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| Greg's diary |
| March 2023 |
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| Wednesday, 1 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 1 March 2023 |
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Upgrading lagoon
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So, whether I like it, I need to upgrade lagoon to the latest and greatest FreeBSD. When was it installed?
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) /destdir/usr 10 -> uname -a
FreeBSD lagoon.lemis.com 12.1-STABLE FreeBSD 12.1-STABLE r355358 GENERIC amd64
Dammit, this horrible lack of information! Somewhere there's a knob to get useful information, like:
=== grog@bde (/dev/pts/5) ~ 1 -> uname -a
FreeBSD bde.lemis.com 13.1-STABLE FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE #0: Wed Nov 2 13:52:12 AEDT 2022 grog@bde.lemis.com:/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable-13/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC amd64
OK, look at the kernel file directly:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) /destdir/usr 12 -> l /boot/kernel/kernel
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 31,364,536 12 Dec 2020 /boot/kernel/kernel
That's not as accurate, since I could touch(1) the file, but it's probably correct. Only a little over 2 years old. OK, this system still has the dual root file system idea that I was using at the time:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) ~ 22 -> df
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ada0p4 39,662 32,759 3,729 90% /
/dev/ada0p1 39,662 22,375 14,113 61% /destdir
/dev/ada0p5 1,748,640 275,047 1,333,702 17% /home
So the upgrade (with immediate recovery if something goes wrong) is as simple as copying the root partition (here /dev/ada0p4) to the /destdir partition /dev/ada0p0. Modify /boot/loader.conf to tell it to boot from /dev/ada0p and /etc/fstab to mount the partitions the other way round, and we'd be done.
But I don't need to do that yet. Set DESTDIR to /destdir and build a new world. And add this file with the stupid name /etc/src.conf with the content:
# Don't drop build date, dammit!
# What a silly name for the knob.
# It's about as "intuitive" as the name of this file.
WITHOUT_REPRODUCIBLE_BUILD=dammit
Isn't it easy?
Well, it would have been, except that I ran out of space. The /usr/obj hierarchy now takes up over 16 GB! It hasn't been that long since there were no disks that big:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) ~ 23 -> du -s /usr/obj
16715 /usr/obj
So, finally build the new world, and boot. All wonderful. make installworld? No, can't do that:
===== Wed 1 Mar 2023 12:55:38 AEDT on lagoon.lemis.com: Make installworld
make[1]: "/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable-13/Makefile.inc1" line 105: A build is required first. You may have the wrong MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX set.
*** Error code 1
So what's the correct MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX? After a bit of looking through the Makefiles, decided that it would be easier to rebuild the world with DNOCLEAN. But no, whether you want it or not, it insists on rebuilding clang, which takes up most of the time.
While it was going, tried upgrading ports. Surprise, surprise! It no longer wants to remove avidemux, ImageMagick and mpv. Instead it wanted to get rid of chromium, opera and samba410. Samba will be an issue, but it can be reinstalled (hopefully). But then I saw, in the update section:
nvidia-driver: 440.31 -> 510.60.02
nvidia-settings: 440.26 -> 470.86
nvidia-xconfig: 440.26 -> 470.86
That's just plain wrong. The nvidia-driver depends on the display card, here a GK208B [GeForce GT 710]. Version 510 won't handle it. OK, let it run.
And, like an old Volkswagen Beetle, it ran and ran and ran. Finally it decided that it had to start again, and this time it remembered to remove mpv and espeak, but not the others.
Finally done. Remove nivida-driver 510, install 440. Oh. No 440. Off looking through the ports tree, where to my surprise I found ports nvidia-driver,nvidia-driver-304, nvidia-driver-340, nvidia-driver-390 and nvidia-driver-470. No nvidia-driver-440. What's in nvidia-driver? Lots of references to specific versions, but nothing that shows how they get set:
.if ${NVVERSION} < 410.057
PLIST_SUB+= EXTENSIONSDIR=${EXTENSIONSDIR}
.else
There are also references to nvidia-secondary-driver and nvidia-secondary-driver-390. What are they?
Somehow this is all more complicated than it should be. Rebooted the old system while I scratched my head. That's enough for today.
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Digital zoom?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
What's this?
It's Yvonne walking with a horse following her. But it's barely visible, like something taken with a mobile phone. In fact, the angle of view very much matches that of a mobile phone.
But why did I take it? I'm very particular with my focal lengths, and what I wanted looked more like this:
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In fact, I recall seeing the flower pot stand on the left hand side, and was planning to remove it. But why the difference?
Once there was a thing called “digital zoom”, which provided lower-resolution crops of the centre of the field of view. Now, however, it's “focus magnification”, which shows only part of the view in the viewfinder, for more accurate focus for example. I must have accidentally pressed the preview button and seen only the middle. A good thing that the photo wasn't worth anything.
| Thursday, 2 March 2023 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | |
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Panic!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Checking the overnight backups this morning, one of the first things I do, I found:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
eureka:/videobackup 7,813,215,884 7,812,627,724 0 100% 96,659 983,915 9% /videobackup
Thu 2 Mar 2023 04:01:41 AEDT Video backup started
rsync: [receiver] write failed on "/videobackup/spool/Download/...": No space left on device (28)
rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(379) [receiver=3.2.4]
rsync: [sender] write error: Broken pipe (32)
Oh. Why is that? A quick check showed that on tiwi I had moved the tree /spool/Docco to a different file system. The rsync should have removed it from /videobackup, but it only does that when the backup is complete. If the backup runs out of space first, it doesn't get deleted.
OK, not an issue: remove the tree manually. Did that, and then I saw:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/4) /videobackup/spool 21 -> rm -rf Docco/=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/4) /videobackup/spool 22 -> df
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ada0p4 39,662 25,558 10,931 70% /
...
/dev/ada1p1 7,629,565 6,957,837 595,432 92% /Photos
/dev/da1p1 1,907,067 1,203,477 551,024 69% /videobackup
/dev/da2p1 1,907,067 1,203,477 551,024 69% /dump
/dev/da1p1 7,630,093 7,490,791 63,000 99% /videobackup
tiwi:/spool 7,567,870 7,226,732 265,459 96% /spool
/dev/da0p1 3,815,019 2,863,694 913,174 76% /backups
Aargh! It's mounted twice! That's the last power failure and the random recognition of USB devices ganging up on me. The first mount looks like the /dump file system, which could get damaged. umount immediately!
And that hung. What do I do? What I should have done at the start, of course: unplug both disks and then recover. As it was, nothing happened immediately. But then the system crashed:
Mar 2 10:10:45 eureka savecore: reboot after panic: softdep_deallocate_dependencies: dangling deps
Mar 2 10:10:45 eureka savecore: writing core to /var/crash/vmcore.9
That makes sense, of course. I'm getting adept at rebooting lately, and it didn't take too long. And the file systems recovered well. Only: /spool/Docco was no longer on /videobackup, but the file system was still overfull. Did I catch the soft update/journalling in a race condition? But now I have a file system that's inconsistent, though SUJ thinks it's consistent.
OK, do a full fsck. How do I tell fsck that? There doesn't seem to be any option. I just need to run without any options:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/3) ~ 16 -> mailme fsck /videobackup
USE JOURNAL? [yn] n
** Skipping journal, falling through to full fsck
** Last Mounted on /videobackup
** Phase 1 - Check Blocks and Sizes
** Phase 2 - Check Pathnames
** Phase 3 - Check Connectivity
** Phase 4 - Check Reference Counts
** Phase 5 - Check Cyl groups FREE
BLK COUNT(S) WRONG IN SUPERBLK
SALVAGE? [yn] y
SUMMARY INFORMATION BAD
SALVAGE? [yn] y
BLK(S) MISSING IN BIT MAPS
SALVAGE? [yn] y
96092 files, 1911739495 used, 41564476 free (25052 frags, 5192428 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation)
***** FILE SYSTEM MARKED CLEAN *****
***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
And after that, the space was there again. I wonder if there's a way of getting the journal version to handle that.
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Repairing Yvonne's car
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne's car has been in the dock since Monday waiting for
a new replacement “computer” to do unspecified things that at least include
running the traffic indicators. Into town with her to pick it up. Still not ready! “Ten
minutes”, said Leigh, holding a tablet used to configure the electronics. And he more kept
to that time, it seems, while I had my hair cut just down the road.
Only: it didn't fix the problem (“sticky” indicators). So we need a better diagnosis and more time in dock. Wasn't it simple when there were normal mechanical relays that did the job?
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More lagoon fun
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yesterday's attempt at upgrading lagoon didn't get me as far as I wanted. About all I could establish is that the Nvidia driver documentation is an absolute catastrophe. For today, I put a ~/startx script in Yvonne's home directory to start X with TCP connections available, like God intended. It wasn't helped by the fact that stopping X garbles the display, and it seems it also leaves the keyboard unresponsive, so the easiest way to recover was the Microsoft way: reboot. But it works, and now Yvonne can run a second, up-to-date firefox from bde.
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Blocked drains
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
The drain from the kitchen sink is blocked. Why? I have a recollection that it wasn't the first time. OK, finally remove the S bend and associated stuff. Yes, it's dirty, but not blocked. Put a bottlebrush down the down pipe, to about below floor level, and found no blockage there either. Put things back together, mercifully without leaks, and it still seems blocked. Damn. Can I do anything with Sodium hydroxide? If the blockage is further down, it seems unlikely.
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Jenny's Lammtopf again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Jenny's Lammtopf again for dinner. I've made various notes about it in the past, most recently 4 months ago. And sure enough, it came out looking as expected.
But there's not enough meat in it! Time to upgrade the recipe.
| Friday, 3 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 3 March 2023 |
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Phone fail
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Call on the “landline” (really VoIP) phone today. Tried to answer it, but it kept on ringing. Further investigation showed that the phone (Uniden 1735) wasn't communicating with the base station. None of the four handsets were. They made a “bump bump bump” noise, and after a while they gave up. The “bump” matched the dial tone, which should be continuous, and I've heard this before, three or four times before the continuous dial tone came. So maybe that's an indication of communication issues.
Never mind, we have another one (Uniden 1635, effectively identical). And of course the batteries were discharged. Recharge, and it worked, sort of. Only two headsets registered, and they also produced a “bump bump bump” for a while before they connected. Is this base station also on its way out?
That's enough. I've had issues with these Uniden phones since I got the first set 16 years ago. Time for a replacement? Off to discover that the Panasonic KX-TGD324ALB was available with 4 headsets for $99, even at The Good Guys. That's the cheapest I've seen so far, and if there are any issues, it's good to know that the local people are there to negotiate with. Can I wait until next time I go to town? Probably.
