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| Greg's diary |
| February 2023 |
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| Wednesday, 1 February 2023 | Dereel | |
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A third of a century of FreeBSD?
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Topic: technology, history, general, opinion | Link here |
It looks as if I'm going to write an article for the FreeBSD Journal about the Early Days. And by way of encouragement, they want the article by 15 February.
I've been using BSD since 19 March 1992, but that was BSD/386, a commercial sibling. It wasn't until the following year (19 June 1993, it seems) that FreeBSD was born (or forked, or whatever). From the calendar.freebsd file:
06/19 Charlie Root <root@FreeBSD.org> born in Portland, Oregon, United States, 1993
The original suggestion was that I should write about the issues relating to writing “The Complete FreeBSD”, in the assumption that it would have been particulary difficult in those far-off days. Yes, it wasn't easy—writing a book never is—but the issues weren't related to the technology of the time, though I did have issues with the time it took to format the book.
The real issues are elsewhere: how to write what people want to hear, how to structure it logically. And that was quite a problem, with the result that I changed the structure of the book from one edition to the next. I submitted the fourth edition for publication almost exactly 20 years ago, and it had taken me well over a year and a number of missed deadlines. Things would be no different today.
In fact, if anything, they're worse this time: explaining how to install or use software is fairly well defined. But what historical events are of interest to the readers? I decided that the history of the book was uninteresting and started writing something about my experiences. And of course I was immediately unhappy with it. This article will be mainly thinking and only a little writing.
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Keeping distress asleep
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It seems that my attempts to get distress (Microsoft “Windows” 10 box) to stay hibernated were not successful: it keeps waking up, and I can't tell it not to. But there's another possibility: get it to sleep, like I do with dischord (“Windows” 7). That only goes via a secret menu, but it seems to work.
Only: it still keeps waking up, apparently every 30 minutes. I had found a way to disable the timers, via a link “change settings that are currently unavailable”. But it didn't seem to work.
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The rider or the horse?
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Topic: general, animals, opinion | Link here |
Do what I may, Yvonne is dead set on riding again. I hope the “dead” is only figurative. She seems to think that if the horse is calm, there will be no problem. But it's not the horse that's the issue: it's the rider, and she's fragile. She could seriously injure herself just trying to mount the horse, even if it didn't move at all. Five years ago the accident was understandable: the horse stumbled (hurting herself as well), and Yvonne was thrown onto a rocky path. The result was ugly:
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But the next time was very different. It was in the arena, she was wrapped in cotton wool, and the horse just bucked. And despite that she was more seriously injured than the first time:
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In principle that's the kind of fall that every rider has at some time or another. Even without any protection, most people just get up and get back on the horse. What's going to happen next time? Death or “just” paralysis?
| Thursday, 2 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 2 February 2023 |
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No lawn mowing
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Paul Donaghy along today to mow the lawn. He didn't.
Before starting the mower, he always looks underneath. What he saw surprised him. One of the pulleys guiding the drive belt had been displaced, and a tie bar for the front axle had been dislodged:
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How did that happen? Paul is fairly sure that he can get it repaired at the Men's shed on Saturday, but for today it was back to looking at the sprinkler system. He found a number of leaks, but not the connectors required to repair them. I'll have to go and buy some more. Dammit!
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“Asian” food again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Various older dishes for dinner today: ikan goreng and spiced green beans. It's been a while since I cooked them, and I had minor tweaks to the beans. Also took a couple of photos.
And the taste? Fish was OK, but the (required) snake beans were too tough, maybe because they had been frozen for so long. But next time I'll take normal green beans.
| Friday, 3 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 3 February 2023 |
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hydra fail
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Into the office this morning, and pressed on a keyboard to wake my sleeping Xs. hydra didn't respond. Yes, the system was still up, but the display wasn't. A quick check showed that X was no longer running. Did I accidentally close the window from which I started it? No, /var/log/Xorg.log showed:
[761020.873] (II) NVIDIA(0): ACPI: received event: !system=CAM subsystem=periph type=error
[761020.873] (II) NVIDIA(0): device=cd0 serial="3C7126908574" cam_status="0x4cc"
[761020.873] (II) NVIDIA(0): scsi_status=2 scsi_sense="70 02 3a 01" CDB="00 00 00 00 00
[761020.873] (II) NVIDIA(0): 00 "
[761023.396] (II) NVIDIA(0): The NVIDIA X driver has encountered an error; attempting to
[761023.396] (II) NVIDIA(0): recover...
[761026.406] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Failed to initialize DMA.
[761026.406] (EE) *** Aborting ***
[761026.406] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Error recovery failed.
[761026.406] (EE) NVIDIA(0): *** Aborting ***
[761026.406] (EE)
Fatal server error:
[761026.406] (EE) Failed to recover from error!
And a restart didn't seem to help:
Fatal server error:
(EE) NVIDIA: A GPU exception occurred during X server initialization(EE)
(EE)
Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support
at http://wiki.x.org
for help.
(EE)
(EE) Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file.
What's that? Looks like hardware. But a second start attempt worked, and it continued to stay up. But maybe another indication that this isn't the best hardware platform.
In passing, that ACPI message is unrelated, but it repeats every 3 seconds. Another thing that I would have to address if I were to keep this system.
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Breakfast fail
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
More bibimbap for breakfast today, mainly to use up leftovers. One of them was rice. I keep the rice frozen in plastic containers, but this time I needed to add to it. Put in a bigger container?
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I suppose that makes sense, and it would have worked, except that there was too much rice, so there wasn't any need. All it meant was that I could no longer create a clean mound on the plate:
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While I was at it: I fry an egg to put on top of the rice, but the pan I normally use was dirty. OK, how about those silicone rings that we once tried? Can I get them to work better?
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No. The total result was less than attractive, though of course it tasted just the same:
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X fonts revisited
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I really need to do something about the X fonts on hydra. I seem to have Cyrillic fonts, but not east Asian ones. OK, what do we have in the Ports Collection? Lots of stuff, of course, x11-fonts/xorg-fonts seems to be the one I want:
This meta-package installs all X.Org fonts and related programs.
But it lies. The Makefile says:
RUN_DEPENDS= xorg-fonts-100dpi>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-100dpi \
xorg-fonts-75dpi>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-75dpi \
xorg-fonts-cyrillic>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-cyrillic \
xorg-fonts-miscbitmaps>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-miscbitmaps \
xorg-fonts-truetype>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-truetype \
xorg-fonts-type1>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-type1 \
font-alias>0:x11-fonts/font-alias
And they're already installed. But they don't include any Asian fonts except Arabic and Hebrew. In particular, from my point of view, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Devanagari are missing, and even fonts like Urdu have missing characters. Clearly the correct thing to do is to install all the fonts, and not just the ones that the port maintainer thought of.
But which? x11-fonts/intlfonts looks like a good choice. Amongst others, pkg-plist lists:
Asian -- Asian (non-CJK) fonts
Chinese -- Chinese normal size fonts excluding what distributed with X
Japanese -- Japanese normal size fonts excluding what distributed with X
Ethiopic -- Ethiopic fonts
What does CJK mean? Chinese, Japanese, Korean? Let's try. Install, all of 9 MB. According to one page I saw, I don't need to restart X, just the browser.
Nothing. OK, what's the difference between the X configuration files on eureka (where it works) and hydra? 10 FontPath entries on eureka, none on hydra. That's a clear difference.
But does it make any difference? The FontPaths on eureka are all the standard ones. It's very possible that modern versions of X look there by default; otherwise hydra would have no fonts at all.
So: without shooting down my “desktop”, the second approach is to start a second X server on hydra and see if that picks up the new fonts.
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Old Unix sources
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
In the Good Old Days (last millennium), access to Unix wasn't easy. My first installation of Interactive Unix System V/386 came on floppies and cost an arm and a leg. Various people spirited away copies of Unix sources, notably Sun, for their own personal use.
Times have changed. VETUSWARE claims to be “the biggest free abandonware downloads collection in the universe”. And certainly their Unix collection is impressive. It includes both Interactive Unix and SunOS, the latter in source. I wonder what the copyright status is, or if anybody still cares.
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Google knows where you are!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Found on a web page today:
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That's right! And it's the first time ever. I've had claims of being all over Australia, or in Europe or the USA. And the IP address hasn't changed. What has?
| Saturday, 4 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 4 February 2023 |
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More Hugin strangenesses
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Last week I had a strange problem with my house photos: the photo east of the house had strange artefacts. But I removed the image before I could save it, and I wasn't able to reproduce it.
