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| Greg's diary |
| January 2022 |
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| Saturday, 1 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 1 January 2022 |
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Another bloody new year!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Yet another new year, my 75th. Where do they all come from? Somehow I find New Year's Day depressing, though I can't quite put my finger on why.
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First photos from the James Webb telescope
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Received from Rudi Blom today: the first image from the newly deployed James Webb Space Telescope:
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Animal feed quantities revisited
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
It's been over a week since I started giving the dogs only 100 g of pellets per day. The results are gradually becoming visible: they're no longer as fat. And in late morning they showed signs of hunger. OK, I didn't want to starve them, just give them an appropriate amount of food. Put 50 g in each bowl and let them at it. They both ignored it.
Wrong time of day? In the evening I gave them 120 g each, and they finished that too. More observation needed.
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Macros: tubes or close-up lens
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Got involved in a particularly stupid question on Quora today: “Why can macro lens achieve much higher magnification with a similar minimum focusing distance?”. The answer's simple, right? They can't, unless the focal length is shorter. But one person took exception to the fact that I quoted the thin lens formula 1/u + 1/v = 1/f. Modern lenses aren't thin! Not that that has anything to do with the matter. He went off on vague claims about running the lenses outside their design parameters, and came up with a claim that it's better to use a close-up lens than extension tubes.
There's so much wrong with these claims that I should have backed off, but I didn't. But I've been there before and established that the thing wasn't very sharp. Here an extreme example:
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But then, it was a 10 dioptre close-up lens. Most only go to 2 or 3. So: how about a comparison. 50 mm lens (the same one I used 12 years ago) and 35 mm lens, the two that will take the close-up lens. Three choices of enlargement: 3 dioptre (typical) close-up lens, 10 dioptre (extreme) close up, 26 mm extension tubes. What magnification do I get on the sensor?
| 35 mm | (EFL, mm) | 50 mm | (EFL, mm) | |||||
| native | 1 | 0.5 | ||||||
| 3 dioptre | 1.1 | 31.7 | 0.57 | 43.5 | ||||
| 10 dioptre | 1.35 | 25.9 | 0.75 | 33.3 | ||||
| 26 mm tubes | 1.74 | 1.02 | ||||||
| 2x 26 mm tubes | 2.49 | 1.54 |
The difference in magnification between the 35 mm and 50 mm is because of the way they're built: the 50 mm lens only manages a 0.5 magnification (“1:1 magnification” as the lying Olympus advertising claimed, compared to 35 mm sensors). Clearly the extension tubes are in a different league. And you can use several sets in series; you can't do that with close-up lenses.
| Sunday, 2 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 2 January 2022 |
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Refining KL Hokkien Mee
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
KL Hokkien Mee for breakfast again today. Not really a good idea: I didn't have any pok choi or choi sam. I thought that it wouldn't make that much difference. It did.
Apart from that, it's gradually occurring to me that the pork isn't cooked enough. I think the squid needs to be removed from the pan, then the pork cooked longer. And a little more garlic wouldn't be that bad an idea after all.
Also the consistency of the sauce still isn't what I want. Next time I'll use less chicken broth.
| Monday, 3 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 3 January 2022 |
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Finding the missing network cable
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, technology, opinion | Link here |
A couple of years ago I had problems with the Ethernet connection to the shed, the one that ran the sprinkler system. All the cables lead to the central switch on top of the freezer in the pantry:
Problem: there are 9 sockets for 10 cables. The ones not visible in that photo are below the left-hand group, as this photo from 2015 shows:
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And none of the connections seemed to be to the shed. Where is it? At the time I gave up and used powerline Ethernet: the communication speed is so non-critical that a 110 bps serial connection could have done it. But reading through my old diary entries gave me the answer: underneath the two that are next to each other, where even today I couldn't find it. Here a photo from 5 years ago:
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To see it at all you need to move the freezer away from the wall. All this stuff should have been at 2 m height, when in fact the highest are at 1.75 m. The new one is at 1.65 m.
At the time I complained frequently and long about Jim Lannen, the electrician, but I thought it would have been over by now.
And what have I done about it? Document it (here). It works with the powerline adapter, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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Google Maps: the ultimate insult
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Some time ago I thought of adding panoramas to Google Maps, but discovered that, in principle, they wanted 180°×360° panoramas, and anything else wanted description files that were more painful than I wanted to get involved with immediately. So I put it in the “too hard” basket and left it so long that I can't even find the details in my diary.
But now I have a 180°×360° panorama of the entrance to Chris Bahlo's property:
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How do I upload it to Google Maps? After some searching, it seems: With a MOBILE PHONE! What kind of abject nonsense is that? There seem to be alternatives ($25 a month leaseware), but they have apparently removed the normal computer interface.
What is the world coming to?
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Dog prices
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Helena Mirčić visited us yesterday, and during the conversation she mentioned that she was looking for a friendly little dog, since one of her dogs had died (happens far too often lately!), and the other was more of an outdoor dog and not very cuddly.
Just the job for Yvonne, who spent a considerable amount of time looking for something suitable. It's amazing how difficult it has become, maybe because of the COVID-19 pandemic. She found one, a cross-breed (“mongrel”), for which they wanted $8,000! I think that's more than we paid for all our dogs in the last 40 years put together!
She finally found a “rescue” dog, also a cross-bred, for “only” $800, more than we paid for Zhivago, Nikolai and Tanya put together. Also more than Helena wanted to pay.
Maybe we should go into the dog breeding business.
| Tuesday, 4 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 4 January 2022 |
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More problems with Carlotta
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Yvonne into my office in tears this morning. Carlotta's hooves have deteriorated further:.
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More attempts to find one of the farriers that Simon recommended on Friday, and while I was trying to resolve some wrong number issues, got a call from Garry Morgan, the one that Simon preferred. He seems to be the only game in town anyway, since the other, Aled Davies (why do they all have Welsh names?) has apparently moved to Tamworth. The earliest appointment is on 6 January in Lethbridge, so we'll take that.
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More garden work
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Paul Donaghy along today, and did a reasonable amount of work in the garden, including mowing the lawn and attending to the sprinkler system, which was greatly in need of it.
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God's service desk
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne came up with this somewhere:
| Wednesday, 5 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 5 January 2022 |
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Chili sauce mix
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
I've been grumbling for some time that chili sauces and pastes never seem to be right: too mild, too strong, too salty, too much belacan. I give up. A 50/50 mix of Lee Kum Kee Chili Garlic Sauce (their spelling) and tomato sauce seems to do the job:
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There's not much taste of tomato sauce in evidence.
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Vegetables!
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Shopping day today, and based on previous successes freezing Chinese vegetables, I asked Yvonne to buy 3 each choi sam and kangkong. But what she brought back blew my mind:
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The bunches of kangkong were at least 4 times the size of the others! In fact, the checkout cashier had assumed that the three choi sam were only one, and that's what we paid for. Here's the choi sam in the front on the left, and a single pok choi on the front right, with the kangkong in the background:
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Cooking with kangkong, web style
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Topic: food and drink, technology, opinion | Link here |
So we have far more kangkong than I know what to do with. OK, what does the web have to say? Lots, of course, including many recipes of Pilipino origin. Some are on YouTube, all with extensive advertising. Others have other ways to annoy me, including CAPTCHAs (why?) and software installation (is this a recipe or a security breach attempt?). In the end, I didn't find any recipe that I could watch, although the recipes summaries suggest garlic, maybe onions, and frequently oyster sauce. I don't need a recipe for that. But it is irritating that so many web resources are making themselves unusable with advertising and other stuff. That's particularly the case with YouTube, which does have useful stuff.
Is this the way of the future? I have already stopped trying to access some web sites because of the low signal to noise ratio. And cooking sites are particularly vulnerable, since the signal is frequently poor anyway.
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Friteuses: goodbye oil
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
A few months ago we bought some oil for the “primary” friteuse, the one with the better (and digital) temperature control. Normally we use fat, which Woolworths, with amazing chutzpah, calls “solidified oil”, though it is really some unspecified animal fat.
The oil has the advantage, of course, that you can remove or replace the basket at any time. I had also heard various claims that it had better cooking results, though my own experience hadn't borne that out. But previously I used the same oil that we use for other cooking. This time we had bought oil specifically designated as suitable for deep frying.
Not a success. First, it stinks! That's not this particular kind of oil; heat any cooking oil to 190° and the smell will be obvious. And somehow I get the feeling that the specific heat is lower, with less crisp results. So we're back to fat again.
| Thursday, 6 January 2022 | Dereel → Lethbridge → Dereel | Images for 6 January 2022 |
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Treating Carlotta's hooves
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Topic: animals, health, opinion | Link here |
Today was the day to take Carlotta to Lethbridge to have her feet examined. I had my concerns: the car had overheated last week, and pulling a float could make things worse. And the weather forecast was terrible: wind, rain, flooding. Should we postpone?
As it was, the journey was without problem. Bright sunshine all the way, no wind, the engine temperature remained normal, the float (borrowed from Melanie Bahlo) was easy and smooth to tow, and Carlotta was completely calm. About the biggest surprise was the way Google Maps navigated us there. I had checked yesterday and found two alternatives: via Meredith, where we would have to go over a considerable stretch of unpaved road and navigate an unpleasant ford, or almost all the way to Bannockburn. But this time the same app took a completely different route, and told us, just as we were passing, that we had arrived at the vet clinic, requiring us to drive several kilometres to find a place to turn.
But when we got there, we discovered that our farrier, Garry Morgan, had contracted COVID-19! And so had his assistant. They were even in the reception area two days ago, where now the receptionists were sitting with no ventilation and no masks! Nothing for it, another 50 km back home.
But what stupidity of the receptionists for not taking any precautions, despite the fact that they confirmed to have been in contact with somebody with COVID-19!
Yvonne read this and told me that only one of the two receptionists (the one with whom we were talking) wasn't wearing a mask. That's not the way I recall it. She also pointed out that I wasn't wearing a mask. Yes, that's correct. I had considered it and decided that it would not be necessary in an outside environment. By the time I found out, we were leaving anyway. But yes, it's clear that I should always use the mask where possible.
About 10 minutes later on the way back I sensed a burning in my nose that could conceivably be related, though it went away within minutes and could have been due to suggestion. But if I do contract it, it will be fairly clear where.
Chris Bahlo along later and cut off the edges of the hoof. Probably it will be OK for the time being until Garry is (hopefully) able to look at it.
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Road blocks
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Topic: animals | Link here |
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Kangkong recipes revisited
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday I grumbled about the obstacles in finding recipes for kangkong. Today I took another look, and the recipes were much easier to read, though they confirmed my impression that there was nothing much to them.
What's the difference? Yesterday I watched on teevee, using a profile without an ad blocker. Today I looked on eureka, with an ad blocker. On the one hand, it shows the advantages of ad blockers, but on the other hand it's a warning: more and more sites will learn to circumvent ad blockers.
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Cooking kangkong
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Finally got round to cooking some of the kangkong that Yvonne bought yesterday. Surprisingly, in total it was only about 1.3 kg.
As usual the quantities were an issue. This time (not reflected in the recipe below) I used 45 g of oyster sauce, the remainder of what was in the bottle, and also 4.5 g salt. That proved to be too much, though Yvonne didn't think so. So for next time I will have:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 20 g | garlic | 1 | ||
| oil | ||||
| 450 g | Kangkong | 2 | ||
| 30 g | soya sauce | 3 | ||
| 30 g | oyster sauce | 3 |
Peel and crush the garlic. Fry at low heat in oil:
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Separate Kangkong into stems (about 250 g) and leaves (about 200 g).
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Saute the stems gently with the garlic and a little more oil for 10 to 15 minutes under cover:
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Add the leaves and sauces, saute gently until the leaves are soft. Serve.
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I also thought of putting in some fried sliced dofu puffs:
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But in the end it didn't seem appropriate, so I'll use them for something else.
