Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- March 24
- So we watched Mockingjay:
Part 2. Aaaaand, well, yeah. It honestly felt like a walk
through the expected beats from the book, and there was yet more
of that "Great Heroine to Disintegrating Teenager" rapid
transition stuff that I didn't much take to in Part 1 (I dunno,
perhaps this is an intentional point that I'm missing because of
my lack of overlap with the target audience in several
dimensions). It's not in any real sense a bad movie, and perhaps
one of the dimensions I don't fit is that I've read the books - I
imagine if you hadn't, there'd be a lot more surprises and
interest in this movie for you. All that aside, though, it really
felt flabby - this could easily have been rolled into
Part 1 and the whole mess trimmed down to a single feature-length
movie without losing any significant plot points.
- March 23
- Upgrading to iOS 9.3 was a barrel of laughs for my increasingly
creaky iPad (it's a second-gen model): I wound up having to do a
full wipe and restore before it'd get past the Active Your iPad
screen. Annoying, given that the iPhone upgrade went without a
hitch. Also annoying is that several of the new features (the
nighttime colours mode, and the entire News app) are Not Available
To Me.
- March 20
- Not necessarily new, but recently-identified annoying UPC/Virgin
Media broadband behaviour: router stops giving out DHCP
addresses. This manifests as various things on the network
claiming they can't get internet access, and specifically for
mobile devices, falling back to GSM access. Pfft.
Other recently discovered weirdness: directory trees including a
directory named "Backups.backupdb" (or perhaps just ones
ending in backupdb?) appear to get special treatment from the OS X
kernel, specifically that you can't go mucking around with those
trees in certain ways - setting file times, renaming files, or
deleting files. This is without doing anything wacky like setting
ACLs or BSD flags or what have you. Rename the Backups.backupdb
component to something else and presto, protected behaviour
stops. I discovered this while trying to make my "pretend
you're Time Machine" Linux backup script emulate Time Machine
closely enough to allow me to open a backup thus created with Time
Machine, something I've not yet confirmed is possible.
Some googling of the above leads me to the Time Machine Safety
Net, a kernel extension which basically steps in over all your
permissions and overrides them. And it comes with a bypass command
to allow you to go back to whatever abusive thing you were
doing. Nice.
waider$ /System/Library/Extensions/TMSafetyNet.kext/Contents/Helpers/bypass
bypass <cmd>
<arg1>...<argN>
- March 15
- 9:07 this morning:
Drobo disk pack has completed rebuilding your data.
Hurrah!
- March 12
- Had a work colleague and his wife over for dinner.
- March 11
- Drobo is still, four days later, doing its drive juggling. It
emails me every so often to remind me.
- March 7
- Irreglarly-scheduled man flu in progress. Bleh.
My Drobo had one of its 2TB drives go clunk (that idea is still
scary, even if the 2TB is multiply redundant) so I had a
replacement shipped, and fitted it today. The first fitting was
slightly impeded by the presence of a dustball which prevented the
contacts from, er, making contact. Once I got that sorted it
started remirroring all the data, so I now I get to wait for it to
stop doing that.
- March 4
- The Martian was pretty much as good
as I'd been told, although having read the book it's hard not to
wonder why they opted for cutting this sequence instead of
that sequence, and so forth. I felt like there was a
missing bridge between "I need to double the battery life of
the Rover" and "I'm doing a multi-day trip in the
Rover", but I think that was the only bit where someone not
familiar with the book might have a brief headscratch (or, I
dunno, completely ignore it). The dialogue was also a bit oddly
and obviously cut to gain a lower certificate, which was mildly
annoying. Still, watch this, it's great.
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