Never mind, a week has gone by, and I've taken the next round of photos. And the same problem happened again! This time I kept the image:
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It's not quite the same: this time the artefacts are sharper. But they happen on the same image in the same place:
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The disturbance at bottom left is the panorama bracket, but that's in every image in all of the panoramas, so its presence here is part of the issue.
This has only happened since I started using a newer version of Hugin (on hydra, but that's unlikely to be the issue). I'll have to think through what causes it, this time without erasing the evidence.
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Repairing the lawn mower
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Topic: gardening, animals | Link here |
Lots of activity today: Jesse Walsh came along to complete the fence to the west of the arena shed:
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Samantha Gale came along with Odin, her Frisian gelding, to try out a saddle, and Paul Donaghy came to pick up the lawn mower. Clearly something was very wrong with it, as the traces in the driveway show:
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This also gave me an opportunity to get photos from the other side of the mower, which show how the mounting bolts have been torn out of the bell housing:
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Chicken mince: ugh!
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Topic: animals, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
During the night I had heard Piccola vomiting. She hasn't done that for a while, and it coincided with a new feed of the chicken mince that we gave her a few weeks ago. She hadn't liked it at the time, so we gave her beef instead. Clearly she's making her point known, vomiting all over the top and door of the outside freezer:
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Alibi environmental friendliness
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
How do I hate Woolworths? Let me count the ways.
No, don't bother, I've done so already at length. But another issue that continually annoys me is their packaging. This package of “sizzling steaks” contains a firm single-use plastic tray that doubles as a way to annoy consumers trying to access the contents:
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But today I discovered this at one corner:
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What chutzpah! Later I followed the suggestion, requiring me to invert the label:
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The QR code simply redirects to Woolworth's home page. The real instructions are:
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Rinse the foil and label and return to store? I should really do that. If enough people do, they might even do something sensible.
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Der Landarzt!
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Topic: multimedia, opinion | Link here |
When we lived in Germany, we watched a TV series called „Der Landarzt“. Yvonne in particular misses it, but so far all my searches have only come up with some surprisingly expensive DVDs.
But overnight all that has changed. ZDF has released round 90 episodes! Now I have a different problem: how do I download them? Yes, I can click on MediathekView until the cows come home. How about youtube-dl? Yes!
Oh. It scrapes the web page and finds 36 episodes. But there are something like 90. Where are the rest? The web page uses this stupid “slide left to see the rest” representation that brain-damaged web designers currently so love, and youtube-dl only finds the ones that are currently displayed. So there's a lot of work just finding the bloody things.
| Sunday, 5 February 2023 | Dereel → Mount Mercer → Dereel | Images for 5 February 2023 |
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5 years uptime!
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Since my Tandem days I've been fascinated by “keeping it up”: rebooting is a no-no. And nearly 10 years ago, with a bit of cheating, I managed to approach the 5 years uptime mark. But then the system hosting w3.lemis.com failed, and there was no sensible recovery—after 4 years, 11½ months!
New provider, new system. I didn't even mention it 5 years ago when I set up ffm.lemis.com. But it's been there ever since, and today I finally saw:
=== grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 21 -> date; uptime
Sat Feb 4 22:15:44 UTC 2023
10:15PM up 1826 days, 7:18, 2 users, load averages: 0.76, 0.59, 0.51
That was 9:15 this morning. When exactly did I boot it? Most of the log files have gone to the bit bucket in the sky, but I have:
=== grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 23 -> l -T /var/run/dmesg.boot
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 5698 Feb 4 14:57:42 2018 /var/run/dmesg.boot
That's close enough, I suppose. On for the next 5 years!
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Della and Victoria marry
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Topic: general, photography, opinion | Link here |
Off to a place in the middle of nowhere between Dereel and Mount Mercer this afternoon to witness the marriage of Della Buttigieg and Victoria Coulton. Certainly an interesting wedding; it was conducted not by the celebrant (who was only there for legal reasons) but by their long-time friend Kylie:
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Somebody brought a horse (Stock horse cross) along for reasons that we didn't find out:
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Many photos, of course, but first I need to sort them.
| Monday, 6 February 2023 | Dereel → Delacombe → Dereel | Images for 6 February 2023 |
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Another hydra crash
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the issues I have with my current hybrid setup with hydra and eureka is that I no longer have a 4 monitor display for processing panoramas. The closest I come are the two monitors on hydra, so today I processed two that I took yesterday.
While I was watching it, small “worms” appeared over both monitors, and the display froze. Shortly after, X crashed. There's not very much information in the Xorg.0.log, but it's the same as before:
[1031521.666] (II) NVIDIA(0): The NVIDIA X driver has encountered an error; attempting to
[1031521.666] (II) NVIDIA(0): recover...
[1031524.676] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Failed to initialize DMA.
This time I wasn't able to restart the server. Powered down the machine, rebooted, and all was well again—for how long? My guess is that it's a thermal issue, but the bottom line is that it's not worth worrying about. Time to finally build a new machine.
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Shopping in Delacombe
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Off to Ballarat Delacombe today to pick up the irrigation fittings I needed.
Why?, I thought as I was on my way. Yvonne will be in town in a couple of days, and it's a long way just for that. But the devil is in the detail.
First, I've already established that Google Maps is particular weak in this area, and it hasn't improved. The maps show the current businesses, and they claim that the imagery is from 2023, but they lie:
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Bunnings (on the right in the middle of the building site) has been open for at least two years, so the images must be at least 3 years old. And it wanted to take me to a parking space that is probably no longer accessible, and to which I need to go the last 100 m on foot:
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Even the route there is still wrong. As I noted 6½ years ago, instead of taking the obvous way down Bowes Road, it took me via the parallel (and further) Tom Jones Road. They fixed that, but now it's reverted:
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At Bunnings, it took me forever to find my bits and pieces. I wouldn't want to do that to Yvonne. And the “self-service checkout” was closed: too few customers, they say. It seems that the checkout is there for the convenience of the personnel, not the customers.
I also needed some more engine oil. I had established that they don't have that at Bunnings, but clearly they do at Autobarn on the other side of the parking spaces. Came in: save 5 l packs of Valvoline XLD for $44. Surely I can get a no-name oil for less than that. Yes, for members only $18.99! Still not cheap.
Round to the lubricants section. Yes, lots of oils with varying prices, up to about $60 for 5 l. Grabbed the cheapest—only about $1 cheaper than the Valvoline—and to the checkout. How much is membership? Free! OK, I'll take 2.
Well, there's a catch, of course: they want my email address. OK, I can make one of them for them. And a mobile phone number. Sorry, you'll have to take my “landline” number. But no, their system didn't want to know. Must be mobile. But why? Still, they didn't really need it—only to contact me if I order something. But it's one more indication that people think that mobile phones are central to people's life.
| Tuesday, 7 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 7 February 2023 |
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Another hydra crash!
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Into the office this morning to discover that X on hydra crashed again, apparently just as I pressed a key on the keyboard to wake the server. Again the same error message, DMA issues. The problem seems to be accelerating, and maybe it's not due to overheating after all.
Damn. I really don't want to have my hand forced in choosing a new machine, but clearly I need to do something quickly. Maybe the interim solution is the other machine that I inherited from Bruce Evans, the one he called zetaplex. It's slower, but bearable.
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KL Hokkien Mee again
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
My recipe for KL Hokkien Mee is gradually stable, but I'm still playing with details. The most irritating part of the dish is frying the squid rings at high temperature, causing much smoke. If I fry them any less, they become tough.
But how about cooking them (and the prawns) in a microwave oven? That's what I did today, and they were OK. Many uninteresting photos. But I'm left with the feeling that the high temperature cooking is better.
| Wednesday, 8 February 2023 | Dereel | |
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More hydra failures
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Into the office this morning to discover that X on hydra had failed once again. Things seem to be getting worse all the time. Once again I was able to restart it, but things can't go on like this. Time to get a new machine built.
Long discussion on IRC. Why do I want to have the machine assembled rather than do it myself, like I have done with almost every other machine in the last 46 years? Laziness mainly, but also a question of compatibility.
