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| Greg's diary |
| January 2024 |
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| Monday, 1 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 1 January 2024 |
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New Year's letter again
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
Another new year, and with it the New Year's Letter. In past years I have just sent a brief message with the URL, at least partially because the idea of creating a batch of photos with MIME attachments was too hard. But this year I found out how. My send script now looks something like
for i in `sed < $CHRISTMAS_LIST 's:.*<::; s:>$::' | sort -u`; do
mutt -s "Happy New Year from the Leheys" < Christmas-message -a New-Year.pdf -- $i
done
Christmas-message (a name chosen for hysterical raisins) contains the message with the URL. CHRISTMAS_LIST is a shell variable pointing to the list of recipients. I print the web page to a PDF file and attach it with the rather strange syntax shown. The -- is required after the file names and before the recipient.
So: test with local recipients (Yvonne and me), works. Go live at exactly 11:00 (0:00 UTC). Off it goes, but precious little came through.
Oh:
Jan 1 00:07:05 lax postfix/smtp[82271]: DC75D2810F: to=<groggyhimself@hydra.lemis.com>, relay=mx0.lemis.com[121.200.11.253]:25, delay=1.7, delays=0.56/0/0.55/0.6, dsn=5.4.0, status=bounced (host mx0.lemis.com[121.200.11.253] said: 554 5.4.0 Error: too many hops (in reply to end of DATA command))
One of the side effects of the batch approach was that the messages went out with the From: address groggyhimself@hydra.lemis.com rather than the groggyhimself@lemis.com that I normally use. And this frustrating Postfix configuration requires configuration for every system for which it should accept mail—or at least I haven't found a way round it:
mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, $mydomain,
mail.$mydomain, www.$mydomain, lax.$mydomain, ffm.$mydomain,
aussie-gw.$mydomain, ftp.$mydomain, pasocentral.org,
tiwi.$mydomain, lagoon.$mydomain, hydra.$mydomain, dereel.$mydomain, teevee.$mydomain, localhost
When I fixed that, I found the usual rejections, but this time for different reasons:
<pooruser@bigpond.com>: message size 40440345 exceeds size limit
31457280 of server extmail.bigpond.com[203.42.40.138]
Message size 40440345? What's that? Part of it is the inefficient MIME coding, but it's only a 5 page PDF document! And I had printed it before and checked the size. 4 MB, far too big, of course. So where do the 40 MB come from? But looking at the files, I saw two different ones, printed by different versions of firefox:
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 29,509,353 1 Jan 13:36 Greg's Happy New Year 2023-2024.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 4,055,865 1 Jan 13:37 New-Year.pdf
The first (nicely with special characters to annoy shells) is from the new version 120.0 on hydra, and the second was probably from the old version 49.0. Who says there isn't progress?
And of course the mail was going out at a snail's pace, at least relative to the size of the messages. All first to mx1.lemis.com at 5 Mb/s, all 247 of them. And I don't know how to safely remove queued messages from a Postfix queue. So off they all went, taking a total of 4½ hours, and about half of them were rejected. I can fix that. Mañana. At least it showed that I can keep a 5 Mb/s uplink saturated; I got rates of up to 8 Mb/s, but even that would require 40 seconds per message.
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MediathekView on hydra
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday's issues with MediathekView were irritating, but solvable, once I found out how to install Java. So today I did that. Then used my old invocation:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/38) /usr/local/MediathekView 123 -> java -DproxySet=true -DproxyHost=allmine.lemis.com -DproxyPort=3128 -jar /home/local/MediathekView/MediathekView.jar
JavaFX wurde nicht im klassenpfad gefunden.
Stellen Sie sicher, dass Sie ein Java JRE ab Version 8 benutzen.
Falls Sie Linux nutzen, installieren Sie das openjfx-Paket ihres Package-Managers,
oder nutzen Sie eine eigene JRE-Installation.
“JavaFX” (whatever that might be) not found in the class path. OK, what does the official start method say?
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/38) /usr/local/MediathekView 124 -> MediathekView
. Configuring for non-portable mode
. Programmstart: 2024-01-01T15:50:44.54388937
. Version: 14.0.0
. === Java Information ===
. Vendor: OpenJDK BSD Porting Team
. VMname: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM
. Version: 20.0.2
. Runtime Version: 20.0.2+9-1
. Maximum Memory: 97824 MB
. Operating System: FreeBSD
. OS Version: 13.2-STABLE
. OS Arch: amd64
Jan 01, 2024 3:50:44 PM com.sun.javafx.application.PlatformImpl startup
WARNING: Unsupported JavaFX configuration: classes were loaded from 'unnamed module @54422e18'
. OS Dark Mode detection not supported
. OS Available Processors: 32
Exception in thread "Thread-2" java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: FreeBSD is not supported
at com.sun.javafx.tk.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit(Toolkit.java:195)
at com.sun.javafx.tk.Toolkit.getToolkit(Toolkit.java:232)
at com.sun.javafx.application.PlatformImpl.startup(PlatformImpl.java:290)
at com.sun.javafx.application.PlatformImpl.startup(PlatformImpl.java:162)
at com.sun.javafx.application.LauncherImpl.startToolkit(LauncherImpl.java:651)
at com.sun.javafx.application.LauncherImpl.launchApplication1(LauncherImpl.java:671)
at com.sun.javafx.application.LauncherImpl.lambda$launchApplication$2(LauncherImpl.java:195)
at java.base/java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:1623)
. Verzeichnis Einstellungen: /home/grog/.mediathek3
. Konfig existiert nicht!
. Es gibt kein Backup
. Weder Konfig noch Backup konnte geladen werden!
It started and produced windows wanting all sorts of configuration information (path to VLC-player, for example, which I don't need and which I suspect is misspelt. But after a whole lot more input, it came up with this:
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“You're running this program on an unsupported operating system. Stopping the program”.
What a cop-out! I thought the whole point of Java was to be platform independent. Looking back at the stack trace above, I see the message
Exception in thread "Thread-2" java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: FreeBSD is not supported
Is that from Java or from MediathekView? In either case it's annoying, especially since I've already established that the people who wrote it aren't interested.
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More thoughts on network throughput
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yesterday I discovered that MediathekView throughput under Microsoft was round 10 times as fast as under FreeBSD. I recalled having done some half-hearted tuning attempts, and discovered that I had done some ten years ago. At the time I had issues with the RSP, which is probably why I didn't follow them up. But clearly now I should investigate again.
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Merrellshoes scam: the sting in the tail
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
I still haven't done anything about the presumed scam that we fell into trying to buy riding boots last week. There's a bare chance, despite all indications, that they're legitimate, and for $50 I'm not sure I want any more pain.
But today, just before going to bed, I had another as a result. DigitalOcean sent me a mail saying that my credit card had been refused. Yes, of course: I had locked it. Off to the web site, fought my way through the billing pages (which claimed that I owed $0.00) to find the right page, and changed the credit card number.
Apart from the appalling web site, all went well. But the bill was nearly 4 times as high as usual. I get 1 TB free per month, but this month, it seems, I used a total of 3.5 TB, incurring an additional charge of USD 25.07. Where did that come from? It corresponds to an average traffic rate of 1.31 MB/s. If this continues, I should check what's causing it.
| Tuesday, 2 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 2 January 2024 |
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2024: The end of time
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
Took my first photos of the New Year with my Olympus E-30 yesterday. Processed them. The time didn't show.
What's wrong there? Did I forget to set the clock? No, the time was set correctly, and it had chosen a file name based on the date (101 in the second to fourth place in the file name), but:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~/Photos/20240101/orig 14 -> exiftool 51012647.ORF|grep Date
File Modification Date/Time : 2008:01:01 10:00:00+11:00
File Access Date/Time : 2024:01:03 11:29:53+11:00
File Inode Change Date/Time : 2024:01:02 10:39:43+11:00
Modify Date : 0000:00:00 00:00:00
Date/Time Original : 0000:00:00 00:00:00
Create Date : 0000:00:00 00:00:00
The E-30 was released in 2008. Can it be that somewhere internally there's a 4 bit year counter?
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Storm!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Bad weather forecast today: heavy rain and thunderstorms. That says one thing to me: grid power failures. To be on the safe side, charged up the batteries of the PV system to 95%.
And sure enough, at 13:15 we had a complaint from a couple of these toy UPS systems that I bought a year ago. Nothing further.
But then at 13:33 I came back into my office to find eureka displaying the first screen of the BIOS setup. Apart from the obvious conclusion that there had been a power failure that the PV system didn't handle, that's funny; normally it doesn't stop there.
While I was watching it, it reset again. And again. OK, nothing to do now. Let's wait until Powercor gets its act together.
That started only 6 minutes later, but the course of the afternoon I received a bewildering series of contradictory messages:
13:39 (only 6 minutes later). SMS from Powercod, restoration expected at 16:30:
13:46: No outages known, and my postcode is invalid:
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14:32: Their map shows an expected restoration of 15:30:
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At some point my SMS got updated without getting a new send time, but at 14:55 I saw:
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Ugh! In my experience, yes, it will be restored before then, but if not, it's time to drag out the candles. Though we removed all heavy power consumers, the sky was so dark that most of the time we had no PV power at all, and it seemed unlikely that we could hold out that long.
I kept an eye on the inverter display, of course; it shows a red LED when the grid is out. At 16:30, the LED was out: we had power again! It proved to have come back at 16:12 after a brief hiccough (red line):
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At 16:40, I received another SMS:
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That is so typical of Powercor. We have power (and based on the grid topology I'm sure that all of STONES ROAD DEREEL had too), but half an hour after restoration they claimed that it would take another 7 hours!
Finally, at 18:10, they caught up with reality:
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This is really amazing, even for Powercor. While accessing their information, I was asked to fill out a survey about the information. Since I had nothing to do, I painstakingly went through it, even entering text on this horrible glass keyboard. And I had to choose answers that didn't match my experience.
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Power fail: the long recovery
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Topic: technology | Link here |
So why did I find eureka stuck in the initial BIOS screen? When the power came back, tried again. No, it wouldn't go any further, and it didn't react to the keyboard. Dead in the water.
OK, from decades ago the sequence is: remove everything connected and see if something is holding it up. Started with the USB connections. Bingo! It came up and started doing normal things.
But I need the USB stuff, so started replacing connections one by one. The 7 port hub was the culprit. Change for the 4 port hub that I had lying around. Still it didn't work.
OK, connect the disks (all 4 of them) directly to the system. No space for camera cables. The first three disks probed fine, but the last (my photo backup disk) didn't show at all. Dead? It powered up happily when I connected it. More elimination, and I discovered good news, bad news: the disks are all OK, but the last USB port is dead.
What happened? The power supply for the USB hub was very hot and smelt burnt. Clearly it was destroyed by a Powercor surge that fought its way through the PV system. And the last USB port? I put the mouse dongle in it, and it probed happily, but didn't work properly, though the mouse stumbled a bit when I tried it. A different USB port? No. Another dongle? Also no reaction. It's not clear why, but it looks like I need a new mouse too.
OK, finally get eureka up and started X. Surprise, surprise. Screen 0, whose monitor is currently not connected, came up on monitor 3, completely disregarding what I specified in the configuration file. And of course all the fonts and things are incorrect, because I was in the process of reconfiguring X (and have been for the past month or two). High time to finally finish the migration to hydra, which is still a fair amount of work.
Done! After only 1½ hours of frustration. And it seems that only eureka went down. Check the NFS mounts on the other system. hydra OK. lagoon OK. tiwi... no response, though rwho told me that it, too, had rebooted.
Into the lounge room to see what was going on. No display! Not again! This drives me mad. Why do I have so much difficulty with this machine deciding which display to use? Dragged in a monitor to the lounge room, pulled tiwi out of its shelf and connected things up. No display.
Of course, these ThinkCentres only even try to display if a monitor was connected at boot time. OK, boot, watch.
Unable to mount dereel:/ on /dereel
Fool! I shut down dereel last week, and I should have checked for file systems mounted from other systems because of the problems I had the following day. Set /dereel to noauto in /etc/fstab and all should be well.