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Branch manager revisited
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Topic: animals | Link here |
We've had a number of puppies whom we have called “branch manager” because of their propensity to pick up branches—always at one end—while walking:
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That's Tanya, Leonid, Sasha and Pedro. Apart from always getting the things out of balance, all the dogs were under a year old when they did it, and Leo and Sasha gave up soon after that. But Larissa is now almost 2 years old, and today she picked up no fewer than four twigs, the first very long:
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Nvidia drivers: the mess
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So what do I do about a display card driver for lagoon? A bit of checking suggested that maybe the Nvidia driver version 510 would work; the ones I have been using had numbers starting in 3, not 4. But I don't have time for that; instead I should find a central set of documentation. So far, for example, there only way I know to find out what driver(s) support a specific card is to search for it in a list on the Nvidia web site. It's valuable information, which is presumably why almost nobody gives links to it. What I have found so far is:
The driver archive. This doesn't tell you which driver to use; it just lists them, all 345 of them, and you would need to search each individual one to find the card. To make things easier, it's in no specific order, starting with the newest, going on to the oldest, and then returning to the ones in between. I get the feeling that some misguided soul decided to add new entries in reverse chronological order. And yes, it lists the 440.100 driver. Follow that link, and with a bit of tickling, confirmed that it supports the GeForce GT 710. But is it the only one? Checking the 510 driver shows that it doesn't. But are there others?
Then there's a NVIDIA Accelerated FreeBSD Graphics Driver README and Installation Guide. I've seen various telling me to look in Appendix A. Problem: there is no Appendix A. For reasons best known to Nvidia, the appendices start with Appendix E, a table of supported product numbers that appears to be completely out of date. The most recent driver version mentioned is 173.14, and none of the cards I have are in the list.
Did I say no references? No, there's a single one, to the Unix Driver Archive, a superset of the driver archive link above. Still no way to find the driver for a specific card. But since fewer drivers are listed, I was able to confirm that the 470.161.03 also supports the card, and that the 440.100 that I found above is no longer mentioned.
With much searching, found this page, which allows me to search for the second product ID (GT 710), and tells me that I need the 340, 384 or 390 versions, contradicting both other information and also my own experience that it works with the 410 driver. On the positive side, I can download versions 340 and 390.
Why is this such a mess? Nvidia is a big company, and the drivers for their cards are a big part of their success. Have they given up on FreeBSD (and Linux)? I almost get the impression.
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Vocabulary for idiots
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
I'm subscribed to a “synonym of the day” service (if that's the word) from Thesuarus.com. I don't know why. They seem to have a strange idea of what a synonym is.
What is it? From OED:
A name or expression which involves or implies a meaning properly or literally expressed by some other; ‘another name for’.
But that's not what thesaurus.com assumes. They seem to think that is is a word that is similar to another, maybe only in a very limited sense. The daily email is mainly of interest in understanding the thought processes that go to produce them.
Today's example was extreme:
Do you know which one is a synonym for growth?
prosperitytoilprocedure
Well, that's simple: none of them are. Ah, but that's because I don't know English like thesaurus.com does. That's doubtless the case. They go on to say:
prosperity is another word for growthGrowth and prosperity aren’t direct synonyms, but they are related concepts and one is often used when talking about the other.
Growth refers to a process of development or a stage of development (his slow but consistent growth; the trees will be beautiful once they reach their full growth).
Prosperity refers to a condition in which someone or something is succeeding or thriving, especially in a financial sense (Her early career was characterized by joy and prosperity).
Often, through growth, someone or something will reach a stage in which it is particularly thriving, in other words, a state of prosperity.
Somehow I see the heart of every true-blooded capitalist beat more strongly.
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Diary tidy-up
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Topic: history, general, technology | Link here |
This diary is written as a PHP script, which allows me to include additional information only for myself, such as restricted content, drafts, comments and notes. This all gets discarded when PHP runs against it. In particular, I have a call '<?php exit (); ?>' after the last day, and after that I have notes for myself.
But they have a way of accumulating. The last two days typically have 300 to 400 lines of content, but the file has grown to over 2,000 lines, mainly comments. Spent some time sifting through the oldest, which prove to be round 4 years old. It's slow going, and I still suspect that I've thrown out some historical gem.
| Saturday, 4 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 4 March 2023 |
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Chasing the weeds
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Jesse Walsh along today to continue weeding. Much of them are now gone, but it's clear that he doesn't have enough time to keep things under control. Another person to help?
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More Nvidia “documentation”
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
While looking for something better than the documentation I found yesterday, I found the NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver README and Installation Guide. Clearly that's not directly related to FreeBSD, but equally clearly it's the Linux version of the NVIDIA Accelerated FreeBSD Graphics Driver README and Installation Guide. Only this one has an Appendix A, “Supported NVIDIA GPU Products”. And it's newer than the corresponding Appendix E for FreeBSD. It goes as far as the 390 driver, and it even mentions my GT 710, unfortunately without divulging the driver version. It wouldn't make much difference: it, too, is way out of date. It's hard to say how far out of date, since it is still being maintained, but release 410.57, also being maintained, was last updated in September 2018, so the documentation must be at least 5 years out of date.
What a mess! But I also found a forum page, if that's what you'd call a page with 10 entries for the last year. Maybe there's something of use there if I dig deep enough.
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Two moons!
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Topic: photography | Link here |
Nice sunset combined with moonrise this evening:
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But that's a crop. Really there were two moons, one larger than any living person has seen:
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The first image is clearly a candidate for Luminar Neo.
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Supporting Larissa
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Life is hard. How can you even sleep without a wall to help?
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| Sunday, 5 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 5 March 2023 |
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Retouching photos
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
As planned, got out Luminar Neo today to retouch yesterday's sunset photo. It's a good thing that I had made notes about how to use it; it's anything but intuitive. In particular, it's remarkably difficult to save a file.
Still, the results are particularly good this time (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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Encouraged by that, I tried another photo that Yvonne had asked me to process: remove the tree in this photo:
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That looks as good as impossible, and the results confirmed my suspicions:
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But what exactly did it do there? There are artefacts that I can't recognize.
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Fall!
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Going out onto the verandah this afternoon, I tripped over the threshold. That can happen, of course, but this time I couldn't catch myself and landed on the ground.
What damage? Broken bones? No, nothing except wounded pride. But why did it happen? Am I getting old and doddery? Or is it just a consequence of my leg injury? Until proof of the contrary, I'll assume the latter.
I didn't completely escape, though, as Yvonne noted in the evening:
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Strangely, it's not at all sensitive
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“Air fried” ham and Kartoffelknödel
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Ham with Sauerkraut and Kartoffelknödel this evening. It's only a small ham:
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Do I really need to fire up the enormous oven for that? How about an “air fryer”? It fits into the smallest, the “coffee machine”.
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But the temperature probe doesn't. I had to push the thing into one corner, and somehow it must have been touching the outside: after only a couple of minutes it was registering 47°. Some hasty repositioning and things worked better. But why are these sensors so long? Presumably they're designed for larger pieces of meat.
The dumplings were another matter. Off looking in my recipe list and found Semmelknödel. But Yvonne doesn't like them: it has to be Kartoffelknödel. OK, find a recipe and adapt it.
Only later did I find that I already had a recipe for Kartoffelknödel, and commented on the bizarre quantities in the parent recipe. But the parent recipe wasn't overly convincing. I found three others that seemed better, and, surprisingly, were very close to each other. In the end I started with this one, though it seems strange that it wants only a pinch of salt for 600 g of potatoes. This time Yvonne formed them, incorporating some croutons in the process:
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And the result? Not bad, though the croutons disappeared, and there wasn't enough salt (I had only put in 7 g to be on the safe side).
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More flash pain
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I've been using (electronic) flash on my cameras for nearly 60 years, and for almost as long I've had pain with it. Lately things are getting better, but we're not done yet.
This evening I had two photos where the flash synchronization wasn't correct:
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The top or left side is clearly not correctly exposed: the shutter wasn't completely open when the flash went off. In each case a repeat worked:
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A great advantage of being able to view the image immediately. In the Good Old Days of film I wouldn't have found the problem until later. But what can cause that? It could be too high a shutter speed, of course, but the setting was correct. Did the shutter malfunction? It's not beyond the bounds of possibility.
But then I had a couple of shots where the flash didn't fire at all. Trigger problem? Went and got another trigger, and all worked well. Checking the battery in the old trigger, found it was delivering 10.9 V instead of the rated 12 V. That would explain the non-firing. Can it also explain the bad synchronization? If it fires late, the results would be like that.
And there's another issue: how do I know when my batteries need replacement? They're el-cheapo devices with no display of any kind. I thought of measuring the voltage across the contacts, but that's only round 3.1 V. Maybe time for something more reliable?
| Monday, 6 March 2023 | Dereel | |
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Error reporting by guesswork or frustration
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
A couple of days ago I had an error backing up the root file system on tiwi:
DUMP: mapping (Pass II) [directories]
DUMP: estimated 1730498 tape blocks.
DUMP: dumping (Pass III) [directories]
zstd: error 25 : Write error : No space left on device (cannot write compressed block)
DUMP: Broken pipe
Well, sure, you can run out of space, and it happens from time to time. But not this time: there was plenty of space. But somehow that number rang a bell, and it wasn't ENOSPC. Check /usr/include/sys/errno.h:
#define ENOTTY 25 /* Inappropriate ioctl for device */
...
#define ENOSPC 28 /* No space left on device */
So why does zstd claim that this is an out of space error? A linuxism? That seems hard to believe. These numbers (and, I think, the names) are defined by POSIX.1, but I recalled pain with Linux header files in the past. Off to check a friendly wizard:
=== grog@gandalf (/dev/pts/5) ~ 2 -> grep ENOSPC /usr/include/errno.h=== grog@gandalf (/dev/pts/5) ~ 3 -> grep ENOSPC /usr/include/sys/errno.h
grep: /usr/include/sys/errno.h: No such file or directory=== grog@gandalf (/dev/pts/5) ~ 4 -> find /usr/include -name errno.h
/usr/include/linux/errno.h
/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/sys/errno.h
/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/bits/errno.h
/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/asm/errno.h
/usr/include/asm-generic/errno.h
/usr/include/errno.h=== grog@gandalf (/dev/pts/5) ~ 5 -> find /usr/include -name errno.h | xargs grep ENOSPC=== grog@gandalf (/dev/pts/5) ~ 6 -> cat > foo.c
#include <errno.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main (int argc, char *argv [])
{
printf ("%d %d
", ENOTTY, ENOSPC);
}=== grog@gandalf (/dev/pts/5) ~ 7 -> cc -C -dD -E foo.c | less
...
# 1 "/usr/include/asm-generic/errno-base.h" 1 3 4
/* SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note */
...
#define ENOTTY 25
#define ETXTBSY 26
#define EFBIG 27
#define ENOSPC 28
#
So yes, the numbers are the same, but what a lot of pain I had to find them! No fewer than 6 header files called errno.h, and none of them contained the error number definitions. cc -C -dD -E runs the program through the preprocessor and outputs to stdout, finally telling me the real header file number. No wonder the author of zstd despaired. What did he do? Callum Gibson found out:
/usr/src/sys/contrib/zstd//programs/fileio.c:
EXM_THROW(25,
"Write error : %s (cannot write compressed block)",
He guessed! Wrongly.