But with more consideration, there's not that much to consider. I have:
So the whole thing revolves around the displays. All of them have DVI inputs. Three of them also have D-Sub inputs, and two HDMI. But modern display cards don't use DVI any more; instead there's DisplayPort. I can get adapters for a surprisingly high price (here for $99, here for $55). But they offer different maximum resolutions. Both are in the range I need, but the fact that there is a maximum resolution is an issue. And this kind of disclaimer also worries me:
PASSIVE adapter is NOT compatible with nVidia Surround and AMD Eyefinity multidisplay modes
The alternative, of course, is to use older cards. I'm currently using GeForce 7xx cards, but they're no longer supported by the current driver.
Oh yes they are, says Juha Kupiainen. Well, maybe. It seems that the current driver supports the GeForce 750 and 745 chip sets. So maybe an approach would be to buy a couple of those cards.
Later it occurred to me: use one of these customization web sites to configure the machine, then buy the components and build it myself. It looks like I could save a lot of money like that, and I'd also have more flexibility.
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Google Maps tracking
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Wednesday is shopping day for Yvonne, and I follow her progress with Google Maps location sharing. But things don't always work the way I expect. In particular, on her way home she stops off at Chris Bahlo's, but Google Maps doesn't want to know when she leaves: it doesn't update her location until she gets home. It has done this consistently for the last 3 weeks.
Today was different: Yvonne was at ALDI in Alfredton, and from then on her location didn't get updated for over an hour.
Why not? Arguably it could be a data link issue. No mobile phone credit left? No, after fighting my way through a particularly reticent ALDIMobile web site, I discovered she had plenty.
Routing issues? Somehow stuck on “Wi-Fi”? Called her up and got her to disable “Wi-Fi”. That was it! Suddenly she showed up where she was.
So why should a lack of “Wi-Fi” connectivity break mobile phone connectivity? Clearly the people who designed these things have forgotten the whole point of internetworking. I'll have to investigate further. Maybe it was trying to authenticate, and got stuck with an (undisplayed) prompt, as this popup suggests:
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New bathroom scales
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne suspects that there's something wrong with her bathroom scales. OK, not an issue: they're on special at ALDI, so she can buy one and compare the results.
Brought it home and discovered a little Bluetooth emblem. Oh. Clearly not the same as the old one. RTFM time. Download the Dr.Weight app from the toyshop, create an account, and follow the instructions.
Did that, marvelling at the particularly poor reviews the app got, and tried to access the scales. Though I had paired, I couldn't find any way to get it to do anything useful. You'd think that at the very least it would display weights, but no.
What's wrong with this picture? Why do I need an app? It seems that people reinvent basic functionality for every single device. This looks like the kind of function that would work just as well as a web page. The approach is so clumsy as to be almost useless. It reminds me of the “Inkbird” that I bought last year. The device looked quite good, but it was made useless by the useless app, the only way I could access it. At least with these scales I can just ignore the app, but why do people do these things? And the requirement to have an account is just bizarre.
| Thursday, 9 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 9 February 2023 |
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Goodbye, hydra
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Into the office this morning, and, almost as expected, X was dead. Restart? Yes, this time without rebooting. But there was a difference: these repeating messages in /var/log/messages:
Feb 9 08:47:06 hydra kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:0f:00): 69, Illegal Class Error: ChID 0001, Class 0000503f, Offset 00000100, Data 8d8d0a00
Feb 9 08:47:06 hydra kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:0f:00): 12, COCOD 00000001 e0012d00 0000502d 00000100 8d8d0a00
Feb 9 08:47:06 hydra syslogd: last message repeated 1 times
Feb 9 08:47:06 hydra kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:0f:00): 6, PE0001
They repeated at regular intervals, probably corresponding to flickering on the X displays. And the first one appears to have happened when I pressed the ANY key on hydra's keyboard.
So, I have four possibilities:
Clearly there are multiple answers. But within an hour, option 1 disappeared: X crashed again. A daily restart is bad enough, but an hourly restart is unacceptable. So I powered hydra down, maybe for the last time, and reverted to eureka X server 0. Potentially hydra would be good as a headless Microsoft machine for forcing DxO PhotoLab to run a little faster, assuming that I could hibernate it easily when it's not needed.
For the time being, I'm back to option 3, though that can't last, mainly because of the out-of-date web browsers. Installing on zetaplex (a system that I won't use for long, and thus can't be bothered to rename) is a good idea from the point of view of testing my installation system. But that means that I first need to tidy up the installation.
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More irrigation fun
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Paul Donaghy along today to mow the lawn and work on the dripper system. He had been due on Tuesday, but then Julie had fun with a borrowed horse float that nearly lost its axle, which kept Paul busy for a while.
I'm beginning to hate irrigation systems! I suspect Paul is too. He got some work done, but there's plenty more to do, and it seems that circuit 1 has developed another leak near the solenoid. By the time he's done it'll be autumn.
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Network outage!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne in this afternoon: “Are we off the net?”. In general the answer is ”no”, but this time she was right, and she found out before I did. The NTD showed a normal status, so for once it must have been Aussie Broadband. OK, wait a few minutes. No improvement. tcpdump showed lots of ARP messages going out, and no reply.
Dammit, I'm going to have to use this horrible mobile phone app to see if they knew about it. The password isn't designed for mobile phones, something like Why d0 you torment me so merc1lessly?. How do you enter that on a mobile phone? Slowly. No, glacially slowly, because you have to watch each individual character before it turns into a blob. After the third attempt I gave up and entered “forgot my password”. No worries. We have sent you email!
No hope there. Try to access Aussie via the web. And of course my mobile phone credit ran out almost immediately, and I had to sign up, which confused web browsers, which claimed that there was no network, though the connectivity should have been there. Finally: yes, Aussie knew about the outage, which started tomorrow morning at 3:25 AM [sic]. The outage really started at 16:16, so my guess is that it took them 9 minutes to notice, and then they treated the time as UTC and re-converted it to AEST.
Nothing to do but worry. How long will the outage be? Should I sign up for a second RSP? How often would it help? Currently the National Broadband Network has threatened a total of 9 hours scheduled maintenance, in two weeks' time, not for the first time. A second RSP wouldn't help there. If we had 5G here, that would be useful, but another NBN service is probably not worth it.
The outage lasted 73 minutes. We've had power outages that have been much longer, so possibly that's nothing to worry about. The real concern is just the worry that the net won't come back.
| Friday, 10 February 2023 | Dereel | |
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Making history interesting
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Topic: history, technology, opinion | Link here |
So I've decided on a topic for the upcoming 30th anniversary edition of the FreeBSD Journal: “FreeBSD: The first 10 years—a personal timeline”, and I've written about half of it.
But is that good? Yes, I can write it, and there's plenty of material. But is it interesting? It is for me: I always thought of myself as a latecomer in the project, but I made my first acquaintance on 27 September 1993, three months after the project was named, and I got actively involved two years later. And things like the new FreeBSD Core Team structure go back to noise that I made in early 2000.
That's interesting for me. But who else cares? How can I make it more interesting for the reader? That's always the problem in writing these things.
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Mail corruption!
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Topic: technology | Link here |
My email inbox is once again overly large, and there are important messages in there that are over a month old. One was from Peter O'Connell, my investment adviser. It started with:
r.d=ppt.com.au;dmarc=pass action=none header.from=ppt.com.au;
Received-SPF: Pass (protection.outlook.com: domain of ppt.com.au designates
Now clearly those are mail headers, but they're displayed as part of the message. Something seems to have corrupted the mailbox. What?
| Saturday, 11 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 11 February 2023 |
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FreeBSD beginnings, continued
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Topic: technology, history, opinion | Link here |
Spent most of the day working on my article on “FreeBSD: The first 10 years—a personal timeline”. As I noted yesterday, it's not the writing that's the issue: it's knowing what to write.
And in that context it's good that I have written a lot about FreeBSD at the time. In particular, it was interesting to look at the slides (PDF) from “Two years in the trenches”, about the FreeBSD Core Team, which I presented in September 2002. It confirms my recollection: by then, nearly 10 years after the project started, we had transitioned from a group of hobbyists scratching an itch to a bureaucracy. It's not surprising that core team members started resigning.
But then there are also the articles that Wes Peters and I wrote for Daemon News between 1998 and 2003, covering almost exactly the second half of the first 10 years. The table of contents is still available online, the wrong way round, but the articles themselves are not where the page thinks that they should be.