But why did that stop it coming up with a display on the TV (HDMI output)? I don't know. That choice is made during the initial BIOS probe, and NFS mounts come much later. Rebooted, and it confirmed my expectations: it came up on both the TV and the monitor, with a multi-headed X configuration that I hadn't expected. Remove the monitor, reboot again, and all was back to normal. Only 2 hours recovery.
Two hours so far. I don't have a mouse on eureka. Isn't this God's way of telling me that I should finally complete the migration to hydra?
| Wednesday, 3 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 3 January 2024 |
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Picking up the pieces
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Topic: technology | Link here |
After yesterday's catastrophic failure, spent most of today documenting the problems that occurred, and recovering from them.
The main issue today was the mouse. I'm sure I had a second Logitech M705 mouse, but I couldn't find it. But I tried out both dongles on hydra, and how about that, one worked. The other was presumably the one that Powercor destroyed. So at least I have one mouse.
I left that on hydra and tried out the other mice and dongles. Two appeared to be the same kind, and probe as
Jan 3 14:38:54 eureka kernel: ugen0.11: <DaKai> at usbus0
Jan 3 14:38:54 eureka kernel: ukbd1: <DaKai 2.4G RX, class 0/0, rev 1.10/3.11, addr 17> on usbus0
Jan 3 14:38:54 eureka kernel: kbd3 at ukbd1
Jan 3 14:38:54 eureka kernel: ums1: <DaKai 2.4G RX, class 0/0, rev 1.10/3.11, addr 17> on usbus0
Jan 3 14:38:54 eureka kernel: ums1: 5 buttons and [XYZT] coordinates ID=1
That looked like they would match the two “Jenkins” mice (an Officeworks brand) that I had lying around, but no, no response. The third probes as:
Jan 3 14:39:37 eureka kernel: ugen0.3: <vendor 0x0430> at usbus0
Jan 3 14:39:37 eureka kernel: ukbd0: <vendor 0x0430 Sun USB Keyboard, class 0/0, rev 2.00/1.04, addr 20> on usbus0
Jan 3 14:39:37 eureka kernel: kbd2 at ukbd0
Jan 3 14:39:37 eureka devd: Executing '/etc/rc.d/syscons setkeyboard /dev/ukbd0'
Jan 3 14:39:37 eureka kernel: ugen0.11: <MOSART Semi.> at usbus0
Jan 3 14:39:37 eureka kernel: ukbd1: <MOSART Semi. 2.4G Keyboard Mouse, class 0/0, rev 1.10/1.02, addr 21> on usbus0
Jan 3 14:39:37 eureka kernel: kbd3 at ukbd1
Jan 3 14:39:37 eureka kernel: ums1: <MOSART Semi. 2.4G Keyboard Mouse, class 0/0, rev 1.10/1.02, addr 21> on usbus0
Jan 3 14:39:37 eureka kernel: ums1: 5 buttons and [XYZT] coordinates ID=3
But I couldn't get any mouse to talk to any of the dongles.
And then there's more: the Logitech mouse has a number of buttons on the side. On eureka, I have it configured so that one of the buttons mapped to button 2. But the same configuration on hydra just didn't work. I have some recollection of seeing this before, but it's just one more thing to chase. I was able to set the simulation with buttons 1 and 3, like I do on tiwi.
And that's about all I had the energy for. I really should finish the X reconfiguration and move the monitors around.
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Christmas message: the sting in the tail
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Message from Alan Kennington today, mentioning strange log messages from his mail server:
2024-01-01T20:45:40.804505+11:00 condor postfix/qmgr[28568]: 32A9C120D94: from=<>, size=3436, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
2024-01-01T20:45:41.432611+11:00 condor postfix/smtp[21039]: connect to hydra.lemis.com[192.109.197.129]:25: No route to host
2024-01-01T20:45:41.634015+11:00 condor postfix/smtp[21039]: 32A9C120D94: to=<grog@hydra.lemis.com>, relay=none, delay=17157, delays=17157/0.01/0.62/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (connect to hydra.lemis.com[192.109.197.129]:25: No route to host)
It was quickly followed up by similar messages from a number of other people.
Oh. hydra shouldn't be visible to the mail system. I had already noticed this shortly after sending it, but of course it affects replies too. But why “no route to host”? This looks like an incorrect error message. Yes, hydra is visible on the net, but it's not listening. The correct message should have been “Connection refused”.
What do I do about it? Add an MX record, of course:
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/0) ~ 3 -> host hydra.lemis.com
hydra.lemis.com mail is handled by 20 mx0.lemis.com.
Tested that, and it worked. So presumably the retries should come through, but so far none have.
I've been meaning to send out mail to the recipients who bounced, but clearly there's more work to be done.
| Thursday, 4 January 2024 | Dereel → Napoleons → Dereel | Images for 4 January 2024 |
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Configuring mouse in the new scheme of things
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Topic: technology | Link here |
So how do I map the side keys on my Logitech M705 mouse? Off searching and came up with this response, which conveniently included a script showing that the replyer has a directory called /temp. With a bit of modification and testing, it works. Put this into my .xinitrc:
# Logitech unwired: find the ID
MOUSEID=$(xinput | grep -m 1 "Logitech USB" | sed 's/^.*id=\([0-9]*\)[ \t].*$/\1/')
# And set middle button to 8 and 9
xinput set-button-map $MOUSEID 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 2 2 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
So at least one problem has been solved. I just wish I understood what good moused is any more. If I don't run it, I can't communicate with the mouse. But mapping flags don't seem to do anything.
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hydra X configuration: next problem
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Topic: technology | Link here |
I'm almost ready to move my main desktop monitors to hydra; all I need to do is to fix my window manager configuration. But before I got very far with that, I discovered that another issue still hadn't gone away: from time to time the window manager crashes, which initially I blamed on x2x. But I'm not doing that any more, and today the window managers for hydra:0.1 and hydra:0.2 crashed, and nothing I could do would restart them:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/15) ~ 30 -> fvwm2 -s -display :0.2 -f /home/local/X/.fvwm/fvwm2rc-hydra:0.2
[fvwm][FlocaleGetFontSet]: (-*-*-medium-r-*-sans-12-*-*-*-p-*-*-*) Missing font charsets:
ISO8859-5, KOI8-R, ISO8859-7, JISX0208.1983-0, KSC5601.1987-0, GB2312.1980-0, JISX0201.1976-0
Assertion failed: (ret != inval_id), function _XAllocID, file xcb_io.c, line 626.
Abort trap
Are the “missing font” messages trying to tell me something relevant? They seem to crop up all the time, so they're probably “harmless”. Is it maybe related to my configuration files? Nope:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/15) ~/public_html/recipes/videos 33 -> fvwm2 -s -display :0.2
[fvwm.2][CMD_EdgeResistance]: <<DEPRECATED>> The command EdgeResistance with three arguments is obsolete. Please use the following commands instead:
EdgeResistance 250
Style * EdgeMoveDelay 250
Style * EdgeMoveResistance 10
[fvwm][FlocaleGetFontSet]: (-adobe-times-bold-r-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-*-*) Missing font charsets:
ISO8859-5, KOI8-R, ISO8859-7, JISX0208.1983-0, KSC5601.1987-0, GB2312.1980-0, JISX0201.1976-0
[fvwm][FlocaleGetFontSet]: (-adobe-times-bold-r-*-*-18-*-*-*-*-*-*-*) Missing font charsets:
ISO8859-5, KOI8-R, ISO8859-7, JISX0208.1983-0, KSC5601.1987-0, GB2312.1980-0, JISX0201.1976-0
Assertion failed: (ret != inval_id), function _XAllocID, file xcb_io.c, line 626.
Abort trap
Where did it get those outdated commands from? Something old and mouldy? Is it maybe a real bug with the current version of fvwm2? Can I use the old version on eureka?
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~ 5 -> fvwm -display hydra:0.2=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~ 6 ->
[fvwm][main]: <<ERROR>> can't open display freebie:0.0
[fvwm][main]: <<ERROR>> can't open display freebie:0.1=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~ 7 -> DISPLAY=hydra:0.2 fvwm
[fvwm][main]: <<ERROR>> can't open display freebie:0.1
[fvwm][main]: <<ERROR>> can't open display freebie:0.0
Where did that come from? Yes, once I had a system freebie.lemis.com, though I'm not sure it was in this millennium. But where is it getting the name from, and why is it using it?
OK, Google, what's going on here? Came up with surprisingly few hits—only 5, of which the last one was this diary. But this one, which points to this page, suggests that it's not just my problem. And the interesting part was:
The dirty fix for me was to switch from fvwm2 to the developing fvwm3 window manager.
OK, I can do that too. And how about that, it works (sort of) with the same configuration files, and it doesn't even complain about the fonts (nor anything else, for that matter). But it comes up in monochrome, so it's not just a drop-in replacement. Before I continue, I should check if it, too, isn't just waiting to crash.
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Where's my camera?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Over the weekend I bought a new camera. According to Australia Post tracking, it was in Delacombe yesterday afternoon, and it would be delivered on Monday, 4 days' time. Do I believe it? Not a bit. It has only been a month since I last had that kind of claim. But this time was different. A little later I received email:
57 N 03-01-2024 To ebay@lemis.c ( 907) eBay N 📦 ORDER DELIVERED: Olympus PEN E-PM1 Full Spectr…
58 N 03-01-2024 To ebay@lemis.c ( 700) Australia Post N Your parcel is ready for collection from the Post Office
That's in the order in which they arrived. “Delivered” (or “DELIVERED") is clearly an approximate term. But of course it was there, so off and picked it up.
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A new camera
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
My new camera is an Olympus E-PM1. Why that? I already have one, which by coincidence I received 7 years ago today, and it wasn't a spectacular camera when it was new, over 10 years ago. But this one is special: it has been converted for “full spectrum”, infrared and normal light. That's better than cameras that only see infrared, since I can convert it to that by simply putting an infrared filter on it. And the price was right: $90, where these things normally cost round $400, more than I'm interested in paying. And of course, since it's a Micro Four Thirds system camera, I have plenty of lenses for it. I had been warned that the image stabilization didn't work, but that's not so big a deal.
First thing, of course, was to compare it to my existing E-PM1. Externally, they're just a different colour. And both of them forget the date when the battery is removed. The only real thing is the sensor. Here the old PM1 and then the “new” camera (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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It wasn't until I looked at these photos that I saw the scratch on the sensor of the new camera. So far I haven't seen any evidence in the images.
OK, take a photo:
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Looks pretty much like the ones I took with other cameras and an infrared filter, including an image that was still on the SD card of the other E-PM1. But in the meantime I have seen instructions that ask for setting white balance. Bingo!
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By comparison, the other E-PM1 gives, for almost the same view,
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As in so many cases, nothing to write home about. But other foliage looks more interesting:
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Somehow, though, everything seems to be slightly out of focus:
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That was taken at f/1.4 with the Leica Summilux 25 mm f/1.4, but something should be in focus. I need to keep an eye on that.
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Reality TV?
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Topic: multimedia, general, opinion | Link here |
While watching TV this evening (Die jungen Ärzte, 2/29), saw this:
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The subtitles translate as “Oh, yes, then I fell into this silly cable”. And there it hangs, on the left of the display, and it continues down to the floor!
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hydra mail: finally fixed?
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yesterday I found a solution for the mail replies to hydra.lemis.com: add an MX record. And it worked, at least for me.
I couldn't put in mx1.lemis.com, because it doesn't know hydra. But it's still broke! Only mx1 can access mx0. I'm not sure how I tested it, but “it worked for me”. And for nobody else.
So, the correct workaround is (finally!)
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/0) ~ 8 -> host hydra.lemis.com
hydra.lemis.com mail is handled by 20 mx1.lemis.com.
hydra.lemis.com mail is handled by 10 mx0.lemis.com.
And finally all the waiting mail came from. It's interesting to note how many people contacted me about it, assuming that it was a permanent error, though they typically got messages like this saying that the server will retry for 5 days:
####################################################################
# THIS IS A WARNING ONLY. YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE. #
####################################################################
I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message has not yet
been delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.