So what was my problem? I think it's an issue with NFS. A repeat worked. When I bring all my systems up to date, I'll pay more attention.
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Fix my inverter!
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
It's been a week since I sent an email to Luke Parry of Effective Electrical, asking him to fix the PV inverter, and setting a deadline of 10 March. During that time I have heard nothing at all from him. Is he still working for them? OK, call Effective Electrical on 5339-8087, speak to Renee (or similar). She tried to connect me but said—a little too quickly—that he was on the phone, and that he would call back.
He didn't. If he hadn't looked at his email previously, he must have now. Is he deliberately avoiding the issue? I fear we're in for a bumpy ride.
| Tuesday, 7 March 2023 | Dereel | |
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Planned Power outage: the stress
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Planned power outage today, the second this year and the third in three months..
TL;DR: We weathered the outage with no problems. The battery charge didn't drop below 99%, and the new UPS in the office beeped, but it protected eureka.
But that's not the way I experienced it. This time they announced that the outage would start at 8:30 and go on to 15:00. That's the longest period ever, and I expected them to use it all. Up in time for the outage to start. Why? Control? I have no control. But come 8:30, no outage. Come 9:00, no outage. It didn't finally come until 10:20.
Then, of course, watched the inverter display to see what was going on. It was relatively sunny, battery at 100%, so all I saw was the PV array feeding the house. Should I turn on the dishwasher? It probably would have been OK, but what happens if something goes wrong and I don't get power back until mid-evening? My guess would be that without heating (fortunately not needed today) and with a bit of care we could hold through until 21:00 or 22:00, but that would preclude using the dishwasher.
Come 15:00. No power restoration. 15:30. No power restoration. Their web site showed planned restoration at 15:00, but clearly it lied. 16:00. No power restoration. Damn, are they using all of the nearly 2 hours they started late? After a while: what if the power is there and something local has failed? Out to fight my way through the cannas to look at the meter box. Nothing visible, but it's an LCD screen in a hard-to-see position. Back again with a torch. Yes, there's power!
So what is it? Back inside. There's power. Powercor chose just that time to restore power.
Somehow this takes too much out of me. A lifetime of “keep it up” is taking its toll.
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Hydra, continued
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Topic: technology | Link here |
How do I proceed with hydra? It's clear I need a new base system (motherboard, memory, case, power supply), but the display configuration is still an issue, and I still don't know an easy way to find out what driver I need for a specific Nvidia graphics card. For each card, I need to search. OK, I have a pile of at least 4 cards, all different. What are they?
Take out the disk from hydra and put it in the old teevee, a ThinkCentre. Got it up with surprisingly few issues (mainly editing /etc/fstab to change da0 and da1 to ada0 and ada1. But I couldn't start X, or even get the driver to recognize the cards. Still, pciconf is your friend:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/0) ~ 7 -> pciconf -vl | less
...
vgapci0@pci0:1:0:0: class=0x030000 rev=0xa1 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x10de device=0x128b subvendor=0x1043 subdevice=0x8576
vendor = 'NVIDIA Corporation'
device = 'GK208B [GeForce GT 710]'
class = display
subclass = VGA
vgapci1@pci0:5:0:0: class=0x030000 rev=0xa2 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x10de device=0x0a65 subvendor=0x1043 subdevice=0x8354
vendor = 'NVIDIA Corporation'
device = 'GT218 [GeForce 210]'
class = display
subclass = VGA
Not what I was expecting. There are two more to try, and then I can go searching the Nvidia web site.
| Wednesday, 8 March 2023 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | |
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Into town again
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
Into town for various things today. The most important was an appointment with my doctor, Paul Smith, who had been concerned about my PSA levels, although they were well within the limits. He had started measuring the levels in May last year, where I registered 0.28 μg/l. Then in November it was 0.72 μg/l, and he got worried and wanted another test.
Somehow that didn't sound right. The levels for concern at my age appear to start round 2 μg/l, so the difference wasn't even important. But Paul seemed to think it could indicate a trend, and clearly we need proof. This time I registered 0.2 μg/l (note that missing second place), so my suspicions were confirmed.
On to The Good Guys and bought a Panasonic KX-TGD324ALB as planned. The only surprise is that they have hidden their check-out desk about as far from the exit (or entrance) as you could imagine. And no check at the exit; I wonder how much gets stolen as a result, and why they did it in the first place.
Back home, I received an email from The Shovel reminding me that K-Mart do the same thing; I had commented on that years ago. But as The Shovel says, there
The funniest bit is when they tell the customer to walk to the centre of the store to pay, only for them to discover that they’ll be asked to show a proof-of-purchase receipt at the front of the store before they leave anyway.
And The Good Guys don't even have that. What's the point? More area to attract the customer's attention?
On with other shopping, finally finding my rice noodles at the Fruit Shack, and on to look at horse troughs. That was worthwhile: they showed me how to dismantle the thing, so if there really is an issue with the float, we can replace it.
And then Yvonne, also in town, called: her car needs to go back into dock again to have an indicator relay changed. OK, we can leave the car in town and come back with mine. Met up at Sovereign Radiology, where they had once again lost my referral. A good thing I had had a copy made. But it seems even shortly after lunch time isn't the best time for an X-ray: they stagger their lunch break from 12:00 to 14:00. No hurry with the X-ray, so left it for another time.
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Roundabouts or traffic lights?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
I've always found roundabouts to be a particularly stupid way of regulating traffic. Slows things right down, requires people to decide for themselves, causing delays and accidents, rather than having clear signals, and to boot they're (nowadays) more expensive than traffic lights. What use are they?
The Ballarat council seems to have agreed, and spent an amazing amount of time replacing this roundabout at the junction of Albert Street and Hertford Street in Sebastopol with a set of traffic lights:
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Nice, right? No slowing down and driving in circles. And now that it's finally finished (it took over a year), things should be much better.
But they're not. Yes, there was always congestion at the junction, but now it seems worse. Why? I really can't see a reason.
But I've finally heard one other reason for the advantages of roundabouts over traffic lights. In each case you can have accidents, and arguably (not in this reasoning) there can be more accidents at roundabouts. But they're at slower speeds, and they're rarely fatal. So: the tradeoff between, say, 30 minor accidents and one fatal accident? I can accept that, if that's the balance.
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Hydra surprises
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Not much time to do anything with hydra today, but one thing had puzzled me: why was the SSD so slow on the HP Z800? Tried the same tests on the ThinkCentre and got completely different results. Here first the Z800 and then the ThinkCentre, running the same disk and the same OS:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/13) ~ 2 -> diskinfo -t da1
Seek times:
Full stroke: 250 iter in 0.016239 sec = 0.065 msec
Half stroke: 250 iter in 0.016996 sec = 0.068 msec
Quarter stroke: 500 iter in 0.079407 sec = 0.159 msec
Short forward: 400 iter in 0.044783 sec = 0.112 msec
Short backward: 400 iter in 0.043068 sec = 0.108 msec
Seq outer: 2048 iter in 0.308084 sec = 0.150 msec
Seq inner: 2048 iter in 0.130764 sec = 0.064 msec
Transfer rates:
outside: 102400 kbytes in 0.747658 sec = 136961 kbytes/sec
middle: 102400 kbytes in 0.746164 sec = 137235 kbytes/sec
inside: 102400 kbytes in 0.746195 sec = 137230 kbytes/sec=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/0) ~ 4 -> diskinfo -t ada1
Seek times:
Full stroke: 250 iter in 0.008681 sec = 0.035 msec
Half stroke: 250 iter in 0.005731 sec = 0.023 msec
Quarter stroke: 500 iter in 0.045294 sec = 0.091 msec
Short forward: 400 iter in 0.025165 sec = 0.063 msec
Short backward: 400 iter in 0.026532 sec = 0.066 msec
Seq outer: 2048 iter in 0.041746 sec = 0.020 msec
Seq inner: 2048 iter in 0.042286 sec = 0.021 msec
Transfer rates:
outside: 102400 kbytes in 0.238732 sec = 428933 kbytes/sec
middle: 102400 kbytes in 0.194549 sec = 526346 kbytes/sec
inside: 102400 kbytes in 0.194806 sec = 525651 kbytes/sec
That's an amazing difference, round a factor of 4! What has HP done? Presumably it works well with their own hardware, but that wasn't SSD. And it's not just diskinfo. Again, first the Z800, then the ThinkCentre:
=== root@hydra (/dev/pts/14) ~ 13 -> time dd if=/dev/da1p3 count=100000 of=/dev/null
100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out
51200000 bytes transferred in 5.591914 secs (9156078 bytes/sec)=== root@hydra (/dev/pts/14) ~ 14 -> time dd if=/dev/da1p3 count=10000 bs=256k of=/dev/null
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
2621440000 bytes transferred in 19.034236 secs (137722363 bytes/sec)
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/1) ~ 3 -> time dd if=/dev/ada1p3 count=100000 of=/dev/null
100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out
51200000 bytes transferred in 2.725376 secs (18786399 bytes/sec)=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/1) ~ 4 -> time dd if=/dev/ada1p3 count=10000 bs=256k of=/dev/null
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
2621440000 bytes transferred in 5.104140 secs (513590913 bytes/sec)
Again the 256 kB transfers are round 4 times as fast. It's interesting to note how much slower the 512 byte transfers are; I wouldn't have expected that on an SSD.
| Thursday, 9 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 9 March 2023 |
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Kitchen cutlery?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Where do kitchen cutlery and crockery come from? I suppose there must be people who buy that sort of thing, but for me it has always been hand-me-downs, like this spoon that I got in a parcel on 15 December 1967:
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Once it was part of our table cutlery, but in the course of time it was replaced and delegated to the kitchen, like what remains of the table crockery that we bought in the 1970s and 1980s.
But somehow we don't have enough kitchen spoons. What do we do? Retire more from the dining room? No, nowadays normally priced cutlery comes in sets, with at least knives and forks and probably teaspoons. I suggested to Yvonne that she take a look next time she was in an op shop. And yesterday she came back with this:
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8 spoons for $1.50! It seems that she had a choice of a number of different spoons, and these were the best matching. As far as I can tell, they're unused.
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Next X configuration pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
During the week I tried to start X on the ThinkCentre incarnation of hydra. “No screens found”. Strange. This box was effectively the old teevee with a second display card, and both had been recognized. And after the inevitable search I discovered that the driver I was using (340.108) supported both cards.
OK, eliminate one potential problem and replace the old, dying teevee disk in the box. No change.
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OK, remove my guess at the “wrong” card (GT218 [GeForce 210]), which I guessed to be the one with the larger heat sink. Reboot. Worked immediately.
So clearly it's related to more than one card. But the driver supports multiple cards—I've been doing this on eureka and predecessors for decades. But this is the first time in years that I've tried to set up a new machine like that. I don't recall any particular issue with multiple cards in the past, and that's a problem: if there is one, I've forgotten it and how to handle it.