I have my articles in what at the time I thought was HTML, but before I present them (or even read them; overlong lines irritate me more and more), I need to bring them up to date. Should I bother?
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Piccola: satiated?
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Topic: animals, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I've been keeping a careful eye on Piccola's health in the past two months. She's looking much better, and she has put on a lot of weight—she could weigh up to double what she did 2 months ago.
But lately she has been eating much less, down from round 200 g a day to about 80 g. Is that cause for concern? In proportion to their weight it's still much more than the dogs eat. I suppose we should try to weigh her.
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Thieving bitches!
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Topic: animals, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Saltimbocca alla Romana for dinner this evening. That's one of Yvonne's dishes. And of course it needs sage. And Yvonne didn't know where the bush was (carefully hidden by uninvited mint), so I went out to help her find it.
Came back, and our scaloppine had greatly diminished, from 6 to two. And two bitches stood around licking their lips.
Yes, dogs do that. But it was the first time ours had stolen anything out of the kitchen, and it caught us by surprise. From now on we'll pay much more attention.
And we discovered that you can make a perfectly good substitute for scaloppine with “sizzling steaks”.
| Sunday, 12 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 12 February 2023 |
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Off the net again?
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Topic: technology, Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Once again this morning Yvonne said to me “are we off the net again?” Into the office to check. No, we still had our Internet connection, but eureka was waiting with a Boot: prompt.
Why? Apart from dereel, which had also rebooted, nothing else seemed to be affected, and I had specifically connected the old office UPS in front of it to tide over short inverter outages. And nothing else in the house was affected. Something wrong with the UPS?
And just to annoy me, the USB subsystem came up in a sequence it had never done before, and I had to modify my already complicated power-up sequence and /etc/fstab to get the file systems in the right place.
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Towards the next riding accident
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Topic: animals, health, general, opinion | Link here |
Arne Koets will be in town next month, and he's holding a clinic at Chris Bahlo's place. Yvonne wants to participate. Hopefully she won't do herself any harm.
And for that, she, Jane Ashhurst and Chris have come up with a complicated juggling act. Jane will swap Samba for Carlotta, who will be picked up on Thursday. That would leave only Dana here until Samba arrives. So this morning Chris came over with one of her horses, Pinta, to keep Dana company until Samba arrives, and had breakfast while she was here.
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What caused the power outage?
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
The messages in dereel's /var/log/messages suggested that it happened round 4:49. After I brought eureka up, I was able to confirm that nothing unusual happened with mains power at that time. So: was it even an inverter issue? Maybe the UPS had a problem. I still need to get Powercor to lower the line voltage, but today's incident doesn't help me with my arguments.
But then Yvonne had more problems: she had to take Chris back home, but she couldn't open the garage door. After some searching, suspecting first the opener, I discovered that one of the circuit breakers had tripped, obviously the one for the garage door opener. But why hadn't I noticed that? After some investigation, it seems that the laundry was also connected to that circuit, and the outside freezer had warmed up to -11°. But all this suggests that was really a power surge.
And in the true “all bad things are three” tradition, the battery in one of our clocks ran out.
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Piccola: problems?
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Topic: animals, health | Link here |
For some days now Piccola has been eating less, and I've been wondering why. But today she at just a little, went outside, came back and vomited slime and grass. And she didn't eat any more.
What's that? Concerning, at any rate. I still need to know whether she's getting a balanced diet.
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FreeBSD article continued
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Topic: technology, history, opinion | Link here |
In my first pass of my article on FreeBSD history, I've got as far as the year 2000. I still need to write up 2001 to 2003.
And suddenly I've run out of things to say. By 2000 I had written the Vinum volume manager, played a significant part in the restructuring of the FreeBSD kernel to handle multiprocessors better, and become a member of the FreeBSD Core Team. What more is there? It seems that from then on it was mainly bureaucracy.
I've already tried to read my old Daemon's advocate articles, and I worked on tidying up another one, but it's slow business, about half an hour per article—and I wrote 35 of them. So for the time I've tried to display them in narrow windows so that things don't look too bad.
And how about that, my articles agree with what I'm trying to say now, all the way down to Mike Smith's “It's not fun anymore” explanation for resigning from the Core Team. Somehow the heady early days were really only about 8 years long. But what a time!
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Spare ribs, the third
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
On Thursday we had planned to eat pork spare ribs, which we had in a freezer. I thawed them out and discovered that they were raw!
OK, after reading the diary entry it seemed to make sense to cook them sous vide before grilling. I went off to look for recipes. There's actually quite a bit of stuff there, some asking for up to 36 hours cooking. What temperature? That depends on what you want them to be like. But according to the recipes, the temperature needs to be high, round 70°, for “fall off the bone” consistency
So that's what I chose, using essentially the same marinade as last time. And then, just as I was about to seal the ribs in the sous-vide foil, I discovered that I had written another recipe a year later. For some reason I hadn't used the same marinade, but a US American one with far too much sugar. And though it had double the amount of five spice powder, I found the result not spicy enough. On the other hand, I hadn't cut the ribs into individual portions. After some consideration, I had left the marinade for the current batch the way it was.
This morning the cooking was done. Left them to cool down, then gave them 5 minutes in the “hair dryer” “air fryer”:
I also boiled up the marinade with some cornflour to make a gravy, which proves to be a good idea. This time, I think, the results are almost good: the meat fell off the bone, and they were spicy enough. The only issue was that the meat was a little fibrous. 65° next time?
| Monday, 13 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 13 February 2023 |
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More sprinkler work
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Paul Donaghy along this morning to help sort out the sprinklers. It didn't start well. I took out the water filter to clean it, and it was completely clogged. Put it back, noting that the water coming out of the pump was still cloudy, and within an hour it was completely clogged again!
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And then there was the solenoid from circuit 1, which was leaking. It's not surprising why:
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The box around it had been pushed down so far that it pulled the hose out, not helped by the lack of a clamp. Paul fixed that, but after that no water came out. Electrical problems?
Paul decided early that he had had enough. I can't blame him. Bloody irrigation!
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More Piccola worries
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Piccola has hardly eaten anything in the last day. She doesn't look sick, but it's a concern. Now that she's closer to a normal weight (2.9 kg), she probably doesn't need as much, so maybe she's now just fussier. That ties in with the fact that we found her on the dining room table eating some preserved trout. Maybe time to reconsider her diet?
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First Buddleja of spring
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Finally my almost-dead Buddleja x weyeriana plants are starting to flower:
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That's not fully open yet, but it's something.
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Mud wasps
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Strange appendages under this stool:
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They must be from mud wasps like the ones we found in front of the house two years ago. I wonder what kind they are.
| Tuesday, 14 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 14 February 2023 |
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Thirty years of FreeBSD, continued
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Topic: technology, history, opinion | Link here |
On with my article on the first ten years of FreeBSD, which is due on 15 February—two days' time, since the date is implicitly in the USA. But I want to submit it by tomorrow evening to be on the safe side.
Gradually it's taking shape. All that I need to do now is to tidy it up a bit and decide how negative I need to be about trends into the future. One that still greatly irritates me is the way people can't express themselves in writing, very noticeable in email. Even people who wrote well 30 years ago now send out a mess that makes them seem illiterate. My guess is that mobile phones are to blame. In that connection found an article that I had published in February 2000. Looking back, it says what I would still want to say, but not well. In many ways things have got worse than the bad examples I showed on that page.
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Piccola's diet
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Topic: animals, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne discussed Piccola's diet with Pene Kirk today, and it seems that we can give her other food, even tinned sardines, which I thought would have been far too salty. But we found some in “spring water” that don't seem to be too salty. And how about that, Piccola likes them. A pity they're so expensive.
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Ignore those expiry dates!
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
When I answered questions on Quora, I was struck by the attitude of the US Americans towards food safety. If you eat something hot in the evening and forget to put the rest in the fridge until tomorrow morning, throw it away! It's dangerous!
But we do this regularly, not because we forget, but because it doesn't make sense to put hot food into a fridge. According to the US Americans, we should be dead.
So it was interesting to read this article in the New York Times, which in general agrees with my opinion about expiry dates: seldom worth mentioning. In fact, it goes beyond my opinions:
Mustard lasts forever ... Contrary to popular belief, mayonnaise has an exceptionally long shelf life...