In passing, it's interesting to consider the price of kangkong. The bunches weighed about 500 g and cost $10. And after cooking, there's very little left. That puts it roughly on par with high quality steaks.
| Friday, 7 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 7 January 2022 |
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Clematis: surviving Bryan Ross
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Walking through the garden today, I was pleasantly surprised to see this:
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What's so special about that? That they're there at all. They're the two Clematis that I bought four years ago. Compared to then, they look terrible:
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But the pleasant surprise that they had survived Bryan Ross's “pruning” attempts: I was sure that at least the “Edo Murasaki” was dead. But the other, the “General Sikorski”, had been looking unhappy before. Where are the leaves? There are some on another stem, but this seems to be a last-gasp flowering. Fertilizer? Water?
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Storming the Bastille: rewriting history
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Topic: history, opinion | Link here |
An interesting sounding documentary from German TV today: „Der Sturm auf die Bastille: Was wirklich geschah“ (“Storming of the Bastille: what really happened”). And how about that, it was interesting. I had always wondered how people without firearms were able to destroy one of the most fortified buildings in Paris.
I've only watched about 10 minutes, in which I was told that the protesters went to the Hôtel des Invalides and stole firearms, but they didn't have any ammunition: that was in the Bastille, and that's why they went there.
But then the narrative ran “France was bankrupt after having supported Britain against the rebels in the American Revolutionary War”. WHAT? Why would the French have supported their arch-enemies? And of course, it's completely wrong. They supported the USA. How can any serious documentary maker make such a mistake?
I've grumbled in the past about poor quality documentaries, summed up with this photo:
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So is it worth watching? The information I have heard is new, and potentially interesting. But how can I tell if it bears any relationship to reality?
| Saturday, 8 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 8 January 2022 |
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Replacing teevee disk
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
One of the first things I do every morning is go through the previous day's log files. And today I found a disturbing set of messages:
teevee.lemis.com kernel log messages:
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+(ada0:ahcich1:0:0:0): READ_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 60 00 a8 cf f4 40 07 00 00 01 00 00
+(ada0:ahcich1:0:0:0): CAM status: ATA Status Error
+(ada0:ahcich1:0:0:0): ATA status: 41 (DRDY ERR), error: 40 (UNC )
+(ada0:ahcich1:0:0:0): RES: 41 40 e8 cf f4 40 07 00 00 00 01
+(ada0:ahcich1:0:0:0): Error 5, Retries exhausted
+g_vfs_done():ada0p4[READ(offset=3919446016, length=131072)]error = 5
That's FreeBSD's inimitable way of saying “your disk is broke”. Nowadays there's only one thing to do: replace the disk before it fails completely. But with what? This is an 8 TB disk, and it's been in the system for a while. It's also almost completely full, so it might be a good opportunity to replace it with a bigger disk.
There now seem to be disks with up to 16 TB storage, if I can fight my way through the web pages describing them. eBay in particular is useless: there are so many sellers offering disks of different sizes as the same “item” that I can't really tell what the prices are. But after some searching, it seems that the sweet spot in pricing is still round 8 TB or 10 GB; for the price of a 16 TB disk you can buy two 8 TB disks and have money left over.
And then there's the question of backups. I have a single 8 TB backup disk, along with a second 6 TB disk that is only half-heartedly in use. If I get a larger main disk, I will have issues with backups, unless I also buy a larger backup disk. So everything's pointing towards replacing the disk with a new 8 TB disk.
But where? Off searching. I think I've had enough of eBay's opaque sellers.
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Noodle cooking times revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
One of the pervading issues with my page on noodle cooking times is that my times are almost invariably longer than the times recommended on the packaging. My taste? The term “al dente” suggests a certain residual hardness in the noodles. But I can't recall eating noodles anywhere, including in Singapore and Italy, that were firmer than I would like.
Still, a bit of experimentation is good. Today a cooked a nest of “Chef's World” noodles and gave them only 6 minutes instead of the previous 7. They were for soup, and they were fine like that. I should check more of these times.
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Finding a farrier
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Topic: animals, health, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne is in a bit of a panic about Carlotta's hooves, though Chris Bahlo had suggested that she could still be moved. The immediate issue of broken-out edges is past, and we need to let the hooves grow before fitting any shoes. But the front of the hooves could be trimmed with advantage.
Yvonne sees that differently: it's an emergency, and we need somebody to look at them now. After some discussion she drummed up Dave Ingle, “Fancy Farrier” in Eddington, phone 0419 819 189, who was prepared to come tomorrow (Sunday). He's a pupil of Garry Morgan, so Yvonne thinks that he will be able to do a good job.
But then she became concerned about exposure to COVID-19. We don't want to infect anybody! More soul-searching on her part, and she called up again to discuss the matter. Yes, Dave agreed, he won't come tomorrow.
And we don't even know to what extent the people in Lethbridge were exposed to the virus. We're contacts of contacts at best.
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ALDIMobile insults
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Our increased use of “smart” phones is showing in our data usage. I used to get by for a year on a single $15 “Pay as you go” charge from ALDIMobile. Now, after only 80 days, I have used more than half of my credit.
But for Yvonne it's worse: after three weeks, she has used up her credit. Where did it go? Checking the usage pages is not very helpful, though it shows that half the costs were phone calls, and after all it's still not very much.
OK, show her how to “recharge” with the ALDIMobile App. All straightforward, and then...
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And why? I'm already logged in. And what's the worst thing about a “smart” phone? The lack of a keyboard! The glass substitute drives me to distraction. You'd think they did it deliberately. Recharged with a web browser and a Real Computer instead. That didn't ask for a password.
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Where's my DNS configuration?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
When she was here on Thursday, Chris Bahlo mentioned issues with her email, which I manage. Yes, indeed, about 2 months ago we changed our DNS configuration, and I made a mess of narrawin.com. I'm surprised that she didn't notice it earlier. OK, fix it. Kick named. Result didn't show up.
Why? After some investigation I discovered that the main configuration file is /usr/local/etc/named/named.conf, and not /etc/named/named.conf, which also exists, and which I had updated: things have moved on in the last couple of decades. But it also seems that only part of the things have moved; the zone files are in /var/named/etc/named, a third location. About the only thing that makes things marginally simpler is that /etc/named is a symlink to /var/named/etc/named. But that's a high priority candidate to move to dereel, which I'm thinking of using to run servers for the household network.
| Sunday, 9 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 9 January 2022 |
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Descaling coffee machine
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Topic: general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Our “new” coffee machine is now a little over 2 years old, and in that time it has insisted on being descaled twice. Why? Because the designers can't conceive of the idea that a coffee machine can be run with completely soft water like the rainwater we use.
How do you do that? Last time I ran into lots of trouble: I made the mistake of reading a downloaded PDF instruction manual, which proved not to match the instructions for the device. So this time I read the instructions. What a catastrophe! References to B3 and A18, which I had to search all over the place, apart from symbols that make no sense at all, like the ones I grumbled about last time:
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It took me 15 minutes to work out how to do it, and in fact once you work around the “documentation” it's straightforward enough:
And for that I had to find information on 5 different pages in the instruction manual. To misquote president Donald T., “there should be a special place in hell for people who write documentation like that”.
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Walking the dogs
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Peggy Naumov along again today with not only George, but also her greyhound Elsie:
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She reminded me immediately of Tina and Tony, our whippets, of whom I have surprisingly few photos:
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Yvonne fell in love with her; a good thing that we already have our quota of dogs.
Elsie got on with our dogs, of course, and George is gradually coming round; today he came up and sniffed my hand. But when Larissa tried to come too close, he snapped at her. Still, it's getting better:
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They weren't very energetic, perhaps because of the heat, and we came back relatively quickly. Put Elsie in a horse paddock with our dogs, but they were too tired to run around:
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Later, though, she did run around with George.
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| Monday, 10 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 10 January 2022 |
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A farrier!
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Dave Ingle, the fancy farrier, along today to take a look at Carlotta. The matter was clear: her hooves had been incorrectly trimmed, too long in front, too short at the back. A simple correctional trim and she would be better in 45 minutes.
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Yvonne was delighted. She had been suffering all kinds of fears over the last 10 days, and even better, Dave has reasonable prices and is prepared to come regularly.
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More rain gauge strangenesses
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Topic: general | Link here |
It's been unseasonably wet this “summer”. So far this month we've had 56 mm of rain in Ballarat; the average for all of January is 40.1 mm, so so far this year we have had nearly 5 times the average rainfall.
Reading the rain gauges is getting more difficult: the markings are wearing off, and I can't find replacements. But they don't agree with each other. I first noticed this nearly 7 years ago, when gauge 2 read roughly 15% more than gauge 1.
But then last year they changed roles, and gauge 1 started recording more than gauge 2. And it stayed that way until almost exactly the beginning of this year. Now they're the other way round again:
| Gauge 1 | Gauge 2 | |||
| 20 December 2021 | 9.0 | 8.7 | ||
| 5 January 2022 | 5.0 | 6.7 | ||
| 6 January 2022 | 1.5 | 3.0 | ||
| 7 January 2022 | 1.5 | 2.8 | ||
| 8 January 2022 | 3.9 | 4.7 | ||
What causes that? The way the rain falls, maybe, or the wind?
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Another handyman
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Jesse Walsh, a handyman in Dereel, came around this afternoon to help change the rollers on the sliding doors. We didn't get very far. It still looks as if I'll need a screw extractor. But it wasn't a total failure: we took a look at the door in the bedroom, and discovered that the adjusting screws had somehow turned and lowered the rollers. At least that explains the difficulty I had getting the doors out of the slides. Is this maybe an issue with the way the things work?
| Tuesday, 11 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 11 January 2022 |
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Arena shed: next step
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Email from Sarah Smith of the Golden Plains Shire Council today:
Please upload elevations and site (both as pdf documents) at your earliest convenience to allow for the application to proceed.
And that was all. What does that mean? What elevations? How do you upload a site? The only elevations that I had were for the shed itself, and they were in the original application, which she had approved nearly a year ago. Sent the application back to her anyway. Yes, just what she wanted, thank you.
I'm left wondering what she was thinking. Hopefully the coming “advertisement” (asking the neighbours what they think) will have the shed in the right place.
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Another strange Triébert bassoon
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Topic: music | Link here |
I have a somewhat strange bassoon made by Triébert, better known for oboes. One of the innovations that he made on the French bassoon was moving the hole for the third finger of the right hand further down, but this instrument, though much later, still has the G hole in the old position:
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It was also made of two different kinds of wood and with two different qualities: the wing is of a lighter wood (rosewood?) and very nicely finished, while the rest is darker and much more coarsely finished. I discussed this at some length shortly after I got the instrument.
Then today I was looking for something else and stumbled on this page, offering what was clearly my instrument. The same lack of cover for the G hole, the same difference in quality of the wing and the rest of the instrument:
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Out to look at my instrument. No, it's not my instrument: there are significant differences, including the lack of rings on the butt. But the same difference in quality and the kind of wood. So much for my guess that this was some kind of experimental model. I wonder what the background is.
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Deep freezer woes
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Topic: general | Link here |
The freezer in the pantry seems to have problems, possibly related to the de-icing. The front of the drawers is frequently moist, and it seems that the contents are occasionally thawed: there are ice crystals there from time to time.
What's causing that? I had thought that it was quite old, but in fact we bought it less than 8 years ago. By contrast we have a third freezer of the same type in the garage. It still works, but it must be well over 20 years old.
OK, replace the freezer in the pantry with the old freezer and see how that works. But that requires either moving a full freezer or taking all the baskets out while we do the move. And then there's the stuff on top of the freezer, including a lot of network stuff that I don't want to disconnect.
So ultimately we put it in the dining room, at least for the time being.
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It had been clean when I put it in the garage, and it looked clean when I opened it. But after removing the bottom baskets, I found:
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After cleaning, put in the top baskets from the other freezer. Since they're the same model, that's trivial. And three things became apparent: the freezer in the dining room is much louder, it ran all the time and... after removing the baskets, the freezer in the pantry no longer seemed to have any temperature issues. Did something impede the air flow maybe?
So what do we do now? I had thought of having the pantry freezer overhauled, but maybe there's nothing wrong with it after all. So for the moment I'll just observe.
