Unexpected visitor drove into the driveway today: two women, one very black. That's unusual
round here: most non-European people are from East Asia, and even the darkest skinned people
are relatively light-skinned compared to the darkest Africans. Since Australia has (far too
grudgingly) admitted some refugees, we see them now from time to time
in Ballarat. But this woman puzzled me:
she didn't look African either. And her accent didn't help: she sounded like any normal
Australian, possibly of British origin. Of course, I didn't want to ask.
It proved that they
were Jehovah's witnesses.
Yvonne was in the process of shooing them away when I came
out and had a chat. The Jehovah's witnesses interest me, and I've had various chats with
them over the years, most recently 6½ years ago, where I discovered that they didn't know
the Ten Commandments, or at
least not the second 10. Mentioned that this time too, and she (the black one, who did all
the talking) hadn't either. But she held her ground, even though her education was very
bible-centric, and when she left she said that she was going to check on the second Ten
Commandments (for which I couldn't give a chapter number, just that it was probably less
than 7; in fact it's Deuteronomy 5,
their link, whose wording differs from other translations I have seen, notably the repeated
mention of the name “Jehovah”).
She didn't know other religious books. She claimed that the Bible was the oldest surviving
religious text. and hadn't heard of
the Epic of Gilgamesh
or Bhagavad Gita. Are they older?
Gilgamesh yes, nearly twice as old, and it clearly had significant influence on the Bible,
but the Bhagavad Gita is probably newer.
Finally they left, undefeated, for the first time in 50 years. I was quite impressed.
I really need to find a replacement gas cooktop to fit next to the new induction cooktop.
It's not easy: most cooktops are 60 or 90 cm wide (and, strangely in Australia, not 600 or
900 mm). I want one that is only 30 cm wide, and there's not much choice.
In principle I'm not asking for much: two burners, one a “wok burner”, the wok burner at the
front so that it doesn't burn the wall like our current cooktop does:
The “low” setting on some cooktops can't be adjusted properly with LPG. It's too high.
Off to Appliances Online to find
out. They knew exactly what I wanted: Domino 30
cm cooktops, politely arranged so that I didn't have to think or get information
overload: one truncated line of “Highest Rated”, one truncated line of “Biggest % Discount
off RRP”. And the truncation was in the middle of the page:
To see more, I had to press on this silly grey arrow in the middle of the first image,
removing what I already had on the screen. I've seen this on mobile phones, where it's a
result of the appalling user interface. But why do they force it onto users of better
interfaces? I can only attribute it to mobile phone brain damage.
OK, fight my way past the inappropriate grouping and look for the specs. There are 17 of
them, only one (according to their page) suitable for LPG. Do I believe them? Not in the
slightest. As I discovered, all the cooktops I looked at could be adapted for LPG,
and many came with an adapter kit. One even delivered more power with LPG than with
“natural gas”.
Next, what power output do the burners have? Who cares? I do, of course, and clearly so do
the people who distinguish between “burner” and “wok burner”. But when I try to compare
these two cooktops, both from the same maker, there's nothing to explain the 3:1 price
difference:
There's a little more below, but basically the “comparison” shows no difference whatsoever
beyond minor differences in dimensions. except that the cheaper one includes trivets and
wok stand, not specified for the others. That's a “comparison”?
Finally ended up downloading the manuals and spec sheets for those cooktops that met the
primary specification: two burners. Even the spec sheets and manuals don't include all the
information. What I got was:
For completeness sake, that last entry isn't from Appliances Online.
I have converted those ratings to kW,
something that Australians don't believe in: they prefer MJ/hour (or, on one spec sheet,
mj/hour), apparently because the resulting number is close
to BTUs. From https://www.stovesonline.co.uk/btu-kw.asp:
To convert kWh to BTU simply multiply by 3414.
To convert kW to MJ/h, you multiply by 3600, of course, making a BTU 1.054 MJ/h.
Only the most expensive one quotes the power in kW, unfortunately incorrectly: it's off by a
factor of 3 or 4. Maybe they meant 17.1 MJ/h, corresponding to 4.75 kW. That would be the
most powerful one—if it's correct. But at $2,500 it's ridiculously expensive.
Apart from that, which is the best choice? The cheap Smeg, for only $409! Who says that
expensive is better?
Statista published some statistics today: between 1968 and 2015, 1.53 million
“Americans” (residents? citizens?) died from firearm-related injuries. That's over 25%
more than all US wars since 1775. And still they haven't done anything about the problem.
A few days ago Facebook announced a new
security breach. Was I affected? Probably not. Would it make any difference? Certainly
not. There's nothing on my Facebook account that can be abused elsewhere. Even my place of
birth, my domicile and my alma mater are wrong (though in each case a subtle hint that
nobody has understood so far).
Still, it would be interesting to see what Facebook says. First, where am I logged in?
“Windows” computer? I don't have no steenking
“Windows” computer. Oh, well, maybe I do, but it's sleeping. What Facebook means, of
course, is that my firefox is
claiming to be Microsoft to get around web sites that don't want to talk to FreeBSD.
My Chromium instance
doesn't, so it's just a “computer”.
But what about the other “computer”
in West Hollywood? I haven't been
in that area for decades. Proxy, maybe? No, don't recognize the IP address. OK, log into
Facebook on the firefox instance on eureka:0.3, which is connected to a proxy
somewhere in the Eastern USA. Yes!
On Saturday I read a message in the local Facebook group: Kim Baxter
had “lost Internet”. OK, let's do what I can to help. “Try this”. No reply, just the
interesting information that she was with Aussie Broadband, my ISP. So is Paul Shire, who also had no problems.