A bit more investigating showed—in the single-card version that worked:
[ 116.410] (WW) VGA arbiter: cannot open kernel arbiter, no multi-card support
What's a VGA arbiter? I've addressed it a couple of times before. On 25 November 2015 I thought that it caused me pain, but it was a red herring. The problem was related to the way I started X. And the issue is that it only appears when X has been successfully started! On the other occasion it doesn't seem to have been the issue at all.
Later I found:
[ 127.884] (==) Not automatically adding GPU devices
...
[ 127.973] (!!) More than one possible primary device found
[ 127.973] (--) PCI: (1@0:0:0) 10de:128b:1043:8576 rev 161, Mem @ 0xf6000000/16777216, 0xe8000000/134217728, 0xf0000000/33554432, I/O @ 0x0000e000/128, BIOS @ 0x????????/65536
[ 127.973] (--) PCI: (5@0:0:0) 10de:0a65:1043:8354 rev 162, Mem @ 0xf4000000/16777216, 0xd0000000/268435456, 0xe0000000/33554432, I/O @ 0x0000d000/128, BIOS @ 0x????????/65536
So there's presumably something in the config file that is confusing it. That would be straightforward enough if I could use the tools available, like X -configure, but I don't know of any way to tell that what driver to use. More head-scratching.
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More vacuum cleaner woes
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Petra Gietz called me today while using the (ducted) vacuum cleaner: is it blocked? Yes, it was still working, but not well. Out to check: yes, the bag was full. So full, in fact, that I couldn't get it out of the box, and I had to completely dismantle the thing to turn it on its side, covering myself in dust in the process.
I don't recall this happening in the past? Yes, the device is stupidly built:
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The top is 1.5 m above the ground, and the bag when full is 70 cm high, so I have to lift it to 2.2 m above the ground. Wouldn't it have been simple to put it on a swivel mount that could allow it to be tilted 90° to pull it out horizontally?
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More courgette experiments
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
We're still trying to use up the courgette that Petra Gietz brought us two weeks ago, but we're losing the battle. Today she brought us another one, mercifully smaller:
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What do we do with the old one? It seems that it should be possible to cut it into slices and deep fry until crispy:
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Problem: it's not in the slightest crispy, and if I go any further they'll just be burnt (and probably still not crispy).
| Friday, 10 March 2023 | Dereel → Sebastopol → Dereel | Images for 10 March 2023 |
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20 years of SCO lawsuit
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Topic: history, opinion | Link here |
20 years ago today I discovered that SCO sued IBM for giving away trade secrets. How time has flown! And what a mess it was!
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Into town yet again
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Topic: general, health, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne's car is fixed! Haven't I heard that somewhere before? Yes, but it seems I didn't bother to note it in this diary. The traffic indicators had failed, probably on 24 February, and Leigh of Sovereign City Service Centre had replaced the control unit (“computer”), since apparently the indicator relay was in the unit. Only it didn't work, and Yvonne tells me that he discovered that there was a relay he could change. So it had to come in again. In any case into town to pick it up. Yes, it's fixed, after only 2 weeks, and there's no more to pay. Yvonne drove off and I discussed the matter with Leigh. Why had he changed the control unit when it would have been sufficient to change the relay? He tells me that the relay is soldered to the controller board, but that the new board also had a defective relay. So he returned the controller and replaced the non-replaceable relay in the old controller.
I suppose that sounds plausible. It's a pity it took such a long time.
Then to Sovereign (a popular name round here) Radiology to finally have my jaw X-ray done. A good thing I didn't wait on Wednesday: even without the “15 minute delay” I had to wait for 15 minutes. I wonder if it's worth making an appointment next time.
| Saturday, 11 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 11 March 2023 |
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Next X attempt
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Why couldn't I start X on teevee with two display cards? The problem is clearly in creating the configuration file, which (as far as I can see) is absolutely necessary if you have more than one card. But how do I create it? X -configure doesn't know about drivers. Juha Kupiainen suggested nvidia-xconfig, which I knew, but for some reason I hadn't thought of using it.
OK, new day, new display card:
vgapci0@pci0:1:0:0: class=0x030000 card=0x85761043 chip=0x128b10de rev=0xa1 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'NVIDIA Corporation'
device = 'GK208B [GeForce GT 710]'
class = display
subclass = VGA
vgapci1@pci0:5:0:0: class=0x030000 card=0x375a1458 chip=0x128b10de rev=0xa1 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'NVIDIA Corporation'
device = 'GK208B [GeForce GT 710]'
class = display
subclass = VGA
Again X didn't start. Run nvidia-xconfig, which dutifully created a brand new /etc/X11/xorg.conf. X still didn't start.
What's in xorg.conf? Lots of irrelevant stuff, of course, description of other components, multiple comments
# generated from default
And the device entries? There's only one! The ServerLayout section doesn't want to know about a second card!
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Layout0"
Screen 0 "Screen0"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection
And the device section is useless beyond specifying the driver:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection
That's an absolutely bare-bones entry. By comparison, the old config file had (along with a number of comments):
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "nVidia Corporation"
BoardName "C61 [GeForce 7025 / nForce 630a]"
Option "UseEDIDDpi" "FALSE"
Option "DPI" "120x120"
Option "UseDisplayDevice" "TV"
EndSection
Interestingly, the BoardName didn't match the real device, so presumably, like so much in X configuration, it's irrelevant.
OK, there's a clear issue here, apart from the obvious conclusion that nvidia-xconfig is useless: we can't identify the device. What do I have in eureka?
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device1"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce 9500 GT"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device2"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce GT 640"
BusID "PCI:5:0:0"
Screen 1
EndSection
BusID! That's the missing link. Did I miss it in the documentation? Well, yes, according to Google: it's not there. What I find is this forum entry from somebody who already knew the trick. And this post points me to the correct documentation, which I have read before, but missed an important part:
BusID "bus−id"This specifies the bus location of the graphics card. For PCI/AGP cards, the bus−id string has the form PCI:bus:device:function (e.g., “:1:0:0” might be appropriate for an AGP card). This field is usually optional in single-head configurations when using the primary graphics card. In multi-head configurations, or when using a secondary graphics card in a single-head configuration, this entry is mandatory. Its main purpose is to make an unambiguous connection between the device section and the hardware it is representing. This information can usually be found by running the pciaccess tool scanpci.
So clearly nvidia-xconfig is completely useless here. It could at least have produced a warning, better a link to the configuration documentation.
It's interesting to note a reference to scanpci. What system uses that? It's called lspci under Linux and pciconf under FreeBSD.
It seems that scanpci is another Linux program. I don't know if it does different things, or just gets bundled with different distributions.
But I found that out later. In the meantime I had tried my fourth display card:
vgapci1@pci0:5:0:0: class=0x030000 card=0x21811462 chip=0x68f91002 rev=0x00 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]'
device = 'Cedar [Radeon HD 5000/6000/7350/8350 Series]'
class = display
subclass = VGA
Radeon, a non-starter—I think. Is it maybe possible to mix drivers after all? The driver name is in the device section, so from a semantic point of view it should be possible. Still, it seems that I have two “GK208B [GeForce GT 710]” and a “GT218 [GeForce 210]”, all supported by the same driver. So I'll try the two GT 710s first when I have time.
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Welcome Priscilla
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Yvonne off to Bacchus Marsh today to meet Pamela Adams, a Facebook friend, Saluki breeder and artist. She had sold Yvonne a model Afghan hound with the name Priscilla.
OK, if she likes it, why not? It wasn't expensive, not much more than the cost of driving to Bacchus Marsh. But strangely it's surprisingly interesting. Even the dogs and cat wanted to investigate:
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| Sunday, 12 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 12 March 2023 |
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Morning walk
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Seen from the lounge room this morning:
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Sunday, day of rest
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Topic: general, food and drink, technology, Stones Road house, opinion | Link here |
McLaren Vale Cellars have a new wine in their catalogue: “Legion Chardonnay”. I've had the Legion Shiraz, and it's one of their better ones. Chardonnay is not my particular preference (I go for Sauvignon blanc instead), but on one occasion I bought some by accident, and it didn't taste bad.
So: let's try a carton of the Legion and see what it's like. Follow the link in the mail and come to... “Black Market Chardonnay”. Not what I was looking for, but clearly a web site problem. OK, email to Mark Curtis asking what I should do.
An answer came almost immediately, on a Sunday afternoon. Yes, the “Black Market” is “Legion” this week. OK, try to order. Out of stock! Another email, another quick reply: try this URL.
And that worked. All in the course of a Sunday afternoon.
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PV inverter pain
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Still no reply from Luke Parry about the issues with the inverter. It's been two weeks since I sent him an email asking for resolution by Friday last week. Dammit. Wrote a letter to management asking for resolution.
About an hour later, I got a phone call—from Luke. Another Sunday call, and the number he called from is the emergency call number. He's on the management mailing list, and it seems that he's on call all weekend—a far cry from the level of service I've had from Effective Electrical so far.
So: why didn't he respond before? Difficulty accessing his mail? I have delivery confirmation (from Gmail), but it occurred to me later that their spam detector might have eaten it. Still, he was helpful today, at least in principle. A couple of takeaways:
Fyodor Torgovnikov is no longer working for Ingeteam. That might explain his indifference to my problems last May. Luke now deals directly with the team in Spain, which requires waiting overnight.
He had looked at the frequent dropouts, and he thinks (correctly, I'm sure) that they're due to overvoltage. He can tune the inverter parameters to allow a few volts more. He didn't suggest that that was the cause of the outage last May, but I'm sure it was.
He'll send me email that I can forward to Powercor to argue to have the voltage dropped.
Once again he changed the inverter configuration without talking to me. When the system was installed it was set to charge the battery from the grid at 20% charge. For some reason I had set the upper limit to 30%, and Luke had changed it back to 20% last May.
But today he decided that wasn't appropriate, and he doesn't seem to have noticed that it was his choice. It seems that he now has a document that says that the optimum is to start producing output at 15% (SOCrecx), charge to 25% (SOCgrid) and discharge to 20% (SOCmin). He'll send me a copy of that, and in the meantime we can leave it like that.
He will send mail to them tomorrow asking if there's anything they'd like to look at before he upgrades the firmware. He'll copy me on the mail exchange, and he won't do anything with the upgrade until I have a chance to take it out of circuit.
He has additional software that produces better diagnostics and allows upgrade of other parameters, and there's a possibility that I can get access to it. I suspect I'll have to chase him up on this one. It seems that it told him of 3 outages on Friday, when I only saw one.
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Where are my batteries?
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
A few days ago I removed the batteries (two each) from two wireless keyboards, since there was no way to turn them off. Left them on the side table next to the armchair.
Today there were only two left. A third was on the “Ottoman” where Elena frequently lies. Had she stolen it? And where's the fourth battery? Eaten? That doesn't sound right.
