Plurrrr

I was recently browsing through an old archive of holiday photos (from dired of course). I wanted to know where the photo was taken, which got me interested in extracting Exif metadata.

Luckily the exiftool command line utility does the heavy lifting when it comes to extracting metadata. Since I want it quickly accessible from Emacs (in either dired or current buffer), a tiny elisp snippet would give me just that (via dwim-shell-command).

Since I only run Windows occasionally (mainly for MS-Office or MATLAB) and all of my machines either run NetBSD, Slackware or Tribblix, it makes sense for me to opt for NFS as a distributed file system protocol to share files from my server over the local network.

Today we're back with a new problem walkthrough, this time from Day 16 of last year's Advent of Code. In some sense, the parsing section for this problem is very easy - there's not much data to read from the file. In another sense, it's actually rather hard! This problem is about parsing a binary format, similar in some sense to how network packets work. It's a good exercise in handling a few different kinds of recursive cases.

After a remote diamond mine collapses in far northern Canada, a 'big-rig' ice road driver must lead an impossible rescue mission over a frozen lake to save the trapped miners.