waider

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#19

Where it started:

June 9th, 2005: Interviewed with Amazon today. I wasn't really happy with the interview; I was unprepared for questions such as "describe a project you've been involved in in the last five years that you're really proud of" largely because I've never asked it before, and while I'd like to think I'm a good sysadmin and know at least some of the way around kernel debugging, the interviewer seemed to keep picking things that I had either never heard of or knew very little about. Gah. I keep thinking of things I could've added to my answers to mitigate the bits I didn't know, but that's no good right now.

Where it's at:

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#19

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#17

One more annoyance with getting music from Qobuz: Apple Music recognises it sufficiently well that it's picked up by Music Match, but it then decides I don't actually have the right country/region on my phone to listen to it. Thanks, Apple.

Investigating the extent of this fileshare jankiness, it looks like trying to copy a movie-sized file from my laptop to the fileshare is not possible. Bizarre. Time to go tinker with the Advanced Settings, I guess. This feels like something that should Just Work, does it not?

Because I'm too lazy to do it right, I flipped a bunch of likely-looking things and now it seems it's working better... or not. I feel like I should go back to AFP despite the fact that Apple's been pushing SMB for some years now.

Turned off Cloud Music sync. Did a manual over-the-cable sync instead. "Warning, this will overwrite songs synced by <machine that hasn't been turned on in several years>". This works, obviously, but I lose over-the-air sync. So, per some random guy on the Internet, I'll try turning the Cloud Music sync back on and see if magic occurs. I guess I can always convert the raw bits into an ISO9660 image and feed it in as a CD... but no, magic appears to have occurred!

Unmounted the duff share and remounted with AFP. No problems since. Go figure.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#17

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#15

Someone pointed me at Qobuz for music a while back. Just tried it out, and first impressions: losing track of what I'm buying when I go through the registration workflow is a bit of an own goal. Bigger own goal is requiring me to use some cruddy downloader app if I don't want to download individual files; why not just let me pull down a zip file like those nice Public Enemy boys did? Buying at "hi-res" gives FLAC files, which is mildly annoying because iTunes Music doesn't support them, but converting to WAV files is a quick lap through FFmpeg so that's ok. Importing to Music naively gives me a bunch of Unknown Track/Unknown Album with no artwork so I guess I gotta figure out a better plan there, and Music tells me it can't do track lookups if I didn't import from a CD, which is also broken (if you've got the raw CD bits in WAV format, you should have enough info to do a CDDB lookup, or at least that's how I recall CDDB working back when I was interested). I guess I could look at converting to AAC instead and see if that does any better.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#15

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#13

Stale-mount-on-desktop is solved by restarting Finder. Ugh, but OK.

Another nice surprise: The Amateur is rather excellent, even if I did guess a few twists that didn't happen.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#13

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#11

Chugging through Voyager S2. It's fine.

Got the DVD ripping code cleanup down to an acceptable minimum and promptly broke it. Then the Mac did its thing where it loses contact with the fileserver and instead of, you know, unmounting the filesystem or whatever, it just leaves an unusable icon on the desktop. Thanks, Tim C, I'm sure Steve J would've loved this.

Tried to buy a book from bookshop.org; it didn't look like it failed, but no book, nothing listed on my orders, and my library page continues to display an infinite spinner (I have no books). So used ebooks.com instead which has been reliable. You get one chance to make a first impression and all that.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#11

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#09

We had some painting done in the house today, so it's a bit ... whiffy.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#09

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#07

I figured I'd spend 20 minutes on something. After spending 10 minutes waiting for an IntelliJ update to get its shit together, I decided I had more important things to do, such as "drinking tea" and "cooking".

Stripping out all the corrective stuff in the DVD ripping project aka the stuff I wrote to homogenise the accumulated nonsense from the previous stuff I wrote.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#07