Spent some time searching for advice on the web. Yes, they're dangerous, contain things like Sodium hydroxide, which can cause severe burns. Look for evidence in the mouth, and examine the well-being of the dog(s). No evidence, the dogs seem well. Could she have swallowed it whole? That doesn't sound likely. So probably the battery will crop up from under a chair some day.
| Monday, 13 March 2023 | Dereel | |
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No mail!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Into the office this morning to find that no mail had been delivered from outside overnight. Why?
Off to the external mail server to take a look. (Only) file system full! A bit of searching led me to /var/log/www/, where the error log was fully 27 GB in size!
How could that happen? Clearly I need to pay more attention to the daily status reports. But it wouldn't have helped. Checking again, the last mail (16:54 yesterday) contained:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ufs/rootfs 53G 41G 8.3G 83% /
So overnight I had written something like 10 GB of error messages to the log file!
Time to set up my log rotation again. Why did I stop?
Tidying up wasn't that straightforward. After compressing the file (why?), I was left with:
=== root@lax (/dev/pts/2) /var/log/www 22 -> gzip www.lemis.com-error.log=== root@lax (/dev/pts/2) /var/log/www 26 -> df
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ufs/rootfs 54,550 48,856 1,330 97% /
devfs 0 0 0 100% /dev=== root@lax (/dev/pts/2) /var/log/www 27 -> l
(www.lemis.com-error.log gone, of course)=== root@lax (/dev/pts/2) /var/log/www 29 -> apachectl graceful
Performing sanity check on apache24 configuration:
Syntax OK
Performing a graceful restart=== root@lax (/dev/pts/2) /var/log/www 31 -> df
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ufs/rootfs 54,550 21,883 28,303 44% /
devfs 0 0 0 100% /dev
So, file gone but not forgotten. httpd had still had it open.
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Walking dogs at the Eagle's Nest
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Off with the dogs to the Eagle's Nest again today, for the first time in over a year. This time off to the west, where we haven't been for years—maybe since we moved to Stones Road. It's a shorter walk than I recalled, but enough with my footwear. I think I'm going to have to accept a reason to wear boots some of the time.
| Tuesday, 14 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 14 March 2023 |
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Healing wounds
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
Last week I tripped, fell and scraped my leg just below the knee:
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It wasn't painful at the time, but rubbing against my trouser leg was uncomfortable, so I put a plaster over it. And when I took it off, it was weeping. Left it off with a little disinfectant, and it improved:
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OK, there's no good reason to keep it covered. All I need is a pair of shorts. But I haven't worn shorts this millennium, and if I can find some, they'd be too tight. So back to an even older style of clothing:
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Fixing web pages
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Topic: technology | Link here |
While chasing up yesterday's log file problems, came across a number of log entries that I can't blame on anybody else: they're relatively benign PHP errors. Spent a considerable amount of time following up there; there will be more to come.
| Wednesday, 15 March 2023 | Dereel | |
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More web site tidying up
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Spent some time today tidying up various issues with the external web site. There are a surprising number of them. I really need to tidy up my logging.
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Oscars and discrimination
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Topic: politics, language, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
The Academy Awards were held a couple of days ago. I don't pay much attention to them, but it seems that they have been accused of racial discrimination. So everybody was delighted when the Michelle Yeoh became the first ever Asian actress to win the Best Actress award.
Well, did she win because she was a good actress or because she was “Asian” (in fact, Malaysian)? To be really non-discriminatory, you'd need to do a blind test, but clearly that's not possible. But the more I see this term “Asian”, the more it grates. What do the Japanese have to do with the Indians? Or either of them with Turks or Arabs? While pondering that, I saw this page, along with graphs:
So, first Asian best actress, but there have already been two others from “Arab/Middle Eastern”? And why don't they count as Asian? OED to the rescue: the use of the term “Asian” is subjective, depending on the geography of the subject:
In early use with specific reference to Asia Minor, the western peninsula of Asia (an area largely corresponding to modern Turkey). In modern use when referring to people of Asian descent typically denoting a person of East or South-east Asian descent in North America, but someone of South Asian descent in Britain.
So according to that criterion, there has still been no Best Actress of recognizably Asian descent as viewed from Britain.
And then there's this incredibly irritating US English term “person of color”, which seems to mean any person with a detectable amount of non-European ancestry. They referred to Yeoh like that, which seems just plain ludicrous.
But the whole thing is stupid. This is racial discrimination! Yes, it's done in the best of intentions, but it's still discriminatory. Why should people pay attention to people's racial origins at all?
| Thursday, 16 March 2023 | Dereel | |
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More PHP debugging
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Topic: technology | Link here |
A lot of the remaining error messages in my Apache error log relate to my PHP code. How do I debug it?
For example:
[Thu Mar 16 01:40:48.975295 2023] [php7:warn] [pid 71294] [client 185.191.171.6:29298] PHP Warning: A non-numeric value encountered in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/php/includes/utils.php on line 180
OK, I can check utils.php and discover that it's in a function addrows(), which sums columns (yes!) in a table. Where's it called from? What has it been passed? Clearly I don't want any of this information to appear in the page that I deliver, but it's very likely that the resultant page is broken.
The first thing is: what was the request? This is in www.lemis.com-error.log, while the request statistics are in www.lemis.com.log. I could join the logs together, but then it's more difficult to find the error messages. What I need is a backtrace and information about the request. And that's easy enough: there's a function debug_backtrace(). Only it returns an array, so I handed it to print_r(). And that does exactly what I don't want: it prints the results in the page.
How do I get the information in a form that I can log, or, as I think might be better, send as an email message? While searching I found debug_print_backtrace(), which might have simplified the solution I already had. But there doesn't seem to be any generic way in PHP to convert an array into a printable string. There's implode(), but that only handles single-level arrays, and the backtrace isn't one of those. So all I get for my pain is:
[Thu Mar 16 02:15:39.400787 2023] [php7:notice] [pid 71590] [client 216.244.66.235:32782] PHP Notice: Array to string conversion in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/php/includes/utils.php on line 969
Surely there must be a way to convert an array into a printable string. Found a “solution” on the web, but it was painful.
And it's clear that I'm not going to get rid of error messages. These ones are clearly due to malice or external errors:
[Thu Mar 16 20:10:05.357610 2023] [php7:warn] [pid 79172] [client 158.69.123.143:56818] PHP Warning: fopen(/home/grog/www.lemis.com//yvon<td>Original size:<\/td><td>2791 × 2976 pixels, 1184 kB<\/td></tr><tr><td>Focus: <\/td><td>∞ (2.07 m - ∞)<\/td></tr><tr><td>Author: <\/td><td>Yvonne Lehey<\/td></photolist.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/php/includes/onephoto.php on line 1414
[Thu Mar 16 22:43:15.346798 2023] [php7:error] [pid 80090] [client 103.121.122.144:64351] script '/home/grog/www.lemis.com/xmlrpc.php' not found or unable to stat
[Thu Mar 16 22:48:06.205810 2023] [php7:error] [pid 80075] [client 156.202.180.4:3954] script '/home/grog/www.lemis.com/wp-login.php' not found or unable to stat
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Still no PV resolution
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
On Sunday Luke Parry called and promised me a lot of action early in the week. So far nothing has happened.
Sigh. Sent him off another email. Is this going to be an uphill battle?
| Friday, 17 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 17 March 2023 |
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Another strange error message
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Came into the office this morning to find an xterm window full of:
console.warn: services.settings: Could not determine network status. Message: TypeError: lazy.gNetworkLinkService is undefined
A quick Google brought me to a surprisingly accurate explanation. This is on eureka, with an ancient firefox, so I think it's a case of “well don't do that then”.
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Huevos a la tigre revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
It's been over a year since I last cooked huevos a la tigre, and with good reason: I'm not happy with the results.
Today I had another attempt, similar to the last one, but with more salt after the last time seemed to have so little. This time I made it with tinned tomatoes, which proved to be a bad idea: there was so much liquid that the eggs wouldn't hold it together. Here last year and today:
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One difference, though: last time I noted that there wasn't enough salt. Last time I used 3 g, this time 7. The truth must be somewhere in the middle.
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Reply from Luke
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Got a reply to my email message from Luke Parry. Yes, he hadn't contacted me, but that seems to be about the only thing he hasn't done. No, I can't get access to the setup software (I had expected that), but he had updated the inverter configuration to take higher mains voltage, and instead of the message about the matter that he was going to send me, he raised a power quality issue with Powercor. That sounds like a better way to get their attention. And it seems that he has contacted Ingeteam with WhatsApp, but they haven't replied yet.
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Piccola: healthy or not?
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Topic: animals, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Piccola has recovered well from her problems 3 months ago. She has eaten a lot, typically 160 g per day, and she has put on a lot of weight.
But now she seems to have lost her appetite again. For the last 5 days, I have fed her:
| 13 March | 160 g | |
| 14 March | 139 g | |
| 15 March | 20 g | |
| 16 March | 132 g | |
| 17 March | 27 g | |
In addition, yesterday evening she didn't drink the milk that Yvonne puts out for her. She still looks well, but why has she eaten so little? Maybe now she has reached her weight. To be observed.
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Bushfire alert!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been a cool, wet summer, and we're well into autumn. But the fire danger still isn't over, as this article in the Ballarat Courier reports. Tomorrow could be the worst day of the season. To quote:
”We've had no real significant rain so far this year,” he said. (Assistant Chief Fire Officer Mark Gunning)
And here's me thinking that we had record-breaking rainfall.
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Fake cous-cous again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
What do we do with the courgettes that Petra Gietz brought us? We had the idea of filling them with a mincemeat mix, and Yvonne bought some meat for the purpose. But I decided that it was too boring. What else do you do with large quantities of this kind of vegetable? Cous-cous, of course! And of course we have a recipe. Yes, it wants turnips, sweet potatoes and pumpkin, but the quantities are flexible, and we have plenty of courgette:
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Only one problem: too salty! That's the second time today. Possibly it's an issue with mixing the dish: Yvonne had no problems with saltiness. Next time I should dissolve it in some of the liquid first.
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Cooking cous-cous
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
One thing about this evening's mea that caused problems was how to cook the cous-cous itself. Modern cous-cous seems to be pre-processed, and in the recipe I write “cook the cous-cous according to the packet instructions”. But this was a bulk pack without any instructions.
OK, what's the web for? Off looking and came up with these pages before it became too stupid:
Like most grains and well, certainly pasta, it’s easy to cook way too much because let’s face it, most of us never weigh it properly. You want to have around 60g of couscous per person.
Couscous is made from tiny steamed balls of semolina flour. Though we think of it as a grain, it’s actually a type of pasta.
And presumably courgettes are really a kind of bean. What a lot of nonsense you can find on the web!
And the ratio, idiots? Take your choice:
Only boiling water is needed to cook your couscous, but the important bit is the couscous to water ratio, you should abide by the 1:1 rule. So, for 60g of couscous, you will need 60ml of boiling water.
You’ll need 1 ¼ cups water or broth per 1 cup of Golden Couscous.
OK, they talk about “Golden couscous”, but this just seems to be a brand.
But maybe that's too much water? A cup of water must weigh a whole lot more than a cup of cous-cous. Never mind, this page only wants one cup of water per cup of cous-cous.