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Dog growth
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Topic: animals | Link here |
It's been some time since we weighed Larissa and Lena, since we haven't taken them near a scale since mid-October. All we can do is measure their heights. Two months ago they measured 67 cm and 71 cm. Since then they have grown, and they now measure 72 cm and 76 cm, both big enough for adult bitches—the range is between 68 and 78 cm. I wonder how much more they will grow.
| Wednesday, 12 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 12 January 2022 |
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Back to work?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been quite some time since I last did any serious development work on FreeBSD. I blame a lot of that on git, but at some point I need to get over my revulsion. And I have a good first thing to do: the current date(1) man page barely references time zones (and when it does, it calls them timezones), and doesn't mention /etc/localtime at all. There's a fix which is simple and obvious (but hopefully not wrong). Time for a new checkout.
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/2) /usr/src 6 -> mkdir src.main=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/2) /usr/src 7 -> cd src.main=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/2) /usr/src/src.main 8 -> igitt clone src
This seems to be a src clone
Cloning into 'src'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 4488277, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (379329/379329), done.
Oh. The first message from igitt (a script that should make life more bearable) suggests that I already have a clone. And so I do; I put the thing in /usr/src/src.main instead of the intended /usr/src.main. But then it must be looking outside the tree. That sounds Just Plain Wrong. OK, wait for it to finish, then move the directory.
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The next smart phone insult
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Phone call from Yvonne (in Ballarat) this morning. OK, answer it. But it didn't want to know. A full-screen display appeared, something like “Please don't cover the earphone area”. Where's that? My guess is at top or bottom, and I was holding the sides.
But how do I get rid of it? No amount of pressing or “swiping” made any difference. In the end, out of sheer desperation, I pressed the power key. And with a certain reluctance it came back to show the phone call that had miraculously been accepted.
WHY are these things so hard to use? At the very least there should be a way to override the user interface stupidity.
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Another PV battery recalibration
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Another PV battery recalibration today, starting at 18:38 and going to 19:10. What next?
| Thursday, 13 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 13 January 2022 |
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Stir-frying on induction cookers
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Daniel O'Connor has just bought a new induction cooktop, so of course we had lots of discussion on IRC. It's a Westinghouse, and proves to be just as badly documented as my Bosch unit. The sales page includes images that contradict each other, and the first time I looked it didn't display any overview of the device. It turns out that, although the page is for a specific model, it includes images of other models. And similarly the description doesn't match the manual, which is also interesting because it comes from Electrolux, not Westinghouse. Yes, they're the same (schizophrenic?) company, but it's still confusing.
The real question, though: how to use a wok (kuali). I have one, but I don't use it. Instead I use a flat steel frying pan:
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My kuali has a flattened bottom about 20 cm across, and checking showed what I expected: that's the area that gets heated, along with a little along the side. But it takes much longer to heat up than the frying pan. Daniel has a kuali with a curved bottom, so clearly his update path should go via a flat frying pan.
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git: the next surprise
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My git checkout had finished this morning, of course. But it was in the wrong directory, /usr/src/src-head instead of /usr/src-head. Nothing that basic commands can't fix:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr 6 -> mv src/src.main .=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr 7 -> cd src.main=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src.main 8 -> igitt up
fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git
It's saves state in its external environment! Yet another thing to hate about git.
How do I fix it? Certainly not by making more assumptions about it. Start over again. After all, it's been years already; what does another day make?
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Pizza dough quantities
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Pizza for dinner tonight. I've been making my pizza dough the same way for years: for two pizze, 300 g flour, 185 g water and 30 g olive oil. But today the dough looked too moist. Added more flour, a total of 15 g or 5% of the total. And it seems to be OK like that. That corresponds to 300 g flour and only 176 g water. I'm not convinced, but I'll note that for next time.
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Ruhrpott and breakfast dishes
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Topic: multimedia, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Watched a new TV series yesterday, WaPo Duisburg, a spin-off of WaPo Bodensee. In each case, it's about the “water police” („WaPo“). The Bodensee is a nice, pretty lake shared between Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and part of the attraction of the series is the landscape. Duisburg is at the end of the Ruhr, where it flows into the Rhein, and it's a gritty, dirty environment. Nobody seems to have tried to make it prettier than it is, and I'm not sure that we'll watch another episode, especially as the story line is somewhat silly (the hero is a Turkish girl who has just started her first job, and she takes over running the station on her first day).
But in one scene we saw a policeman eating breakfast at our Turkish hero's home: menemen. It looks interesting, and with a bit of searching I found not only an interesting recipe, but also a recipe for shakshuka, a similar Tunisian dish. I'll try them out some time.
| Friday, 14 January 2022 | Dereel → Napoleons → Dereel | Images for 14 January 2022 |
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The Djokovic saga
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Topic: health, politics, general, opinion | Link here |
I have never had any interest in spectator sport, but we can't get away from the names of sportsmen, and certainly Novak Djokovic is a name I immediately recognize. He's not just a tennis player (it was tennis, wasn't it?), but also a vehement anti-vaxxer.
So it was with mixed feelings that I heard at the beginning of the month that he had been granted a vaccination waiver to play in the Australian Open in Melbourne, apparently a tennis tournament. And it was quite amusing to watch what happened next, and what the press made out of it:
He arrived at Tullamarine airport and was immediately detained, apparently kept awake all night and not given access to a lawyer. Then his visa was revoked, and he was put into the immigration detention facility at the Park Hotel in Carlton.
On 10 January the media reported that a judge had reinstated his visa because he had done all that he could be expected to do, but that the immigration minister could still revoke his visa, automatically triggering a 3 year ban on re-entering the country. Bad immigration minister, going against the court decision.
In the next few days, many contradictions surfaced: Djokovic had tested positive for COVID-19 on 16 December, requiring him to isolate. On 17 December and 18 December he appeared in public without a mask. The press made a lot out of the fact that he might not have known that he was positive on 17 December, but that doesn't help with the 18th. And then a few days later, on 22 December, he tested negative. He also traveled to Spain before flying to Australia, though he had stated on his visa application that he had not, as page 76 of the legal documents shows:
He later claimed that this was done on his behalf. I don't see what difference that makes; he was responsible for the content, and he should have ensured that it was correct.
In passing, what a sloppy formulation on the form: “Are you an Australian citizen, permanent resident or immediate family member?”. An immediate family member of whom? I'm reminded of the Ode to Joy: „Und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle weinend sich aus diesem Bund“.
We then discover that the dismissal of the visa revocation on Monday was on procedural grounds: Djokovic had been denied his rights in defending himself. No reason that the visa still couldn't be legally revoked.
And the three year ban on reentry? That's at the discretion of the minister. But the press only discovered that after his visa had been revoked again.
So, what do we have here? The press reporting on the issue is clearly suboptimal. At the very least there are questions about Djokovic's statements. This timeline states that his visa application was granted on 18 November, before he tested positive for COVID-19. So what was his excuse for not being vaccinated? The ones we have heard were that he had recently recovered from COVID-19. But that hadn't happened yet. And why did he claim that the tick in the box in the application was a mistake made by somebody else? Clearly he should have either corrected the answers to his visa application (how?), or, more sensibly, stuck to the conditions to which he agreed. There's a lot that doesn't add up here, and none of the international press attention seems to have addressed it. Could this whole positive/negative thing have been staged to give him a reason to convince Tennis Australia that he should be exempted? If so, he was missing the very important issue that he still needed to be vaccinated to enter Australia.
Anyway, as I see it, there are reasons to allow him to play and reasons to revoke his visa. On the “for” side, he's the World Number One in tennis, and if he wins here he will set an all-time record for something or another.
On the “against” side, though:
Most obvious: he lied on his visa application form. When was it filed? If it was before he allegedly tested positive, his reasons for exemption are not valid. If it was filed after he allegedly tested negative again, then his overseas travel answer was a lie. Either way, the visa isn't valid. Arguably he should be allowed to stay and be sentenced to the maximum penalty of 12 months in jail.
It's not fair to people in Melbourne (or elsewhere in Australia) to ask them to put up with severe restrictions and then waive them for a celebrity. I think this point alone has probably used up a lot of the sympathy people might have had for Djokovic.
He's a known anti-vaxxer, and his actions could trigger further resistance. It makes sense for the government to treat him harshly.
It's not clear whether his reasons for exemption are valid. Did he have COVID-19? It doesn't disappear in a matter of 10 days.
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The Djokovic connection
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Topic: history, opinion | Link here |
I have never been interested in sports, a distinct disadvantage when living in Melbourne, where social life revolves around sports. And even so, if I were to get involved, it would be to perform myself, not watch others do it. But the Djokovic saga brings certain connections to light.
Over the weekend of 8 January 2022 he was detained in the Park Hotel in Carlton, where I stayed in its “Rydges Hotel” incarnation 20 years ago. It was just round the corner from 177 Grattan St, where we had lived in the late 1950s, and where decades later Julian Assange had lived.
The hotel is opposite the north-east edge of Lincoln Park, where I had a (friendly) wrestling match with my younger cousin, Mark Doyle. He later changed his name to Louis Nowra and wrote a fictive book based on his childhood, titled “The Twelfth of Never”. I went into some detail about his claims here, but one thing I couldn't have guessed was that over 20 years later the location of our “wrestling” match would have been directly in front of the Park Hotel.
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git clone: Next attempt
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Into the office this morning to look at my cloned git tree. The display on the xterm didn't look good:
error: unable to create file contrib/nvi/vi/vs_smap.c: No space left on device
error: unable to create file contrib/nvi/vi/vs_split.c: No space left on device
Huh? There should be plenty of space:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr 22 -> df .
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ada0p2 197,114 92,316 89,028 51% /
Looking more carefully showed:
/: create/symlink failed, no inodes free
Another disadvantage of symlinks: they usually require an inode. Another reason to hate git? After removing a couple of obsolete trees, I had plenty; it seems that a src checkout requires about 110,000 inodes. How many are symlinks? Peter Jeremy says (and I haven't checked) that the old subversion trees had about 90,000 inodes, so it wasn't that much.
OK, Yet Another clone. I had more important things to do anyway.
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A new disk for teevee
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The new disk that I bought for teevee on Saturday (“overnight delivery”) has now arrived, so off to Napoleons to pick it up. Back home to put it in the spare ThinkCentre that I had reserved for the system build.
Oh. No cables. Spent some time looking for things that I should have at hand, and finally found them. Then open the box. Why does every ThinkCentre have a different method?
Finally opened it. Oh. No memory. Do I not have any left over? Looked around in a number of old machines, all bare of memory. That in itself suggested that I wouldn't find any lying around elsewhere. OK, vandalize dereel and put half its memory in the new machine (tiwi until it's ready to go live). Reboot dereel blind. It didn't come up.
Dammit, more cables to connect power to the monitor. It had booted from the memory stick that I had copied for the installation in tiwi, and which was still in dereel. Want to install? No thanks.
Put it in tiwi, where it came up with a completely different view. No offer to install, just to boot. OK, boot. And it hung almost immediately with some display of screen dimensions.
I had some recollection that I had at least one defective ThinkCentre, but I was reasonably sure that this one was OK. It did have a disk inside it when I found out how to open it, and it happily booted from that.
So: it doesn't like the memory stick image I used. OK, there are alternatives. In fact, so many that I couldn't make up my mind. The obvious ones were to install from DVD or use the existing disk to partition the disk and install an existing system, maybe from dereel. What do I do? For the past 20 years at least I've been trying to establish a canonical method of installing the software, and while I no longer have much hope, it would be nice to try something that other people could repeat. So, the DVD it is.
Why is the download so slow? It came across at about 400 kB/s, meaning it would take hours to arrive. Mañana.
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More clematis surprises
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
It's only been a week since I commented about the state of my clematis plants that have suffered so much.at the hands of Bryan Ross. The General Sikorski had been looking unhappy last week, but at least it had some leaves at the base. And now they're dead too! Here last week (first two images) and now:
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That can't all be Bryan's fault. What's the problem?
On the other hand, the “Edo Murasaki” is growing happily. Again last week and today:
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Vomiting dogs
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Round midday Yvonne called me to show me what Lena had done:
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What is that? Larissa had eaten up a lot of it, and later vomited it up again (clever idea to let her eat it in the first place). The white lumps proved to be bits of the brisket bones that the dogs had been given earlier. Is that the cause or just an accompaniment? I should have investigated the dark lumps too.
The dogs seemed little the worse for the experience, though they didn't want to go for a walk. That could have been due to the weather, however.
| Saturday, 15 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 15 January 2022 |
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teevee upgrade: more delays
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Into the office this morning to continue the upgrade of teevee. Where's my DVD image?