But it turned out that it was an Aussie problem after all. A few hours later Kim stated “a
problem with their firewall”, and pointed me to their Facebook page, which indeed stated
something about problems. Which problems? No idea. It's gone again. How I love Facebook!
And why only on Facebook?
But then today I got mail describing a meltdown at their central server facility
in Melbourne. Not too much
detail—after all, most customers are non-technical—but a link to a technical analysis on Whirlpool.
That makes excellent reading.
It seems that something, probably an infected customer machine, targeted their
central VoIP infrastructure, and inadequate
protection allowed the load to spill over into other systems,
notably DHCP
and DNS. They described what
happened, what they did about it (with times), and how they intend to stop it happening
again. That's a refreshing change from
the CYA attitude of most ISPs.
An interesting article in the New York Times today,
pointing to a Pew Research Center survey of “foreigners” (in other words, non US Americans) about
their opinion of the USA. The results were
no surprise, but interesting for purposes of quotation. There's still majority support for
the USA, but it's diminishing, as this comparison
with China shows:
One of the better Chinese dishes I recall from my childhood is West Lake Fish. What's that? I
only ever ate it, and never cooked it. But it's freshwater fish cooked with ginger and
spring onions. Yvonne has bought some
frozen Barramundi a while back, so it
sounded like a good idea to try it.
Which recipe? Pei Mei had one that didn't look very typical, and she wanted it boiled.
Wendy Hutton's “Singapore food” looked better, though she didn't call it “West Lake Fish”. It was
to be steamed.
OK, we have a big enough steamer. But it wasn't to be steamed directly in the steamer It
needed to be in a bowl to collect the juices:
In general, undercooked fish isn't an issue, but here the meat wouldn't come off the bones.
Another 10 minutes (probably the equivalent of 5 if we had done it before serving) was
enough, and it didn't taste bad.
But it's still just a beginning, leaving us with a number of issues:
The fish weighed 500 g. Not enough for 2 people, not even with Yvonne's tiny appetite.
We need to find something bigger.
What sauce? Looking at the recipes I (later) found online, most want vinegar. I'm not
sure that I do. If that's the hallmark of West Lake Fish, maybe I want something else.
Steamed, boiled, or something else? It's quite clumsy using our 40 cm steamer, and it
leaks, requiring a wok burner running quite hot to keep the insides hot enough. Is
there an alternative? Microwave oven, maybe?
Using the steamer shows a disadvantage of all of the gas cooktops I have been looking at
recently: the hot burner
is at the back. That doesn't really work:
I'm still looking for gas cooktops, and gradually I've come to the conclusion that the
Smeg SARV532X3 is the best choice. But Appliances Online no longer list it.
Chatting to one of their web people, I was told that it was discontinued, and that I should
buy the 3 times more expensive and weaker Smeg PGA23G. Grr!
But there are other alternatives. On eBay I
found an Elfa BLGSW30CF, interesting because it's the only one I have found with the
wok burner in front. But that has its issues, as this review shows:
... the large gas ring is next to the handles. If you put a fry pan or saucepan on the
ring, the handles become so hot you cannot touch them without a towel. When using the
large ring for a lengthy time the handles will smoke and then erupt into flames. I believe
the manufacturer has a fault in their design. The small ring should be near the handles or
the handles made to be further away. Be careful when purchasing this item, it could burn
your kitchen down!
Maybe that's why the burners are at the back. Burn the wall, not the knobs. Of course,
there are alternative solutions, but clearly this cooktop is out of the question.
But then there are single burner cooktops with the burner oriented like on our current
cooktop. Are they a better idea? I'm reluctant to choose one.
Unexpected item in the post today. I had already puzzled over the notification slip,
showing only my name (and thus not an eBay item, which get sent to both Yvonne and me) and with a tracking number ending in MY,
meaning Malaysia.
It proved to be a copy of “The Merdeka
Interviews”, by Lai Chee Kien and Ang Chee Cheong, along with a thank-you from Chee
Kien: it included a couple of photos of my father taken on 27 July 1965:
The background: the book is a summary of a number of interviews (as the title suggests)
about architecture in Malaysia in the 1960s (which has nothing to do with the title). The
interviews were started a couple of years after my father's death, and the only people whose
names I recognize were Ivor Shipley and Dudley Pritchard (who, it occurs to me, could be
related to this idiot Llewellyn Pritchard who wrote an incompetent report on the problems in
our house earlier this
year).
There's thus not much mention of my father—I haven't even found a reference to his work
at FLDA, though the photos were taken from
a page which also included
perspective drawings of a number of FLDA houses. And Dudley Pritchard, who talked about
Dad, was inaccurate enough in his dating that it should have occurred to Lai and Ang: he
claimed that he was still at the Technical College when the photos above were taken; in fact
he had been working on the FLDA project for a couple of years.
Still, it's a nice-looking book, and I haven't read much of its 688 pages, and the
reviews look positive. But it brings back to me again how long ago it all was—the
book arrived almost exactly on time for my 70th birthday, and when I took those photos I was
17 years old.
With some satisfaction I heard of yesterday's ICJ judgement on the US sanctions
on Iran: parts of them were declared
unlawful.
Yes, it's more a symbolic ruling: the USA will ignore it, and it has given them cause to
tear up the
Treaty
of Amity, Economic Relations and Consular Rights that they made in 1955 and had clearly
forgotten about. But from a moral standpoint, once again
the USA is not living up to its own standards
as an upright defender of international law.
