The state of TV shows these days tsk tsk

I’ve been watching 70s movies lately, and it’s reminded me how much fun it is to watch Cybill Shepherd on the screen. Which eventually led me to wonder… “was Moonlighting any good?” I saw some episodes of that back in the 80s, and I remember it being an amusing if dopey show, but I don’t remember much else.

I looked around for it, and:

Er… OK… so it’s a sought-after item, but not enough to make them re-release it on 4K blu ray or anything.

It’s available for streaming — but not around these parts. So I went all “arr arr” and half an hour later, I had the complete series. It’s apparently so popular that it’s well seeded, too.

So how is it? Well, it’s amusing but dopey, so I remembered correctly, but the most striking thing about it is:

Look at this! This is a short sequence to illustrate how dull her life is. But over 40 seconds, there’s five (or six) complete setups, and each one is perfectly, intentionally lit and blocked well.

(And not only that, she isn’t talking on a phone saying “I’m so bored and I’m so dull” to a friend, because you need that these days to inform the audience what’s happening (they’re on the phone, too).)

Look how great it looks!

Compare this to something modern, that also (I think) has a larger-than-average budget, The Four Seasons. (Chosen at random because it’s also something I watched yesterday.)

Look at that! It’s horrible! Totally flat lighting, because that’s easier to set up, and because that makes it easier to deal with post processing — perhaps they’ll decide to fly in a new background instead of that bar, and if there’s anything but this unsaturated, dim greigeness, that’s much more difficult to do.

(And The Four Seasons is much better than the average TV show — there’s a lot of location shoots and stuff. But still.)

Watching Moonlighting really brings home how visually unpleasant modern TV and movies are visually — and for economic reasons, not for creative reasons.

Another thing we also need to bring back:

Stunts where the long shots feature a stunt person who’s 30% taller and 70% wider than the actress. It adds a certain jennesequa.

Anyway. That’s today’s “tsk tsk kids these days” talk. You’re welcome I’m sure.

Pull the rug on the rye

There’s an amusing word pair in English and Norwegian: English rug is rye in Norwegian… and Norwegian rye is rug in English! *slaps thigh in amusement*

It’s sort of the opposite phenomenon of the “false friend” thing, where the same word has different meanings in different languages. Sort of. If you squint a bit.

Of course, this led me to wonder whether there are other word pairs like this… in any language. And this is impossible to google for, because… what are you gonna google for?

So a couple of years ago I asked ChatGPT, and it, of course, just output complete nonsense:

It’s like… it’s like… Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.

But now the LLMs are all brilliant and stuff! Let’s try ChatGPT again.

That’s indeed much better! It “understands” what the issue is. But of course “plage” isn’t spelled the same as “plague”, so nope. I prodded it some more, and asked it to take its time:

Well, See/meer and meer/zee is pretty close, actually. But no cigar/zeegar, I guess.

And that’s after five minutes of thinking.

What about Claude?

It gave me the see/meer/zee, too, but then it’s back to nonsense like “false friends”, which is the opposite of what I’m looking for.

(And besides, see/meer is less amusing than rug/rye because the two words mean almost the same already — that feels like more of a misunderstanding, like… “you call that cabbage rutabaga?! Well I call that rutabaga a cabbage!”)

OH NOES! I”VE POISONED CLAUDE

I prodded it some more, and it wrote some Python scripts and then ran for fifteen minutes, and nope.

It may be that rug/rye vs. rye/rug is the only pair that exists. I guess I’ll ask an LLM again in a couple of years.

Todo Lists and Procrastination

Two years ago I wrote a super simple todo package for Emacs to see whether I could get over my tendency to 1) procrastinate a lot and 2) being annoyed at my tendency to procrastinate.

Reader, you won’t believe the answer: Yes and no. Or rather, no and yes.

That is, I still procrastinate a lot (but less than before), but I’m way less annoyed about it.

As you can clearly see from the Emacs mode line above, I’ve got 27 “new” things on the todo list, 4 things that are “in progress” and… tada! 616 things that have been done!

It cannot be! That’s about one thing per day! (Although it’s more like no things most days and then eight things on a random day.)

I’ve had a look at other todo systems, but like I said two years ago, they seem to be specifically made to enable further procrastination: You can tinker endlessly with priorities, deadlines and arranging things in hierarchies. So you can spend an hour working on your todo list and then feel you’ve really made some progress. Which is a total lie, of course.