<groggyhimself@hydra.lemis.com> delayed: host mx0.lemis.com (121.200.11.253): Network
error: Could not connect: Connection refused
Only one person got a “modern” message:
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It's 140 kB in size, compared to about 1 kB for the typical message. To make up for that, it omits almost all information: the name of the server (though it appears to be in the Google domain), the time of the message, whether it would retry or not (it seems that it didn't, unlike all other servers). We're living in modern times!
| Friday, 5 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 5 January 2024 |
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Much work, little result
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
Somehow I spent most of the day catching up with documenting the problems I've had so far this year. And I'm still dawdling with moving my computer display to hydra, at least partially because it's going to be a lot of moving monitors around. But it's uncomfortable the way it is now, so I should really do so.
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A new mouse?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Using a mouse with a cable is a pain! Time to buy a new one. I've been using the Logitech M705 for nearly 11 years, without being overly happy with it. But it works. Still, that's a long time. What has changed?
Off searching the web for “best mouse” and such things. but didn't come up with anything overly interesting. Mice are beginning to look even more bizarre, but I couldn't find the details I wanted. I could, however, pay up to $200 for a “gaming” mouse (is that a wild mouse?). In the end, it looks like I should just get a new M705.
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Mowing the lawn
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
As the result of the lack of carburettor, our lawn mower is still out of action, after nearly 2 months in a season with particularly virulent grass growth. Garry Marriott has lent us his mower, and today Paul Donaghy came by and mowed the lawn for us. The mower is a particularly large one, and he had difficulty with the corners. Garry doesn't have anything like that, so it works fine for him.
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Shepherd's pie yet again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Shepherd's pie for dinner again this evening. Last time I had finally established the correct quantities, so there wasn't much to do. I had 250 g (OK, 248 g) of lamb, and for that I needed a dish with a surface of 250 cm². For a circular dish, that's a diameter of 17.8 cm. The one I found had a diameter of 19 cm, but it was only just big enough:
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That fitted fairly well. And the gravy? 1.5 times meat makes 375 g. I tripped over a fencepost and made some with 375 g of water, a total of 413 g, and it was probably a little too much.
The good news is that the sachets of mashed potatoes (the ones with contradictory quantities) weigh a “metric” 115 g, very close to 4 oz avoirdupois (113.4 g). They want 500 ml of water, making a total very close to the 600 g in the recipe (though here today it should really have been 500 g). Still, that's close enough.
Next, how long and how hot do I cook it? 30 minutes at 180°. But no, after that time is was still quite pale. I had to raise the temperature to 190° and put it on grill, after which things were quite acceptable:
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And somehow it tasted better today.
| Saturday, 6 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 6 January 2024 |
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More gardening
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Jesse Walsh along today to do some more gardening. He's a fast worker, but it still took a long time. We should consider reshaping the garden to make things easier.
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hydra conversion: minimizing down time?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I'm using hydra more and more, which currently means that I have a total of 7 active displays. But that's only part of the desktop:
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From left to right, that's:
So the only thing stopping me from connecting all these displays together as one system is that I didn't connect eureka:0.0, and that I didn't reboot euroa. Then I could have connected them all together with x2x. That gives me the largest display surface that I have ever had, (finally) beating the 17,382,400 pixels that I had 22 years ago:
| Number | Resolution | Pixels | Total pixels | |||
| 2 | 1366x768 | 1,049,088 | 2,098,176 | |||
| 5 | 1920x1080 | 2,073,600 | 10,368,000 | |||
| 1 | 1920x1200 | 2,304,000 | 2,304,000 | |||
| 1 | 2560x1440 | 3,584,000 | 3,584,000 | |||
| 1 | 3840x2160 | 8,294,400 | 8,294,400 | |||
| 26,648,576 | ||||||
Why didn't I connect up the stragglers? It's not worth the trouble. This kind of setup is just plain uncomfortable, covering an angle of about 200°. Even without the laptops, the different angle of view for hydra and eureka is physically painful, to the point that I've stopped using x2x and am now using separate keyboard and mouse for each system.
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Finally! Hugin on hydra
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
House photo day, and once again I tried doing it on hydra.
Success! Well, sort of. These strange screen blank events on the root window still occur, but they prove to be harmless, and xearth soon clears up the mess. About the only problem that occurred is something that I have seen before. For some reason, this view continually gives me problems with newer versions of Hugin. Here as stitched with the same commands on hydra (Hugin version 2023.0.0) and eureka (Hugin version 2018.0.0). Run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour:
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But that's nothing to do with X, just another hurdle to cross when the time is right. The actual stitching is done in batch mode, so theoretically I could do this with the old software. So there's one less obstacle to moving my displays to hydra. About the last remaining one is physically moving the connections, including the new monitor. And that will require new connections, since the single DisplayPort cable that I have is too short for the new location.
| Sunday, 7 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 7 January 2024 |
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Still more hydra delay
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Topic: technology | Link here |
I really should be moving my displays to hydra, and if I had more time, I would do so. But maybe the delay isn't such a bad idea after all. It's becoming clear that while the new LG 27” 27UP850-W 4K UHD monitor is excellent for photos, it causes problems for much software, in particular “modern” things like web browsers, which can't scale correctly. But how do I even resize the cursor?
So maybe it's a better idea to move it to position 0 in the new layout, where I don't use it all the time, but where it's available for photos. And for that, I need to get Nvidia to talk to the old Matrix monitor.
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Examining the full spectrum E-PM1
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Topic: photography | Link here |
I've had my “new” Olympus E-PM1 for a couple of days now, and it looks as if it might have serious problems, but I've been too busy to check. Finally got round to it today: take comparison photos at minimum and maximum focal lengths and and widest aperture and f/22, with and without an infrared filter on both E-PM1s, using the old Zuiko Digital ED 12-60 mm f/2.8-4.0 SWD on it, because it's one of the few that can take my infrared filter.
The new E-PM1 had great difficulty focusing, and it was happy to take photos anyway. But why the difficulty? It seems that it's the camera/lens combination. The other one also had problems. In the middle of the testing, the battery in the old camera ran out, and I had to remove the tripod mount to change it. I don't have time for this! Let's wait until I'm back from Melbourne.
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ARD download fixed
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
Finally yt-dlp has been updated to download videos from ARD. A good thing, too. I've been through a whole set of alternatives, all with their own problems:
But finally it's done, at least for this obstacle.
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Change in Dereel
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
We've been in Dereel for nearly 17 years, well over a fifth of my life. And we're seeing change over that time. This afternoon I went to the Elfords to borrow their mobile fridge again, and on the way noticed a number of changes:
In our old house in Kleins Road they are changing things to look less livable and more commercial:
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And across the road, a new Jenny (Furneaux) has moved in where Jenny Bartlett once lived. It seems that they have started a riding school, but it would be difficult to tell from the appearance. Only the high-roofed hall behind the house could have something to do with it:
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And then down Harrisons Road a new house is under construction, near the one on the corner which was built 4 years ago.
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We had looked at a property in that area a couple of days before Stones Road, if I'm interpreting my diary correctly. The issue was at least that there was no electricity, and five years ago I wrote:
I wonder what they'll do for electricity.
But now there is power, at least to the new house and potentially to the old one. I wonder what they had to pay for that.
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Preparing for Melbourne again
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Topic: general | Link here |
Tomorrow we're off to Melbourne again, for the first time in nearly 3 years, for Yvonne to have another EUS and possibly FNA. And it had to be a Monday!
The process takes forever (well, 30 minutes). But then there's the interminable waiting time, 90 minutes recovery and of course 4 hours driving. Last time I went shopping and looked round the places of my childhood.
So, where do we go shopping? All the markets are closed, but there are other places. Setting up my route, I discovered that Fleischers (nomen est omen) Butchers in Boronia have closed down. What other German butchers are there? Years ago I went to the Wursthütte in Malvern, but they're not open on Mondays either. And then there's the Malverrn Continental Butchers, which appear to be the same thing with a different web site, also generally closed on Mondays and in this case also until 22 January.
What's left? Box Hill Central for Chinese food, Minh Phat (a company which seems to have lost its web site) for Vietnamese and general South-East Asian food, Casa Iberica for Spanish and Mexican food. Not much for an itinerary.
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Ceramic pan fail
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Three years ago I was pleasantly surprised by the new ceramic frying pan that I had bought: it was really non-stick:
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But that was 3 years ago. Sadly, like so many ceramic things, it seems, it's no longer even average non-stick:
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Even removing the residue and putting it through the dish washer wasn't enough:
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That's a pity. I wonder if newer pans will be better.
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Biriani: No thanks
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Lamb biriani for dinner this evening. We had originally planned it for a group dinner nearly 3 years ago. But then a COVID-19 lockdown was imposed, and since then we no longer have dinner guests.
The dish is remarkably complicated, though today I found a few minor improvements: you don't need to soak saffron in water if you're then going to put it in a broth, for example. And the spice proportions (which I'm sure I had greatly increased relative to the original recipe) still seemed far too low, and I increased some of them by up to double.
It didn't taste bad. But somehow it didn't taste nearly as good as I had recalled, and certainly not as much to justify the work it took.
| Monday, 8 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 8 January 2024 |
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Off to Melbourne again
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Topic: health, general, food and drink | Link here |
Off to Melbourne as planned this morning, through some of the worst weather I've seen in Australia: fog with visibility down to 100 m, and drizzling rain all day long, making driving on the freeway the kind of agony that I haven't seen in decades.
Dropped Yvonne at the Epworth Hospital and on to Minh Phat, not far away, where Google Maps carefully guided me into a dead-end delivery bay. Back out and round the corner, fighting my way through the rain, and actually found quite a bit of stuff, though I had planned to do most of my shopping in Box Hill Central.
Then off to Box Hill Central, where Google Maps obligingly brought me to the underground car park, and found a parking place close to the stairs. Upstairs, nothing looked familiar. Yes, it's been 6 years since I was last there, but I shouldn't have forgotten things completely.
After discussing with a bloke trying to raise money for guide dogs, found my way up another flight of stairs. Still nothing looked the way it should have done. Found a sign pointing to the exit, but it was to the east. It should have been to the north. Had I lost my orientation since coming into the car park? No, it proved that I was in a different building! Last time I was there, I thought there was only one, but they have extended with further buildings.
Into the main area, which was as I remembered it. Except that the supermarkets weren't anything like as good as I recalled. On the whole, I think that Minh Phat matches my requirements better. Bought some choi sam and something with a name like “mustard caixing”, which looked similar. I should have taken a photo. And that was all.
Walked around the area round Box Hill. I don't know how long the predominantly Chinese centre has been there, but my father was in the area 90 years ago, going to Box Hill High School. And it's one of the first places I went to when I returned to Australia on 12 March 1997. No mention of a Chinese centre there at the time.
Getting out was fun: the payment machines for the parking are really confusing, and if they're capable of issuing offered a receipt, they do a good job of hiding it. And when I got to the exit, the barrier wouldn't accept the ticket. I couldn't even get it to try to read it. Pressed the “Help” button, with no immediate reply. And then I saw that the barrier was open! My guess is that it recognized my registration (which it had written on the ticket when I entered). But they're too polite to assume that I wouldn't know that.
OK, where next? Casa Iberica in Alphington? Sorry, says Google Maps, they're closed for the day—and that round 15:10. OK, Fitzroy? They close at 16:00, and you'll need 20 minutes to get there. OK, off, getting misled on the way, and arrived round 15:40, where at least I was able to get some chorizo and masa lista, along with some Manchego cheese for the fun of it.
And now? Round the corner to the Melbourne Museum? They close at 17:00, so I wouldn't have much time there. In the end I gave up and went back to the hospital, where, though Yvonne had finished her procedure, I wasn't allowed to see her for another hour.
Finally she was allowed out. Down to the car park, where they had the same kind of parking machines as in Box Hill. But there I paid $2 for 2 hours. Here it was $24 for 1½ hours! And interestingly, Yvonne says that she saw it display a brief text in German. Sadly, I didn't, but that once happened to me in Box Hill 5 years ago, and on that occasion I thought that I might have hallucinated. And at the exit, once again my card wasn't accepted. This time it pulled it in, spat it out and asked me to repeat. Tried all four orientations to no avail. Finally called help, and was asked if I had paid, if I had tried all orientations. Then the barrier went up. What a mess!