Now those are two things with a very short shelf life. We keep mayonnaise refrigerated, and mustard really won't last a year. But of course, they're talking about processed foods, not home-made mayonnaise and fresh mustard powder.
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Dan Murphy redefines arithmetic
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Topic: food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
Dan Murphy's sent me a member special offer that's worth having: Oettinger Pils slabs of 24 for $4 off. OK, it's time anyway, and this time they had the sense to offer the discount on whole slabs and not overpriced 6 packs. Buy 5 slabs, and Yvonne can pick them up tomorrow.
Oh:
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Member price $55.90. Five slabs make... $287.74. How do you explain that? There's a little face at bottom right. Click on that and try to ask a question. But it's a bot, not a person, and I can only ask questions that it understands. In particular, it seems that it doesn't understand a $ sign:
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Do modern non-techies understand the term “alphanumeric”? In principle it should also exclude spaces. But why?
While I was trying to work around the issue, Murphy became catatonic and said something to that effect. Please send a request to customer service. Started that, and the browser crashed. Restart the browser, and to my surprise most of the context was still there. And before they would deign to look at it, they wanted me to fill out a CAPTCHA:
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You'd think that they're trying to annoy their customers. But where does the error come from? Unspecified additional charges? At first I thought they had tried to convert the $20 to US $ (they do use a non-Australian time zone in their email). But that would be $13.96, rather too far from the $12.26 that they mention to be an explanation.
This isn't the first time. I ranted about similar issues last year (when the beer was much cheaper) and 3 years ago. In each case, the real issue seemed to be terminal idiocy. You'd think they'd have had time to get their act together.
| Wednesday, 15 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 15 February 2023 |
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FreeBSD article: done!
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Topic: technology, history, opinion | Link here |
I was given a hard deadline for my article on FreeBSD history: today. Well, maybe tomorrow: 15 February. Got a couple of people on IRC to take a look at it, but they came up with nothing interesting. OK, it compiles, ship it! But it still took all day.
While reviewing, Edwin Groothuis came up with a request:
Can you put it in a Google Docs thingie so I can write my comments?
Simple answer to that: no. I've reviewed things on Google Docs, but I don't know how to put things in there. And I'm pretty sure that if I did, it would break the structure (currently a web page with PHP extensions), so I'd have difficulty going back.
That's all assumptions, of course, but I'm pretty sure they're correct. How can Google Docs understand some of my more obscure PHP functions? And that's the issue with so much modern software: while Google Docs makes it easy to add comments, it throws a lot of other stuff out in the process.
A hollow voice whispers “Interoperability”.
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Dan Murphy responds
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Topic: general, food and drink, technology, opinion | Link here |
Reply to yesterday's complaint to Dan Murphy's:
Thank you for contacting us and bringing this to our attention.
I have sent this to our online team to rectify but if you would like to go ahead and place an order now, let me know and I will refund you the difference back to you.
Apologies for the inconvenience caused.
That's reasonable enough from her perspective, but it shows that she's not able to fix the problem immediately, nor even get the “online team” to do so. So off to buy the stuff and hope that I'll get the remainder back some time.
Oh. Now I can't order 5 slabs. They only have 4 left. OK, order 4, in the process trying to see what the page did with the different numbers:
| Number | Price | Difference | Difference (%) | |||
| 1 | 55.90 | 0.00 | 0.00 | |||
| 2 | 111.84 | 0.04 | 0.04 | |||
| 3 | 167.76 | 0.06 | 0.04 | |||
| 4 | 227.75 | 4.15 | 1.86 | |||
| 5 | 287.74 | 8.24 | 2.90 |
So whatever the bug is, it's not obvious. Even the assumption that there is no discount on the last slab doesn't work out: the difference between 4 and 5 slabs is $4.09, more than the discount. The good news is that the pickup went without incident. But I still have to arrange for the refund. Is it worth it?
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Goodbye Carlotta
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has had her mare Carlotta for about 15 years—she has a recollection that she got her as a yearling, which must have been about the time we moved into Kleins Road. They've been through a lot together, but now the end has come: she's swapping her for Samba, whom she had even earlier. They had arranged to have her picked up tomorrow, so Dave Ingle, the farrier, along at the crack of dawn to trim her hooves.
But as so often, the transport details changed. This evening at 21:00! A good thing Dave came when he did. And here are the last photos we're likely to see of Carlotta:
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| Thursday, 16 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 16 February 2023 |
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Lies, damn lies and deadlines
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Topic: technology, history | Link here |
I submitted my FreeBSD history article yesterday, just before the hard deadline. Mail back today: it'll be at least a week before he can look at it. So at least I have time to reconsider the content.
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All the time in the world
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Now that my deadline is over, back to normal work. Why do I take so long to get things done? The answer is clear: because I don't have any spare time. My daily timetable is something like:
| Start time | End time | Activity | ||
| 8:00 | 9:00 | Get up, washed, dressed | ||
| 9:00 | 10:30 | Read mail, download videos, etc. | ||
| 10:30 | 11:30 | Cook and eat brunch | ||
| 11:30 | 14:00 | Write up diary | ||
| 14:00 | 14:30 | Walk dogs | ||
| 14:30 | 15:00 | Read old diaries | ||
| 15:00 | 15:30 | |||
| 15:30 | 16:15 | Watch news on TV | ||
| 16:15 | 17:30 | |||
| 17:30 | 19:00 | Cook and eat dinner | ||
| 19:00 | 22:00 | Watch TV | ||
So that leaves me less than 2 hours a day which aren't tied up with some daily activity. Today I didn't even get that far: while working on the article, I neglected my old diaries, and by evening I still hadn't caught up. No wonder it takes me a long time to do anything.
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Camera strap pain
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
One of the better discoveries I have made are miniature carabiner hooks to hold my camera straps to the camera. Here a view from above:
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It makes removal child's play, and I've fitted nearly all my straps with them, though I usually don't have a strap on the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II. But yesterday I put one on for the night photos of Carlotta leaving. And despite my care, the left-hand hook—only the left hand hook—opened by itself no less than 4 times. Fortunately I didn't drop the camera.
Why? It never happens with the hooks on the other cameras. Yes, it's not exactly the same, but the differences don't seem important:
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I should try cutting off the lever at the top. It'll make it more difficult to open, of course, but that's the intention.
| Friday, 17 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 17 February 2023 |
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Another PV inverter crash! Another!
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Topic: technology, Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
In mid-afternoon, into the kitchen to heat something up. Turn on the cooktop and BEEP! The PV inverter failed again!
Why? Whatever it was lost power to the whole house. Of course, it was only temporary, maybe 3 seconds. But that was enough.
Dammit, this is really unacceptable. One of the main reasons for the PV system was exactly to avoid this kind of problem. Reboot eureka. I'm getting far too adept at this. But first put a surge protector in front of the UPS for eureka and friends. Disconnect the UPS input, and everything died. The UPS claimed to have capacity for 30 minutes, but it lied. That's sufficient explanation for why eureka died, anyway.
Then around to look at the others. lagoon and dereel had weathered the crash, but of course the NFS mounts on eureka had failed. But tiwi was a completely different matter. No reaction at all. And this thing has the irritating property that it can't put the console display on the TV. Off to connect another monitor. Still nothing. Dammit, there are 4 video outputs on this machine: motherboard D-Sub, graphics board D-Sub, DVI and HDMI. I had set the BIOS to And for whatever reason, possibly something in the mind of the graphics card, it would only display on the DVI port. I never had this problem with the old teevee, almost identical: it happily put the console on the HDMI output to the TV, where it belonged.
OK, boot again. It hung after probing the external USB disk. OK, disconnect, try again. It still hung. Left it for a few minutes, came back and found:
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Wow! That's why it hung: the normal fsck at boot doesn't get started with the -y (answer “yes” to all prompts) option, so it hung. OK, let the full fsck run. A couple of other problems which I'll look at later. The one that puzzled me was this one:
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That was a directory last modified over 3 months ago. Does that make sense?
After fixing that, things worked again. Started X. It came up on the monitor on the DVI output! But then, I had disconnected the HDMI output. Still a problem. This is one of the machines that can't switch back from X to console: it just displays random blocks of colour. That's one of the too many bugs that I have known for years but have worked around rather than fix. The workaround? Start X from another machine, in this case eureka.