My failure with the
Bosch PIJ611BB1E induction cooktop last week rather discouraged me, and it wasn't
until today that I connected it up correctly, in the process marvelling at the complicated
cable clamp, which requires tools to disengage.
Connect it to the power. No problems. How do you turn it on? Clearly you press on the
button. Did that. Dammit, no reaction.
OK, RTFM:
To switch on: touch the
symbol. An audible signal sounds.
Dammit, what's wrong? A bit of investigation shows: the documentation. You need to press
the area for at least 1 second before it will deign to do anything.
That's not the only fault in the documentation. It has two different + symbols with
different meanings:
That missing reference is also missing in the thoughtfully included instructions in French.
The real issue, though, is that there's no easy way to turn off a field (“hotplate”). You
need to hold down the - symbol to count down to 0, and 1 second per half unit. So to
turn off a plate set at 9 (the maximum) takes 18 seconds!. It seems that it
makes more sense simply to remove the pan and wait until the unit decides for itself to turn
off.
In fact, there's a faster way, though the designers probably didn't intend it: press on
the “boost” to the right on the bottom line of controls, then +. This will
wrap round to 0.
Somehow this is incredibly short-sighted. It should be enough to press on the +
symbol (the bigger one). That's what you use to turn the field on, but you can't use it to
turn it off again. And a selection of all the numbers along the front of the unit would be
so easy to implement—even the el cheapo ALDI unit has that. What are the designers
thinking? Or is it product management?
In passing, it's interesting to note
the regular expression used to
describe the models to which these instructions claim to refer:
What are the German instructions like? Hard to say. After fighting my way through no less
than 10 pages on http://www.bosch-home.de/, I couldn't find this
model. I did find other interesting information, though: their price range is from 937 € to
4060 €, far above what I paid for mine (the equivalent of 647 €), and they seem to be moving
towards a uniform heating surface rather than individual “hot plates”.
The closest model I could find to mine was the NUE645CB2E, also the cheapest at 937 €. The instructions are
similar, including the missing reference, but there's a reference to an otherwise
undocumented knob:
Where is that knob? There's nothing shown on any of the other illustrations, only
the + and - fields, which are not documented here. It looks like the left
hand, right hand syndrome. The documentation also says that you can turn off a field by
pressing on the big + symbol, as I had suggested. But can I believe it?
So finally I can use the Bosch PIJ611BB1E induction cooktop, for cooking breakfast. The first surprise (which
I discovered yesterday): it's quiet. Maybe it was that or something else, but I got the
impression that it didn't heat as much as the old ALDI cooktop. The field I used is rated at 2200 W, compared to 1800 W for the ALDI.
But it's 22.5 cm in diameter, compared to 18 cm for the ALDI, so the power is only 5.5
W/cm², compared to 7.1 W/cm² for the ALDI. Does that make a difference when you're heating
the same utensil?
Another reason might be that the ALDI cooktop has too many settings at the top end of the
scale and not enough at the bottom end: 300, 600, 900, 1200, 1400, 1600, 1800 and (“boost”)
2100 W, and I find that 1200 and 1600 are of no use at all: start cooking at 1800 W, then
turn down to 900 W. By comparison, on the Bosch I started at level 9 (they're too polite to
mention nasty things like Watts) and continued at 7 or 8. Still, the good news is that it
works.
They're hardy in the extreme, and the Echium pininana sows so many seeds that you could
consider it a weed, and we decided to remove it from the garden. But since arriving in
Stones Road, now nearly 3½ years ago, our cuttings of the Echium candicans have done nothing
useful.
Decided to make a laksa for breakfast
today. That's straightforward: mix the pre-packaged paste with water, bring to the boil,
add fish.
But the cooktop (the new Bosch PIJ611BB1E) didn't want to talk to the enameled steel pot! Dammit, what's
wrong there? Tried another pot, and that didn't work either. Both work on the old
ALDI induction cooker, so completed breakfast
on that.
What's wrong? Is this Bosch cooktop so fussy that it won't take normal enameled iron?
That's not what they claim, and it makes no sense. After breakfast grabbed an assortment of
pots to try out. They all worked, including the ones I had had trouble with before. What's
the issue? The best I can guess is that I misplaced the pots on the cooktop. To be
observed.
ALDI have an interesting item in their weekly
“specials”: a Nokia 3 “smart” phone (a
term I've decided not to use where I can avoid it) for only $129. That's by far the
cheapest phone I've seen from a brand name supplier, and since it's ALDI, I asked Yvonne to pick one up when she was there this morning. In the course of
discussion we decided to make it two, in case Yvonne wanted one too.
In the meantime, did some investigation and discovered that it was on offer at Woolworths in Sebastopol—just across
the road—for $90 (or, as they put it, $89.99). That's amazing, since ALDI is usually almost
invariably the cheapest. But clearly it's a clearance item (after all, it is last
year's model, released 15 months ago), and elsewhere it's going for only a little under
$200.
Which should I take? $40 is $39.01, but if I don't like it, I can't take it back. Did some
thinking until Yvonne called and told me that I had read the wrong “specials” newsletter:
it's not until next week. She wasn't going to Woolworths, so that was that, at least for
today.
The question is, of course, do I need a new phone? The biggest issue I have with my
current Samsung I9100 is that the
battery consumption is so high. And as Peter Jeremy commented on IRC:
<peter> grO0gle: Why do you want a new mobile phone? You only ever whinge about them.
But even a new battery for the old phone would cost me about $12, and potentially the new
one wouldn't be as irritating. We have a week to think about it.