But maybe it's too little, not too much. So how about this one?
For most types of instant couscous, use a ratio of 1:1 1/2, so for example 1 cup of couscous to 1 1/2 cups of water.Allow around 60g of couscous per serving.
And yes, the written-out fractions are original. I particularly like the mixture of volumetric and weight measurements.
In the end I went for 1:1 by weight, and it worked well. But why is there so much nonsense on the web?
| Saturday, 18 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 18 March 2023 |
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Bushfire!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Strange weather today. It started out normally enough, except for heavier than usual winds—the dreaded north wind that changes to west during the day. When it's coming from the north, it spreads bushfires south. When it turns from the west, it spreads the whole length of the bushfire to the east.
So we kept a careful eye on the paddock to the west, which is grass for about 200 m. In principle, the wet summer means that there's not much to burn. Here the area round the house, taken today:
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Still, a good idea to try to squeeze some useful information out of this horrible VIC Emergency web site. Since last time I saw it, the map has got dirtier, but no smaller, showing much of South Australia and New South Wales as well as the area it should be concentrated on. Here a crop showing only Victoria (839x587 out of 1017x1032, or 47%). Now it has lots of dots on it:
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What are those dots? In fact, what are all the symbols? They're too polite to assume that I don't understand them. OK, click on one of the flyspecks. Nothing happens. Ah, of course. First I need to zoom in. Then I get:
Ah, it's an incident! And it's so important that it's still there after well over 2 months! What kind of incident?
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“This area is updated separately to warnings.”
OK, clearly a grammar fail incident.
And that's all I could get out of it. ZOOM just zooms in the map. It doesn't give any more information, including why it's still there after such a long time.
OK, there's also a mobile phone app. Try that; I set it up long ago in the vain hope that it might be of some help. It gives me a choice:
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What's an “incident” or two between friends? And why does it give me two different radii? Take a look at the map:
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Now there are 6 “incidents”, including two bushfires. How about listing them?
Yes, there are bushfires not far from here:
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What are they? Ah, I can list:
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So, are there any real bushfires? It seems that anybody with intuition would know that the dotted fires are planned burns, and a real fire is yellow.
It turned out that the danger wasn't as bad as feared. At the end of the day, I don't know if any bushfires started. There was one down the Great Ocean Road near Lorne, but that started before the extreme fire danger.
In passing, it seems that the map is always 11 hours out of date. Writing this article on 19 March at 13:10, I see on the map:
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Now that I do understand, though I don't know why. They've put the time in UTC. Victoria only has one time zone, UTC+11. Why can't they use it?
People, this is literally a matter of life and death. I've been ranting about this for years. Why can't people do something about it? At the very least:
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Snake!
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Walking the dogs today, saw this:
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Some kind of snake, of course, probably a juvenile. It's about 60 cm long. Yvonne claims that they're more poisonous than the adults, but I still don't know what kind it is.
| Sunday, 19 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 19 March 2023 |
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Larissa branches out
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Topic: animals | Link here |
For some weeks now Larissa has been picking up random tree branches when we go walking. But today she found something tastier:
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And yes, she brought it home and ate it.
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Corymbia ficifolia, finally
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Our Corymbia ficifolia is finally flowering as I expected:
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It's not done yet. Hopefully it'll survive the coming spring.
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Piccola: still not eating?
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
It's clear that there's something wrong with Piccola. Or is there? For the past 5 days she has been eating considerably less than previously. This morning she hadn't finished yesterday's food, so I gave her 10 g of pellets to see if she preferred them. No, she ate some, but didn't finish them. Here an update to Friday's table:
| 13 March | 160 g | |
| 14 March | 139 g | |
| 15 March | 20 g | |
| 16 March | 132 g | |
| 17 March | 27 g | |
| 18 March | 77 g | |
| 19 March | (pellets) 10 g |
She doesn't look overly unwell, but there's a clear difference from the 140 g or so that she ate previously. And overnight she vomited, including some of the beef she had eaten. That's nothing unusual for her, but since December. we've been on edge. And when she came back from her morning walk, she tripped over the threshold. On the other hand, I can do that too.
And then there's a comparison: Larissa weighs an estimated 35 kg, about 10 times Piccola's weight, and she eats 200 g of pellets a day. So in proportion Piccola still eats more. Maybe this is all that she needs now that she's back to normal weight. Still, it's worrying, and I gave her another 37 g in the evening, which she could finish overnight.
| Monday, 20 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 20 March 2023 |
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You want uptime?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Now that ffm.lemis.com has exceeded 5 years uptime, I've been keeping an eye on it daily:
=== grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 19 -> date; uptime
Mon Mar 20 03:11:10 UTC 2023
3:11AM up 1869 days, 12:14, 2 users, load averages: 0.15, 0.18, 0.15
But that's nothing. carn/carneous on IRC (I don't know his real name) has a machine called hubble:
hubble# uptime
2:22PM up 4766 days, 20:35, 1 user, load averages: 0.06, 0.01, 0.00
That's a little over 13 years. If I have this right, the machine must last have been booted on 2 March 2010.
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Piccola again
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Piccola continues to eat less. Is it the food? Is it the balance? Pene isn't available to ask now, but giving cats only beef to eat can't be balanced. OK, give her some (brand name) canned cat food.
Gone! Yes, she's hungry, but not hungry to eat the beef I offer her. OK, we can try giving her half and half. After all, it can't be that bad.
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Carrying cats
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Topic: animals | Link here |
We have thousands of photos of Piccola and other cats, but there's one that I don't think I've taken before: the “steward's presentation”:
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That's the way we (the stewards) used to carry cats for presentation to judges at cat shows in Germany. Or at least those cats who were happy with it. I still carry Piccola like that a lot of the time, but I think this is the first time that we've taken photos.
You can tell that she likes it:
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| Tuesday, 21 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 21 March 2023 |
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Jane Ashhurst visits
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Topic: general | Link here |
Yvonne into town early this morning to pick up Jane Ashhurst, who is visiting for a few days.
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Garden flowers in March equinox
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Today was the equinox, time for more photos of what flowers are still present in the garden.
Some bushes are doing better than expected. The Corymbia ficifolia is still coming into flower:
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At the rate it's going, it could flower for another month. And the Buddleja x weyeriana that we planted on the south side of the house also seems to be doing better than any other since we moved here:
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And the Abutilons that we cloned are also surprising. Now the one that I thought was dying has come back with good foliage, but little in the way of flowers:
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And the other one has finally come up with a solitary flower:
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I should really get round to repotting it.
One surprise were these lilies, which I thought only flowered in the middle of the summer:
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The Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” suffered so badly last winter that it only bore two flowers the whole summer long. The best thing I can say is that it isn't dead yet:
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And our eight year old Ginkgo biloba doesn't look overly convincing:
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Hopefully that's just the coming autumn.
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Black cockatoos
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Topic: animals | Link here |
While taking my garden flower photos, heard a noise:
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I'm surprised I got anything on the image at all. Black cockatoos! They're usually relatively rare, but they seem to be becoming more common. Yvonne has discovered that she has something in common with rms:
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She likes them.
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Preparing for autumn
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Paul Donaghy along today to mow the lawn and tidy up the garden. He certainly made a big difference with the cannas on the north side of the house. Here before and after:
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Getting emergency warnings
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Mail from a Free Thinker today—that's the name he uses—to tell me of an alternative to this horrible VIC Emergency web site. It seems that there's an XML feed with the information, and he includes a script to download it and send it to a mobile phone. I haven't examined it yet, but it looks like it would be relatively easy to modify it to send it to a Real Computer™.
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Understanding X fonts
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the things that is holding up my system upgrade is the question of X fonts. I have a list of things to investigate, but basically it's far more complicated than it has any right to be. One of the things that puzzles me is things like this:
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Yes, they're all spam, in different character sets. But once upon a time I could display them. What has gone wrong?
Spent some time investigating the matter. xterm has a font selection menu with very few fonts dating back decades. As my eyes deteriorate, I've been choosing ever larger fonts (currently “Huge”, apparently not as big as “Enormous”). Could it be that some of the other fonts can render the characters?
A qualified “yes”. The smaller ones generally can't, though I suspect it depends on the machine on which I run the xterm and the fonts that are installed. But the default font is “Huge”. Or is it? After returning there, I suddenly found:
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But there's still the first one. I can only render that with the “Large” font set:
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In fact, it's not much smaller than the “Huge” fonts, but uglier. And none of them can display more unlikely character sets like Hangul or Devanagari. At least I know where to look now.
| Wednesday, 22 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 22 March 2023 |
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A new magnolia
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Paul Donaghy was in town today, and he picked up a Magnolia × soulangeana “Burgundy Glow” from Karen, the same person who gave us the maple “Chantilly Lace” last June.
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It's a nice looking plant. I feed a bit sorry for Karen, who has had trouble keeping them on her property. They must have cost a lot of money.
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Fence construction
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
While putting the Magnolia in place, saw this:
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What an amazing construction!
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Goodbye DPreview
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Unexpected message in the mail today: DPReview is closing down. Just like that, out of the blue, on 10 April. I checked that it wasn't dated 1 April, but no, it looks like it'll be gone in 3 weeks.
That's a pity. I've been relying on their information for nearly 15 years, and in general it has a good reputation. It seems that this is part of a series of layoffs that Amazon are planning.
This article gives some background: it seems that Amazon bought DPReview years ago, and now that they're in financial trouble, they're just closing them down. I wonder what the financial implications of them buying themselves out would be.
| Thursday, 23 March 2023 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | |
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Where does all the time go?
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Topic: general, gardening, opinion | Link here |
Somehow I'm not getting anything done lately, but it's keeping me busy all day long. Today I had to go into town to buy some food we had forgotten, and also to get some soil and fittings to respectively plant and irrigate our Magnolia × soulangeana “Burgundy Glow”. That went without issues, but somehow I got almost nothing done.
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Car insurance over the web
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
We've been driving our cars without third party, fire and theft insurance for over a year now, since RACV bungled our renewals. No particular harm: the most important insurance is included in our registration, but clearly we need to do something. On Juha Kupiainen's mention, tried Budget Direct, who offer a web signup.
But it doesn't work! Some parts of the signup process are so slow that I couldn't finish. Clearly they think that I'm too stupid to enter the expiry date of my credit card directly, so they produce selection lists which take over 20 s to react. When I finally did, pressed CONTINUE and watched the thing hang.
Why? That's so extremely bad that it can't be typical. Possibly it's an excessively inefficient implementation that it wouldn't work over a networked browser (running on one computer, displaying on another). So had to call up and do things manually after all, which also ended up being $30 more expensive. I did it anyway: life's too short for this sort of pain.
| Friday, 24 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 24 March 2023 |
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Even less work
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Topic: general, animals, gardening | Link here |
Where does all the time go? Somehow I got almost nothing done. Off “riding” with Jane, Yvonne and the dogs, though we didn't go very far:
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Jane was riding Samba, which is strange, because she used to belong to her, but she didn't ride her. And now, after exchanging her for Carlotta with Yvonne, she comes 1000 km to ride her here.