And things ran well for nearly an hour. Then, for no obvious reason, tiwi spontaneously rebooted again! Power issues again? Only tiwi was affected. And just after I had it up and was about to do something, the screen went blank again! This time, though, it was just the TV. Nothing else. What's going on?
But that was all. After that things worked normally. But this can't go on. At the very least I need to put functional UPSs in front of each group of machines.
But finally, at 16:45, I received a message from Powercor:
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“We expect to restore power by 04:30PM [sic]. We expect to restore power by 05:030PM [sic]. We expect to restore power by 06:00PM [sic].” You'd at least think that they'd update it rather than append to their failed deadlines. And yes, the power failed at exactly the time I turned on the cooktop. Not my fault after all.
| Saturday, 18 February 2023 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 18 February 2023 |
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Analysing the tiwi crash
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So how much damage did the tiwi:/spool file system suffer yesterday? Made a list of the inodes, and found:
inode 1727507 was an active news video download:
1727507 -rw-r--r-- 1 grog home 213,647,360 17 Feb 14:13 AlJaz-14.part
The modification timestamp corresponds to the time of the power outage. I suppose that's understandable, though it's not clear why the file size should be bigger than advertised.
Inodes 2573824 and 892928 (directories) were both empty and the parent inode (2402304) for 2573824 didn't exist. Both were relatively large, however. 892928 dated from 9 February, and as already noted, 2573824 was from November last year.
Like those two, inode 570368 was an empty directory with a non existent parent (567808).
In summary: one broken file that was being written to at the time of the crash, and three broken directories, none of them new.
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Next computer issue
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Topic: technology, photography | Link here |
Tried to read in photos to the computer today. No communication with the E-30. A bit of investigation showed that it was related to the USB adapter, the one with the power switches. All was on, but the system didn't want to know about that port. Put the cable on a motherboard port and all was well. But why do these things keep happening?
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The customer lies!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Off to Ballarat today as planned to buy some UPSs at Officeworks. Their web site had shown stock of a number of devices that came into the question, but when I got there, almost none were there, and then ones that were were too polite to call themselves UPS:
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Found a somewhat reluctant Rowan Atkinsonesque salesperson and asked him, but he didn't want to know: “If you have an issue with our web site, call them on the phone”. I couldn't see any price labels (they're modern and thus hidden close to the ground), so I asked him “how much are they?”. He replied “$3”. What, $3 each for all of them? Yes, he said, and hurried off up the back.
OK, clearly that's not the list price, but at that price I'll take all of them. On the way to the checkout I found another, more sensible person, who scanned the bar codes and told me the price. No thanks, I'll take the first offer. Of course, convincing the cashier was another matter, and she called the manager. That makes sense.
The manager, Rhys (I thought that was a surname) was not cooperative. He had spoken to everybody who came in question, and nobody agreed that he had said that. What I was saying was not correct. What, was he accusing me of lying? Yes.
Of course he wouldn't give me the UPSs at the price I had been offered, and he said that the offer had to be in writing, and that the statute of limitations applies. I told him that that only applied to time, and not even 10 minutes had gone by, but he didn't want to know. That's something to follow up on. He also said that none of the people he spoke to admitted having spoken to me, and he wasn't prepared to call any of them.
What's wrong here?
So I think that I should probably follow up the issue with Consumer Affairs Victoria and Officeworks management.
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Muscle pain
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Since Monday I've had muscle pain in my left thigh. Time to talk to Heather Dalman. But no, she's not available until early April, and neither is anybody else. I can't put up with it for that long, so in town today I picked up some Voltaren cream from the Chemist Warehouse, though I'm a member of UFS. On to UFS—they're only 500 m apart—and found it was were, indeed, cheaper than the UFS member's price.
At UFS I was looking for some kind of heating pad to reduce the pain. Yes, they had them, exactly where people in pain need them:
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So I had to kneel on the floor to read the details and the prices (once again directly visible only from the floor). Found what I want, and... I couldn't get up again! And nobody came to help me!
Finally I was able to get up, steadying myself on a glass shelf. But it was a bit of a shock, rather like what happened to Yvonne two months ago. Only I hadn't had a serious accident shortly before. It took me several hours to maintain my balance again.
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What fixed focal length?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
When I'm in town I have three cameras: usually my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I, the E-PM2 and my phone, for what that's worth. I leave the E-M1 in the car unless I need to do something more complicated. Otherwise I use the E-PM2 with the Panasonic Lumix G 20 mm f/1.7, which has the advantage of being very small.
But is the angle of view wide enough? I've been thinking about this for years, and in principle a wider angle wide aperture lens could be better. But they're bigger. For some time now I've been considering the purchase of a Panasonic 14 mm f/2.5, but I already have a Leica DG Summilux 15 mm f/1.7 ASPH., a whole stop faster. Only it's considerably larger. Here the 14/2.5, 15/1.7 and 20/1.7:
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As I had planned 3 years ago, finally put the Summilux on the camera and used it today. Surprise, surprise: the size made no difference, since the camera lies on its back in my handbag, and there's plenty of space for even longer lenses. So for the moment anyway I'll leave it like that.
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Next computer problem
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
We watch the news on TV round 15:30. But today I discovered that nothing had been recorded since yesterday. Tried it manually:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/1) ~ 14 -> LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$STREAM -o blah
[youtube] GEumHK0hfdo: Downloading webpage
[youtube] GEumHK0hfdo: Downloading m3u8 information
[youtube] GEumHK0hfdo: Downloading MPD manifest
ERROR: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type youtube-dl -U to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
Huh? How did that happen? OK, time for pkg upgrade. Yes, I had version 2022.06.29 and it upgraded to 2022.11.11. Does it work now? No. OK, do as requested, but after saying that it would upgrade to version 2023.02.17 (look at that date!), it told me to upgrade via the ports system.
What does the port say? The file /usr/ports/www/yt-dlp/files/patch-yt__dlp_update.py contains:
@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@ _NON_UPDATEABLE_REASONS = {
**{variant: f'Auto-update is not supported for unpackaged {name} executable; Re-download the latest release'
for variant, name in {'win32_dir': 'Windows', 'darwin_dir': 'MacOS', 'linux_dir': 'Linux'}.items()},
'source': 'You cannot update when running from source code; Use git to pull the latest changes',
- 'unknown': 'You installed yt-dlp with a package manager or setup.py; Use that to update',
+ 'unknown': 'Please use the command \'pkg upgrade yt-dlp\' to upgrade.',
'other': 'You are using an unofficial build of yt-dlp; Build the executable again',
OK, build from the port. But the Makefile contains:
DISTVERSION= 2023.02.17
That looks straightforward enough: change it to 2023.02.17. And how about that, it built, it worked. My first ports hack in well over a year.
| Sunday, 19 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 19 February 2023 |
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Peace!
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Topic: general | Link here |
It's been a hard week. I haven't really had time to do most of my normal daily routine, let alone anything special. Spent most of today catching up on my diary.
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Updating the yt-dlp port
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yesterday's update to yt-dlp clearly requires committing to the FreeBSD ports collection. That's Yuri Victorovich's (surname uncertain) baby, and clearly it's a one-line patch. But is my ports tree up to date? More pain with git.
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /src/FreeBSD/git/ports 1 -> mailme git pull
From https://git.freebsd.org/ports
600101b2ff88..77a91720bc14 2023Q1 -> freebsd/2023Q1
error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge:
www/yt-dlp/Makefile
www/yt-dlp/distinfo
Please commit your changes or stash them before you merge.
Aborting
With CVS, of course, it would just be flagged and left to the programmer to sort out. What's stash? According to the OED, to conceal a robbery. All this new terminology? But after some RTFM, I got it to do what I wanted:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /src/FreeBSD/git/ports 2 -> git help stash=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /src/FreeBSD/git/ports 3 -> pd www/yt-dlp/
/src/FreeBSD/git/ports/www/yt-dlp /src/FreeBSD/git/ports=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /src/FreeBSD/git/ports/www/yt-dlp 4 -> git stash
Saved working directory and index state WIP on main: 811d80b66494 Merge branch 'main' of https://git.freebsd.org/ports=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /src/FreeBSD/git/ports/www/yt-dlp 5 -> git stash list
stash@{0}: WIP on main: 811d80b66494 Merge branch 'main' of https://git.freebsd.org/ports
And then I found that a change (exactly the same one, obviously) had already been committed:
commit 357f249d883e809a5c399a2322230b977c773db5
Author: Daniel Engberg <diizzy@FreeBSD.org>
Date: Fri Feb 17 08:33:51 2023 -0800
www/yt-dlp: Update 2023.01.06 â<86><92> 2023.02.17
PR: 269597
This commit was made at 16:33 UTC, over 11 hours after I did my fix, and the character mutilation is courtesy of git (should be a → character). It refers to a bug report made slightly earlier, and that report also points to this discussion, which suggests that the real issue was just a choice of regular expression.