About a year ago I did a lot of playing around with focus stacking, which I intended to use
for wildflowers. Today while walking the dogs, saw lots of new wildflowers. And there was
almost no wind—ideal conditions for focus stacking photos.
But it's so difficult! Well, not so much difficult as fiddly. I had to force myself to go
out and do some photos, and even then I didn't bother about the viewfinder. Took something
like 300 images, including down Misery Creek Road, leaving me wondering whether I should
keep all the originals or not.
This stuff is really fiddly. How many images do you take? How do you set initial and final
focus? I'm no further ahead now than I was this time last year. The camera could really
offer better help for this sort of thing.
We're having a number of guests on Monday, and we're planning to
serve Gazpacho andaluz
and Paella valenciana. Today Yvonne started with the gazpacho, and I tried to take photos:
What went wrong there? It had to be at a time where Yvonne really wanted to continue her
work, of course. I tried a total of 15 images, and none of them were what I normally get
without trying.
I have two studio flash units in lounge room and kitchen (Australian houses are too polite
to have a separate kitchen). The unit in the lounge has a wireless trigger, and the one in
the kitchen is triggered optically by the one in the lounge room, because I can't get at the
wall switch, and any trigger would be under power all the time. Was it not firing? No, I
distinctly saw the flash when I pressed the test button.
Much messing around and cursing. Finally I gave up and got my mecablitz 58 AF-2 on-camera flash:
Why is it still underexposed? Somehow I never have good results with on-camera
flash. What am I doing wrong?
More investigation showed that my slave studio flash wasn't firing after all: the flash that
I saw was the reflection of the other flash unit. It seems that the bright conditions in
the lounge room prevented the flash from triggering. I'll need to look at how to put a
wireless trigger in there after all. But I still have no idea why the TTL exposure on the
mecablitz produced such terrible results.
That's a dish she learnt from her first mother-in-law, Paulette Binos de Pombarat. The
recipe is here. It tasted OK, but
more Southern French than North African. I think our tastes have moved on in the last 40
years.
Daylight saving time began
today, and with it the usual resetting of countless timepieces. Well, not countless: there
were 14 of them, including 4 cameras, the oven and one of the microwave ovens. All of the
above are a pain. The Olympus E-PM1 and
E-PM2 don't have a
way to set seconds, and the most accurate way to set the OM-D E-M1OM-D E-M1 Mark II is with
Olympus' appalling OI.Share app. I managed it in about 2 minutes with the E-M1, but for some reason it didn't want to
communicate with the E-M1 Mark II, and just pretended it wasn't there. In the end I had to
set it manually.
The kitchen devices are also strange. I have two microwave ovens, but I can't find any way
at all to set one, and the other needs to be set digit for digit. I also can't find any
sensible way to set the oven: either there is none, or it's so well hidden that I couldn't
find it. Instead I had to power cycle the device.
And ten minutes after I was done, we had a power failure! Kitchen devices all over
again.
When I got married to Yvonne, who is French, I was entitled to French citizenship as a result. I considered it and
discovered that it would mean renouncing my Australian citizenship, so I decided not to.
The key thing was that I had to apply for citizenship; at some previous time it had been
conferred automatically, which would have allowed me to keep my Australian citizenship.
Recently there was some discussion about dual citizenship on Quora, and I responded accordingly. And then I discovered
that the law has changed, and I would now be allowed to take on French citizenship without losing my
Australian citizenship.
Of course, who knows if it's still open to me? But on reflection, I can't see any good
reason to take it on now. 33 years ago I was travelling a lot, and it could have been
useful, but I don't see much use any more.
Yvonne had to go into town today to pick up some food that
she had forgotten. Time to pick up a couple of
the Nokia 3 phones that I had been
thinking about yesterday? Nope, the special offer was over. But she asked anyway, and how
about that, there were exactly two left, and she got them for $90 each.
Back home, the usual fun trying to set the thing up. Battery was discharged, of course, and
when I connected it to the charger, nothing happened. But that was one of the amazingly few
things they documented. The entire instructions are on a single sheet of paper (the safety
instructions are much longer). Even the link to the real instructions is generic: www.nokia.com/phones. But it
does say
If the battery is completely discharged, it may take several minutes before the charging
indicator is displayed.
In fact, it didn't display at all. I had to press the “On” button briefly to see a display
indicator. After a couple of hours it was round 36%, so I tried things out.
One positive thing is that the phone is that it is designed for
2 SIMs. But how?
Yes, there's space for two, but only a cutout for the first one:
What a puzzling map. A number of the details seem just plain wrong. But the clear answer
(on the left) is “Currently no voice coverage”. So Vodafone isn't an option.
But phones aren't locked any more, right? I've unlocked phones before, and there wasn't
much of an issue. Went looking and finally came up with this page, which tells me:
If you purchased your device after 1 August 2013, it won't be network locked.
Ah, but there were strings attached to that. That's for “on a plan”. Select the “On
prepaid” and I get:
If you purchased your device outright to use with a prepaid service, there'll be a fee to
unlock it from the Vodafone network.
If you’ve had your device for less than 6 months there’s a $50 unlocking fee.
If you’ve had your device for over 6 months there’s a $25 unlocking fee.
Damn! Is that still allowed? And where does it say on the box that it's locked?
Sorry, Vodafone, this is unacceptable. They go to the trouble to make it clear that there's
no micro SD card, but they don't say that it's locked, at least not directly, and the
indirect reference is hidden in small print and unrelated text (“with ... a 4G device”;
don't they know whether this device can do 4G or not?). Theoretically I could have bought
this thing for $5 less than an unlocked one and then lost the option to buy the unlocked
one. And the unlocked ones are really only $40 more expensive.