Off home. What a day!
| 10:30 | Set off for Melbourne | |
| 12:30 | Yvonne arrives at hospital | |
| 15:15 | Yvonne admitted to procedure | |
| 15:45 | Procedure complete, start recovery | |
| 17:30 | Recovery (“1½ hours") complete | |
| 17:45 | Yvonne dismissed | |
| 18:00 | Leave for home | |
| 19:45 | Arrive home |
The bad news is that yes, there is some anomaly in Yvonne's pancreas, and it might need an operation that would remove most of it. We'll have to discuss that with Kon Shimokawa soon.
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Mobile phones out of desperation
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I spent over an hour at the hospital waiting for Yvonne. What could I do? Play around with my phone. I had tried to send her some photos of fish in the Box Hill shopping centre, but I hadn't been able to work out how to do it. Finally I found out. I should have written it down: it's so non-intuitive that I have forgotten again.
The other surprise was the amount of credit that mobile date uses. It's difficult to get an
overview from ALDI Mobile, but it must
have been about $20. Given that I used to get by for a year on a $15 recharge, that's
clearly a lot. My tariff “plan” is cheap for phone calls, but really expensive
for mobile data. Should I change? No, I don't think so. Today I could have used one of
their $20 data “plans”, but that's so seldom that it wouldn't be worthwhile. And the other
costs, including parking, made it relatively insignificant.
| Tuesday, 9 January 2024 | Dereel | |
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A whole day writing diary
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Topic: general | Link here |
A lot has happened over the last couple of days, and I didn't get a chance to write my diary yesterday. As a result, I barely got it finished before dinner. Once again the question rises whether I shouldn't just be less verbose. But no, I think it's worth my while.
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Full spectrum camera: first results
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Finally got round to looking at the photos I took on Monday. The good news seems to be that the focus isn't that bad after all. And after trying to take photos with the Zuiko Digital ED 12-60 mm f/2.8-4.0 SWD, I discovered that my two newest general purpose lenses, the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO and the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-200 mm f/3.5-6.3, both have the same 72 mm filter thread, so next time I can try them.
First recognition: yes, the new camera does focus correctly:
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That's taken at f/4 and a focal length of 60 mm.
And the infrared filter does make a difference. Here without, then with (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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Surprisingly, the version with the infrared filter looks more “natural” than the one with full spectrum. I should investigate the influence of ultraviolet light.
| Wednesday, 10 January 2024 | Dereel | |
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Still in catchup mode
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Topic: general | Link here |
Spent most of today not quite as busy as yesterday, but there's still a lot of work to catch up with; my benchmark mail inbox was sitting at round 100 messages, nearly 2 pages of display.
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Where's my mail?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Despite my overflowing mail inbox, it seemed that I wasn't getting as much mail as usual, in particular from news sources. And Quora seems to have stopped altogether.
OK, check the mail logs. To my surprise, I found a whole lot of things like this:
Jan 5 15:53:31 eureka postfix/smtpd[25111]: connect from mx2.freebsd.org[96.47.72.81]
Jan 5 15:53:31 eureka postfix/spawn[25649]: warning: command /usr/local/bin/perl exit status 2
Jan 5 15:53:31 eureka postfix/smtpd[25111]: warning: premature end-of-input on private/bld-policy while reading input attribute name
Jan 5 15:53:32 eureka postfix/spawn[25649]: warning: command /usr/local/bin/perl exit status 2
Jan 5 15:53:32 eureka postfix/smtpd[25111]: warning: premature end-of-input on private/bld-policy while reading input attribute name
Jan 5 15:53:32 eureka postfix/smtpd[25111]: warning: problem talking to server private/bld-policy: No error: 0
Jan 5 15:53:32 eureka postfix/smtpd[25111]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mx2.freebsd.org[96.47.72.81]: 451 4.3.5 <groggyhimself@lemis.com>: Recipient address rejected: Server configuration problem; from=<owner-src-committers@freebsd.org> to=<groggyhimself@lemis.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<mx2.freebsd.org>
Jan 5 15:53:32 eureka postfix/smtpd[25111]: disconnect from mx2.freebsd.org[96.47.72.81] ehlo=1 mail=1 rcpt=0/1 data=0/1 rset=1 quit=1 commands=4/6
That was the first occurrence, but it's 5 days ago. What is it? What's private/bld-policy? Have I changed something in my mail configuration? Or DNS? No, nothing corresponds. And the strange thing is that not all email is rejected.
Off looking for private/bld-policy. Two hits:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/4) ~ 6 -> locate bld-policy | xargs ls -l
-rw------- 1 root wheel 0 13 Feb 2013 /home/oldroot/var/spool/postfix/pid/unix.bld-policy
-rw------- 1 root postfix 0 2 Jan 2017 /var/spool/postfix/pid/unix.bld-policy
Clearly neither of those has anything to do with the issue. What is it? It took a while to think of searching the Postfix) configuration files. And there I found:
smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
check_recipient_access hash:/usr/local/etc/postfix/accept-to,
reject_unauth_destination
check_policy_service unix:private/bld-policy
What's that? It must have been there for ever. On searching, it seems that I added it relatively recently and implicitly on 13 January 2007, apparently as the result of installing the now-defunct Blacklist Daemon—thus the bld in the name. Removing the last line of the specification fixed the problem.
So why did it turn up now? My guess is that bld went away when I installed the current version of eureka. So far I have been receiving mail only relayed from mx1.lemis.com, so permit_mynetworks allowed everything through. But last Friday I changed my firewall rules to allow direct mail access, and that triggered the issue. And why did some mail get through anyway? Presumably, for some reason, it was relayed via mx1.
And Quora? They really seem to have given up trying.
| Thursday, 11 January 2024 | Dereel | |
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Where did my weather data go?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Looking at the weather observations today, discovered something disturbing: no data. The entire directory /var/db/mysql/weather was empty! The modification timestamp of the directory showed that it had last been changed at 13:14.
How can that happen? My programs can't do that, because they don't delete entire directories, and they don't know about some of the files in there. In any case, nothing for it: that's what backups are for, so restored all my MySQL tables, including the ones in other databases that weren't deleted, and noted with a certain satisfaction that I didn't need to restart MySQL.
And then they were gone again, at 15:48! Another restart, and some head-scratching. I had just received two emails from CERT-bund warning me of open ports on my firewall. Ah, yes, I should close them. Could they be the clue to the lost data? One of them was NetBIOS, but that still requires authentication. As the mail said, the main vulnerability is elsewhere:
Over the past months, systems responding to NetBIOS nameservice requests from anywhere on the Internet have been increasingly abused for DDoS reflection attacks against third parties.
And if it was an attack from outside, why just my weather data? Well, do I know that it's just my weather data? I don't see anything else, but that's something to check tomorrow. In any case, I didn't have any further issues with the weather data.
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Genocide then and now
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Topic: politics, history, opinion | Link here |
I was brought up in the mid-20th century, at a time when the treatment of the Jews in Hitler Germany was a shock that still hadn't died down. The newly formed United Nations had held a Genocide Convention as a result. Never again should this happen.
And the Jews finally found their homeland, as the British had wished for a long time. The country flourished. The only fly in the ointment was the jealous neighbours who wanted (and in some cases still want) to destroy the country. Bad neighbours!
But gradually my sympathy for israel has dampened. It has been clear for some decades that they have no intention of releasing the territory that they have occupied, and there was more than enough evidence of their mistreatment of the rightful owners of the land even before 7 October 2023. Under those circumstances, it's not surprising (though also not pardonable) that the Palestinians arise and attack the Israelis.
But wait, the Israelis can do better. You kill 1200 Israelis? We can kill 25,000 Palestinians! And we won't stop! Out, damned Palestinians!
It's not surprising that other countries are opposed to their brutality and destruction, and finally South Africa has gone to the International Court of Justice and accused Israel of genocide—the very crime that was created because of the way the Jews were treated under Hitler.
We'll see how that pans out. The whole thing turns my stomach. I'm reminded of verse 7 of Deuteronomy:
When your God brings you to the land that you are about to enter and possess, and [God] dislodges many nations before you—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations much larger than you—and your God delivers them to you and you defeat them, you must doom them to destruction: grant them no terms and give them no quarter.
But one thing has been becoming clear to me: what I learnt at school was not the unbiased truth. The Palestinians weren't just jealous, they were angry for having been driven out of their home and into refugee camps that have now been holding “refugees” for longer than I have been alive. And even then the peace-loving Israelis had used genocidal tactics, such as the atrocities.
So I've been trying to find more about this for some time. A while back I participated in a course produced by some Israeli institution. It was interesting, but I've forgotten most of it, and I don't recall much discussion of violence. On the other hand, Deir Yassin wasn't an invention.
So I've been looking for, and finding, videos about the matter. There's this one:
But it's not very long (10 minutes), and it suggests that nothing seriously went wrong before the Six Day War. What led up to Deir Yassin? More searching brought me to this series of videos, a total of 3 hours, produced by Al Jazeera:
That paints a very different picture. On the face of it, it all looks very plausible, and there are details in there that explain what happened later. The bottom line I got was: the Jewish (Zionist) settlers were anything but friendly towards the people they displaced, and atrocities like the ones we're seeing now also occurred before the Second World War. The difference seems to be the press coverage, possibly one of the reasons why the Israelis seem to delight in killing reporters.
But is it balanced? Al Jazeera is an Arabic broadcaster, one run by the government of Qatar. On the whole I have a good opinion of them, but that doesn't mean that they're always neutral in what they present. It would be nice to find something as plausible and as detailed presented by “the other side”.
| Friday, 12 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 12 January 2024 |
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Understanding mustard greens
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
I've heard the term mustard greens before, but never really quite understood it. But it seems that whatever I bought on Monday is one of many kinds.
Petra Gietz knows of others; in fact, she grows them, and today she brought some along for comparison:
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That's mine at the top, hers are the bottom two. It's interesting to note that they all have serrated leaves, and they have a somewhat spicy taste. But hers are more strongly flavoured than mine, and she tells me that they grow like weeds. So possibly I should investigate further.
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Some garden improvement
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
The last few years have been pretty terrible for the garden, but lately there have been some encouraging signs. The curry tree is finally (just) flowering:
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And the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis and transplanted Fuchsia are also promising:
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So is the Corymbia ficifolia, which must have 500 buds:
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And even the Clematis that was looking so sick six weeks ago has picked up:
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Data breach checks
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So what caused yesterday's loss of data? Was it really a security breach? And did more get lost than I thought? How do I check?
The most important things, of course, are my photos. And that proved comparatively easy. I do an automated backup every night, and this morning the output showed:
Fri 12 Jan 2024 05:05:01 AEDT Greg Photo Backup disk 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 25 11 Jan 05:34:05 2024 /photobackup/Iam
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/da3p1 7,629,565 7,217,012 336,257 96% 1,743,234 1,500,412 54% /photobackup
sent 34,480,155 bytes received 190 bytes 36,123.99 bytes/sec
/dev/da3p1 7,629,565 7,217,012 336,257 96% 1,743,234 1,500,412 54% /photobackup
Fri 12 Jan 2024 05:21:40 AEDT Photo backup ended
~
By chance I hadn't processed any photos yesterday. The important thing here is the iused column in the df output: no change. So my photos are safe unless somebody went and replaced the contents.
What about elsewhere? If files get deleted, the directory is modified (remove the file name entry). So this should help:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/33) /usr/local/etc/postfix 35 -> find -x / -type d -mtime -2 > /var/tmp/toucheddirs=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/33) /usr/local/etc/postfix 36 -> find -x /home -type d -mtime -2 >> /var/tmp/toucheddirs=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/33) /usr/local/etc/postfix 37 -> xargs < /var/tmp/toucheddirs ls -lrdt | less
This finds all directories that have been modified in the last 48 hours and lists them by modification date. The only relevant entries were:
drwx------ 4 mysql mysql 1536 11 Jan 17:33 /home/var/db/mysql/weather
drwxr-xr-x 2 root mysql 1024 11 Jan 17:33 /home/var/db/mysql/weather/saveweather
That's the time when I restored the contents and also created a backup directory. So it seems that nothing else was changed.