After all was said and done, Callum Gibson came up with a better solution for my interaction with git:
if you don't want the changes you "git reset". I usually "git reset --hard"
That sounds like the ticket. Now I need to find out how to get rid of that stashed data.
| Monday, 20 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 20 February 2023 |
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Peace!
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Topic: general | Link here |
It's been a week since I got into overload mode, and I'm just getting out of it now. One of my main indicators is still not back to normal: more than the 67 outstanding messages in my inbox that will fit on one page. But it's good just to do nothing!
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Dirty toothbrush puzzle
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Last June I puzzled about the dirt on my toothbrush charger:
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That's accumulated “dirt” of one week, Four months later I showed it to Leela Movva, my periodontist.
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He wasn't able to explain it. It continues. But things have changed:
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Why the difference in appearance? This time it's the accumulated crud of several weeks, and there's clear cracking in the deposits. But that also shows that they're much whiter than previously. Can it really be related to our water?
| Tuesday, 21 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 21 February 2023 |
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Chorizo subsittute
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Huevos rancheros for breakfast today. Oh horror! No (fake) chorizo left! Finally found some ancient sausages that Yvonne had marked “Sausage, Polish smoked (very hot) use for "Chorizo" for Paella” nearly 8 years ago. It's considerably darker than the Rookworst that Yvonne eats:
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And the taste? About as “genuine” as the ALDI “chorizo”.
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Garden flowers in late summer
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
A month until the equinox, time for the monthly garden photos.
As time goes on, I wonder whether I bother. In Kleins Road there was something to see. Here I'm reminded of the old question “are there any trees in Australia?”, with the answer “No, we import them from overseas and watch them die”. It really almost looks like that. Here our 7 year old Ginkgo biloba:
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Some plants look marginally better than they have in the past, like the Schinus molle:
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And I can't make up my mind about the Corymbia ficifolia. It might even have grown a little, and I can't make up my mind whether these stalks have flowered or not:
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The Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” has recovered from the winter frost, but it has only produced 2 flowers this year, and I didn't get a photo of them. But the whole area seems to have been taken over by the cannas:
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There's also a now-unhappy Alyogyne huegelii in there.
The “Chantilly lace” maple that we got last June is clearly not in an appropriate place. The leaves are burnt:
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When it drops its leaves I think I'll move it in front of the house, where it only gets the morning sun.
The Leucadendron that nearly got drowned seems to have survived, and is coming up with new growth:
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The Clematis “Edo Murasaki” has finally got over Bryan Ross' mutilation and is in its autumn flowering season:
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And the Abutilons continue to surprise. Clearly the one left in the pot has outgrown it, and it's not looking at all happy. And on the other hand, the one in the ground, which was looking so unhappy earlier in the season, has at least partially recovered, though one of the stems has died:
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It's a similar story with the Buddlejas. The one in the pot is only holding its own, and the one flower is looking less than happy:
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On the other hand, the one of the three small cuttings that I planted in the south bed has greatly outstripped the other two:
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So there's a lesson here: instead of taking photos of the things dying, I should do some basic gardening to improve the plants. But it's all so depressing.
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Russians want peace
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
I don't know why, but Larissa seems to love white feathers:
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Is the tinge of yellow significant?
| Wednesday, 22 February 2023 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 22 February 2023 |
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Heart problems?
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Woke up in the middle of the night with heart palpitations, which continued for about an hour. How serious is that? I suppose I should go and get myself checked, but the thought of being on medication somehow turns me off.
After getting up, checked my blood pressure. Clearly the sphygmomanometer was confused by the irregular pulse. Over a period of 20 minutes it recorded pressures between 99/70 and 137/85:
| Time | Systolic | Diastolic | Pulse | |||
| 8:50 | 137 | 85 | 100 | |||
| 8:57 | 99 | 70 | 118 | |||
| 8:58 | 124 | 67 | 115 | |||
| 9:05 | 113 | 80 | 79 | |||
| 9:07 | 117 | 74 | 90 | |||
| 9:09 | 114 | 76 | 86 | |||
The good news was that things gradually improved, and I felt no worse for wear. But clearly something to discuss with Paul at the next appointment.
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More health issues
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Into town today to see Heather Dalman about my leg. Yes, probably a result of the exercises I was doing for osteopaenia, and lots of suggestions about how to treat it. It looks like it's not going to go away immediately.
Then on to the Midwestern Dental Specialists to sign a form, in the process learning a new word: Endodontist (Theo Chan), a person specialized in root canal surgery.
From there to Dorevitch in Victoria Street for a blood test, in the process discovering that the time (lunch time) is not the best, since people could be out to lunch. Instead of the normal 2-3 minutes wait I had 14.
Had planned to go to Sovereign Radiology for a jaw X-ray, but since it's not urgent, decided to defer to next time, when I can get there a little earlier. A whole morning spent with health-related issues!
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Don't buy Bengal cats
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Saw an article in the NZZ recently: don't buy Bengal cats. Spent some time trying to find out why not. The referred to an unlinked article from the Swiss Animal Proection agency, but I couldn't find anything specific there. The closest that I came was this document, but it's not specific about Bengal cats. But there were other articles too, like this one. The suggestion is that they're really wild animals (“The leopard in your front garden”), that it's difficult to house-train them, and that they're aggressive towards other cats. And indeed those are the reasons why we got rid of Rani, though she wasn't so much aggressive as dominant.
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Language misunderstandings
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Topic: politics, language, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne bears a particular animosity towards Vladimir Putain. She came up with these somewhere:
| Thursday, 23 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 23 February 2023 |
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Petra returns
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Topic: general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Petra Gietz had cleaned our house from October 2016 until October 2021, when she had to stop because of health issues. Helen proved less than ideal, and then the replacement we found decided that cleaning wasn't for her. So... back to Petra, who thinks that she can now handle things if she only does two hours each on two separate days.
She arrived bearing gifts:
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What's that? “Courgette” seems inappropriate. But “courge” is something else. More to the point, how do you cook it? So far discovered only that they tend to get bitter when large, and that they require long cooking to make up for it.
And certainly she got to work. She discovered some mouse droppings behind the kitchen dustbins. We haven't had mice in the house in over a year; the last two cleaners must have missed them.
| Friday, 24 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 24 February 2023 |
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Samba returns
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Topic: animals | Link here |
It's been eighteen years since Jorge de Moya gave Yvonne got Samba, a Paso Fino horse:
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The name was an issue because of Samba (software), and I insisted on getting explicit permission from Tridge and Jeremy Allison to use the name. Yvonne sold Samba to Chris Yeardley some time in 2012, and Chris later sold her on. The most recent owner was Jane Ashhurst, with whom Yvonne later swapped Carlotta. And today Samba came home again:
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And so Pinta left:
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She made friends with Dana relatively quickly:
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But then, Dana has seen quite a bit of change since she's been here.
While in the paddocks, I found a partial explanation for the leaking trough that has been annoying us for some time. Somehow the ball valve sticks, but Yvonne had noted that it was because the float had been moved too far to the back of the trough. Pull it forward and it works again. Yvonne thinks, probably correctly, that the horses somehow manage to push against the protective covering.
Now how do we stop that? Make it unpleasant to push on the covering?
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Random garden stuff
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Summer's nearly over, and already we have the first tomatoes!
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They're a yellowish kind, and apparently ripe. But they're the first!
And then there are a couple of survivor gazanias:
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There used to be dozens of them.
And the Clematis “Edo Murasaki” is finally looking almost like it should:
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Take that, Bryan Ross!
| Saturday, 25 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 25 February 2023 |
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Alu lap chong revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I had some red capsicum left over from another meal. What should I do with it? I suppose it would work in my fake phat thai, but I've only just had that. How about my experimental alu lap chong?