OK, pull the card and try to use the other features. Pain! I suppose people in the
Microsoft space are used to the user interface changing with every release, but I really
wasn't able to work out how to use this one. It has voice input, so I asked it “OK, Google,
how do I navigate this abortion?”. The result was about as good as I would have expected,
useless: “Abortion services in Victoria - Better Health Channel”.
How do people in the Real World learn to use these devices? My bet is that they find a
friend who knows what to do. And probably a not insubstantial proportion of new users never
find out how to use the things.
So do I keep it or not? One way or another my old phone is old, and I'll have to put up
with these continually changing interfaces. As Peter Jeremy implied, at least I have
something to whinge about.
OK, more fun with focus stacking.
This time I wanted to use flash, which has its own issues. The saved configuration for my
Olympus E-M1 Mark II was for aperture priority, and for studio flash I want manual control. How do I set
that?
After some reading, I don't think that you can. Normally you set the exposure measuring
mode to P (“program”), A (aperture priority), S (shutter priority)
or M (fully manual) with the mode dial:
For studio flash I need M, since there's no feedback between flash and camera. But
as set (C3, custom settings), I can no longer set that, and it seems that the people
who designed the menus hadn't thought of that. Instead you need to restore the custom
settings to one of P, A, S or M, which rather defeats the
purpose of the dial position. And at the end you need to wipe it again. That could do with
improvement.
And the exposure? The first attempt looked overexposed in the viewfinder, and I turned the
exposure down a bit. But that was misleading; the first one looked best after processing.
Here first and last (run the cursor over an image to compare it with
its neighbour):
Last monthTony Northrup claimed that
the Micro Four Thirds
system won't survive what he calls the “Mirrorless WARS”. Is he right? Time will tell.
My personal feeling is that smaller cameras, and in particular smaller lenses, are the way
to go. But certainly the recent spate of new releases of full-frame mirrorless cameras goes
against that feeling. One of the new releases is the Panasonic Lumix S1R. What does that say about Panasonic's commitment to υFT?
Not enough, it seems. Panasonic did announce a very interesting new μFT lens, the
10-25 mm f/1.7, at Photokina, and now
they have issued a statement:
Round 3:00 into the clip, they say
We'll never give up on micro Four Thirds. ... 30% of the market is full frame, and 70% is
smaller sensors, for example micro Four Thirds.
So they're covering their bases. That makes sense, I suppose. Certainly it will be a long
time before anybody comes out with a 20-50 mm f/1.7 zoom for full frame.
Another basil plant, the sole survivor of some seeds that I planted in mid-winter. It has
grown while the other one died. OK, now that it's warm (today we hit 27.5°) I planted some
more, along with some chives.
This week there's a skill at arms workshop for mediaeval reenactors
at Kryal Castle, and Chris Bahlo has
a visitor from New Zealand who is
participating, so we had put off our normal Saturday dinner until tonight. He's called Ed,
surname so far unknown, and he has a PhD,
apparently, as he says, so that people can call him Dr. Ed rather than Mr. Ed. Also
Margaret Swan (I could almost say "as usual") and Amber Fitzpatrick, who lives a little far
away (other side of Ballarat) to be a
usual.
Had a Gazpacho andaluz
and Paella valenciana, the started on the
new Bosch PIJ611BB1E induction cooktop rather than the wok burner. The results?
Excellent! About the only issue is that there's no heat setting between 2.2 kW and 3.7 kW;
the latter was too hot, a far cry from gas.
Dinner was the usual fun, even if Amber had reservations:
I think that the single flash in the dining room is good as long as there are just a few of
us, but for 6 of us I need a second flash for more even lighting.
Things are similar in the lounge room. Am I just getting more fussy? Here we are without
and with the second flash on the fridge to the right of the photo, pointing into the kitchen
space:
I have my own approach to Internet security: keep important things exclusively behind a
firewall, use separate email addresses and passwords for every site with which I am
involved, don't use mobile phones for anything security-related, A recent discussion on IRC
suggested that I go to http://www.haveibeenpwned.net/ to see if I had
been compromised.
Yes! 10 of my 466 email addresses were “pwned”. Or were they?
Email
Pwned sites
greg@lemis.com
River City Media Spam List
groggyhimself@lemis.com
Onliner Spambot
lddwwey@lemis.com
Gaadi
may-paula@lemis.com
Adobe
rog@lemis.com
River City Media Spam List
These addresses have one thing in common: they don't exist. In
particular, groggyhimself@lemis.com is a honeypot email address that I use in this
diary to represent myself. If I could be bothered, I'd collect a list of sites that try to
contact it. greg@ is an obvious but incorrect email address, and rog@ is
clearly a cut-and-paste-o. I have no idea where the other two came from.
So: how much danger emanates from this? Clearly this doesn't mean that they have my
passwords, and in fact none of the other addresses have a password associated with them.
Interestingly, my Facebook user
has not been pwned.
Sad news today: Margaret Swan, who was here for dinner last night, suffered a fall from her
horse during the skill at arms training today, and is now in hospital with a dislocated
shoulder and a broken arm. Apparently she has had an operation, which makes her condition
even worse than Yvonne's in January. Details are scanty—Chris
Bahlo, who reported it, is too busy for details, and nowadays people “text” and don't make
phone calls—and I don't know whether it's appropriate to call Margaret directly.
