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

Found a set of discs where I'd swapped disc 1 and disc 2 of a season while ripping (i.e. ripped disc 1 as disc 2 and vice versa). In the old days this would have been prevented, or caught, or at least minimised by a CDDB lookup. My half-hearted attempts to find a modern equivalent for DVDs that doesn't somehow involve selling a kidney or its weight in PII have failed miserably, so I am reduced to looking at the disc content. Of course, this means I'm rewatching bits of shows I enjoyed enough to buy, so that's not exactly hardship.

It would appear that the promised November 30th end-of-life for the vendor API for my car charger has finally arrived, only a week late. Someone's done a third-party hack that replaces the vendor software with local management software; I'm halfway inclined to set it up, but also cognisant of the fact that I've never really used any of the API - I plug the car in, it charges, the end. I guess I can at least make sure that the charger doesn't sit there for all eternity trying to phone home only to get sucked into a botnet at some point in the future when the vendor lets the domain lapse, or goes out of business, or whatever.

It now occurs to me to wonder if they've remotely disabled the charger's phone-home capability... ok, just tried poking the API with the hacky client I made. It's definitely no longer a going concern.

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

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

Thinking about the DVD Rip project. There are a couple of drivers behind automating something. First, for me, there's the fun of solving the puzzle, "how do I make a computer do this thing for me". This is particularly interesting where there's an implicit or unrecognised human factor - for example, how do I match the tracks on this disc with the episodes listed on something like IMDb. Second, there's the avoidance of tedium: ripping discs is slow, repetitive work and having something do as much as possible of it for you is really useful - particularly if, say, you're tinkering with filesystem layouts, codecs, etc. and need to redo a bunch of already-complete work. And then somewhere out there, for personal projects, is the dim prospect of maybe sharing this with someone else who might find it useful. For the DVD Rip project I think I've convinced myself that that's sufficiently unlikely at this point that beyond the odd snippet here (or the odd patch to FFmpeg!) much of what I'm doing is for me only, and therefore doesn't need to be generic, or clean, or even wholly logically sound. It's also ok to one-off bodge things if the code can't otherwise cope.

For the record I've now got it figuring out which titles on a TV-series disc are likely episodes, then presenting me with a static web page that embeds the ripped title (i.e. the actual video, playable in browser) under review along with a list (from IMDb) of the candidate titles, and I get to tell it which one it is. So, human factor being covered by ... a human.

John Wick: Parabellum was on the box, so we watched it. Neither of us could remember most of it from the last time we watched it, which I think is the nature of the John Wick movies.

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

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/december.html#05

Having a few days off work, which means pottering around my hard drive (and house) for a bit. Epic cleanup of some scraping stuff I use for TV listings means I got to fix a bunch of long-standing bugs. Focusing my attention on the DVD ripper now which I've more or less got into some sort of shape to handle the TV series discs, although in doing so I seem to have screwed up some of the metadata so I'm winding my way back to making that work.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/december.html#05