But was it an attack from outside? /var/log/messages is full of messages like
Jan 11 15:52:22 eureka smbd[13647]: [2024/01/11 15:52:22.505008, 0] ../source3/lib/access.c:338(allow_access)
Jan 11 15:52:22 eureka smbd[13647]: Denied connection from 41.208.71.226 (41.208.71.226)
Jan 11 15:52:22 eureka smbd[13647]: [2024/01/11 15:52:22.505356, 0] ../lib/util/pidfile.c:153(pidfile_unlink)
Jan 11 15:52:22 eureka smbd[13647]: Failed to delete pidfile /var/run/samba4/smbd.pid. Error was No such file or directory
Jan 11 16:15:41 eureka smbd[59185]: [2024/01/11 16:15:41.244124, 0] ../source3/lib/access.c:338(allow_access)
...
That covers the time of the second deletion, and it doesn't show anything different from the rest of the day. And now, of course, it's silent.
So: there was a vulnerability that doesn't seem to have been exploited, and the localized nature of the data loss also doesn't seem to match. One that got away?
But then, syncing my diary, I got this message:
...
12900 files...
13600 files...
13993 files to consider
./
diary-aug1966.php
102,332 100% 1.57MB/s 0:00:00 (xfr#2, to-chk=13805/13993)
13,993 files? That should be over 15,000! What got lost?
Oh. Symlink pain. That was on hydra. Try again on eureka and I got
15313 files to consider
I really need to complete this transition.
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Gaza or Ghazza?
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Topic: language | Link here |
Gaza is term that's in everybody's mind at the moment. But looking back in this diary, I found the alternate spelling Ghazza—by me! Why?
Looking at the original spelling غَزَّةَ, it's clear that it starts with the letter غَََّ, also written medial ـغـ and final ـغ. That's transliterated as ghayn in the Wikipedia Arabic alphabet, though I recall it as ghain. And that's the letter normally transliterated as gh, like in names for Baghdad and Afghanistan. The letter normally representing g is ...
Oh. It seems that there isn't one. I learnt (as far as it went) Arabic script via the Malay Jawi script, and the alphabet contains some letters that don't exist in Arabic. Letters like ڽ (nya) and ڠ (nga), representing the ny and ng sounds, are understandable, but ڤ (pa), representing the p sound, is less understandable. I knew about that because over 60 years ago my friend Fadel Abdul Khadir, from Kuwait, couldn't read ڤيراق (Perak) on stamps in my stamp collection, pronouncing it Ferak instead. But only now do I discover that ݢ (ga) is another of these basic sounds that have no representation in the Arabic alphabet.
So: Gaza, Ghaza or Ghazza? I don't see any explanation for the doubled z. And from what I've heard in Arabic, Gaza is probably closer. But it took a while to find that out.
Intrestingly, there's a Ghazzeh ( غزة)) in Lebanon. Bar the diacritics, which I don't understand, the spelling is the same.
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Learning about full spectrum photography
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Topic: photography | Link here |
Does my “new” Olympus E-PM1 work well enough to keep? Should I return it or ask for a reduction in price? Spent some time looking at videos about the topic, and this one in particular seems useful:
I'm still making my way through it, but so far it has given me a better overview of the topics, and also the difference between “only infrared” and full spectrum imaging. It also shows that I misinterpreted the photos I took Nowadays “only infrared” is effectively monochrome, like this photo I took today, using my R72 infrared filter:
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And here it is again without the filter:
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In passing, it's interesting to note the difference in exposure: the R72 filter reduces exposure by about 1 EV for this camera.
Other details: I stopped while he was talking about infrared photography with unmodified cameras. I've been there before nearly 10 years ago, but on that occasion I didn't know about changing the white balance, something that I'm going to have to look at now. So far he hasn't made the important point that the results depend on the sensor/internal filter combination, as I had noted at the time. But he did bring back the spectre of hot spots and gave a link to a table of good and bad lenses. Not surprisingly, the Zuiko Digital ED 12-60 mm f/2.8-4.0 SWD that I used last time figures in the “bad” column, but it claims that the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO is good. On the other hand, one of the comments states “very bad hot spot” for that lens.
The other interesting point is that he recommends only brand name R72 infrared filters, specifically Hoya. Went looking. In my diameter (coincidentally 72 mm), the cheapest I could find cost $92.75, and one (from Austria) cost $186 plus $90 postage! That quite relativizes the $90 I paid for the camera.
And how much difference do the scratches on the sensor make? Took a photo without a lens of the backdrop at the back of my office and got:
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Yes, it's not even, but I can't see any evidence of scratches. Why not?
| Saturday, 13 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 13 January 2024 |
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More garden stuff
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Seen this morning:
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That's the best Buddleja_×_weyeriana I've seen since we've been living here.
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Still more full spectrum investigations
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Spent a lot of time this afternoon looking at further videos on full spectrum photography. In particular, Rob Shea produces a surprising amount of content. Today I looked at a video titled DxO PhotoLab 7 for Infrared Photography :
I'm still using DxO PhotoLab 5, and so far I haven't seen any reason to upgrade. Is this the reason? No, I don't think so. Nearly all the functionality he describes is in version 5 as well. And some of the ideas are worthwhile, like this transition (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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This is an image I took 10 years ago, and with which I wasn't very impressed (first image). The second is after applying some kind of white balance, and the third after a little frobbing with DxO. They're still not good, but it shows some promise.
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Slow network performance
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Every day I sync my diary and other web files to the external web server www.lemis.com. It usually take a couple of minutes. But today it hung in the middle. Why? Yet another thing to investigate.
| Sunday, 14 January 2024 | Dereel | |
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DDoS?
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Why was my network upload so slow yesterday? Did some checking, first with my network statistics page. It showed complete nonsense. Then with traceroute, which showed latency of round 250 ms down my network link. Problems at Aussie Broadband? First I need to understand why my network statistics were so crazy.
That was simple: firewall misconfiguration. I had blocked all incoming ICMP packets, and that included outgoing pings. I do need to do something to limit the amount of incoming ICMPs, which are round 300 per second, but in principle it doesn't help to just reject them. That would only work if the pingers decide to give up.
Second best: reject all packets for systems that don't exist. The same consideration applies, but at least that will show if it makes a difference. All my IP addresses are in the upper half of my net block, 192.109.197.128/25, so I can reject anything to 192.109.197.0/25. I also thought that I could reject 192.109.197.192/26, but I have some things in that range. It'll be a while before I see any results there.
Gradually performance improved—I think part of the latency issue was that I was downloading a video at the time—and I started looking at other things, such as this diary. Finish it, sync...
/: write failed, filesystem is full
mkdtemp: private socket dir: No space left on device
Oh. That's on the external server. Tried to connect, which took for ever. OK, first find the disk hog. Log files, of course. This machine only has about 50 GB of disk, and over 15 GB were in old log files. I didn't want to delete the last one, just compress it, but for that I need more space....
Finally it was done, but performance remained terrible. top told me something like:
238 processes: 62 running, 176 sleeping
CPU: 94.8% user, 0.0% nice, 3.5% system, 1.7% interrupt, 0.0% idle
Mem: 486M Active, 2589M Inact, 976K Laundry, 739M Wired, 375M Buf, 389M Free
Swap: 3048M Total, 391M Used, 2657M Free, 12% Inuse
PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND
63576 www 1 23 0 28M 13M RUN 1 0:02 6.42% httpd
63591 www 1 24 0 30M 13M RUN 0 0:01 5.73% httpd
63536 www 1 23 0 28M 13M lockf 0 0:02 5.72% httpd
The web server was maxed out:
=== root@lax (/dev/pts/6) /home/grog 4 -> ps aux | grep httpd | wc -l
111
111 httpd processes! What does restarting the web server do? Nothing. The call hung. OK, hard shutdown:
=== root@lax (/dev/pts/8) ~ 1 -> killall httpd
No matching processes were found
I've seen that a lot recently. What's behind it? In any case, this did it:
=== root@lax (/dev/pts/6) ~ 9 -> ps aux | grep httpd | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}' | sh
But restarting the server quickly shot the load up again:
=== grog@lax (/dev/pts/5) ~ 5 -> ps aux|grep httpd|wc -l
127
What is all this stuff? The log file shows:
8.219.75.135 - - [14/Jan/2024:03:33:07 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-apr2008.php?dirdate=20080426&imagesizes=111211112111111111112111111111111111111111111111212 HTTP/1.1" 200 190059 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
8.219.105.244 - - [14/Jan/2024:03:33:12 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-apr2008.php?dirdate=20080406&imagesizes=1111112111221111111111111111111111111111111112 HTTP/1.1" 200 243494 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
8.222.203.212 - - [14/Jan/2024:03:33:13 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-apr2008.php?dirdate=20080423&imagesizes=2111111111111111111112111111111011111111111111111113 HTTP/1.1" 200 240241 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
8.219.75.135 - - [14/Jan/2024:03:33:12 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-jul2008.php?dirdate=20080713&imagesizes=11111121111111111111111111111211111111111112 HTTP/1.1" 200 306536 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
8.219.198.76 - - [14/Jan/2024:03:33:11 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-apr2008.php?dirdate=20080420&imagesizes=1111112111111111111311212 HTTP/1.1" 200 243415 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
8
I've seen this before. Those are web crawlers, and they're iterating through all image sizes in my diary. At the time I had identified the names of the crawlers and redirected, but these crawlers are too polite to have reverse lookup. I can employ heuristics, but there must be an easier way. I need to think about it.
The good news is that the load average gradually dropped during the course of the day, though it remained over 20. Can it be that the crawlers adapt to when they expect the network load to be the lowest?
| Monday, 15 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 15 January 2024 |
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Prawn noodles
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
While in Melbourne on Monday, I bought some prawn (“shrimp”) pastes that I hadn't seen before. This one, I thought, would be like petis udang.
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It wasn't, but possibly close enough. The other I had intended to use to make some prawn noodle breakfast, possibly like the too-pedas Tean's mi udang paste:
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But it's in oil. Maybe something like KL Hokkien Mee? With that vague idea, I tried:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 60 g | squid tubes, cut into strips | 1 | ||
| 60 g | raw prawns | 1 | ||
| 1 | small chili, chooped | 2 | ||
| 10 g | garlic | 2 | ||
| 5 g | ginger | 2 | ||
| 15 g | “shrimp” paste | 2 | ||
| 60 g | choi sam | 3 | ||
| 180 g | cooked spaghetti | 4 | ||
| 50 g | medium prawns (4 to 6) | 4 | ||
| soya sauce | 5 | |||
Unlike with KL Hokkien Mee, I didn't fry the squid tubes; I fried the choi sam stalks with the paste, garlic and ginger, then added the prawns, squid and the rest of the choi sam. The result looked a little dry, so I added a little soya sauce:
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The result? Not bad, not spectacular. It proved that the paste was pedas enough by itself, so if I do it again, I'll leave out the chili.
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Web server: the solution?
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Topic: technology | Link here |
So how can I fix the load situation on my external web server? The issue is at least that crawlers overload it by requesting the same page multiple times with different image sizes. The obvious solution is to migrate the image resizing to the browser. That means Javascript, something that I barely know. Spent some time looking at the function oneimage () that prepares the images. It's 750 lines of particularly convoluted code, some of which may be obsolete. But converting it is non-trivial, and for the moment the load is down, so I'll put that on the tuit queue.
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X display: finally?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been running a mixed X environment for some time now, trying to decide what to do next. My issues are:
So what do I do? What is the problem with fvwm2, anyway? Does it behave the same if I build it from source? That's easy enough to test.
No, the behaviour is different. Previously it crashed every day or two. Now it crashes every time. But that has an advantage that I can test it. What happens if I don't give it a configuration file? It works! So it has something to do with the configuration file, which explains part of how it could get away.
More playing with the configuration files. Somehow it's related to the xterm starting menus that I've been working on. But it's not the entries themselves; just a frame of a menu is enough to cause it to crash.
OK, what about other versions of fvwm2? I have them on all my systems, and they don't crash. So: run tiwi's fvwm2. It crashes! The crash itself is somewhere in an X library, so that in itself is not surprising, but it does help localize the bug.
So run fvwm2 on eureka, just pointing to hydra. That works. The only issue is that I can't start an xterm natively on hydra; I need ssh. For the time being I'll have to put up with that, though it seems silly to run input to a local xterm via another system.