For the past 6 months or so I have been
using TIFF as the intermediate format for my
composite photos (panoramas, HDR, focus stacking). They're big,
typically round 120 MB per image, and for a single HDR panorama I typically need 12 of them.
On Saturday alone my photos added up to 23 GB.
Do I really need all this stuff? No, I can recreate it relatively quickly from the base
photos. So today I deleted all the TIFF intermediate files from March to September. That
was worthwhile. Here before and after:
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ada2p1 7,629,565 5,077,266 2,476,003 67% /Photos
/dev/ada2p1 7,629,565 4,762,431 2,790,837 63% /Photos
A good 300 GB! That's more than double all the photos I had 10 years or so ago. It's not
that long ago that that was a serious amount of storage.
ALDI had a number of specials today, including
various Indian food, sadly much of it from Pataks (a name that I always interpret as the Malay word meaning “snapped, broken” in
English), the British Indian food company. I have decided to avoid any “Indian” food that
contains cream: it seems that the vast majority of Indians is lactose intolerant, so
cream is Just Plain Wrong.
But I asked her to bring a lot of stuff back anyway, including, accidentally, such horrible
ideas as this:
Why do people buy this stuff? ALDI isn't expensive, but even so it costs about 10 times the
price of raw rice, and I shudder to think what it tastes like. But the good thing is that
we can take it back, no questions asked.
And then she brought back some ceramic knives. We've tried them in the past and found them
wanting, but hope springs eternal. And how about that, this time they seem to be good. It
remains to be seen whether they stay that way (as they claim), but we'll see. About the
only thing that will take some getting used to is the colour (top knife).
Cooked noodles for dinner today. Nothing unusual, but first you need to get the water to a
boil. So far that has clearly been the electric kettle (2 kW). But the Bosch PIJ611BB1E induction cooktop has a “Boost” rating of 3.7 kW. Tried that today
(briefly but significantly overloading the 10 A plug, whose temperature rose to 25°), and
it's really impressive, almost frightening. It's really a pity they don't have anything
between 2.2 kW and 3.7 kW.
Off to Ballarat this afternoon for my
six-monthly checkup. This time he found something: a “hole”, he says. Will need a filling.
Nothing serious, but irritating, because he couldn't do it today, and I'll have to come back
next week.
I bought 10 kg of fertilizer the last
time I was in Ballarat, and at the
time I noted that they had “Rose & Citrus Fertiliser” with two different
compositions (under the heading):
The 10 kg didn't last nearly enough, so today I bought another 15 kg. This time they didn't
have those two, just normal fertilizer and “Rose & Citrus Fertiliser”—with
the same composition, 9-1-7-12
(N-P-K-S)!
I took the photos of the fertilizer with my
new Nokia 3 phone, as well as with the
old Samsung
GT-I9100T for comparison, completely forgetting the Olympus E-PM1 in
my handbag. At first sight there's not much difference:
That's the Nokia first, then the Samsung. Both have the same resolution (something that I
hadn't noticed previously). About the only obvious difference was that the Nokia didn't (in
general) focus as closely. It's not yet clear whether that was my fault or the phone's.
And the new one is like my old Nikon Coolpix 880 in
that it chooses “shutter” speeds and ISO apparently out of a continuous scale. For example
the image above was taken at 1/33 s and ISO 24.7°/237. It's also interesting because it
claims EV 7.0, while the Samsung, with exactly the same lighting, claims EV 8.6. It does
look marginally darker, but not 1.6 EV darker.
And the image quality? Based on those two photos, the Samsung is better. But that's not
exactly a rigorous test. And after all, they're only phones.
Stopped in at Woolworths in Sebastopol on the way
home to return one of the Nokia 3s that
Yvonne bought on Sunday. Too hard for the
(surprisingly busy) person at the info desk, so she called a manager, Alex, who told me that
they couldn't take it back for reasons unspecified. I pointed out that it was clearly still
shrink-wrapped, and that it had been sold under false pretences. Oh, they only sell locked
phones, and the salesperson should have told Yvonne that it's locked.
Wrong answer. It should have been made clear on the packaging. I pointed out that the
packaging warned that the microSD card was not included; why not the fact that it was
locked? Puzzled look. Finally he called Scott, the second-level manager, who agreed to
take it back with no further issues. But he wasn't prepared to unlock the other phone,
though he would have taken it back. He did read the fine print, and found the “unlocking
charge may apply” (my italics) stuck between “Offer not exchangeable or redeemable
for cash” and “All offers subject to change”:
That's clearly not the right place for such an important detail about the phone, and it
should have made clear “This phone is locked to the Vodafone network. Unlocking
fees will apply to allow other networks”. I think he secretly agreed, though clearly
he wasn't allowed to say so. He wasn't prepared to get the phone unlocked—not that I
expected him to, but I had to ask. So do I now go to Consumer Affairs Victoria, or do I just wait 6
months and have it unlocked for $25?
Mick the gardener along this morning to look at the garden. It took him 6 hours, only
cutting grass and spraying weeds. And he's only half done. That's not his fault: it really
takes that long.
Yvonne into town today to pick Margaret Swan up
from hospital. Given the breakages she's been through, she doesn't look too bad, but it
looks like it will be quite some time before she is back to normal again.
While in town yesterday, I picked up a couple more ceramic knives at ALDI. The last ones had red handles, so I chose green
for the new ones. It wasn't until I got home that I discovered something else. A couple of days ago I had commented on
the dirty colour of the blades on the ceramic knives. But that's not a bug, it's a
feature. The green ones have white blades:
The new Android phone has a presence on my local net, of course, so it needs a name. Yes, I know most
Android users are too polite for such things, but I'm not most Android users. What shall I
call it? My first Android device was a tablet, so I called it flachmann. Then the
Samsung GT-I9100T got the name talipon. What should I call this one? It's Finnish, so it should
be a Finnish name, which really eliminates teflon. How about
translating flachmann? taskumatti it is.
