Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

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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