On the way back saw this:
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So now is the time for these lilies after all.
| Saturday, 25 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 25 March 2023 |
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Planting the Magnolia
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Topic: general, gardening | Link here |
A busy day today. First Jesse Walsh came along and planted the Magnolia × soulangeana “Burgundy Glow”:
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He had barely arrived when a load of mulch arrived to keep him busy in coming days.
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Horsey games
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Caroline Hamilton along a little later to join Yvonne and Jane in some horse games:
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Camera problems
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Once again Yvonne had problems with her photo processing. Part of it seems to be related to being a second user on distress, the Microsoft “Windows” 10 box that we use for our photo processing, but there are other issues too. Today she overlooked the silly icon that DxO PhotoLab uses to say “I don't have a profile for this lens/camera combination”. But it was her standard combination of Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III and the old Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 14-42 mm f/3.5-5.6 II R that she got with her Olympus E-PM2. She had been using the Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4, but found it too heavy, so she had just changed it. And the Exif data told me:
File Caroline-38.jpeg
Date taken: Saturday, 25 March 2023, 13:16:43
Exposure: 1/125 sec, 250/25.0 ISO
Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III
Focal length: <i>unknown</i>
Focus: MF infinity
Meter mode: ESP Program AE
Stabilization: Body
Comp: +1 EV
Size: 2934 x 3313 pixels (9.72 megapixels)
Copyright: Yvonne Lehey
Unknown focal length? No aperture information? Manual focus? The lens information wasn't coming across! And she didn't even notice. The manual focus was a particular issue, but looking at the results, most, but not all were acceptable:
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What caused it? Badly sitting lens. I moved it left and right in the mount, without removing it from the camera, and it worked. That's a worry, of course: should I check every time? This is only the second or third time it has happened in 15 years, and on previous occasions I had noticed immediately. And why are some of the images in focus? Luck, I suspect.
The other thing is that Yvonne insists on overexposing her photos. Most of these were exposed at 1 EV more than normal. Why? I keep telling her that it's not appropriate, but she keeps doing it. I think the problem is that she uses the rear display, not the viewfinder, and in the open the display looks dark, so she compensates by overexposing the image. How can I get the display brighter (or, of course, persuade Yvonne to use the viewfinder)? And of course, if she had waited for the in-focus “beep” from the camera, she would have noticed the lens problem.
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Paella again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Paella valenciana for dinner today. It's a lot of work, but as usual the main issue is the decisions. We made a smaller portion today, in the smallest paellera. The recipe is laid out for a paellera of 35 cm diameter, and this one was 30 cm, so the quantities should have been reduced by a third. But that still seemed far too much, particularly the chorizo, which I noted in the recipe: 400 g in the original seemed too much, and after consideration I reduced it to 225 g and most of the rest to half the original recipe.
Only the chicken drumsticks were an issue: 6 enormous Australian drumsticks, weighing 1 kg between them. But the chorizo was sufficient:
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And the rest? We didn't have much in the way of seafood. and the 50 g of squid tubes got completely lost.
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The only prawns were the ones on top, and I think that next time we should put smaller ones in the rice. And mussels? Not my thing, and I thought there were too many, but between them Yvonne and Jane finished them off. At the end we had eaten most of the rice, chorizo and peas, all of the seafood, and only a third of the chicken:
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What do we next time? I'll decide then.
| Sunday, 26 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 26 March 2023 |
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Peace!
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Topic: general | Link here |
Jane Ashhurst left for Melbourne this morning. Peace! Yes, it was nice having her here, but somehow it kept me busy the whole time. Now I have time to look at my backlogged mail.
It won't be for long. Pam Hay has announced that she'll be coming for several days' visit on Thursday. At least we're in practice.
| Monday, 27 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 27 March 2023 |
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More recovery
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Topic: general | Link here |
What a time it takes to catch up with life after a visit! Yes, now I have attended to most of my email, and I've tidied up some (but by no means all) of the things that I have left lying around. And that despite the fact that Jane visited Yvonne, not me.
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Filthy dogs
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Topic: animals | Link here |
I was a little concerned about the soil that I bought last Thursday: the dogs were bound to get into it. And probably they did, but it wasn't until today that it became a problem: it rained, and so the soil was nice and moist. The dogs were covered in it, and despite my attempts to wipe them clean, they brought lots of it into the house. Time to do something about it.
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Understanding Android, yet again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne is somehow a master of accidentally setting obscure things on digital devices. Last Tuesday she managed to set “Airplane mode” on her phone. I still don't know how, but I do now understand that I can reset it by pressing the aeroplane icon on this page, which, for want of better documentation, I call the settings overview page:
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Some of that information is perfectly clear: it was taken at 14:02 today, mobile data is turned off, I'm connected to a Wi-Fi network L3M15, Bluetooth is enabled, and I have a field to shine a torch if I wish.
And the rest? Without any kind of documentation, I've established that the rose at top right goes to the detailed configuration pages, the aeroplane symbol means “airplane mode”, the bell seems to globally silence the loudspeaker, and the rectangle at bottom right is a brightness control. But that still leaves 8 symbols that tell me nothing at all. I tried one and ended up in a page that looks like a QR scanner, but which was too polite to tell me so. What tricks are hidden behind the other symbols?
Time to get the documentation. Oh. I've been there before. The manual I downloaded from the Xiaomi site is 106 pages long, but that's only because it's in 15 languages. The English part is 7 pages, 5 relating to safety and regulatory requirements. The other two show a full-page drawing of the phone and what the orifices are: nothing useful.
A further search produced the mi phone user manual, which at least is 54 pages long. But it's useless. I get to the settings overview by swiping town from top right. According to the manual (round page 17), this will get me to the “Notifications Status Bar”, presumably that which I get when “swiping” from top left. All is made all the more obscure by the lack of illustrations, and it seems that the most important thing is locking and changing “wallpaper”.
But maybe the “Notifications Status Bar”, which the translator also calls “Notification shade” also includes the settings overview page:
3-Notifications Status Bar
Basic features
1. Opening Notification shadeSwipe down from the top of the screen to open the Notification shade.2. Rearranging togglesToggles for mobile data, Wi-Fi, flashlight, and other items are available in the Notification shade by default. Tap the "More" toggle to rearrange items.
OK, I'll bite. What's the “More” toggle? Probably one that looks nothing like More.
It's quite possible that this is a particular problem with Xiaomi, and that other makers do it better. But I wouldn't bet on it. The whole area is rife with undocumented and—in the best case—badly documented “features”. I feel for Bjarne Stroustrup.
| Tuesday, 28 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 28 March 2023 |
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Protecting the dirt
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
The filth that the dogs brought in yesterday was enough. Time to not only fence off the pile of dirt, but to electrify the fence:
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Understanding Android, next step
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Discussed my Android documentation problems on IRC today. TL;DR:
<fwaggle> You're not imagining it, that UX is fucked
Swap one lack of documentation for another. UX? Like Tandem Computers' NonStop UX that I knew and loved decades ago? No, it seems to be a modern term for “user experience”.
Various people on IRC showed the contents of their corresponding screen, whose name I still don't know. They had one thing in common: they were all different. And modulo lack of documentation, they weren't any better than the MIUI screen.
By experimentation I did find the meaning of another symbol, this one:
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Pressed on it and received a prompt: do you want to disable location services? So now it's clear—how intuitive.
But I did find a number of pages on the web, none of them from Xiaomi:
https://www.urtech.ca/2020/08/solved-the-complete-guide-to-icons-on-android-devices/ The complete guide to icons on android devices
https://sensorstechforum.com/android-system-icons-list-mean/ Android System Icons List (Top Screen) – What Do They Mean?
https://www.webnots.com/meaning-of-android-symbols-and-icons/ Meaning of Android Symbols and Icons
https://droidrant.com/what-are-the-symbols-on-android-phone/ What are the Symbols on Android Phone?
The most interesting piece of information is that the symbols I'm trying to decipher aren't icons at all; icons are the much tinier symbols along the presumed status bar at the top of the phone display. So far I haven't found a definition of what to call these symbols, but after all, this is Android.
And then Callum Gibson came up with another suggestion:
cgibson: incidentally, you can configure what appears there (click the writing pencil
at the top right). There might be additional descriptions in there
Aaah! Another undocumented symbol, presumably the rocket being fired from its bunker:
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And how about that, it gave me a complete list, along with descriptions like “Floating wir”, “Screen Recc”, “Reading Mc” and “Nearby Sha”:
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By Android standards, that's presumably good documentation.
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/24 for sale
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Topic: technology, history, opinion | Link here |
I've received a message from RIPE: I am no longer entitled to the /24 network block (192.109.197.0/24) that I have had for 31 years, nearly as long as RIPE has been in existence.
Oh. That's sad. Somehow it's part of my life, and I use the block every day. Just not on the Global Internet. And it's nice to know that the address range is so low in what used to be called a “Class C network” that it's considerably lower than the RFC 1918 range of 192.168.0.0/16.
But the writing's on the wall: LEMIS no longer exists (closed down in 2007, deregistered in 2019), and since I haven't found a good way to use the address block on the Internet, it's not clear what good it is to me. Now I need to find out if somebody wants to buy the block.
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Bloody SBS!
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
SBS advertised a marginally interesting sounding series today, so tried to download it. Oh!
WARNING: [ThePlatform] Failed to download m3u8 information: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden
Does it display on my browser? No! You're outside Australia!
Hmm. Maybe losing the /24 isn't such a bad idea after all. But more experimentation showed that it was just a bad error message, and that it no longer put up with the presence of my ad blocker. With other browser instances I could watch just fine, if “just fine” can include putting up with up to 60 seconds of ads before anything starts.
What can I do? Out of date yt-dlp? Yes, it seems to be a few weeks out of date, but the FreeBSD package hasn't been updated yet. Callum Gibson uses the development version from GitHub, and he tried that with the same results.
Supply user and password? He tried that without success. Do I care? There's relatively little on SBS that's worth watching, but some things are—Servant of the People, for example. And the fact that they invariably have subtitles for foreign language films is also an advantage. More stuff to investigate.
| Wednesday, 29 March 2023 | Dereel | |
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Norman Lehey: Happy century
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Topic: history, general, opinion | Link here |
Read in my mail today:
Mar 29 Norman Lehey born in North Carlton, 1923
100 years! Of course he has been dead for nearly 14 years. But somehow it's a milestone.
| Thursday, 30 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 30 March 2023 |
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Bibimjang again
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Bibimbap for breakfast this morning, requiring bibimjang, the sauce that goes with it. Two months ago I found a recipe, made it, and found it excellent. But I made only a small quantity, and I didn't put it in my recipes page. Another attempt today with a larger quantity:
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Somehow I think there's far too much sesame seed in there, and that proved to be correct. I had multiplied the original quantities by 3, but somehow I ended up with 6 times the sesame seeds. Time to update the recipe.