And open sores todo lists encourage further meta-tweaking — altering the todo software itself, so that you can add even more features. I’m proud to say that after starting to use it two years ago, I haven’t touched the anddo code even once! Behold the Microsoft Github repo!

So it’s just a list of tasks, and the ones that are new or in progress are shown. You can edit them and add notes, and you can change status, but that’s it. No dates, no priorities, no nothing. Just do it.

This system has really made me actually take care of a lot of annoyances and stuff, but even more importantly: Instead of looking at the lamp that’s sitting on the hall table every day and going “oh yeah, I should hang that on the wall somewhere; I must remember that”, I just put it on the todo list… and then my brain stops doing that every time I see the lamp on the hall table.

The system works!

(And then I might even hang it on the wall one day when I’m in the mood to do something, and I pull up the todo list… I might.)

I sort of… postpone the procrastination.

Anyway. That’s the life hack.

WWAN Antennas Are Annoying

A couple weeks ago, I got a new Lenovo laptop. When I ordered it (three months ago), Lenovo apparently didn’t have any WWAN (i.e., 5G or 4G cellular cards) in stock, so I couldn’t get one with a card preinstalled. But I got it with the harness (antennas and brackets and stuff) so that I could install it myself “easily”.

I checked the Lenovo parts store, and they now listed two WWAN cards. I got the Quectel EM05-CN, because I know that has solid Linux support now. It’s a 4G card — I could have gotten the 5G card, but apparently the Linux support for that one is pretty iffy. It doesn’t really make that much difference, in my experience…

(Whenever I mention having a laptop with built-in 4G, people without such a thing always defensively say “Oh, I just use a hotspot from my phone”. LIKE AN ANIMAL!?!?)

Last week I got it and:

Remove four screws, and pop the bottom off.

There it is! Four antennas strapped down, and a place to pup the card in. It’s got four antennas — they’re for the 4X4 MIMO thing that 5G uses. 4G uses 2X2 MIMO (sending and receiving simultaneously), so it uses only two antennas.

But here’s the problem. Those WWAN antenna connectors! I hate them! I’ve messed around with them before, but I’ve never gotten the knack of getting the antennas properly connected. I somehow managed to get the orange antenna connected, but as much as I tried, I just couldn’t get the blue one on there.

And… I seem to have messed up the connector by using too much force?

I hate those things! In the end, I destroyed the connector on the blue antenna..

It works, though — Linux detected the card automatically, and I’m getting pretty decent bitrates using the card, so I guess it works with just one antenna, too?

I’m not quite sure whether I should futz around with this any more. I could use one of the two remaining antennas that still have a connector instead of the blue one, but I think I’ve messed up the connector on the card. So I could get a new card? But…

Is there a trick to getting those connectors to er connect without using ALL THE FORCE!?

I don’t even know what those connectors are called… Let’s see… “U.FL”?!

Yeah, that looks right.

Heheh:

Many confusingly-similar looking connectors are called U.FL. The same or compatible connectors can also confusingly have multiple names, coming from different vendors or being transcribed differently.

How to Operate MHF® 4L Mating and Unmating Tool/ Micro RF Coaxial Connector / I-PEX

Oh, there’s a tool?

X.FL series and U.FL series [Connector] - Hirose Electric

Oh, he does it with just a finger. Hm.

How I connect MHF4 RF connections the easy way yes it’s cheating

“Here’s how the pros do it.” OK, that was actually very helpful… he uses a nail to seat it.

Hm… but should I get a new card or should I try to get one of the remaining antennas to use the possibly messed-up card socket? Decisions, decisions.

(I could also do some soldering, but I’d prefer not to. Or… would that change the impedance or something? I kNoW nOtHiNg.)

Is this Youtube Compliance Audit mail phishing or just vibe coded?

I mean, I do not have that many Google projects. Especially not Youtube projects. I have, like, eight?

But the DKIM/SPF on the email are valid, and the link is:

c.gle is the Google-controlled URL lengthener they use to track clicks and stuff, so it all looks legit. Except that they list a couple hundred project numbers.

Amusingly enough, it appears that none of the Cloud Console pages list these “project numbers” — you have to use the “shell”:

And indeed, that’s one of the project numbers listed in the email.

So… whoever generated this email just, er, did something wrong that added a gazillion other projects that have nothing to do with me? No wonder they want to audit me!

I’d also want to audit the person who has project number zero!

So… anybody know what’s going on?