So: update my genxterms.el to not single out the local system for special treatment if that system is hydra:
But it doesn't work! While balancing my parens, I got messages like
Wrong number of arguments: (lambda (entry) (car entry)), 0
How do you debug that? That's the body of the called function, but the name itself is missing. All I have is entry. With a bit of searching, found
(defun system-entry (entry)
(car entry) )
But all the calls appeared to be complete. Yes, Elisp has debugging features, but this runs in batch mode, and I have no idea how to run it interactively. So off to debug with (print), which was, for some reason, particularly difficult. It seems that the error messages are wrong. In the end I gave up for the day with a configuration file that used ssh for every system. Grr.
| Tuesday, 16 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 16 January 2024 |
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Still more fvwm configuration
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Why am I having so much difficulty configuring fvwm? Part of it is the historical background, coming on 28 years, part of it is my lack of good Elisp debugging—something that I should investigate more—but it seems that part of it is simply that the original was also buggy. Why did I write this script in Elisp? It's predominantly string-based, and something like PHP would have done better, but when I wrote it I didn't know PHP. But since then it has been through 116 revisions and more than tripled in size.
So: after much pain I've established a bug in the original, but ran out of energy to fix it. Will that be the end of it?
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Recovering fuchsia
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
The Fuchsia that I replanted last month is recovering as well as can be expected. At least it's bringing some foliage and buds:
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But then I discovered that I had repotted it “relatively” recently, only a year ago, and at the time it looked much better:
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So what went wrong?
| Wednesday, 17 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 17 January 2024 |
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Prawn won ton mee soup
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
in Melbourne on Monday I bought these frozen prawn wontons:
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Put them in a mee soup for breakfast. They became enormous:
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In fact, together they weighed about 60 g before and 84 g afterwards, but they're so much bigger! I think 2 would be enough. And yes, they don't taste bad in the mee. They're a little bit pedas, which I hadn't expected.
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Modern exposure correction
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Decades ago, exposure for a photo was mainly guesswork, helped with little tables like this one that came with my FED-1, since most people didn't have any kind of exposure meter:
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How accurate are they? Looking back through the photos I took at the time, I got reasonably good results, though they could be out by 1 or 2 EV.
Today I don't need that, but I can still mess up exposure, like with this photo I took today:
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I had taken that with the camera set to manual exposure. What I really wanted was this:
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Not much difference? That's postprocessing for you. The first image was taken at 1/250 s and f/5.6 (EV 12.9). The second was taken with exposure metering, 1/80 s at f/4.5 (EV 10.7). It's surprising how little difference it made, but the colour gradation in the soil is one place to look.
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More server overload
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Topic: technology | Link here |
The www.lemis.com web server continues to suffer under extreme overload, with load averages up to 120. And for once I let my daily sync run. Normally it runs for 30 seconds, checking through the 15,000 odd files. Today, though, I had:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/41) /home/local/X/.fvwm 21 -> time syncgrog
Wed 17 Jan 2024 13:04:44 AEDT
...
sent 494,660 bytes received 256,471 bytes 89.92 bytes/sec
total size is 4,487,460,324 speedup is 5,974.27
Wed 17 Jan 2024 15:24:13 AEDT
real 139m29.308s
user 0m2.956s
sys 0m0.278s
2 hours, 20 minutes! The surprising thing is that the server responds to web page requests relatively promptly.
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Still more X indecision
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So I've established why my Elisp scripts were misbehaving. Time to fix things. But while thinking about it, discovered that running fvwm2 on eureka to control a hydra window was even more suboptimal than I thought: every program that it starts is on eureka, not hydra. So it looks as if that isn't the solution. Should I really go to the trouble of finding the bug? Compared to “modern” software, fvwm2 is positively tiny: when I built it, it happened so fast that I thought it hadn't done anything. I should find out again how to build a debug version and at least find out what is triggering the bug.
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Camera settings for full spectrum
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Topic: photography | Link here |
What can I do with my new full spectrum Olympus E-PM1? I've watched a lot of videos of varying quality, but nothing tells me what sort of motives to use, nor how to process the images for best effect. Full sunlight, lots of greenery, and that's about it.
OK, how about tracking my weekly house photos? What can I do in the settings? Spent some time RTFMing, and discovered that the camera has some vestiges of long-forgotten features like panoramas and 3D images, but not (apparently) exposure bracketing. Still, the settings were worthwhile: it was set to take photos before focus was complete, something that's easy enough to change. And white balance? It's meaningless for raw images (which, all sources agree for once, is the only way to go), but it certainly helps compose. Here the default display on the viewfinder and then the modified one:
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I suppose I could change it further, but so far it's not clear what colours I should be aiming for. At least here I can see colour differences. Frustratingly, it seems that the camera has a further problem: the external VF-2 viewfinder doesn't work.
| Thursday, 18 January 2024 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 18 January 2024 |
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A Hibiscus!
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
It seems that it has been for ever since we've had Hibiscus rosa-sinensis flowers. Why? I'm not sure. Part of it was the bad winter two years ago, but even the potted one didn't want to flower. But now the first of many buds has opened:
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And the outside bush is also gradually recovering, though I wonder if it isn't about time to replace it.
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Pancreas: the verdict
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Into town today to talk to Kontoku Shimokawa about the results of last week's investigations of Yvonne's pancreas. In principle nothing that I didn't already know after reading the report. She has a main duct intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm with maximum diameter 13 mm, and like Wikipedia, he tells us that this is a benign tumour that can develop into cancer. The questions are if and when. He appeared quite nervous, and his answers to my questions were vaguer than I would have liked, but it seems that there is no immediate danger. On the other hand, pancreatic resection appears to be one of the most difficult operations there are, 7 hours or so, and the chances of survival are only about 95%. The real issue is catching it in time if it does become cancerous, and for that she'll initially have an ultrasound in 3 months and an MRI in 6 months.
| Friday, 19 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 19 January 2024 |
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Still no advance on hydra
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
Somehow I can't get myself to migrate further to hydra. An obvious reason is because it more or less works as it is. But it's inconvenient to have two sets of keyboard, mouse and monitor.
So what's holding me up? Little details. While I'm quite happy with the new LG 27UP850-W monitor, but it's clear that “modern” software—and even some older software—has issues with it. A web browser is a catastrophe, and I haven't found a way to tell the window manager how to enlarge its icons and things. Even finding the mouse cursor is non-trivial.
So switch it down to 2560×1440, like the old monitor? No, sometimes it's really useful to have the resolution. Just not for the main display. So: set up the old “Matrix” monitor, as planned? nvidia-setup doesn't want to know about it, and though I could give it the EDID data, what further problems are waiting around the corner? How much longer does it have to survive? Should I maybe buy a new 2560×1440 monitor, like I had planned 2 months ago? I decided against it then, and after looking at pricing today, I think I would decide against it now. In the meantime, do nothing.
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More full spectrum photography insights
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Watching further videos on full spectrum (“infrared”) photography today. I was quite positively impressed by Rob Shea's videos, and the videos by others help maintain this impression: they're frequently badly produced and badly informed.
The real question: what do you want to do with infrared photography? You can't reproduce it the way it was, because you can't see infrared. So at the very least you need to remap the colours. But how? Rob Shea is also not perfect in this respect. To really understand it, you've got to consider the technology: modern digital cameras have sensors that respond roughly to three different colours of visible light. The way that they do it doesn't match human eyes very well—somewhere I have commented on this, but I can't find it.
This page shows the spectral response of an unnamed camera sensor:
But that's very different from the spectral response of a human eye, here from Wikipedia's page on spectral sensitivity:
And of course the camera curve already factors in the infrared and ultraviolet filters in front of the sensor. What do these sensors do without those filters? I don't know, and it seems that none of the video producers have even thought of the idea.
In any case, it's clear from my experiments ten years ago that all sensors are not equal, not even with my limited sample of Olympus sensors. So the real issue is how to remap the "colours” to something that humans can see. Kodak made something like that with their Aerochrome film, with fixed remapping of course. But people seem to misunderstand that to the point that one of the videos, by Vincent Versace, claimed that there was no advantage whatsoever to Infrared film, and that digital could do anything that film could. I haven't finished watching the video, and I may not: it's long, and despite the fact that it was produced in cooperation with DxO, it seems to emphasize processing software that I don't use.
So: wouldn't it be nice to find something that discussed colour remapping, in particular what mapping makes sense? Rob Shea touches on this idea, but in a manner that emphasizes process rather than intention.
Tomorrow's house photo day. I'll try a couple of full spectrum panoramas along with the normal processing.
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Strange Emacs message
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Seen on an Emacs today:
Error running timer `mouse-avoidance-fancy': (wrong-type-argument number-or-marker-p nil)
What does that mean? My guess would be another mouse driver issue.
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Escaped horses
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
While watching TV this evening, saw horses running past where no horses should be. Outside to find:
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The answer was simple: gate left open. No harm done, and the horses were easy enough to catch and return to the paddock, but it gave me the opportunity to see a less usual view of the house:
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| Saturday, 20 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 20 January 2024 |
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More weeding
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Jesse Walsh along today for more garden stuff, mainly weeding. I get the feeling that the weeds are winning.
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Full spectrum panoramas?
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
House photo day again today, and as planned I took some photos with my “new” full spectrum Olympus E-PM1. Started off with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO. It proves to be really irritating that I can't use the VF-2 viewfinder; without it I had great difficulty reading the displays. I really need to get these cataracts seen to.
After that, I also took a panorama with only infrared. That required the Zuiko Digital ED 9-18 mm f/4.0-5.6 lens.
The results? We're not there yet. Somehow, despite all claims to the contrary, the first two fisheye sets were out of focus. It seems to have focused on my hand on the panorama bracket:
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And everything was so fuzzy that Hugin wasn't able to find control points.
That seemed to be an issue with confirming focus. When I replaced the lens with the 9-18 mm, things seemed sharper, and they also did so when I put the fisheye back on. The camera was set to “middle” focus (the middle 9 of 35 focus points); maybe I should set it to the middle only, like I do on my other camera. But maybe the E-PM1 has difficulties with the fisheye lens, either generally or without the sensor filter. In particular, all the photos with the fisheye showed smudges along the bottom, what here was the left side. And they weren't there in the photos taken with other lenses. Here roughly the same view first with 9 mm rectilinear and then with the fisheye:
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And it seems from the last image above that the lens also has a hot spot, just below the window. I should check my old Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/3.5 fisheye to see if it does better.
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The annual roast turkey breast
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Once a year or so, round Christmas, I buy a prepared turkey breast from ALDI. Most of it is intended for slicing and eating cold on bread, but the first time round we eat it as a roast.
On a previous occasion I noted that the cooking times were very accurate: 90 minutes at 170° fan-forced to hit a meat temperature of 82°, but that the roast didn't brown. That's at least partially because they want it cooked in foil. Yes, take it out of the foil 30 minutes before completion so it can brown. It's supposed to be turned after 40 of 90 minutes, so I removed the foil at the same time. Still not brown enough. Next time I think I'll turn on the grill at the same time.
| Sunday, 21 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 21 January 2024 |
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US-sanctioned genocide
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Topic: history, politics, opinion | Link here |
I'm really upset about the situation in what is now the State of Israel. It's horrifying, and I can't see how anybody with any sense of decency can accept it. People who do object talk about the plight of the Palestinians. But it's not because they're Palestinians: they're humans, even if some of the current Israeli government seem to call them the Hebrew version of „Untermenschen“.
Spent much of today watching the video series from Al Jazeera about Al Nakba. Somehow it's not so horrifying any more: after seeing what's going on now, it seems almost “normal”. But it goes to show the power of propaganda. Golda Meir stands up on her hind feet and claims that poor Israel is attacked by seven peoples with armies much larger and better equipped than the Israelis. Who could believe that nonsense?
But people did believe it. I believed it until 1967, and the change in opinion came slowly—not because I was in the area in May 1967, but because I was in Hamburg with my friend Abdul Matin Tatari in October 1967. I didn't believe everything he said, and my doubts grew only very slowly.
But looking back with as neutral a viewpoint as I can muster, it seems that what Israel is doing is completely in accordance with what they had planned even before the Second World War, and which was published after the war: displace all the Arabs from what then was Mandatory Palestine. And that's the gentle part. If they don't want to go, kill them. The current situation in Gaza is just the next step in a long-planned extermination of the Palestinians.