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Another system crash!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My IRC proxy wasn't running again today. It's really very unreliable, so in to restart it. But this time things were different:
=== grog@lax (/dev/pts/3) ~ 4 -> uptime
12:57AM up 16:45, 4 users, load averages: 0.59, 0.49, 0.51
The system was restarted! That's the second time in three months! The good news is that ffm.lemis.com is still going fine:
=== grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 37 -> date; uptime
Thu Mar 30 01:27:57 UTC 2023
1:27AM up 1879 days, 10:30, 2 users, load averages: 0.39, 0.38, 0.36
I wonder how long it will be before it also goes down.
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Gardening: losing the battle
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Somehow, despite attention, the garden looks worse now than it did at the beginning of the season. Here the current state of the north garden:
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It's almost time to call in somebody to concrete over the whole thing.
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Use a mobile phone!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Strange error message from Google Maps today: “Something went wrong, please reload” or some such. And of course a link to a “learn more” page that didn't address the issue at all. But that's modern.
What's also modern is apparently that I'm not using the right kind of “device”:
Your account, g@gmail.com, is signed in on a device that doesn't have a screenlock. If your phone is lost or stolen, a screenlock helps protect your personal info. Add a screenlock.
Well, fools, you're wrong. My Gmail account isn't signed in on my phone. And my “device” is a real computer, and locking the screen wouldn't help much: it's the keyboard that's the issue.
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Why is my phone so slow?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
enzian, the Xiaomi Redmi 9A that I bought for Yvonne, proved so slow that I had to buy her another phone. Since then, enzian has been on my desk for playing around with. And yes, it's amazingly slow.
Why? I've had cheaper phones that weren't that bad, and the phone is several orders of magnitude faster than my 1970s supercomputer benchmark, the Control Data 7600. Has anybody else found insights? Off looking, and came up with a number of pages, none of them overly convincing. This one might be worth following up on, but in general the opinions are that it's related to storage overload, which doesn't seem to be correct.
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Accessing SBS again
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
What has SBS done to stop me accessing videos? Callum Gibson had tried with a password, without success. But when I tried it, there was a clue in the error message vomit:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/10) /spool/Series 488 -> yt-dlp -u Gurgling -p FooBlah https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/vanda/season-1/vanda-s1-ep4/2177935427823
WARNING: [SBS] Login with password is not supported for this website. Use --cookies-from-browser or --cookies for the authentication. See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/FAQ#how-do-i-pass-cookies-to-yt-dlp for how to manually pass cookies
OK, I'll bite. It seems that yt-dlp can read save cookies from web browsers with an invocation like
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/9) /spool/Series 224 -> yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --cookies ~/cookies.txt
firefox is a keyword that can also be chrome. It seems to go off looking for the cookies database, not always cleverly:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/9) /spool/Already/Series 224 -> yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser chrome --cookies ~/chromecookies.txt
[Cookies] Extracting cookies from chrome
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/runpy.py", line 197, in _run_module_as_main
return _run_code(code, main_globals, None,
...
File "/usr/local/bin/yt-dlp/yt_dlp/cookies.py", line 120, in extract_cookies_from_browser
File "/usr/local/bin/yt-dlp/yt_dlp/cookies.py", line 281, in _extract_chrome_cookies
FileNotFoundError: could not find chrome cookies database in "/home/grog/.config/google-chrome"
I was going to say “of course not, idiot”, because all I could find was a directory ~/.config/chromium/, full of horrible file names with spaces in them. But it doesn't contain anything likely, just:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/9) /spool/Already/Series 230 -> l -rt ~/.config/chromium/*ook*
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 28,672 6 Mar 2020 /home/grog/.config/chromium/Safe Browsing Cookies
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 0 6 Mar 2020 /home/grog/.config/chromium/Safe Browsing Cookies-journal
And clearly that hasn't been used in over 3 years.
But of course the web page is too polite to remind me that the browser I sometimes use isn't “chrome”, it's “chromium”. And with that keyword it works.
The firefox cookies get found after searching for the file cookies.sqlite in over 30,000 files (directories), although it's in the standard place ~/.mozilla/cookies.sqlite:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/9) /spool/Already/Series 232 -> time yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --cookies ~/chromecookies.txt
[Cookies] Searching for "cookies.sqlite": 36050 files searched
...
[Cookies] Extracting cookies from firefox
[Cookies] Extracted 1791 cookies from firefox
Usage: yt-dlp [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]
yt-dlp: error: You must provide at least one URL.
Type yt-dlp --help to see a list of all options.
It's not clear why the error message appears, but it does store round 1800 cookies in text form, including some for SBS. It doesn't help much, though:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/10) /spool/Series/Vanda/01 504 -> yt-dlp --cookies ~/cookies.txt https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/vanda/season-1/vanda-s1-ep4/2177935427823
[SBS] Extracting URL: https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/vanda/season-1/vanda-s1-ep4/2177935427823
[SBS] 2177935427823: Downloading JSON metadata
[ThePlatform] Extracting URL: http://link.theplatform.com/s/Bgtm9B/ZyWXAvrege7b?feed=Video%20-%20Single&mbr=true&manifest=m3u&o...il_url%22%3A+true%7D
[ThePlatform] ZyWXAvrege7b: Downloading SMIL data
[ThePlatform] ZyWXAvrege7b: Downloading m3u8 information
WARNING: [ThePlatform] Failed to download m3u8 information: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden
So what's the problem now? I need to follow through and find when cookies get saved, and how firefox distinguishes between cookies for different profiles.
| Friday, 31 March 2023 | Dereel | Images for 31 March 2023 |
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Riding photos
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Topic: animals, photography | Link here |
Yvonne and Pam spent some time in the hall today playing with horses and taking photos:
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Black cockatoos!
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Topic: animals | Link here |
While walking the dogs today:
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I have a feeling that I can improve on those photos, but the originals could have been better. Maybe it's an opportunity for Luminar Neo.
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Another gardener
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Samantha Berry along today as the next person to address our weed disaster. We've met before: she did some work for us in Kleins Road, but I didn't mention it in this diary, and I can't recall why she stopped. She'll be here again on Monday.
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Ukraine refugees in UK: animal import only via Google or Facebook
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Topic: politics, general, technology, opinion | Link here |
I receive a regular newsletter from the UK Government about the Ukraine crisis. Refugees are allowed to bring in their domestic animals, something that in the past has been almost impossible for mere mortals. But there are conditions:
Before you travel to the UK, apply to bring your pets to Great Britain from Ukraine. You will need a Google or Facebook account.
O tempora! O mores!
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More download experiments
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
Why couldn't I download SBS programmes yesterday? My suspicion was that I wasn't getting cookies from the right place. Today I spent some time looking for alternatives:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/13) ~/.mozilla 57 -> locate cookies.sqlite | xargs ls -rtld
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 1572864 18 Aug 2019 /home/grog/.mozilla/firefox/Braved-New-World/cookies.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 32768 18 Aug 2019 /home/grog/.mozilla/firefox/Braved-New-World/cookies.sqlite-shm
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 1442880 18 Aug 2019 /home/grog/.mozilla/firefox/Braved-New-World/cookies.sqlite-wal
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 2097152 9 Dec 2020 /home/grog/.mozilla/firefox/Brave-New-World/cookies.sqlite.bak
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 2097152 9 Dec 2020 /home/grog/.mozilla/firefox/Brove-New-World/cookies.sqlite.bak
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 2097152 9 Dec 2020 /home/grog/.mozilla/cookies.sqlite.bak
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 1572864 2 Jan 2022 /home/grog/.mozilla/firefox/Brove-New-World/cookies.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 590288 2 Jan 2022 /home/grog/.mozilla/firefox/Brove-New-World/cookies.sqlite-wal
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 1572864 27 Jan 2022 /home/grog/.mozilla/cookies.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 688664 27 Jan 2022 /home/grog/.mozilla/cookies.sqlite-wal
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 1572864 17 Mar 12:52 /home/grog/.mozilla/firefox/Brave-New-World/cookies.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 590288 17 Mar 12:52 /home/grog/.mozilla/firefox/Brave-New-World/cookies.sqlite-wal
Not what I expected: the most recent cookies file hasn't been modified in 12 days. But it shows that there are multiple cookie files, one per “profile”. And though many of them are the same size, the contents are different.
OK, what happens if I log in to SBS and then stop the firefox instance to allow it to save its cookies? No change.
Maybe this is a time where chromium could have an advantage. Let's take a look:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/13) ~/.config/chromium 66 -> l -rt Default/Cookies*
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 0 24 Jan 22:05 Default/Cookies-journal
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 425,984 24 Jan 22:05 Default/Cookies
OK, that could be right. Log in to SBS and see what happens to the cookies file:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/13) ~/.config/chromium 67 -> l -rt Default/Cookies*
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 425,984 31 Mar 16:31 Default/Cookies
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 0 31 Mar 16:31 Default/Cookies-journal
OK, there's something to compare. But how do I extract them? RTFM? No, no FM. First find the documentation, then extract and compare. Mañana.
But then there was another issue. Pam Hay had pointed us to some programmes that looked interesting, notably A Place to Call Home, of which I downloaded the first season. I was sure that we had seen it, at least in part, but after we watched the first episode in the evening, Yvonne can't recall it. I can, but vaguely.
But there was other stuff there, including The Love Boat. Yes, it doesn't look like it will be worth watching, but why not check?
ERROR: [7plus] LBOA01-001: This video is DRM protected
Oh. In principle, that's enough to give up, but there must be some way to download these files. After all, I can look at them with a web browser. Off searching for information and found this page, which contains a lot of seemingly contradictory statements, one of which mentioned the undocumented option --allow-u:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/10) /spool/Series/Love-Boat/01 511 -> yt-dlp --allow-u https://7plus.com.au/the-love-boat?episode-id=LBOA01-001
WARNING: You have asked for UNPLAYABLE formats to be listed/downloaded. This is a developer option intended for debugging.
If you experience any issues while using this option, DO NOT open a bug report
[7plus] Extracting URL: https://7plus.com.au/the-love-boat?episode-id=LBOA01-001
[7plus] LBOA01-001: Downloading JSON metadata
....
[info] LBOA01-001: Downloading 1 format(s): hls-2061+dash-54a252ff-511c-4665-ae49-b4fa91db6095-3
WARNING: You have requested merging of multiple formats while also allowing unplayable formats to be downloaded. The formats won't be merged to prevent data corruption.
[hlsnative] Downloading m3u8 manifest
[hlsnative] Total fragments: 288
[download] Destination: S1 E1 - The Captain & The Lady One If By Land Centerfold [LBOA01-001].fhls-2061.mp4
ERROR: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u29f8' in position 31: ordinal not in range(256)
OK, the character set error was fixable with the right LC_ALL, but the result was still not displayable. But there's more on that page:
DL video part
DL audio part
Decrypt video part
Decrypt audio part
Merge both decrypted parts with ffmpeg
What that entails is another case for pasado mañana.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
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