Time to update the DNS
configuration. Where is it? It used to be in /etc/named/db.lemis.com, but since
then it has moved a couple of times, to /var/named/etc/namedb/db.lemis.com and then
to /usr/local/etc/namedb/db.lemis.com. But this is on eureka, which has a
horribly out of date system. Where is it?
Guessed at /etc/namedb/ and updated. Damn. The changes didn't stick. Where else
could it be?
Huh? The SOA has the implied format YYYYMMDDnn (years, month, day, serial number per day),
so this SOA refers to changes that I made on 12 December 2017. But none
of the files have a modification date anywhere close to that. OK, grep for it:
None of them! Where is it? What did named say on restart?
Oct 12 11:31:26 eureka named[1848]: all zones loaded
Oct 12 11:31:26 eureka named[1848]: running
Now isn't that helpful? At the very least it could say where it looked for
its named.conf.
I know that if your config file contains a lower serial number than the current
one, named ignores it. Without saying so? No, I'm pretty sure that it does.
It took a while to find it: a typo, making the serial number one character longer:
I've had contact with them in the past. Wes Peters, of the FreeBSD, is a Mormon, and I spent a weekend with him
in South
Jordan, Utah (a suburb
of Salt Lake City) about 19 years
ago, including attending a 3 hour celebration on the Sunday morning. But since then there
has been nothing. I didn't know they had any (clearly inaccurate) records about me, let
alone ask them to remove them. I'm puzzled. Where did this come from? Yes, I could ask
them, but I'm not that interested.
Suggestion from Jamie Fraser today: buy an unlock code for
my Nokia 3 on eBay. Interesting idea, and sure enough, there are two
different offers under $20. That still makes it cheaper than ALDI's $129 offer that comes up tomorrow. Clearly worth
a try.
In to Sebastopol before
breakfast this morning to get some of ALDI's special offers: a microwave oven (“microwave” in the newspeak of non-technical people) with
convection and grill function, and a “digital air fryer”, not a device for frying digital
air, but a deep fryer that tries to ignore the laws of thermodynamics and heat food without
supplying adequate thermal mass to do the job.
Clearly I'm not convinced of either. But that's exactly the reason I bought them from ALDI:
I can bring them back, even if I decide that the idea is good but the implementation is
dubious.
That definitely seems to be the case with the “microwave”. I can't work out how to control
it. I've never seen a microwave oven control panel quite like it. Here the two we have at
the moment (the second one also from ALDI), and then the new one:
On the positive side, it's the first microwave oven I've had in a long time that has a 24
hour clock, and the idea of the rotating knob for setting the time is not bad either,
unfortunately marred by a lack of exact choice in the time. But i can't
recognize anything on the panel! In general the photos I take show things much more
clearly than you can see with the naked eye, but in this case the camera had difficulty too.
Coming closer I get a tasteful reflection of myself and some barely recognizable icons.
Clearly the device is designed for illiterates:
Browsing through the “instructions” suggests that I don't have much choice in the
combinations of heat, but that could just be that they're not very well laid out. We'll be
reheating pizza in a day or two, and that sounds like a good task for trying out the
combined heating.
Other thoughts about the microwave oven: the dot matrix display looks long overdue on modern
equipment, but it's on all the time, and it's quite bright. It's also considerably smaller
than the old oven that it could potentially replace. And we'll have to see whether modern
low-end microwave ovens now also have continually variable heat output (“inverter”, to
use Panasonic's terminology).
I haven't unpacked the “air fryer” yet. I'll wait until we have some application for it.
The affair about Jamal Khashoggi
(another of these unpronounceable names,
like Mnangagwa. It seems that
Khasohggi should really be called Khashoqji, based in the name جمال خاشقجي) is fascinating
for many reasons. None of them is the fact that today was his 60th birthday.
Firstly, it tends to confirm my negative opinion
of Saudi Arabia, who have been
making life hell for their neighbours—the war
against Yemen, with hundreds of thousands
of casualties (over 50,000 children have died of starvation due to Saudi blockades), and
trying to bully Qatar into doing what the
Saudis want, including shutting down
the Al Jazeera network, and their
continued attacks on Iran. All this, like
the atrocities committed by Israel, can
only happen because of tacit support by
the USA.
Then there's the world reaction. Despite the horrendous death toll in Yemen, the world
became most horrified by the death of a “mere” 40 children in a school bus on 9 August
2018—so much so that I didn't discover until I checked that 11 adults died too. Yes, that's
sad, but compared to the others it's a drop in the ocean.
And now one man has reportedly been killed, on Saudi territory. And the world
is up in arms! Of course it's horrifying. But what is there about this one suspected death
that is so much worse than the hundreds of thousands of other casualties? But if it makes
people sit up and finally do something about it, all the better.
Then there's the piecemeal reporting by the Turks, themselves not known for great respect of
human rights. Almost every day there's some new detail, starting the day after his
disappearance on 2 October. Had they bugged the Saudi Embassy? Possibly. Certainly they
have surveillance cameras outside (on Turkish territory, and thus legal), and they've shown
footage showing Khashoqji entering the embassy. But clearly if they have bugged the
embassy, they have clear audio evidence of what happened, and also no way of presenting it
without incriminating themselves. Thus the piecemeal revelations?