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 0 14 Jan 17:18 FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso
-rw------- 1 grog lemis 3,594,911,276 14 Jan 19:31 FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso.par
Only partially downloaded, after over 2 hours! What do you expect when you use a web browser to download large files? Restarted, but the real solution is to use a real program:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /src/ISOs 174 -> fetch https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.0/FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso
fetch: https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.0/FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso: No address record
Huh? What about on freefall?
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/4) ~ 30 -> fetch https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.0/FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso
FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso 4562 MB 92 MBps 49s
That looks better. Now just to copy it to eureka:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /src/ISOs 172 -> scp freefall:FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso .
FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso 22% 1049MB 55.1KB/s 18:08:17 ETCorrupted MAC on input.
Disconnecting: Packet corrupt
lost connection
But by that time I wasn't looking any more: for some reason it copied even more slowly than the browser. So I let it run, and finally it was done:
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 4,784,017,408 15 Jan 16:44 FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso
Another whole day wasted copying a file that, by video standards, isn't even very big. And then I had to copy it to an SD card (will that even work?)? It took nearly 10 minutes at only 9 MB/s.
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 6 -> dd if=/src/ISOs/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso of=/dev/da0 bs=128k
36499+1 records in
36499+1 records out
4784017408 bytes transferred in 527.020794 secs (9077474 bytes/sec)
Will it even work? gpart tells me:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 7 -> gpart show
=> 3 9343779 da0 GPT (7.4G) [CORRUPT]
3 24 1 freebsd-boot (12K)
27 53 - free - (27K)
80 4096 2 efi (2.0M)
4176 9339606 - free - (4.5G)
=> 3 9343779 iso9660/13_0_RELEASE_AMD64_DVD GPT (7.4G) [CORRUPT]
3 24 1 freebsd-boot (12K)
27 53 - free - (27K)
80 4096 2 efi (2.0M)
4176 9339606 - free - (4.5G)
=> 3 9343779 diskid/DISK-201408282030 GPT (7.4G) [CORRUPT]
3 24 1 freebsd-boot (12K)
27 53 - free - (27K)
80 4096 2 efi (2.0M)
4176 9339606 - free - (4.5G)
Given the time, I won't make any further progress until tomorrow.
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Dogs changing coat?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Both Larissa and Lena have particularly curly coats on their backs. Well, some of it. Larissa has a smooth coat on her right side, but not on her left:
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And Lena has a smooth section on the middle of her back:
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It's interesting to note the change of colour of Lena's coat. I wonder what it will look like in a couple of months' time.
| Sunday, 16 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 16 January 2022 |
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Cleaning filters
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Topic: photography | Link here |
How do some people keep their lenses so clean? I have bought a number of second-hand lenses, and the glass has always been spotless. I have given up on that a long time ago, and instead I put filters in front of the lenses. That protects the lens and makes it easier to clean, at least in theory.
Today I had a dirty filter. OK, take it off and clean it in the iso-propyl alcohol that I had bought for the purpose. It doesn't work! The smudges didn't go by themselves, and somewhere I ended up with granules of something that weren't there before. Lens cleaning tissue? It spreads the smudge around. In the end, things looked worse than before.
OK, to the bathroom. Wash the filter in warm water and kitchen detergent. Rinse copiously. Soak up the remaining droplets with a serviette (just touch, don't rub). Done!
No idea if this would work with hard water.
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Upgrading teevee, day 3
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It took me all day yesterday to get a boot image for my upgrade to teevee. And it was for a DVD. But I wanted to install from a memory stick. And in fact all I had was an SD card in a card reader. Can I even boot from that?
Yes! But that was the only good news. It failed to boot in exactly the same way as the memory stick did on Friday:
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Clearly there's something wrong with the distribution media, since the computer itself (ThinkCentre 91p) works, and the boot media works with other ThinkCentres (M93p). What should I do?
The screen corruption at the top of the screen wasn't reproducible, but the hang was. I tried it with the standard boot, “safe mode”, boot to single user, and it always hangs in the same place. The -v option doesn't produce any additional information.
Entered a bug report. I don't have much hope of a quick fix, but this kind of problem needs to be documented.
So what do I do now? Copy an installation from another system? No, I don't think so. I'm trying to make this a textbook installation; I'll need to find another machine or other installation media. Another day with no progress.
| Monday, 17 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 17 January 2022 |
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More tiwi fun
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
OK, it's fairly clear that I can't boot FreeBSD 13 installation media on my spare ThinkCentre M91p. But it doesn't seem to be a problem on the M93p that I call dereel. Simple: remove the dereel disk from the M93p and put it in the M91p. That worked so easily that I wondered why I hadn't thought of it before. It also gives access to a better monitor: before I had to share with eureka's monitor 4 ():0.3).
OK, first thing after boot is to partition the new disk. How I hate this fake GUI interface that people have been running for decades! It evolved from the system that I described in the first edition of “Installing and running FreeBSD” in February 1996. The only difference is the disk partitioning menu: now it's even more GUIfied, and I decided to avoid it and escape to a shell to run gpart:
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Where's ada0 there? It isn't. All three “geoms” are the same thing, the SD card, with different names. Confusingly, the card is almost exactly 1/1000 of the size of the disk: 7.4 GB instead of 7.3 TB. Miss that G instead of T and you can easily come to the wrong conclusion. I didn't find a way to access the disk. So back through the horrible menu after all, though I didn't create the /spool partition; I can do that later at the end, also giving me the opportunity to use custom newfs parameters.
Installation went without a hitch. Now install the ports.
root@tiwi:~ # pkg install bash emacs
The package management tool is not yet installed on your system.
Do you want to fetch and install it now? (y/N) y
Could not resolve host: pkg.freebsd.org
root@tiwi:~ #
Huh? What went wrong there? It works on freefall:
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/4) ~ 33 -> host pkg.freebsd.org
pkg.freebsd.org is an alias for pkgmir.geo.freebsd.org.
Local DNS issues? On freefall I had:
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/4) ~ 36 -> nslookup -q=soa freebsd.org
Server: 127.0.1.132
Address: 127.0.1.132#53
Non-authoritative answer:
freebsd.org
origin = ns0.freebsd.org
mail addr = hostmaster.freebsd.org
serial = 2022011704
refresh = 3600
retry = 900
expire = 1209600
minimum = 3600
Authoritative answers can be found from:
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/4) ~ 37 -> date
Mon Jan 17 04:40:53 UTC 2022
That's the same as I got locally. But look at that serial number. The canonical YYYYMMDDvv. Dated today, when it's only 4:40, and there have already been four revisions! Clearly somebody is having problems, confirmed when I tried to update my git tree: it couldn't find git.freebsd.org either.
OK, wait...
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src-13 33 -> while :; do date; host git.freebsd.org; sleep 60; done
Mon 17 Jan 2022 15:48:04 AEDT
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
Mon 17 Jan 2022 15:49:14 AEDT
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
Mon 17 Jan 2022 15:50:24 AEDT
git.freebsd.org is an alias for gitmir.geo.freebsd.org.
gitmir.geo.freebsd.org has address 140.113.168.168
gitmir.geo.freebsd.org has IPv6 address 2001:f18:113:c5fb::e6a:1
gitmir.geo.freebsd.org mail is handled by 0 .
...
Mon 17 Jan 2022 15:52:27 AEDT
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
Mon 17 Jan 2022 15:53:37 AEDT
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
Mon 17 Jan 2022 15:54:48 AEDT
git.freebsd.org is an alias for gitmir.geo.freebsd.org.
...
OK, spend the time building a new world and kernel (13-STABLE). By the time I was done, freebsd.org was up to serial 2022011717.
When it had stabilized somewhat, finally got round to installing Xorg, bash and emacs. But it didn't quite finish downloading the 260 odd packages before things went away again.
But a retry helped, and by evening I had my three base ports installed. Now at least I have an xterm from tiwi on eureka:0.1, and another day has gone by.
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How do you start an NFS server?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The source tree that I needed on tiwi is mounted on dereel. I'll need NFS to mount it.
I've been using BSD for not quite 30 years (since 19 March 1992), but there are still some basic things that I have never understood. One is: how do you start an NFS server on a running system? It's not enough to have an /etc/exports and a running mountd. Something about port mapping? rpcbind is your friend. nfsd? Yes, of course. Set all that up, but the mount still failed.
OK, use the only way I know: put this into /etc/rc.conf and reboot!
# NFS
nfs_client_enable=YES # This host is an NFS client (or NO).
nfs_server_enable=YES # This host is an NFS server (or NO).
rpc_lockd_enable="YES" # Run NFS rpc.lockd needed for client/server.
rpc_statd_enable="YES" # Run NFS rpc.statd needed for client/server.
rpcbind_enable="YES"
That worked, but I really don't understand. I'm pretty sure that rpcbind is essential, and that lockd isn't. statd maybe? In any case, the other big difference is that when I start nfsd from a shell, I only get one process. When I start it at boot, I get two. Here the related processes:
root 742 0.0 0.0 12828 2020 - Ss Mon11 0:00.05 /usr/sbin/rpcbind
root 785 0.0 0.0 15444 2152 - Ss Mon11 0:02.51 /usr/sbin/mountd -r -S
root 787 0.0 0.0 15316 1824 - Is Mon11 0:00.01 nfsd: master (nfsd)
root 788 0.0 0.0 12756 2288 - S Mon11 1:25.78 nfsd: server (nfsd)
root 791 0.0 0.0 277508 2104 - Ss Mon11 0:00.03 /usr/sbin/rpc.statd
root 794 0.0 0.0 15416 1976 - Ss Mon11 0:00.05 /usr/sbin/rpc.lockd
Another strange thing after rebooting: I got hundreds, no thousands, of old mail messages from dereel:
From MAILER-DAEMON Mon Jan 17 11:39:48 2022
Return-Path: <MAILER-DAEMON@dereel.lemis.com>
Received: from localhost (localhost)
by dereel.lemis.com (8.16.1/8.15.2) id 20E7a12I001316;
Fri, 14 Jan 2022 18:36:56 +1100 (AEDT)
(envelope-from MAILER-DAEMON)
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2022 18:36:56 +1100 (AEDT)
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON>
Message-Id: <202201140736.20E7a12I001316@dereel.lemis.com>
To: grog@dereel.lemis.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/report; report-type=delivery-status;
boundary="20E7a12I001316.1642145816/dereel.lemis.com"
Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated (failure)
[-- Attachment #1 --]
[-- Type: text/plain, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 0.5K --]
The original message was received at Sun, 9 Jan 2022 18:18:00 +1100 (AEDT)
from localhost [127.0.0.1]
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<grog@dereel.lemis.com>
(reason: 450 4.2.0 /var/mail/grog: No locks available)
----- Transcript of session follows -----
>>> DATA
<<< 450 4.2.0 /var/mail/grog: No locks available
<grog@dereel.lemis.com>... Deferred: 450 4.2.0 /var/mail/grog: No locks available
Message could not be delivered for 5 days
Message will be deleted from queue
Why now? And how many of them are there?
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src-13 3 -> mailq
postqueue: warning: Mail system is down -- accessing queue directly
Mail queue is empty=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src-13 4 -> ps aux|grep mail
root 944 3.7 2.9 212516 173408 - Ds 11:28 0:31.88 mail.local -l
root 912 2.0 0.1 18212 7784 - S 11:28 0:18.24 sendmail: ./20E3C3aH064970
root 911 0.0 0.1 18084 6904 - Ss 11:28 0:00.01 sendmail: accepting connec
smmsp 914 0.0 0.1 18084 6364 - Is 11:28 0:00.00 sendmail: Queue runner@00:
root 1035 0.0 0.0 12864 2324 0 S+ 11:40 0:00.00 grep mail=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src-13 22 -> sendmail -bp
postqueue: warning: Mail system is down -- accessing queue directly
Mail queue is empty=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src-13 23 -> /usr/sbin/sendmail -bp
/var/spool/mqueue is empty
Total requests: 0
How can I be getting thousands of messages when the mail system is down? Is this another case of postfix masquerading as sendmail?
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src-13 24 -> wh sendmail
96117 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 27032 5 Nov 04:54 /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
78659 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 11 17 Jan 09:46 /usr/sbin/sendmail -> mailwrapper=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src-13 22 -> /usr/sbin/sendmail -bp
...