Tried that, in the process changing the proportions a little: only 2 g turmeric, but 10 g of ginger and 23 g (as it turned out) of capsicum:
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The result? At best, still not the correct balance. There's still too much turmeric and too much tamarind. And this time the potatoes weren't quite cooked, and the curry leaves are dry.
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Weeding?
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Jesse Walsh along today to do some weeding. He removed lots of weeds, but there are still more. I think the weeds are winning.
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Paintings: getting the mood
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Topic: photography, animals, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne came to me today to ask me to take a photo of a painting she had done.
Nothing easier than that. She could do it herself, except that she doesn't have flash in her office:
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But no, that's not what she was aiming for. The background should be a much darker red, and the highlights round the mouth and the eyes are wrong. Looking at the original, she's right.
Much fiddling around, and I came up with this:
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That's much closer to the painting, but the mouth is still too bright. I need to learn how to selectively change the gradation. And there are still issues: on the screen, the final result doesn't look as good. And why is it so difficult to get a faithful rendition of the original?
| Sunday, 26 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 26 February 2023 |
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Power fail!
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Topic: technology, Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Into the office this morning to see the display Boot: on eureka's console. Another grid power failure that found its way through the inverter! Again! This is impossible!
The best thing about it was that it gave me the opportunity to put the new UPS in circuit. It's a nasty thing. There are only two buttons: a power button that doubles as secret handshake, and a red button to reset something that could signify overload or power surge (in each case, presumably, negating the claim of being an uninterruptible power supply). One of the secret handshakes was to tell the thing to shut up when source power goes away. And that's necessary: it squeals like a stuck pig when it happens, and I couldn't find a way to turn off the squeal without turning off the output power. Next time, presumably...
Still, it works, and since I have a power meter in series, I can see that I use about 245 W for all computers (bde, dereel, dischord, distress and eureka) in standby, about the same as hydra by itself, and about 320 W with the monitors on. I can live with that.
But why did it happen again? A real power outage, 29 minutes:
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And though the PV system did what it should have done and prevented a total outage, once again all the computers in my office went down. Or did they? It wasn't until later that I discovered that it was only eureka. I rebooted dereel for no good reason, and the Microsoft boxen were hibernating, so they weathered the storm. Still, finally time to get Effective Electrical to do something about the situation.
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Swine Bismarck?
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Topic: food and drink, language, opinion | Link here |
What do you call a filet of beef wrapped in pastry? Bœuf en croûte of course. But nowadays even the French call it Bœuf Wellington.
But that's not what Yvonne wanted to bake a fillet of pork in the same manner. No recipes, not even a name. No worries, we can work it out. And the name? Clearly a German dish with pork. Name after a great statesman? Pork Bismarck? Swine Bismarck? That has a ring to it, even if the Google search came up with nothing useful.
The dish itself was uncomplicated:
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Eating an elephant
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And somehow that seems to apply to our giant courgette. With dinner, tried slicing it, salting it to dry it out, and then baking a couple of slices and deep frying the rest:
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How did it work out? Though one slice was too thin and thus browned excessively, it was acceptable but boring. They were also excessively salty. If I try this again, I should rinse the slices before baking them. And despite the long frying, the ones from the deep fryer were still soft and equally boring, though they weren't overly salty.
Never mind, there's plenty left.
| Monday, 27 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 27 February 2023 |
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Repairing the trough
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Topic: general, animals, opinion | Link here |
So if Yvonne is right, the reason why our horse trough is overflowing is because horses push against the float valve cover and push it backwards, where it sticks. The obvious solution (and proof of the hypothesis): keep them away from it. Yvonne found a length of 4×2 that should do the trick. Tie it to a part of the dividing fence with cable ties:
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It certainly worried Dana, who started before I had a chance to zoom:
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Now to wait and see what happens. In particular, will they dislodge the wooden bar?
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Preparing for Microsoft “Windows” 11
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So it's clear that the HP Z800 that I inherited from Bruce Evans isn't appropriate to be my main machine: only marginally faster than my current machine, and uses more power than all the other computers in my office put together. But what about using it as a Microsoft box that mainly sleeps and just gets woken for a few minutes a day? It's certainly faster than the current distress and dischord.
But now the current version of Microsoft is “Windows” 11. What do I need to install it? With some discussion on IRC I discovered that I had the choice of Windows 11 Pro, Windows 11 Pro N, Windows 11 Pro for Workstations, Windows 11 Pro N for Workstations, Windows 11 Pro Education, Windows 11 Pro Education N, Windows 11 Education, Windows 11 Education N, Windows 11 Enterprise and Windows 11 Enterprise N. What is all this stuff? All I really need to know is whether I can run Remote desktop on it. From my experience with “Windows” 10, that means Pro.
Still, off to investigate. But this is clearly in the Microsoft space, and it seems that nobody is interested in the kind of question I'm interested in. On this page I found
the Pro edition may have all features of Windows 11 Home, but with some additional functions. The additional functions are designed for professionals and business environments
Isn't that helpful? But it's not from Microsoft themselves. They can do it too, though they do tell me:
The Remote Desktop Connection application is only available to users of Windows 11 Pro or Windows 11 Enterprise, as users of Windows 11 or 10 Home are specifically excluded from this feature by Microsoft.
I can't be bothered asking ”why”. At least I have finally found an answer. But will “Windows” 11 even work on my HP machine?
Elsewhere I discovered
The N editions don't include Windows Media Player, Skype, or certain preinstalled media apps (Music, Video, Voice Recorder)
It seems that these versions respect some EU law or another.
So, next question: will the Z800 run “Windows” 11? A Google search gave me conflicting information. The obvious place to ask is HP, HP, but that didn't help much. Finally I found Running Windows 11 on an HP Z800 workstation, which gave me interesting and apparently contradictory information:
Your PC also does not have a UEFI BIOS, support secure boot, or have a TPM 2.0 security device, so it is more than just the processor that isn't supported for W11.
You should be able to install W11 on your PC as is...
You would need to have previously installed W10, so that W11 will activate after the clean install.
So: do I even care? How long with “Windows” 10 be supported?
| Tuesday, 28 February 2023 | Dereel | Images for 28 February 2023 |
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More fried egg experiments
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
How easy is it to fry an egg? That depends on how good you want the results to be. I really gave up frying eggs after a bad experience years ago, but occasionally I want one, for example as part of nasi lemak. And almost no egg will maintain a completely circular shape by itself.
Rings? Tried that. They stick:
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But how about frying in a smaller pan to limit the spread? We have a tiny one, but the sides are high. How will I get it out again? Decided to fry in a lot of oil so that I can get a spoon underneath. It is also incompatible with the induction cooker, so I had to do it on gas.
Surprise, surprise. The egg lifted up at the edges:
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Still not perfect, but maybe better. It would be nice to find a larger pan with dimples for frying eggs in. Time to search.
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We will cancel your colonoscopy
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
I was due for a colonoscopy in April 2021, but I haven't been chasing them up. Then I received a letter from
the Ballarat Base Hospital Ballarat Health Services Grampians Health dated 12 February (why do
they always take so long to deliver mail?): Please reply to this questionnaire by 26
February or we will remove you from the waiting list.
Isn't that nice? On the positive side, they don't want a signature. I wonder if this is even legal. Called up, had to be reconnected twice because they were too polite to include a phone number (though they did include a fax number; who uses faxes in this millennium?), and they made a note that I had called, but despite my request not that I wanted to stay on the waiting list.
I've been very happy with the medical treatment at the hospital. Clearly the bean counters are something else.
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Firefox breaks system again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has not been able to use the Facebook “Messenger” feature for a couple of days now. Why not? Ignoring helpful answers on Facebook (“it will work if you reboot”), off to find out. It works on Microsoft! Yes. It seems that Facebook has relied on a new firefox feature that isn't in the version (73?) on lagoon.
pkg upgrade? Yes, willingly, in the process removing avidemux, ImageMagick and mpv. Damn! I couldn't even build it, because it wanted a different version of perl.
So it looks like a complete upgrade, in the process revisiting the pain that I had building avidemux
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Corymbia ficifolia!
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
It's the last day of summer, and our Corymbia ficifolia hasn't flowered. I thought that it should have flowered in December, but it seems that they can flower between December and May. In any case, I've been watching incipient inflorescences for over a month. And finally they're there!
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Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
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