of one of the eeros to see if it'll be any better behaved.

May 17

DVD ripping: currently working my way through the titles - slowly, and in one of the more stupid ways I could do so - checking runtimes against expected runtimes. I'm sure I could kill this project entirely by tossing the whole thing into Plex, but where's the fun in that?

May 16

I don't know how you characterise a movie like That They May Face The Rising Sun; there's no story arc, per se, it's more like a series of vignettes that are, as far as I understand it, loosely autobiographical (it's based on a book of the same name by John McGahern and seems to have more than a little of himself in it) and set in some goregous scenery out Connemara way. There are scenes in the movie that are litterally slow pans or even long shots of the countryside, sometimes with cast included, sometimes not. And yet it's strangely compelling for all that. I started watching it with half an eye on my laptop but after an hour the laptop was asleep and I was fully focused on the lack of happenings.

May 15

The Murder in Angel Lane was a nice little murder mystery set sort of roughly in Jack The Ripper's London (he doesn't get a mention, but Leman Street police station does) and while we'd guessed some of the plot as it went along we didn't see the betrayal coming. Pacing isn't hectic but it didn't need to be.

May 12

We have a Roberts "internet radio" here that's proven deeply unhappy with mesh networking for some reason and periodically decides that no network is good enough for it. I have just now dug out the old Airport to see if it'll be happy with that. Problem being, of course, that it can go for weeks at a stretch without a problem before deciding that nah, Wi-Fi isn't worth it.

May 8

Crime 101 was a fairly straightforward movie that didn't try to be anything more than what it was, and worked well because of that. As noted by Mrs. Waider, we were coming right up to the inevitable denoument without really being sure of how things would play out, other than that snotty motorbike kid would get some form of comeuppance. Good stuff, would happily watch again.

May 6

Ugh, that was unpleasant: internet offline at 2pm, not back online until almost 9. Best guess at what happened: router firmware update deployet at 2pm causing an outage, and our normal diagnostic of checking the obvious (does the TV-which-shares-the-cable work? what are the modem lights doing? etc.) concluded with power-cycling the router which may have broken the firmware update irrecoverably. A factory reset after dinner, and reconfiguration to put things back the way they were (more or less) and then an inexplicable wait and all was restored.

May 4

Having words with the ZWave network, as is traditional. I did finally get the battery-powered device which has been running successfuly for months on, it claims, a 0%-charged battery to finally admit that the battery was in fact fully charged.

May 1

DVD project: right, we're back on track. I had apparently gotten to the point of wanting to match the discs to IMDb, and decided I'd implement my own IMDb API using the data they publish for download (why? because.) and that's allowing me to validate that I've ripped a movie/episode to within 10% of its IMDb-posted runtime, which is one more mechanism I'm using to verify that the rips are valid. I dunno, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Anyway, it's already identified one dud, so I guess it turns out to be worth the effort.

The International was a pretty solid thriller, although the ending was rather abrupt and the newspaper articles over the credits were kinda reinforcing Wexler's conversation with Salinger which was a bit of a buzzkill, but anyway. Between the two of us we managed to call a few of the, ah, shots before they were reveealed.

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