But why, why does the USA support Israel in this genocide? They had the moral high ground in supporting Ukraine against Russia's invasion. With their support of genocide, they have lost that. By comparison, the Russians are gentle. I can only hope that the International Court of Justice comes up with a damning verdict in the South Africa v. Israel (Genocide Convention). And of course if the USA were to stop supporting these atrocities, a lot could be achieved.
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Garden flowers in mid-summer
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
It's a month after the summer solstice, time for the monthly garden flower photos.
Last month things looked good. This month, it's not as clear. Part is definitely due to the lack of lawn mowing and trimming, but there's still a lot more than can be done to combat weeds. Here's the status to the south of the house:
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Still, some things are looking good, notably the roses:
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And the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” is flowering again:
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The curry tree is flowering, something it doesn't do very often:
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And the Mirabilis jalapa that we bought 13 years ago seem to be indestructible. I thought that we had removed all traces of them from this position, but they don't want to know.
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Indestructible? Well, sort of. In the last few years we no longer had any red flowers, only yellow. This is the first time in a long time that red flowers have reappeared.
And the Buddleja x weyerania is definitely doing better:
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The Abutilon that we grew from a cutting three years ago has had its ups and downs. Lately it doesn't seem to have been flowering, but that appears to be incorrect. It's hiding its light under a bushel:
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The Corymbia ficifolia has been promising to flower for weeks now, but all we have is what must be over 1000 flower buds:
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Other plants, like this Schinus molle and the Camellia japonica, seem to be surviving rather than flourishing:
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The same applies to our 8-year-old Ginkgo biloba and our seven-year-old Box elder:
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But possibly there's hope for them.
| Monday, 22 January 2024 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 22 January 2024 |
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Health assessment
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Topic: health | Link here |
Now that I'm over 75 years old, I'm eligible for an annual (I think) free health assessment. What's that? I suspected that it was something like the checks I had done almost exactly 12 years ago when they diagnosed diabetes. And indeed it seemed to be the case. First an hour with a nurse going through a checklist of things that could go wrong with me, and then a session with Paul Smith, my GP, who once again had a student with him. The good news is that there was nothing of interest. And for my next blood test we have a new bet: Paul says MCV 101, and I'm sticking to 104. With an odd difference there can't be a draw.
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Fruit shack again
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
After that to the Fruit shack. Every time I go there things are different. I was looking for choi sam and noodles. No Chinese choi sam, only Australian, which looks more like pok choi. And none of the rice noodles that I was looking for. But I found a number called “Ramen” noodles, which I had thought to be Japanese, but these showed no such connection. The prices clearly didn't relate to what was in the shelves. In the end I took one of them to the checkout and found that it cost 3 times as much as I had guessed, round $10, so I ended up getting another one, 2 kg instead of 375 g, for a little over the $7.50 that I had seen on the shelves:
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And another pack of rice noodles, not the kind I was looking for:
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In fact, they're not rice noodles at all! Bean noodles. I'll have to see what I can do with them.
| Tuesday, 23 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 23 January 2024 |
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Ramen noodles
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another experimental breakfast today, including left-overs: I had started to clean out the dried remains of the juice in the oven pan from Saturday's turkey breast, and I discovered that it was quite consistent. So how about using it as a broth for the Ramen noodles that I bought yesterday?
Apart from that, it was similar to the fake Phat Thai that I make with pastes from ALDI. I used beef instead of chicken, and on the whole it wasn't bad. Next time I think that some Shiitake mushrooms might improve it.
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Google Translate, two years on
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Topic: rant, language, technology, opinion | Link here |
Two years ago I found a strange problem with Google Translate : the translation from English into German depended on whether the initial letter (I) was in upper or lower case. The sentence “I will meet you at half eight” was mistranslated as „Wir treffen uns um halb neun“ (“We will meet at half eight”), but “i will meet you at half eight” was mistranslated as „Ich treffe dich um halb eight“ (“I will meet you at half seven”). Two different errors, depending on the capitalization of the first word.
Have they fixed it? Well, partially. The sentence with lower-case i is now correct: „Ich treffe dich um halb neun“. But the (correct) upper case I generates „Wir treffen uns um halb acht“, now doubly wrong.
Should I rant or submit a fix? I did both. We'll see if anything comes of it.
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Weather station woes
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
My Fine Offset WH-1080 weather station must be one of the most unreliable devices that I have ever had, and I've been grumbling about it for nearly 15 years. But things are changing: it's getting worse. Specifically, it can no longer communicate with the outside unit from my office. I've put it in the lounge room, where it has direct line of sight (about 15 m) from the outside unit, and it works there, but for the while I don't have any recording.
Why? The strange thing is that another device with an external wireless thermometer, but without computer attachment, does the same thing. It doesn't even work any more when the external unit is right next to it. I'd half suspect some kind of radio frequency interference, but apart from these two devices there's no indication, and when the device is right next to the receiver it seems to be unlikely.
Today was particularly irritating, because it was possibly the hottest day in the month. I saw temperatures round 34° on the display. I should do something about replacing it, but that requires work, and I should first finally finish setting up hydra.
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hydra: the next step
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Another 4 days with no work on hydra. Time to finally finish the window manager configuration. Spent some time this afternoon and came up with some files that looked worthwhile. It builds! Ship it!
| Wednesday, 24 January 2024 | Dereel | |
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Power fail!
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
Woke up round 4:00 this morning to hear significant thunder. Damn! What's the chance of a grid power failure? But I couldn't be bothered to go and check.
Woke up round 8:00 and into the office, where I saw the too-familiar Boot: prompt. Damn. eureka had gone down again. So had tiwi, because it's still on this silly interrupting power supply. And Yvonne's bedside clock had also reset. Nothing else had: in other words, a sub-second interruption, possibly triggered by a power surge. The sooner I get hydra completed, the better.
And the failure itself? From 3:42 to 4:02, so it was pretty much over by the time I woke up. And it was widespread enough to make the newspapers.. Maybe that's why they fixed it so quickly. During that time battery charge dropped from 22% to 12%, so that wasn't the issue (this time). Once again I wonder if a surge protector would make things easier.
Bringing up eureka had a couple of issues: firstly, since I'm running the window managers for hydra on eureka, I needed to restart them for hydra as well. And secondly, the configuration files were my works in progress, and some things didn't work. I think the xterms-$MYDISPLAY files are now correct, but there's a second file fvwm2rc-$MYDISPLAY which should read in the corresponding xterms-$MYDISPLAY file, and it seems not to have done so. So I recreated the old files and used them. That was enough fun that I couldn't be bothered to continue for today.
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Outsmarting the Ports Collection
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
So it's relatively clear that my weather station no longer communicates reliably when it's in my office. In principle it should be in the lounge room anyway, since that's where the inside temperature is of interest.
So why not connect it to tiwi? I forget why, something to do with MySQL. OK, try:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/11) ~/src/weather/WH-1080-tiwi 6 -> wh1080
ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libmysqlclient.so.18" not found, required by "wh1080"
In fact, no MySQL component was installed. OK, pkg is your friend. But only if you maintain your system the way the ports team wants. And that means regular uptime-killing updates. What I had was:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/10) ~ 10 -> uname -a
FreeBSD tiwi.lemis.com 13.1-STABLE FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE #1 stable/13-n251977-519b3b5b542d: Fri Jul 29 15:27:13 AEST 2022 grog@tiwi.lemis.com:/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/obj/stable-13/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable-13/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC amd64
18 months old! And your ports database is in a format that I no longer recognize. Please update your system first.
But there's a plan B, build from source. Spent a lot of time waiting for source files to download before finally running into broken dependencies relating to cmake. I've been there before, and it drove me crazy.
OK, plan C? It wants libmysqlclient.so.18. I must have that on eureka. Yes:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~ 5 -> locate libmysqlclient.so.18
/usr/local/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.18
Copy that across. Same message. The loader doesn't know about /usr/local/lib/mysql.
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/12) ~ 3 -> ldconfig -m /usr/local/lib/mysql=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/12) ~ 4 ->
And it worked! I had feared some obscure access issues, but no, it works. And the station finally maintains communication with the outdoor unit. I wonder how long that will last.
This is all the wrong approach, of course. But it works, and the right approach is too much work for this life.
| Thursday, 25 January 2024 | Dereel | |
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Cooking Ramen noodles
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
More Ramen noodles for breakfast today to use up the rest of my pan drippings. A shiitake mushroom, a bit of cornflour and more carefully dosed soya sauce and all was well. This time I didn't forget to measure the weight increase. 51.3 g of dry noodles gave me only 90 g of cooked noodles! Most noodles would have increased to 130 to 140 g. But somehow it was enough, though maybe I should go to 60 or 65 g.
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Academia: coming into the 20th century
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I have a number of “papers” on Academia, some uploaded by others. I have free access, not because of the papers, but because of Academia's policies. They continually try to get me to sign up for paying features, and I get silly messages like “Claim “Treasurer” for your profile”. What's the document? No idea. I have to pay to see it.
Today I got one that was even more interesting: “Congratulations! "The Vinum Volume Manager" just got its first reader”.
What's that? Again, I can't say for sure what they have there, but my best bet is the paper on Vinum that I presented at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Monterey on 9 June 1999, just shy of 25 years ago. And this is the first view! Now doesn't that say something about the visibility that you get from Academia!
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hydra migration SNAFU
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've noticed several times this month that processing my photos loses old index entries. Why? It didn't take long to find out: the control files for /grog/photos/dirlist is on /src/Sysconfig/eureka/MasterRCS/home/grog/public_html/photos/RCS. And /src is a symlink to /home/src. I had copied eureka:/home to hydra:/home some time ago, with the intention of only using /hydra:/home. But somehow links leaked through, and now I have two of them. It's not an a small quantity of data, round 2 TB, though only a small amount of data has been changed. How do I find it?
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More house degradation
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Cooking pizza this evening. That requires a really hot oven, and I started warming up early. But later I looked at the oven: no display. Not only was it not heating, it wasn't running.
OK, power cycle this silly switch that they have installed on one of the power points, over which I tripped when we moved in. Flicker on, then off again. With a bit of playing around, established that the switch had failed! We must have used it 10 times! Now it seems to work in the “almost off” position:
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It's really amazing how many things have failed in this house in less than 10 years. In this case I suspect that Jim Lannen had used second-rate fittings. Replacement shouldn't be a big issue—I could do it myself—except that it will probably take down a couple of computers to do so.
| Friday, 26 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 26 January 2024 |
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A new lawn mower
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Topic: gardening, technology, general, opinion | Link here |
We still don't have a new carburettor for our lawn mower! It's been out of commission since mid-December, and we've been waiting for a new carburettor for over a month. And they still don't have any!
OK, this can't continue. Clearly I made a bad choice buying the mower, and at least I have learnt to steer well clear of Jono and Johno. Let's buy a new mower, have the old one repaired if we ever get a new carburettor, and sell it come spring. Yvonne put a posting in a Facebook group, and how about that, we got a response, and a good one at that: Nicole Toohey offered a John Deere Z445 mower for only $1200! OK, check out the details. That's quite a good mower. Don't they know what they're worth? Where are they located? 109 Tantaus Road, Dereel! Just round the corner! OK, we'll come and take a look. No, don't do that, we're not there yet. We'll have to wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, can you pay a refundable deposit? Sure, can do. Drop in on your way home and we'll give you cash. No, sorry, can you send to our bank account?
Alarm bells. More discussion, no, Nicole is an honest Christian person, like us. Even more alarm bells. We'll wait until tomorrow and take our chances.
The obvious thing to do is to go to their place and see if anybody's there. Yes, indeed, the owner, Greg Patterson. He had never heard of Nicole, and no, he doesn't have a lawn mower to sell. Clearly a scam. But why did she give us the address and bank account numbers? That doesn't make sense.
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Facebook: on the side of the scammers
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Clearly the first thing to do with the Facebook scam is to save the message exchange. Once that worked, but now I can't select the text. With some pain discovered that I could “archive” the message. But what can I do with it then? I still can't save it anywhere. Much more pain trying to find how to get a copy outside the Facebook domain, and finally came up with a particularly painful download method. Activated that and was told that it could take a while, without any clarity of how long. At any rate it was more than the time that remained until we went to bed.