20C3W0Zl056277 961227 Wed Jan 12 14:32 <grog@dereel.lemis.com>
(Deferred: 450 4.2.0 /var/mail/grog: No locks available)
<grog@dereel.lemis.com>
Total requests: 1807
Yes! So it's running sendmail, and since postfix is installed, it hides the fact from the user.
/var/mail on dereel is a symlink to the directory on eureka, so it seems that I did need rpc.lockd to access it. But I've been running dereel for months, so while it's needed for some things, it's certainly not essential for everything. And now I had 7,700 messages to delete from root's inbox.
|
Checking up on Lorraine
|
Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Lorraine Carranza has not been in the best of health lately, and today Helena Mirčić came by with horror stories of her being at death's door, taken to hospital with severe dementia, dead horses, and more.
Off in the afternoon, stopping first at Sally's, the neighbour down Westons Road who had looked after her. That was a good idea: we got a clearer answer from Sally. I think I've seen her before on 5 years ago when I found her dog on the main road. Yes, she had found Lorraine in her bed, half falling out and unaware of her surroundings. She screamed when touched—Sally says this is a symptom of dementia, though I didn't know it—and they had her taken off in an ambulance. She's somewhere in Ballarat, but she doesn't know where, and her son Claude is planning for a place for her in an aged care facility in South Melbourne. And yes, Lucy is dead, though she doesn't know what happened to the carcass. At the very least it seems that Lorraine didn't look after her, and since we had given Lucy to Lorraine, I'm a bit disappointed that we didn't hear anything about the problems. But she was old: Yvonne got her fully grown 15 years ago, so she must have been over 30.
Westons Road looks different. Eight years ago it looked like this (after I had managed to wedge the car across it):
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Now it looks as if it wouldn't be possible:
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| Tuesday, 18 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 18 January 2022 |
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Huevos a la tigre revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I've been thinking about menemen for some time, and I've looked at some recipes that don't look overly exciting. But then there's shakshouka, which appears to be the same with fried eggs instead of beaten eggs and with a different choice of spices.
And then it occurred to me: my huevos a la tigre recipe is also somewhat similar. The issue I have had is how to cook the eggs. I had tried fried eggs, but not found them very interesting. How about a menemen with the ingredients from huevos a la tigre? Instead of baking the ingredients, do them in a frying pan:
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It took a surprisingly long time. With the induction cooker set first on 7, then on 6, it took over 10 minutes:
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Too hot? No, the underside was nicely browned, but no more, and the pan was clean:
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And the result? Somehow boring. As befits a dish with mixed Mexican, Turkish and Tunisian origins, I had added some garam masala, but it didn't help much. And the dish needed more salt.
So what's the magic ingredient needed to make it exciting?
|
Roasting peanuts again
|
Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
More peanuts to roast today. For some reason I had never tried them in the “air fryer”. Did that today at the temperature and time that I had guessed at two years ago (has it really been that long since I last did some?), and it worked fine. One more work that has progressed to its conclusion.
|
tiwi go-slow
|
Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So now I have a tiwi instance up and running. Install a few more ports: mpv, rsync, postfix. With rsync I'll be able to copy the /spool file system from teevee piecemeal. In the process I ran into more DNS problems with freebsd.org. This morning the SOA serial number was 2022011726, and by the evening it had progressed to 2022011805. That's at least 31 updates in the last two days!
But that's all I did. The real issue now is: how to copy the teevee “personality” to tiwi? There are a number of files, like ~/.ssh, that should be symlinks to directories on other systems (in this case eureka), and the files on /etc need very careful examination. An excellent reason to do nothing.
| Wednesday, 19 January 2022 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 19 January 2022 |
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Bloody Android!, episode 5133
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Mobile phones have had a problem for as long as they have been mobile: how do you carry them on your person? 30 years ago my Motorola brick had a clip that went over my belt, and nowadays they fit in a pocket—if you have a belt or a pocket. Yvonne frequently has neither, so when she goes outside to attend to the horses, she frequently leaves her phone behind.
Today I heard it ringing from the other end of the house. Dashed there as quickly as I could, but once again it stopped ringing just before I got here. Dammit, there must be something I can do about that. Settings? No. Vertical dots? No. Google?
The number of rings on your Android phone is controlled by your service provider and can't be changed in your phone's settings.
Dammit, what's on the ALDImobile site? More pain. Nothing. OK, call up the service number 2534, free for customers. That's good: otherwise it would have cost me about $3.50 by the time they finally answered. Answer (after he went looking for it): call **61*101**30#. 61 is the code, 101 the number to call, 30 the delay in seconds (the maximum).
That rings a bell. A quick search: I've been here three years ago. Yes, exactly the solution, and people still haven't fixed things.
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A booster!
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
We're scheduled for a third (“booster”) COVID-19 vaccination on 1 February, but Yvonne has really, really wanted to bring it forward. No luck. We registered when 1 February was the earliest possible date (6 months after the second vaccination), and when the times were shortened, there was such a demand that we couldn't change it, not helped by the almost complete impossibility of getting a response to a phone call.
But it seems that Yvonne has frequently checked the queue outside the vaccination centre, and today there was none. So she went in, and how about that, she was vaccinated immediately. Called me up and asked me to come in too. For me it wasn't immediate: it took 5 minutes. But at least we have that behind us.
|
Graffiti in the time of COVID
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Topic: general, health, opinion | Link here |
To get to the vaccination centre, I parked across the road in the “two hours free” parking house attached to the Central Square Shopping Centre. The back staircase is typical of these places:
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But the graffiti has changed:
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There's something strange about this park house. It has automatic license plate recognition, but for some reason it doesn't like mine. Two other cars went through while I was trying at both exits to get the cameras to recognize my rego. Today wasn't the first time, but today an attendant came out, checked my ticket, and opened the gate for me. It seems that you can still scan them in. He didn't understand the problem either. He thought it might be non-recognition on entry, but the ticket apparently had my rego on it.
Approach the gate too fast, maybe? That wouldn't explain why the second gate didn't let me through, unless I didn't back up sufficiently for the camera to recognize me.
I'll be there again. Time for more investigations.
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Don't leave us alone!
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne was in town today when I went there—in fact I picked her up at the car repairers on the way home, while she left her car for a cooling system check—but I wasn't gone long, less than two hours, so I left the dogs in the house.
Bad decision. The dogs were not amused, and showed it:
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I don't know if we'll be able to repair the damage to the door.
| Thursday, 20 January 2022 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 20 January 2022 |
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More Android annoyances
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Woken up at 6:22 this morning. enzian, Yvonne's phone, was making some random noise that it probably thought was music. Phone call? Out to take a look:
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Huh? What kind of alarm? I was sure (and Yvonne later confirmed) that Yvonne hadn't set an alarm. And why did it wake me 38 minutes too early?
Later I did a bit of investigation and found:
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So it seems that the alarm had been going for 20 minutes before I heard it, and the message was just to confuse me. But who set those alarms? And why did I not hear them until now, though Yvonne has had the phone for months? Checking my phone, I found that the “clock” app also has the same settings (6:00 and 7:00), but at least it has the decency to turn them off.
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The perfect dry omelette
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I've been very happy with my ceramic frying pan, which is so non-stick that you can fry a beaten egg in it and then remove it with no problems:
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But it's not perfect. For it to work, the “omelette” needs to be cooked through to the edges. And then it tends to become crispy in the middle. Today I did a bit of experimentation, unfortunately without a complete solution. If the edges are still soft, you get something like this:
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But not much later the middle started crisping. Try it anyway?
|
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The result was probably the worst I have had with this pan. The edges weren't done, and the middle was shiny cooked:
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Part of the problem, of course, is the construction of the heating surface. The induction heating only heats about the middle 80% of the pan, and the rest gets hot by conduction. Time to use a bit of gas on the edges?
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Off to the doctor again
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne had booked an appointment for me with Dr. Paul Smith today, to address my itchy face. Originally it seemed to be a good idea, since we had to pick up her car, but that looks like being a bigger operation: new water pump, new thermostat. And changing the thermostat is much more expensive than changing the water pump! How times have changed.
But that meant that I couldn't combine the pickup with visiting Paul. Off anyway, and he found a cream to try out. Blood pressure was 133/83. Paul wasn't concerned, but it seems to have been a while since my systolic pressure was under 130.
The visit also gave me an opportunity to experiment with the cameras on the way out of the parkhouse. Did I approach too fast last time? This time I went slowly, and how about that, it worked. But I have a feeling that it was still much slower than for the other cars I saw yesterday.
What's causing the itch? By chance found this page, with the pretty image:
Is that what's causing the itch?
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Off to Bunnings
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
Off to Bunnings after visiting Paul. Minor congestion. OK, Google, take me to Bunnings Delacombe. And how about that, after an interminable wait (network issues), it found a way, almost to the end. But it missed the side entrance. OK, feed that back. “Point to the correct entrance”. Apart from the fact that there is more than one entrance to the parking area, depending on where you come from, I had to choose in this mess:
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That claims (on a real browser) to be imagery from 2022, but it shows the place still under construction, round the first time we saw it, coming on 5 years ago. How do I feed that back?
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Protecting against dogs
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
We don't want a repeat of the destruction that the dogs caused yesterday. How about a baby gate? Took a look at Bunnings, but things are both expensive and require serious installation:
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Hopefully the dogs will soon be out of this phase. In the meantime we can find other ways to protect the doors.
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Vaccine side effects
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Topic: health | Link here |
Yvonne wasn't feeling too bright today, a bit of a headache, a bit just under the weather—just the side effects that people can have from a COVID-19 vaccination, or from just about any other one for that matter. I didn't have anything beyond a vague soreness in my arm.
| Friday, 21 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 21 January 2022 |
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M91p boot bug: fixed
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Topic: technology | Link here |
As requested in the followup of Sunday's bug report about being unable to boot FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE on my ThinkCentre M91p: please try 13-STABLE and 14.0-RELEASE. OK, worked. So it really looks like a duplicate of bug 209821.
Fixed? No, I don't think so. The media are still out there for download, and bug 209821 shows that it occurs on a variety of hardware from different manufacturers. Release Engineering should think of a solution, but what?
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More tiwi stuff
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Rebooting the M91p meant shutting down dereel, which had been running on that box. OK, we haven't yet confirmed that the tiwi installation will run there. Clearly something to try, so first updated some of the files in /etc: exports syslog.conf src.conf, master.passwd and group. I also copied crontab, but that's not a good idea at this point: we don't want tiwi doing teevee's job to the outside world yet. We can leave that until just before cutover. In this case, however, it wasn't important, since I hadn't changed crontab.
/etc/group has always been an issue, and I've tended to fake it. But today I wanted to do it right. At the very least I need to add local groups home and lemis, and give myself access to wheel. But when comparing I came up with stuff as old as the last millennium:
guest:*:31:root,velte,andreas
ingres:*:74:ingres
lemis:*:1000:grog,bsd,joerg,harti,yvonne,wkt
home:*:1001:yana,norm,yvonne,grog
begemot:*:1002:joerg,harti,grog
ibm:*:1011:
rocksoft:*:1030:grog
pasocentral:*:1031:grog,di
velte is Jack Velte, who may have had access some time in the late 1990s. He has been dead for over 10 years. ingres is clearly for the Ingres database, which I can't recall using this millennium. joerg and harti are Jörg Micheel and Harti Brandt; again I don't think they have had access since 2000. norm is my father, who died 13 years ago. ibm and rocksoft relate to my real work in 2001-2002 and 2004-2005. And di is Diane Saunders, our neighbour in Echunga, who has definitely not had any access since we left, and probably not since about 2002.
So: instead of trimming, why not start again? I'll see when I run into trouble.
/etc/rc.conf was simpler than it might have been. I had already provided for this kind of migration. It starts with:
FORREAL=1
if [ $FORREAL -eq 0 ]; then
hostname="tiwi.lemis.com"
Just change FORREAL to 0 and it's OK.
Then I needed to start sshd, which required me to run ssh-keygen. And on the other side, I needed to remove (the old) tiwi from ~/.ssh/known-hosts.
OK, change the disks and reboot. Some issues with the network, but they went away. But dereel didn't come up cleanly:
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What caused that?
