Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- August 28
- Hmm. Mountain Lion comes with pgrep but drops whichever
command-line spelling thing makes Emacs' inline spell-check work,
which is annoying. Also whichever emacs version this is is not
quite behaving itself with respect to how it sets up my buffer,
which appears to be due to the disappearance of
filladapt.el from the included libraries. Boo hiss
etc.
- August 26
- Having installed some of my more usual tools, I can now update
this a little more easily. One of the main drivers for the new
machine was Mountain Lion, but also the fact that my old Macbook
increasingly spends its time spinning its fans at high RPM for
reasons that are rarely clear to me. The new machine is (so far)
blissfully silent by comparison - helped, no doubt, by having
twice as much memory to sling things around in.
In an attempt at something approaching housekeeping, I've avoided
wholesale copying my home directory from the old machine. Instead,
I'm copying files as I need them, or connecting things like Music
Match, so that I can at least clean up my environment a little
bit.
One thing I'd hoped to do was transition from separate accounts on
the Mac mini and the laptop to using a single Open Directory
account with kerberos-based single-signon and all that, but there
are two sizeable impediments: "promoting" a local
account to a OD account doesn't appear to be trivially documented
anywhere, suggesting it's difficult or impossible, and renaming an
existing account is equally opaque. There's also the minor
inconvenience that I can no longer figure out how I'm supposed to
create OD accounts at all given that the Server tool
appears to create local accounts only, and the Server Admin tools
for Lion don't work with Mountain Lion.
Anyway, to backfill some of what's going on for the last week and
change: the new Mac showed up on Wednesday 15th, and then lay
mostly untouched as last weekend was the anniversary of Mr. &
Mrs. Waide (two such, in fact - happy anniversary, Patrick &
Angela!) Some movies were also watched:
Mission
Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol: so this was a reboot, eh? I
thought that was where you pretended that none of the previous
movies had happened, threw out most of the cast, and went off in a
completely other direction. This wasn't that. More Tom Cruise,
more stunts with a loose plot tying them together, and I firmly
agree with the guy who said that the lack of an ever-present
villain made for a lesser movie all round because it made the
threat seem more remote. Add to that Simon Pegg's constant joking
and really this was a mediocre attempt at best.
Avengers Assemble: I think
the only thing I didn't like about this was the title. Everything
else was a big pile of fun, loaded with decent dialogue and a
proper story and character development and basically everything
you'd expect from Joss Wheedon. I'm looking forward to seeing more
of this. Oh, and Captain America's "orders" to Hulk
during the endgame completely cracked me up.
We inadvertently had a Keira Knightly weekend chez Waide, with The Duchess and Silk (very popular movie title, the
latter). Neither is what I'd exactly call gripping, and Selene and
I disagreed on which of the two had an actual story to tell. I
can't say I'd recommend either of them, to be honest.
- August 23
- Something of a placeholder entry to note that I got a new
Macbook and have not yet set up all the stuff that I normally use
to keep this site ticking over.
New Mac is shiny.
- August 12
- I switched on two-factor auth for GMail last week, and today had
an "entertaining" round of whack-a-mole between iCal and
Mail to try and figure out which password was saved where. The
nice thing about MacOS is that all accounts are managed centrally
through "Mail, Contacts and Calendars", except where
they aren't, or an app has cached the wrong password, or
something; I wound up deleting all references to Google,
resetting the app-specific password on the Google website, and
recreating them again. Smooth. I know Apple's no longer
best buddies with Google, but this is kinda
ridiculous.
Speaking of Google's account stuff, apparently I've granted access
to both "Google+" and
"com.google.GooglePlus". Again, smooth (perhaps
a descriptive text field might be of assistance?)
- August 11
- The Ghost had a bunch of
excusable mediocrity throughout, but the ending was pretty
terrible, especially the off-camera bit. For the most part you're
left wondering what sort of idiot the main character is, trusting
his life and the secrets he's uncovered to anonymous strangers on
an unknown phone number. If the ending hadn't been so slack, the
rest of it would have been passable fare, but I think the ending
just drags the whole thing down. And this won awards!
- August 7
- Watched the first ten minutes of We need to talk about
Kevin. Gave up. Opted for The Rum Diary instead, which was
sort of like a less crazy versin of Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas (as you might expect). A bit flat, to be honest, but
not terrible.
- August 4
- Saw The Dark Knight Rises in
an actual cinema, specifically the new (well, six months old)
Odeon at the Point Village. The theatre was a little small, but
the seats were lovely and comfortable. The movie was pretty good,
although there was definitely at least one part where I was making
mental "wind it up" gestures, possibly one of the
"Albert reveals depth of love for Bruce" sequences. I
had more or less accidentally avoided seeing any trailers or
pre-movie hype in general, so the surprises came as surprises,
including the cameos and the twists. Of the latter, I think most
of them I figured out a few minutes before they actually showed
up, although the main one I figured out incorrectly midway through
the movie. I did find some of the gravelly voices (both Bane and
Batman) a bit hard to follow at times. And I need to convince
myself that Blake's yelling at the cops on the bridge
isn't a lift/homage to Charlton Heston yelling at the
Statue of Liberty. On the whole, I enjoyed this; it's a bit of a
shame that there were no references to The Joker, albeit
understandable. Oh, and I was a little surprised at the open
ending. Nolan's pretty publicly said he's doing no more Batman, so
now I guess the door is open for someone to come in and turn it
into a farce like the '90s-era movies.
previous month | current month | next month