Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- April 29
- Green Zone is a fairly decent
thriller, as you'd expect from post-Bourne Matt Damon; not a whole
lot else to say about it - there are no surprises in this movie,
except that they apparently didn't have the budget or schedule to
pay for Brendan Gleeson to come back for the finale
reshoots. Worth a look.
- April 26
- It took a bit of effort, but since the Windows version of Arq doesn't seem to support
creating a restricted AWS account by itself, I reverse-engineered
the Mac one and applied that to a Windows backup - and lo, it
appears to have worked. I'll poke at it a bit more and then maybe
post some details here.
- April 24
- While upgrading SSL certs on DSPsrv, I took advantage of the
fact that StartSSL now supports up to 5 subject names per cert, so
one cert serves all purposes. Also turned on opportunistic TLS on
the SMTP server and - for once - made sure that all presented
certs actually validate (complicated by the fact that noone seems
to quite agree on how this should work; exim and dovecot both
support putting the entire cert chain in the cert file, but
disagree over ordering, for example.
- April 21
- Excellent, I've successfully spoofed the top-level folder in the
fake Time Machine backup so that Time Machine displays the range
of backups correctly. It might be that the additional tomfoolery
is only of use to Time Machine itself for thinning out backups (as
best I can tell, they index the oldest and newest snapshots
containing any given file, plus some metadata about
snapshots).
- April 19
- I've been gradually pushing a backup script towards emulating
Time Machine, as previously noted, and while I've finally got what
I think is the correct filesystem layout, Time Machine was still
refusing to consider the result valid. So now I'm looking at file
attributes and it seems like this might be the one piece I'm
missing. Downside: it looks like every file that goes into the
backup gets some attribute tagging; given that I do the backup
using rsync, that means doing a traversal of the backup after the
fact and adding all the attributes. Ouch.
- April 17
- Applied the various OS and software upgrades I'd been avoiding
on the Mac Mini pending the hard drive replacement. All appears to
have gone smoothly.
- April 16
- Had to replace a hard drive in the Mac Mini, and had been
putting off various upgrades pending that, so I finally decided to
do it last night. Trying to figure out which of the two drives to
replace proved to be ... non-trivial; getting the serial number of
the failed drive from the Mac's perspective involved googling,
then matching output of a command to a hunch; then I popped open
the case and discovered that I couldn't find the serial number on
it anywhere. Swapped what I thought was the correct drive,
reassembled everything - because unlike my old PCs, running a Mac
half-assembled isn't something I feel comfortable with, nor am I
sure it'd even work - and reckoned I'd replaced the wrong
drive. While puzzling over this, I looked at the drive I'd
removed, and only then did I find the serial number and,
yes, it was the wrong drive. Reopened the case, swapped things
around again, reassembled, and everything was back in
order.
- April 15
- Another throwback to the 80s: The Witches of
Eastwick, starring Jack Nicholson's eyebrows and a supporting
cast. It's an odd sort of movie, but a bit of fun. Trivia: ILM did
the effects. Clearly the Star Wars money was running
out.
- April 9
- Hendrix showed up on a hotel channel,
so we watched that. It gets slated a lot - it's a TV movie with a
cast of People You Probably Don't Know and sod-all budget - but as
a broad synopsis of Hendrix' life it's not bad.
- April 8
- In Bantry for my birthday weekend. Watched The Living Daylights
because it was on the hotel TV. I think I may have originally seen
this in the cinema. In any case, it's not a bad movie, and I think
Dalton makes a good "Book Bond" - which really, I guess,
wasn't what people wanted at the time, since he only got two
outings before Brosnan took over as a less harsh
Bond.
- April 7
- Got myself an iPhone 6 (yes, the "old" model) as a
birthday present. Also the customary Otterbox to stop me from
smashing it into tiny pieces at the first available opportunity.
Annoyingly, the Amazon Basics lightning cables, of which I have
about eleventy-seven, do not fit the opening on the Otterbox
case.
- April 3
- I've been running Arq
on my Mac for most of the last month, and it's quitely doing an
hourly backup to encrypted S3 files for me. At this stage I've
decided it's sufficiently unobtrusive and reliable that it's worth
paying for. Really cute feature: their storage format is open, so
you can use open-source tools to access it, or fiddle around with
it yourself if you're so inclined.
Ancestry seem to have altered their website recently in such a way
as to break the Back button on Safari; if you use it, all the
javascript-driven stuff on the page (which appears to be
everything, even what should be simple links) stops
working. This would be less laughable if it weren't for the fact
that some pages essentially direct you to use the Back button (or
they have a link that is the javascript equivalent of
same).
- April 1
- The somewhat chest-beating America The Great stuff aside
("we totally don't torture people in our custody"),
Bridge of Spies is a well-made
movie and worth seeing. That is all.
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