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/41) ~ 26 -> arp -a
dereel.lemis.com (192.109.197.135) at cc:52:af:41:c3:55 on em0 expires in 279 seconds [ethernet]
tiwi.lemis.com (192.109.197.177) at cc:52:af:41:c3:55 on em0 expires in 948 seconds [ethernet]
arp still knew the old dereel! That's quite impressive, since I had booted the machine 3 times since it was dereel!
Connecting with ssh wasn't quite what I expected:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/3) ~ 1 -> ssh eureka
Enter passphrase for key '/home/grog/.ssh/id_rsa':
Yes, after I found my passphrase and entered it, it worked. But normally it's automatic. What went wrong? After some searching discovered that I had special-cased teevee and tiwi in my scripts: on them I start X automatically on startup and set up an ssh-agent. This time, though, I didn't. Run the commands manually and all was was well.
So now I can create the /spool file system and start copying the video data across:
gpart add -t freebsd-ufs ada0
newfs -L spool -O 2 -U -a 64 -b 32768 -d 32768 -e 2048 -f 4096 -g 2097152 -h 64 -i 1847296 -j -k 1152 -m 1 -o space /dev/ada0p4
mount /dev/ada0p4 /spool
cd /teevee/spool
rsync -Havx * /newfs > /tmp/foo
That came across nice and fast. iostat showed:
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/3) /etc 33 -> iostat 1
tty ada0 pass0 pass1 cpu
tin tout KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s us ni sy in id
0 76 989 110 106.0 0.0 0 0.0 0.0 0 0.0 19 0 6 0 75
0 80 970 113 107.1 0.0 0 0.0 0.0 0 0.0 20 0 7 0 72
0 78 989 113 109.1 0.0 0 0.0 0.0 0 0.0 20 0 6 0 74
Huh? 900 kB transfers? I thought the absolute maximum (MAXPHYS) was 128 kB. But it seems that they have increased it recently. Netflix effect? But those transfer rates, over 100 MB/s, are welcome. Unfortunately they didn't stay that way. This isn't a shingled disk, is it? I thought the green WDs were supposed to be high performance. Of course, if they are, it's not a big deal: after all, I almost always only read from them.
The only other strangenesses were with bash and Emacs: bash seems to interpret Meta keystrokes strangely, so M-f capitalizes instead of moving a word forward. It's not clear why: it doesn't happen all the time, and it could be that there's some issue with X.
That could be the issue with Emacs too: I can't cut on one system and paste on another. So I'll probably have to find out what they have broken in X this time.
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Amateur phishers
|
Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Another phishing email today:
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2022 16:32:41 +0100
From: "PostMaster@netbsd.org" <alisourcepro@service.alibaba.com>
To: groggyhimself@netbsd.org
Subject: Email Shutdown For: groggyhimself@netbsd.org
Dear groggyhimself@netbsd.org
This is to inform you that we are closing the old version of our mailbox today.
Below is a quick guide on how to update your account to avoid shutdown. This service is free!
Click Here To Update https://colegiocaraguata.com.br/wp-admin/users/index.php?email=grog@netbsd.org
Thank You.
Email Support
There's not the slightest doubt that that's a phisher, of course, but clearly he's aiming at people with broken MUAs. How can anybody reading that believe that it's genuine?
|
A good, old-fashioned network outage
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Mail from Aussie Broadband today: an unplanned National Broadband Network network outage, with a negative duration:
| NBN Outage | ||
| Start Time | 21-01-2022 05:25:02PM | |
| Status | InProgress | |
| Last Updated | 21-01-2022 05:25:01PM | |
And sure enough, we were having problems. Not a real outage, more significant degradation. It was over in about an hour.
| Saturday, 22 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 22 January 2022 |
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Garden flowers in mid-summer
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
It's “mid-summer”, really a month after the solstice, and time for the monthly garden photos.
After a very cool spring things have gradually warmed up, and in the past couple of days the temperatures have been over 30°, with more forecast. The grass in some places has adopted its typical summer colour, brown. And of course there aren't many flowers at this time of year.
The Alyogyne is now surrounded by cannas, and it's barely flowering at all:
|
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Is that Bryan Ross, or does it stop flowering in mid-summer? Looking back to last year we had:
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So I'd say that Bryan is off the hook this time.
The cannas are doing well, and there's even a volunteer in the middle of the lawn:
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One plant that definitely doesn't look happy is the Eremophila nivea:
|
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I'd say it's dead. Of course, it has flowered happily for several years, and maybe it's just short-lived. The Banksia next to it looks as good as ever:
|
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It's the only tree that we have planted that has exceeded 2 m in height; it must be double that size. Maybe we should plant more of them.
The struggling trees in the front garden are making some progress. The Corymbia ficifolia has recovered from what I think was a near-drowning in the spring, and though it still doesn't look good, it's a lot better than this time last year (third image):
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The Box elder, Oak and Schinus molle are still around; maybe the Schinus molle will survive after all:
|
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The Hibiscus rosa-sinensis has produced the first real flower, and the cutting that I got from Chris Bahlo (also a descendent of the “Uncle Max” bush) seems to have decided to grow:
|
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|
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And the Hibiscus syriacus on the north side of the house also has a few flowers:
|
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The second one, opposite the shade area, clearly doesn't like the position. Unlike so many of our plants, it's not dying, but it's also not doing well.
The Clematis aren't dead yet. The “General Sikorski” looked as if it was dying, but it's now producing new leaves:
|
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And the “Edo Murasaki” is growing almost normally and producing the first buds:
|
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|
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And the Vietnamese mint that Bryan Ross murdered is now coming back, presumably with a vengeance. It now looks almost the way it did when I got it:
|
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One weed that keeps coming back is this:
|
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That's some kind of tomato, of course. I wonder what kind. I've given up trying to cultivate them, but potentially there's something worth having there.
|
Tricking Google Translate
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Topic: language, technology, opinion | Link here |
Google Translate has improved considerably in the last few years, to the point where I have nothing to rant about. But today one possibility of tricking it occurred to me: In German, „halb neun“ (“half nine”) means halfway to 9 o'clock, in other words 8:30. In English some people refer to this time as “half eight”. Does Google Translate know?
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No! Time to feed something back. But the browser (firefox version 80) was too old to find Google's favour. OK, try Chrome:
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Huh? Why should that make a difference? It doesn't. It depends on whether I write “i will meet you” or “I will meet you”. Somehow Google Translate doesn't pay attention to the same things that humans do.
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Another NBN go-slow
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
Another hour or so with high packet loss this afternoon. This time it was more irritating because it impacted on the download of Al Jazeera news. Once was amusing, but if it becomes more frequent it will be a real nuisance.
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Beef with broccoli and orange
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
A while back I found an interesting recipe for orange beef (a Chinese recipe) on the web, and for some time I've been planning to cook it. Problem: one of the key ingredients is Chinese dried orange peel. Where do you find that? In case of doubt at the Fruit Shack. Yvonne went there last week and, with some assistance, found it:
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It's becoming more and more clear than an inability to speak or read Chinese is a real problem. Yes, the English name is written there, barely:
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Here's the recipe as I made it today:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 160 g | thin beef steak | 1 | ||
| 20 g | orange juice | 2 | ||
| 6 g | cornflour | 2 | ||
| 6 g | vegetable oil | 2 | ||
| 9 g | oyster sauce | 2 | ||
| 1 g | five spice powder | 2 | ||
| 40 ml | warm water | 3 | ||
| 6 g | sugar | 3 | ||
| 20 g | orange marmalade | 3 | ||
| 40 g | orange juice | 3 | ||
| 25 g | light soy sauce | 3 | ||
| 5 g | Shaoxing wine | 3 | ||
| 1 g | sesame oil | 3 | ||
| 6 g | ginger | 4 | ||
| 7 | whole dried red chili peppers if desired | 4 | ||
| 5 g | dried Mandarin orange peel | 4 | ||
| 1 | star anise, crushed | 4 | ||
| 5 g | garlic, crushed | 4 | ||
| 15 g | spring onion | 4 | ||
| 130 g | broccoli florets | 5 | ||
| vegetable oil (plus 1/2 tablespoon) | 6 | |||
| cornflour for coating beef | 6 | |||
| 5 g | cornflour | 8 |
Mix the cornflour, orange juice Cut the beef into rectangles about 5 to 8 cm in size:
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Mix orange juice, cornflour, oil, oyster sauce and five spice powder. Mix well and marinate the meat in the mixture for an hour or more:
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Dissolve the sugar in the water. When dissolved, add marmalade, orange juice, soya sauce, wine and sesame oil. Reserve.
Prepare ginger, orange peel, star anise, spring onions and garlic. Chop the ginger into small pieces, cut the peel into small pieces (this to be confirmed next time), crush the star anise, cut the spring onions into slices about 3 cm long and peel the garlic ready for crushing.
Boil the broccoli in water for 45 seconds. Drain and reserve.
When ready to start, turn the pieces of meat in cornflour and fry in copious oil until cooked, ensuring that all have contact with the pan. This may require several panfuls. Place the beef in the serving dish
On gentle heat, fry the ginger, star anise, orange peel and dried chili if used. Fry for about 60 seconds. Add spring onions and crushed garlic and fry for another 30 seconds.
Add half the reserved marinade from step 3. Mix the cornflour into the rest, and add when the first half is boiling.
Warm beef and broccoli in microwave oven, pour sauce over it and serve.
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I use what Woolworths call “sizzling steak” for this dish. That's beef about 8 mm in thickness, too much for this dish, so I hammer it with a Schnitzel hammer after cutting. This roughly doubles the area, so the pieces should be about 4×6 cm before hammering.
The original recipe wanted “baking soda” (Sodium bicarbonate) in the marinade. I don't know that usage, so I left it out. The quantities for the marinade are barely enough to moisten the meat, so I roughly doubled them, in the process omitting water and replacing with orange juice.
The recipe called for coating the meat in cornflour before frying. I would have used wheat flour, but I'll try it this way a couple more times.
The recipe wants salt and oil in the water for boiling the broccoli. Given the short cooking time, this makes no sense to me. The dish tastes fine without it. I also omitted the oil, though arguably it's worth trying. I put the broccoli in the sauce rather than round the edges. Either way it needs re-warming before serving.
The recipe states simply “star anise”, suggesting that an entire star should be fried. I broke it into pieces, but it's still inappropriate. It should be divided much more finely.
While my orange peel is undoubtedly Chinese, it seems different from the peel used in the original recipe. It's much smaller:
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The original recipe talks of pieces 1 to 1½ inches in size. This is less than half that on a side. But of course weights are the important thing.
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Easter Island comes to Dereel
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
After dinner, while idly looking outside, I saw:
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There's something about that leaf (it's a Strelitzia nicolai, not a banana) that reminds me of the Moai on Easter Island. The lower tear in the leaf looks like a mouth, the upper like the eyes. But how do I convey that appearance?
| Sunday, 23 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 23 January 2022 |
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Disk copy: done
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
Finally the copy of my video files from teevee to tiwi is done, after about 40 hours:
sent 6,737,984,445,407 bytes received 1,008,718 bytes 49,277,153.17 bytes/sec
total size is 10,965,075,308,067 speedup is 1.63
Those are interesting figures, but one is clearly missing: how long did it take? I can calculate it (not quite 38 hours), but wouldn't it be easy to include it?
The other thing of interest is the total size, round 50% more than the size of the disk. It seems that it has been counting the size of every file name without checking if it is a link. That would also explain the “speedup” claim: it should have been very close to 1.0.
But somehow I had so much on my plate today that I didn't get any further.
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Sourdough starter strangeness
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Time to bake bread today (in fact, it was yesterday, but I forgot). And for once there was no darkening on my starter. But it still looked strange:
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Is that some kind of fungus? We'll see: I used it anyway.
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Catching the honeyeater
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Topic: photography, animals | Link here |
The Kniphofia flowers outside the dining room attract a number of different honeyeaters. For some time I have been planning to get photos, but of course it's not easy. Place a camera on the other side of the window, put a flash where it won't reflect off the window, add a remote control, turn on the camera and wait:
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It wasn't easy. Getting the exposure right showed that I had serious issues with the remote flash trigger. Of 10 test photos, it only flashed 3 times, and that after much cleaning, screwing and cursing. OK, cable it is.