And in the meantime, Nicole cleared her side of the “chat”. All that was left, even in the “archive”, was what Yvonne wrote. Oh horror! What happened to data integrity? And how can somebody access our private saved data and excise themselves? What an opportunity for criminals like Nicole!
| Saturday, 27 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 27 January 2024 |
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Ragù bolognese again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I cook large quantities of ragù bolognese and then freeze it. As a result, it doesn't happen very often: the last time appears to have been 2½ years ago. Currently we're out of it, so it's time to make some more. And once again I didn't read this diary with comments on the last time.
Since then, I had doubled the quantities, giving 1.2 kg of battuto and 1 kg of meat. I used large utensils as a result, but not large enough. Here battuto and meat:
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As it stands, the recipe also calls for 60 g of olive oil, but I think that's too much:
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I also weighed how much we ate for our dinner main course, spaghetti al ragú: 180 g. Does that mean 120 g per person? Yvonne only eats a half portion.
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Catching the scammer
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
Just before going to bed, Yvonne called me: her Facebook “chat” with Nicole Toohey had come back to life:
It seems that the ? at 20:07 was today, and it reinstated the whole “conversation”, allowing me to copy it with infinite pain and xv, not made any easier by Yvonne's German-layout keyboard and poor office lighting (which I must fix). That was just as well, because Facebook has still not sent the data that we requested yesterday. Is this maybe just an alibi function for them? At any rate, my opinion of Facebook, already low, has dropped further.
I was also able to recover the photos of the machine. Somehow the background doesn't look Australian. The sheds (barns?) look typically North American:
I wonder if the serial number tells me anything:
Presumably the DOM field stands for “date of manufacture” (25 April 2008 in US American date format).
| Sunday, 28 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 28 January 2024 |
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More infrared photo processing
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday was house photo day, and once again I took some comparison photos with my full-spectrum Olympus E-PM1. Out of the box they look like this:
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OK, first thing is to get a profile for the camera from Rob Shea's collection. Much reading. No, no E-PM1, but other cameras with the same sensor. Wikipedia tells me: Panasonic G1, G2, G10, GF1, GF2; Olympus E-P1, E-P2, E-P3, E-PL1, E-PL2, E-PL3, E-PM1. And Rob's list includes multiple profiles for that sensor.
Which do I download. All of them! The collection is a single ZIP file, and it's up to me to download it and extract the correct profile. So I downloaded it to /Photos/Infrared/, extracted into /Photos/Infrared/DNG-Color-Profiles/ moved the non-Olympus profiles to /Photos/Infrared/DNG-Color-Profiles/other,
How do I select the correct profile? On DxO PhotoLab I select the “Color” tab and the “Color Rendering” section:
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That gave me a directory tree popup that allowed me to climb to P:\Infrared\/DNG-Color-Profiles and select the one I wanted. But which one? I had at least:
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 55,888 1 Jul 2023 Olympus-E-P1-Infrared-Temp--100.dcp
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 55,886 1 Jul 2023 Olympus-E-P1-Infrared-Temp--50.dcp
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 109,936 20 Sep 2021 Olympus-E-P3-Infrared-Temp--100.dcp
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 109,934 20 Sep 2021 Olympus-E-P3-Infrared-Temp--50.dcp
More reading. The web page said effectively “try the first, and if the white balance setting is out of range, try the other”. And sure enough, I needed the other. Which one?
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Now isn't that clever? DxO changes the name so that I can't tell. Still, with that I was able to get a better representation of the image, which also required higher contrast settings:
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Still nothing to write home about, but at least a useful basis for further processing.
I had a couple of other purposes in yesterday's experiments. I had established that the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO has a significant hotspot. How about the old Four Thirds mount Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/3.5 fisheye lens? So I compared them, here first the old
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Yes, finally a use for the old lens—maybe. The other obvious difference is the even more extensive vignetting on the left, even apparently showing parts of the insides of the camera. I'll need to investigate this. The funny thing is that it's not visible in the viewfinder, and that it seems to be one-sided.
And then there's a difference in exposure between the two fisheye lenses. My guess is that the iris diaphragm of the old lens is inaccurate. I set both to f/22 in case I ran into focus issues; that corresponds to a hyperfocal distance of 36 cm, and an aperture opening of 0.36 mm (coincidentally). A difference of 0.1 mm each direction in the diaphragm is the difference between f/17 and f/31.
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Hibiscus again!
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
It's been years since our outside Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” has flowered properly. Last year it only had two flowers all summer long, and it still doesn't look good. But it has a flower, and a couple more on the way:
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So maybe there's life in it after all.
| Monday, 29 January 2024 | Dereel | Images for 29 January 2024 |
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What use full spectrum photography?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Spent most of the day playing around with my full spectrum photos. I haven't taken anything yet that really pleases me, and I'm beginning to wonder if all the magic isn't in the processing. And maybe I could do similar magic processing with normal sensors.
The whole thing confirms my choice of a cheap camera. My first attempts were with film, which cost the equivalent of AUD $16 for a 20 exposure roll, and I thought that cheap at the time. This camera cost only 6 times as much.
But I should try more experiments, and if I find it worthwhile, I can always buy a better camera.
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What happened to Andy Farkas?
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
Andy Farkas used to be a regular on our IRC channels, but we haven't heard from him for over a year. Today I got a message asking me if I know where he is.
No. How do you find people whom you only know from the Internet? He has a domain andyit.com.au, and that was updated somehow last month, but no active name servers. I run one of them, ns1.lemis.com, so it's worth looking more carefully. Why can't I resolve the name?
Jan 28 19:06:54 lax named[26775]: transfer of 'andyit.com.au/IN' from 210.1.210.40#53: failed to connect: timed out
Jan 28 19:08:24 lax named[26775]: transfer of 'andyit.com.au/IN' from 202.87.175.55#53: failed to connect: timed out
That goes back as far as my logs go (about a month). What else can I try? Google doesn't help: What happened to Andy Farkas tells me that he died of Alzheimer's disease in 2001 at the age of 84. Once again I wonder why I'm the only person of whom I know no Doppelgänger.
| Tuesday, 30 January 2024 | Dereel | |
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More hydra migration
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Topic: technology | Link here |
I've been using a hybrid setup with eureka and hydra for a couple of months now. That's nothing new: for years I spread my desktop across two computers and multiple screens. But I still have the goal to reincarnate eureka as a virtual machine on hydra. In the meantime, the most important part is to rearrange the screens. And that proves amazingly difficult—not because it's hard to achieve, but because I want it to be comfortable. That's the same reason why I tend to go into my office to check things while cooking, although I have an Apple (fwaggle.lemis.com) in the dining room: it's less comfortable.
So: arrange for more comfort. And that means moving the displays to the old position. And that means tidying up the configuration files. Did some of that today; to my surprise, there was almost no difference between the old and new configuration files. Next, run nvidia-settings to get the display working the way I want. And that's a minefield. I know two ways to write the configuration file. The old one allows me to change monitor resolutions, something that may be useful on the 3840×2160 display. But that no longer seems to work with the modern driver, and I can't work out how to do it with the new method. And then there's the question of loading the EDID for the old Matrix monitor. So: mañana.
Instead, addressed another issue: I had two file system hierarchies called /src, one on eureka, one on hydra. A consistency nightmare that hasn't waited to happen. So: fix the (fortunately few) discrepancies, ensure that hydra:/src is the correct version, and change eureka:/src to point to it. That also changed the backup scripts.
Hopefully that's done now. The next step is eureka:/home. In principle I could do that there too, but for the foreseeable future I intend to leave things like web server and mail on eureka, so I need to be more careful.
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How long is Andy Farkas gone?
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
I've established that Andy Farkas' domain andyit.com.au no longer has active name servers, and that I haven't been able to update the zone for over a month. But of course there's other information: the zone file. When was it last updated?
=== grog@lax (/dev/pts/2) /usr/local/etc/namedb 25 -> l slave/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root bind 1,137 10 Nov 2022 andyit.com.au
That was two months before we last heard of him. Hard to say what it means, but it's concerning.
| Wednesday, 31 January 2024 | Dereel → Geelong → Dereel | Images for 31 January 2024 |
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Off to Geelong again
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Off to Geelong today for the first time in 15 months: since changing periodontists I no longer have a reason to go there.
With the dubious help of Google Maps, made it to the Gourmet Asian Grocery, where I found what I was looking for, though recently most of the stuff is available at the Fruit Shack. Still, he had the Jack Hua noodles and Teans Gourmet mi udang paste, as well as the petis udang that I should have bought in Melbourne earlier in the month.
In the process, it's worth reading what I wrote last time. How many of these pastes do I use? Updating the table from 15 months ago, I have
| Paste | Start | Purchased | October | Used | Purchased | Stock | ||||||
| 2022 | Jan 2024 | Jan 2024 | ||||||||||
| Curry laksa | 5 | 5 | 10 | 8 | 0 | 2 | ||||||
| Mi udang | 1 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 6 | 8 | ||||||
| Penang laksa | 7 | 5 | 12 | 5 | 0 | 7 |
I need to think more about the format of this table, in particular the mi udang paste, of which I bought 3 online in September. But one thing's clear: my tastes are changing. The pastes I bought in October 2022 were intended to last for (a good) 6 months. The mi udang didn't last much longer, thus the purchase in September 2023, but the laksa pastes have lasted much longer.
When I started eating this sort of thing for breakfast, my favourite was the Penang laksa that I ate when I was young. But clearly I've gone off that: in the 15 months since my last purchase, I have used 5 sachets (about one dish a month: a sachet makes 5 servings). And though it doesn't show in this table, I seem to be eating less curry laksa too.
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Geelong parking: insulting
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Down town to the St John of God hospital in Geelong. Found another of these emetic parking meters, a variant of the ones I haven't been able to understand in Ballarat:
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I couldn't read the display. That's not surprising in itself: I was there to have my eyes looked at. But Yvonne couldn't either. From recollection, the first thing I had to do was enter my registration number on this horrible ABC keyboard. Finally typed it in—I think. How do I pay? Nothing seems to work. About the only thing I could read was the white label on the right, giving numbers to call in case of problems. But the number wasn't connected! It wasn't until I processed the photos that I took that I saw:
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SMS the details! Standing out in bright sunlight, scraping a glass keyboard that's almost as bad as the one on the parking meter! And where's the meter ID? All I see on my photos is a “Parking Area Code”, whatever that may mean. You'd think that they're trying to annoy you! In the end, Yvonne took the car elsewhere while I went for my eye appointment.
Looking at the photos later, more stupidity comes to light:
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http:\\app.easypark.net/? What kind of brain damage is that? My browser can't even resolve it. And is that a single backslash (quoted) or two? And why no HTTPS? And why is this attempted URL in the .net domain? Also, it seems that the sensor to the right is really for reading credit cards, but it didn't respond when I waved my credit card past it.
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Cataract examination, second opinion
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Finally found our way into the St John of God hospital and up to see David Fabinyi. Quite a difference from Trent Roydhouse. Much flashier surrounds, quick attention, many more examinations: I had my eyes investigated by 4 different machines, only one of which I had seen before. Nevertheless I was in and out in an hour, and I didn't even have time to open the book I had brought with me.
David had a lot more information than Trent, in particular explaining the operations (cataract surgery and vitrectomy, recovery times and similar). I need to decide which to do, but in the meantime they put me through the final two machines to determine the optics of my eyes so that they could prepare the replacements.
And my other questions? No, Paul Smith's description of lens replacements with focus function was a hot topic about 10 years ago, but they don't work. My guess is that that's when Paul heard of them. And accommodation, depth of field? He was vague enough to suggest that he hadn't really thought of that. That remains an unanswered question. He described some patients who were able to read normal text without corrective lenses. And yes, he doesn't understand how that can work either.
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Crab crackers
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
While at the Gourmet Asian Grocery, Yvonne bought these crackers:
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Why? I think the mention of crab tickled her fancy. It's not the sort of thing that I would buy. Still, we bought them, and tried them this evening. They look like tiny kerupuk, and taste like artificially sweetened, tasteless tiny kerupuk. Yvonne agreed: I think we ate three of them between the two of us. If she wants something like that, we can fry some real kerupuk.
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