A little later, still no honeyeater. But the battery was dead! Yes, this is the old Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I, now over 8 years old, and with equally old batteries. What should I do? Wouldn't it be nice to have a mains power supply? But it seems that for that I need a battery grip and power supply. Is it worth it?
| Monday, 24 January 2022 | Dereel | |
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Actron Air: No support
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Our Actron Air air conditioner is not behaving correctly. It's not clear what the problem is, but when it gets warm (even as opposed to hot) outside, it no longer cools adequately.
The obvious assumption would be lack of coolant. But unlike our two deep freezers, arguably suffering from the same problem, it doesn't even try. In my office I have the temperature set to 24°, but the temperature rises to nearly 26°. If it were lack of coolant, it should run continuously, like the freezers, but it continually stops. On the other hand, the exhaust air from the coils of the external units is relatively cool, so it could be a combination of inadequate coolant and overheating elsewhere in the outdoor unit.
It's been six months since our the air conditioner started showing problems: first an E17 “peripherals error”, and from then on frequent E25 “ambient temperature not updated”. At the time I called up Mechtrol and got voice mail and no call back on my message.
Gradually the E25s went away, and so I ignored it, though it did seem that the temperature control was less accurate. But I can't ignore it any more. Found a real number for Mechtrol in Geelong, 5243 1036. Called up and spoke to Gene, who didn't want to know. They don't want to do residential air conditioners any more, and Actron didn't pay enough for the warranty calls. And nowadays air conditioners have more computers in them than in your phone. While that's quite an exaggeration, I can sympathize: I can't make up my own mind where the problem might lie, and that's one of the reasons I didn't want somebody coming on site, scratching his head and leaving because he couldn't find a fault.
It wasn't until I told Gene that the unit was out of warranty that he thawed slightly and told me that the people in Ballarat were really a separate operation, and gave me the phone number of Helen, the person I called last July. Told him so and he said “see, they don't really want to do it”. Then he gave me the number of Mark, 0418 993 460.
Called him. Voice mail. But he called back quickly and told me the same story: they don't want to know, and in any case they're booked out for 30 days. Other companies to try? Celsius, Ballarat refrigeration, Mt Clear refrigeration, ... He doesn't know any of them.
Dammit, that's not good enough. Time to contact ActronAir's service department on 1800 119 229. Yes, I can fill out a web form, but it requires a business name and all this nonsense that seem to be normal for web forms. So waited on the phone for 15 minutes before being connected with Katarina, who asked me for my serial number—not even the model—and had all my details. Now why can't the web forms do that?
OK, she says, the company you're looking for is Metrol. Not Mechtrol? Ah, yes, Mechtrol. Told her what they thought. Put me on hold, and finally came up with A1 Air Control, a company without a web site, in Camperdown, 90 km away! Phone number is 5593 1039, though Google gives me (03) 5231 6061, a Geelong number (120 km away) from Camperdown. And they, too, would have a wait of 30 business days (6 weeks)!
Somehow this is just not acceptable. Yes, January isn't the slowest time for air conditioner repairers, but they managed much faster two years ago. Maybe it's really time to install a second air conditioner from a different maker so that we don't have any down time.
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Yet another NBN outage
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
A third National Broadband Network problem today. Unlike the high packet loss scenarios on Friday and Saturday, this was the well-known total outage, nearly 55 minutes. Was that maybe NBN repairing the underlying cause? In any case, let's hope that that's the end of it.
| Tuesday, 25 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 25 January 2022 |
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There is life in bureaucracy!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
An unexpected letter to Yvonne today:
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From the Assurance Retraite (Retirement Insurance) Midi-Pyrénées in Toulouse, in the extreme south-west of France. Dated 10 December 2021, over 6 weeks ago. Why did it take so long? For once, there are markings on the envelope:
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Sent from the Caisse Nationale d'Assurance Vieillesse (National fund for old age insurance) in Paris. Or was it?
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Posted from Charleroi in Belgium! And clearly they must have sent it those first thousand kilometres by mule train, since it wasn't stamped (and posted priority) until six weeks later!
So what does the letter say? It's from Mme Croza, who doesn't know her telephone number:
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“I have received your letter datedThe payment of your pension will be reinstated on reception of .
Well, who says that bureaucrats don't respond? It's not clear (apparently to any of us) to which of Yvonne's several complaints she is referring, but the last one was some time in April 2021, over 9 months ago!
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Making it comfortable for Lena
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Lena has been coming into my office and lying down on the floor recently. Normally the dogs have baskets in Yvonne's office. OK, we can put (the remains of) a basket in my office too:
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Sometimes I wonder why I bother.
| Wednesday, 26 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 26 January 2022 |
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More work on tiwi
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Topic: technology, multimedia | Link here |
Somehow I haven't found time lately to work on my tiwi upgrade. I know why: this time I really want to do a really clean installation. And I have already betrayed my intentions. While trying to understand why key combinations like m-f no longer work correctly with bash, dumped the environment variables from tiwi and teevee and compared them. The results were suprising:
PYTHONSTARTUP=/home/grog/.pythonrc.py
+REAL_EMAIL='Greg Lehey <grog@MySQL.com>'
RSYNC_RSH=ssh=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/6) ~ 20 -> grep REAL_ .*
.bitkeeper:export REAL_EMAIL='Greg Lehey <grog@MySQL.com>'
Where did that come from? My “home kit”, which I created 16 years ago when I was working for MySQL, of course. I thought that I had updated it, but clearly I didn't. And in any case, I need different things for local machines (links rather than copied files, for example). So start again and copy the files I think I need from teevee.
But it still didn't help. I recall a similar issue when I set up lax/www; I'll have to go searching. Mañana.
So: next to set up X. I have a card that I think is pretty much the same as the one in teevee. Power down tiwi, put it in and reboot. All seemed well, including the autologin on /dev/ttyv0. But no NFS file systems. mount -t nfs -a didn't work. No (on-board) Ethernet interface!
Much investigation. It's a ThinkCentre M91p, and no, the boot probes hadn't identified an Ethernet interface. Reboot. No change. I haven't seen this since the bad old days of ISA.
OK, remove the graphics card. Reboot. No Ethernet. Check lights on office switch (a9c2 active, b9ca present). Power off. No change. Check BIOS configuration. Ethernet interface active. Leave BIOS (F10). Box powers down. It should have continued to boot.
OK, to my knowledge I have no special settings in the BIOS. Select defaults (F9). Save. Continues to boot, finds Ethernet interface (a9e2/b9ea). Power down, reinsert the graphics card, boot. Finds both graphics card and Ethernet interface, and comes up running X, just without the window decorations. I didn't have a mouse connected, but everything else seemed normal.
That's quite amazing. I don't know when I last saw a problem like that.
OK, clearly I need to install fvwm.
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 1 -> pkg install fvwm2
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
pkg: http://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:13:amd64/quarterly/meta.txz: No address record
repository FreeBSD has no meta file, using default settings
pkg: http://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:13:amd64/quarterly/packagesite.pkg: No address record
^C
Not that bloody DNS problem again! Time to find another way to access it. Can I add a slave freebsd.org zone?
zone "freebsd.org" {
type slave;
masters {199.19.56.1; 199.19.53.1; 199.19.54.1; 199.19.57.1; 199.249.112.1; 199.249.120.1; };
file "db.freebsd.org";
};
Yes, I can, but it doesn't help much, since freebsd.org doesn't want me as a slave. OK, what happens if I remove the forwarders?
options {
directory "/etc/namedb";
resolver-query-timeout 30;forwarders {// Aussie BB202.142.142.142;202.142.142.242;};
};
Yes, that does it. Maybe I should just leave it that way; does it really have any performance impact?
So, on
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 2 -> pkg install fvwm2
pkg: No packages available to install matching 'fvwm2' have been found in the repositories=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 3 -> pkg search fvwm2=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 4 -> pkg search fvwm
fvwm-2.6.9_2 Popular virtual window manager for X
fvwm-themes-0.7.0_6 Themes for the Fvwm2 window manager
fvwm3-1.0.4 F? Virtual Window Manager=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 5 -> pkg install fvwm-2
pkg: No packages available to install matching 'fvwm-2' have been found in the repositories=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 6 -> pkg install fvwm-2.6.9.2
pkg: No packages available to install matching 'fvwm-2.6.9.2' have been found in the repositories=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 7 -> pkg install fvwm
The following 3 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):
New packages to be INSTALLED:
fvwm: 2.6.9_2
m4: 1.4.19,1
p5-XML-Parser: 2.44
Finally! Why have they changed the name of the package? Once there was an fvwm package as well.
And that's about as far as I got.
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Another bloody NBN outage!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Just to complicate my work on tiwi, we had another National Broadband Network outage today, over 35 minutes. I wish they'd get their act together.
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Yana visits
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Topic: general, health, food and drink | Link here |
We're off to Briagolong on Friday for a memorial service for my aunt Freda, and Yana wanted to come too. She left Adelaide early this morning, but called from Kaniva to say that she had been a close contact of a confirmed COVID-19 over the weekend. She took a rapid antigen test, which came up negative, but she's going to need another one in a couple of days, so it's not clear whether we might have to cancel at the last minute.
She brought a lot of interesting foodstuffs with her:
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The paté and sausage (Cervelatwurst) are normal enough, but I didn't know any of the others. The bullets on the left are “finger limes”, “native rosemary”, Pepperberry (Cryptocarya obovata) and Wattleseed, none of which I know. We'll have to research what to do with them, though Yana has intentions to do something with the finger limes.
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Birthday card promises
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Topic: history, general | Link here |
By accident I came across my diary for 26 January 1966, in which I had written:
One of these days, no doubt very much in the future, Bev [my sister] will get a birthday card from me, but the time is not yet come. So be it.
I couldn't recall sending her a card ever, so I sent her an email saying that now was that day in the future, though cards are no longer modern.
Her answer: I had, indeed, sent her a birthday card, reading
“I wanted to wish you something special for your birthday, so when I met a Spanish person, I asked him how to say ‘Happy birthday' in Spanish. He said: ‘¡Tu estás pisando mi pie!’.
Unfortunately, I later discovered this means ‘You are standing on my foot’”
That rang a bell, but I thought she had sent it to me. Can I find the card? It must have been before I learnt any Spanish, so a long time ago Some discussion with Yvonne and Yana; the latter said it sounded more like my humour than Bev's. Do I have something about it in my diary? Yes! I mentioned it on 15 November 1967, but indirectly. It seems that I sent her the card the following year, though she tells me I sent a second one to her some time later.
| Thursday, 27 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 27 January 2022 |
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BSDCan 2022
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Topic: health, technology, opinion | Link here |
Video call from Dan Langille today, the father of BSDCan. I'm one of the committee, and he wanted to discuss the option of whether there should be a face-to-face BSDCan this year, or whether it should be completely online. The real issue with planning face-to-face is that you don't know whether it won't have to be canceled at the last minute, putting a lot of people out of pocket. On the other hand, we haven't found a way to incorporate the hallway track into an online conference.
An interesting detail that I didn't know: Allan Jude runs a company called ScaleEngine. It does video streaming, so clearly he's the choice for streaming the conference.
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Phone holder
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The call with Dan gave me the opportunity to try out my new phone stand. It worked well, up to a point. I had hoped to position it so that my screens were in the background, something like my home page photo:
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But no, says Dan, that doesn't expose well. All you see is the screens with my silhouette in the foreground. On the other hand, where do I mount it? The best place is probably at half height in front of one of the screens, not the most convenient position.
We're off to Briagolong tomorrow, and I'll use the phone to navigate there. Time to try out the tripod mount in the car. Not a success:
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That's at least partly because the tripod mount itself is so high, but I didn't have a better alternative at hand, so for tomorrow at any rate I'll have to put it in front of the speedometer.
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Repairing the air conditioner
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Called up Waldron, the suppliers of our air conditioner, today, and spoke to Lee, who sounded little more interested in our problems than Actron on Monday, and suggested that I call Actron. But after some discussion he gave me the number of the person who does the service work for them: Tony, surname unknown, at Atmos, a company without a web site, phone number 0419 110 370, coincidentally the phone number of the company. Called him up, got a voice mail message promising to call back. Left a message. No call back.
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Aussie Broadband support channels, again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Sent off a problem report to Aussie Broadband today, describing the issues with resolving the freebsd.org zone. The answer I got still puzzles me:
Thanks for shooting us an email about your issue.
If it's urgent, we suggest either:
* giving our friendly Australian team a call on 1300 880 905 (8am to midnight Australian Eastern Time), OR
* logging a fault via the MyAussie app or portal
OK, it's not urgent. But how can it be easier for them to take any real problem report by phone? Helping people solve their usage problems is one thing, but I can't see myself getting any resolution of this problem by phone in a timely fashion. And an app! I'll spare a repeat of my rants about inappropriate interfaces. The “portal” (I think they mean their web site) sounds like a good idea, but where is it? The web site only offers phone or email. I would send them feedback, but that, too, requires much unnecessary input: it clearly doesn't notice that I'm already logged in and that they have all the information they need.
In passing, I've been watching the serial numbers for freebsd.org. I always thought that DNS configurations were relatively static, but it seems that it's normal for freebsd.org to change several times a day. I must ask why.
And Edwin Groothuis answered my original question: how do I get the name server to use different resolvers for specific zones? I have already established that a slave zone isn't the answer: the master server won't let just anybody be a slave. But there's also a forward zone definition:
zone "freebsd.org" {
type forward;
// forward only;
forwarders { ns1.freebsd.org };
};
The forward only really means “don't cache”, and Edwin says that there are arguments for that. I didn't ask further.
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Fondue with Yana
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
One of the things that Yana brought with her was a kg of Appenzeller cheese, things unobtainable out here in the sticks. We didn't actually use it; we still have some reserves to finish first. But of course there was a fondue. Here Yana's photos, taken with a mobile phone:
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| Friday, 28 January 2022 | Dereel → Briagolong → Dereel | Images for 28 January 2022 |
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Off to Briagolong
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Topic: general, health, animals | Link here |
Today was the memorial gathering for my aunt Freda, who died last month and would have turned 97 on Monday. Can we even go? On Saturday Yana had been exposed to somebody who since contracted COVID-19. Her first RAT on Tuesday had proved negative, but another was due today. The result?
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A dead RAT! And nothing to do with Linux.
Somehow we still didn't get off to a smooth start. While checking the route, we had another
That's what I published. Clearly something was missing, but only a year later I don't know what.
Breakfast was later than planned, my coffee machine came up with an arcane display and didn't want to run, and the route that I had carefully uploaded to my phone yesterday had disappeared or gone into hiding. OK, try it approximately: “OK, Google, take me to Briagalong”. Response: “Here are answers for Viagra long”. But the second time it worked.
Driving through Melbourne is hell! Although it was freeway or similar all the way from Geelong to Traralgon, there were constant changes in speed limit, many making no sense at all. I've already established that the well built 4 lane stretch between Geelong and Melbourne has a limit of 100 km/h, while the stretch east of Melbourne, only 2 lanes, has a limit of 110 km/h. But in between there is still lots of construction, with limits down to 40 km/h, and the 110 km/h is punctuated with 80 km/h areas for no obvious reason.
Near Moe the phone decided that I should cut across country. Should I believe it? Decided it couldn't be worse than the traffic after Traralgon, and so off on a route to the north of the one I'm used to. Here the routes in each direction:
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One problem became evident: I had planned to drop by and say hello to Karen Nott in Stratford on Avon, but while calculating our driving times I discovered that I had forgotten the start time: 13:00, not 14:00. No hope of dropping in on Karen. As it was, we didn't arrive until 13:35, by which time Kline was thinking of sending us a text to ask where we were.
The weather on the way was excellent, despite the warnings of heavy rain. That waited until return journey. Between Nambrok and the Princes Highway we got some reasonably heavy rainfall, enough to slow us down, but once on the Princes Highway it stopped completely within about 200 m. More rain on the way back, but nothing like the 35 mm that fell in a space of 30 minutes in Springvale earlier in the day.
Timing on the way back: Briagolong to the outskirts of Melbourne: 105 minutes, including 7 minutes filling up with petrol. Through Melbourne to the Geelong freeway: 90 minutes. Start of Geelong freeway to home: 75 minutes. What a day!
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Freda's memorial
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
The memorial was for close relatives only; it seems that I wasn't the only person to have had issues with the number of people present for her 90th birthday. And the purpose was to dispose of her ashes, as she had asked, over her favourite fig tree:
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Before that, a number of sometimes emotional tributes:
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And still more photos. There are people there whom I don't even recognize:
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The death of Robert Francis Abel Herbert
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Topic: history, general, opinion | Link here |
My grandfather, Robert Francis Abel Herbert, 1893-12 December 1945, died in an unusual way: he was shot dead by his daughter Gloria. This was the framework for her son and my cousin Mark's (Louis Nowra's) book “The Twelfth of Never”, and it's telling that Gloria was acquitted of the murder.
Today my cousin Helen Consalvo, née Lehey, asked me about the incident. It's not clear why: Helen is from my father's side of the family, and the murder was on my mother's side of the family. But it occurred to me that I had done some investigation, and I knew that my mother had taken Bev, my sister, to the library in Melbourne to show her the old newspaper clippings. But I had never spoken to Bev about it, and since she was there, I called her over. And then Margaret, Helen's mother and the widow of my uncle Max, came along.
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She's the last remaining representative of that generation, and though she didn't meet Max until a few years after the incident, she recalled what she had been told then. In principle the story was similar. Bev didn't seem to realize that our uncles Bob and Keith were witnesses to the incident, and Margaret told us that Keith and Max (pretty much the same age) had been friends, something that I hadn't known. I also didn't know that the others all thought that Gloria had received the pistol some time earlier from her (by then divorced) husband Joop. But my (now deceased) uncle Bob told me some decades ago
Specifically, this was in Schellnhausen over Christmas 1993.
that he had given the gun to her, and that nobody had ever found out about it. Bev told me another detail that I didn't know: she had apparently had a miscarriage in Brisbane some time before, two still-born twins.
It seems that her children, at least Mark (“Louis”) also didn't know this, or he would have put it in his book.
And then Bev came up with more interesting news: her daughter Alice retrieved the witness statements relating to the trial from the Public Record Office, though sadly not (yet) the transcript of the trial, which she presumes to have been lost. Still, I received a promise that she would send me scans of what she had, so I see the beginnings of a web page coming.
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The dangers of cheap clips
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Lately I have been taking most “normal” photos with my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I and leaving the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II for more complicated things. So it usually doesn't have a strap.
But today I used the Mark II for the reunion photos, and I had put a second strap on, which was too short. OK, remove the strap from the Mark I and put it on the Mark II. I wasn't prepared for what happened:
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It seems that the clips are plastic. This one broke at a good time, while I was getting it out of the car, but what if it happens while I'm carrying the camera? My “solution” to changing straps doesn't seem so good after all.
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Another bloody power failure!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Back home, discovered that there had been a short grid power failure round 13:30. It was interesting in that it tried to come back a couple of times before it managed it, thus justifying the PV system's “first wait 60 seconds” strategy. But nothing to worry about: our system weathered that without a hitch.
Well, no. Battery charge was 79%, and nothing should have happened. But both lagoon and teevee lost power long enough to reboot. Why?
| Saturday, 29 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 29 January 2022 |
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Metaday
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Ever since I started keeping this diary, nearly 60 years ago, I have had an issue to contend with: what do I write about keeping the diary? It's a daily occurrence, so normally I say nothing. But then there are days like today, where I spent the entire day writing up my diary, processing photos and chasing up links, and I still wasn't done. It's not completely transparent.
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Still more COVID-19
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Yana had intended to return to Adelaide tomorrow, but today she heard that her housemate has contracted COVID-19. Where does she go? She doesn't seem to want to stay here, and had planned to return to Briagolong for a few days. But Gill and Kline are off on holiday. So she found Sol Santana, who was here a couple of years ago, and who lives in Melbourne. It seems that she'll wait there for the “all clear”.
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DxO does it again
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
It has been six weeks since DxO released a new version of PhotoLab with a bug that displays the output files even when told not to. Here the black images in the strip at the bottom are the output files, although “Images generated by DxO PhotoLab” has not been selected:
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And it has taken this long for me to convince the support team that it is wrong, and they promised to fix it. That sounds straightforward enough: just go back to the way it was.
But today they released a new version with the “correction”. Now there are two complementary selections: “display images generated by DxO PhotoLab” and “don't display images generated by DxO PhotoLab”. You can select neither, either or both.
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Why? They already had it right. And to make things even stranger, it doesn't work! In the second image we have the original and the output, although it has been explicitly deselected!
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What are these people thinking? About the only clue that I got was when I compared an older version, here PhotoLab 2.4.0:
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But here we have another problem: although “display images generated by DxO PhotoLab” is set, it doesn't! Of course, who ever wants to display the output images in the input strip.?
I never cease to be amazed.
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Caterpillars
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Topic: animals, photography, opinion | Link here |
Walking the dogs, Yana found this caterpillar:
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She took a couple of photos with her phone, but she doesn't want to share. It would have been interesting to compare them with mine. From what I recall looking at the phone, they weren't that bad, and the depth of field was superior. But they're interesting animals. I wonder what the butterflies look like; they're about 8 cm long.
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Mexican ceviche
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Yana did the entrée for dinner this evening: a Mexican take on ceviche, served on small tortillas:
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An interesting variation on the ceviche we know.
| Sunday, 30 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 30 January 2022 |
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Goodbye Yana
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Topic: general | Link here |
Yana off in mid-morning after yet another breakfast:
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It's only partially a coincidence that I finally got my diary up to date.
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More ceramic frying pan insights
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another “dry omelette” to make today, like the ones I tried over the last couple of months. In November things looked good:
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But it wasn't all success. Last week I addressed the issue of the middle cooking before the outside, making it difficult to remove while still crisping the middle:
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Today I had another issue: the new frying pans that Yana brought with her have a significantly rougher surface than the older orange one. Will it even work? Did a bit of experimentation, in which I was successful and also seem to have solved the previous issues with the uneven cooking. The solution: heat one outside corner of the pan over a local gas flame to cook through, and the whole thing came out relatively easily with the aid of a spatula. I didn't take photos, but I shall next time. It's not clear why the outside was cooked enough and the inside wasn't crispy, though possibly it had something to do with the pan.
One thing hasn't changed, the domed base:
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I suppose I'm going to have to live with that.
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Italian grammar
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
Seen in the pantry today:
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«Lasagne verdi»? Shouldn't that be «lasagne verde»? «Lasagna» is feminine, «lasagne» the plural. And «verdi» seems masculine to me.
But after some searching, it seems that «lasagne verdi» is correct. Why? How can I find out?
| Monday, 31 January 2022 | Dereel | Images for 31 January 2022 |
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Hello Bary
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Helena Mirčić has been looking for a new dog for at least a month, and Yvonne has risen to the challenge of finding one that doesn't cost a ridiculous price. Finally she has been successful: a nine week old Kelpie/Jack Russell cross (¾/¼), just round the corner, for $400 including vaccinations and microchipping.
Off with Helena to pick him up:
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She has decided on a name: Bary, after a dog she had for a considerable period of her life; he lived to the surprising age of 22. .
Back home, Yvonne went to a lot of trouble to tell her how to feed the dog. Helena has had dogs all her life, so it's not clear how necessary that was. In any case, she was very happy.
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More examination of the DxO bug
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Finally found some time to examine what the new 5.1.3 version of DxO PhotoLab does. It's really confusing. There are four selections:
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If I select none of them, it seems that I get everything. If I select “images not generated by PhotoLab” it eliminates the images generated by PhotoLab, which at least makes sense. If I also select “images not generated by PhotoLab” it displays them again.
This makes no sense. I think that last sentence should read “images generated by PhotoLab”.
If I deselect “images not generated by PhotoLab”, it displays only the output images. All this would make sense if they were alone, and if nothing were displayed if nothing is selected. But then there are the (shouted) RAW images and RGB images, which apparently include JPEG. They overlap, and it's not clear why.
Sent off a reply to DxO, not helped by the fact that their web interface to their bug reporting system is down for maintenance, apparently deliberately. Probably the real question is: who wants to see the output images anyway?
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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