But today we found out: Khashoqji was wearing
a smart watch with audio logging to
his mobile phone. He wasn't allowed to take the phone into the embassy with him, so he left
it outside with his fiancée, logging what went on inside.
Finally a use for a smart watch! And also a game changer for people being interviewed. In
the past it was the phone that did the recording, and thus at least one of the reasons that
the phone was not allowed into the embassy. But now watches also count. And when they're
prohibited, what will come next? Time to accept, as I have done, that in this networked age
we no longer have any privacy.
Received the unlock code for my Nokia 3
phone today, much earlier than expected. 16 characters! And I have to type it in via this
appalling touch screen interface. What happens if I get it wrong? Clearly something to
check very carefully before submitting.
OK, typed it, and there it was: ****************. It's too polite to display it!
Checked again, watching every digit as it popped up briefly before being obliterated. Must
be right. Yes, it was. But what kind of nonsense is that to hide the input? I can't think
of any situation in which people aren't reading the code from some other surface to type it
in.
And is it really unlocked? I was able to make a call with it, and shortly later, by chance,
I received my first ever spam call on a mobile phone: a survey about my (non-existent)
gambling habits.
OK, that wasn't that bad, considering. A brand new, relatively modern Android phone for only
$103.49, including unlocking. That's considerably better than the $129 that ALDI wanted this weekend for the same model.
Next put in the microSD card. Detected!
Do you want to format it as device storage? Yes, maybe that will make it more useful than
it was in the old phone. OK, off it goes. 20% formatted...
10 minutes later it was still 20% formatted. What went wrong there? Checked the storage
configuration, and there it was, apparently mounted and using 1 GB for the system (how does
it manage to use that much space?). It had been too polite to tell me that it was finished.
Next, sync phone numbers. In the Good Old Days this was a null operation: the numbers were
stored in the SIM
card. But now there's all this sync stuff. How do I do it? People tell me that it's
automatic, but I had nothing.
OK, go search, and come up with this video, showing me Android phones with interfaces completely different from my old one. That's
understandable, given its age. But they're also different from the new one. Clearly
Android has been through at least 3 different appearances and menu layouts.
Found the “sync” settings, which of course were turned off—GMail insists on copying all my mail to my phone—and turned it on, ran sync. It
hung. Aborted, checked and found that there were many kinds of data to sync. And it told
me that my Contacts list had been synced.
OK, back to the video. Next, go to my GMail at top left and select Contacts. Not there.
Much searching and second-guessing, and finally found it behind a
miniature noughts-and-crosses
box at top right. Contacts were empty.
Much more messing around, and discovered that I could enter contact details on my computer,
and that they would be synced to my phones—maybe. After entering four, the first three
(Yvonne, Home and a misspelt Petra Gietz) disappeared, leaving me with this:
Where did the first two go? Still more messing around, including checking on a different
browser. Now you see me, now you don't. Here's what I had, alternately on two different
browsers on eureka, in order of increasing time:
What the hell is going on? Still more searching and discovered that this is a sync issue.
Add a contact and that's all that gets changed. Reload the page and all contacts are
displayed. And this in 2018!
In passing, why “Petraz Gietz”? This horrible glass keyboard! That, too, I was able to fix
easily after getting a sane interface.
And where are the phone numbers that I had in my old phone? Ah, they're not Contacts,
they're Favorites [sic]. How do you sync them? This is a Samsung phone, and they're
not telling. What a pain this Android stuff is!
The good news is that I can now enter my Contacts on a web browser and have them show up on
my phone. About the only positive thing I've seen.
The new Nokia 3 phone has a feature
called HDR.
How good is it? Time to do a comparison of the various methods available to me for better
dynamic range. In fact, there are a surprising number. In rough order of increasing
usability, I have:
My Olympus OM-D
E-M1 Mark II in “HDR1” mode, the raw image and DxO PhotoLab.
I'm pretty sure that this is only one of the images that go to make up the
composite JPEG HDR image.
There are two main things to look at here: the outside view and the bottom right-hand
corner. In the Samsung image, both are unrecognnizable. They're barely any better in the
Nokia normal image, but the “HDR” does improve things a little. But even then it's nothing
like a standard image out of the Olympus. The bottom left-hand corner is also of interest,
though the narrower angle of view of the Samsung makes it difficult to compare.
For completeness' sake, here are the other Olympus attempts. First, “HDR1” (first) compared
to DxO:
Once again my opinions are confirmed: the in-camera “HDR” functionality is no better than
enhancing a single shot. And only the last shot shows both the flowers on
the Carpobrotus outside the window
and also the striped cushion at bottom right. But the “HDR” mode on the Nokia does show an
improvement, though from a pretty poor base.
Petra Gietz brought me some snow pea
seedlings yesterday, 8 of them in a punnet. It's too early to plant them outside, so once
again I put them in pots:
The word is that we should plant them
after Melbourne Cup Day, which
seems to be the measure of many things, even
outside Victoria:
in South Australia, that's the
day to mow hay, and in the USA, six years out
of 14, they have national elections.
Middle of the month, and also middle of spring, time for some flower photos. We've been in
Stones Road for nearly 3½ years now, and it's time to recognize that something is seriously
wrong with the garden. Things are dying, and other things are just not growing the way they
should. The Betula pendula that I
looked at with concern last
month is no longer worthy of concern: it's dead, Jim. Here the two remaining trees:
But why? It can't be the cold. These trees are some of the most frost-resistant trees I
know of, somehow typical of Siberian landscapes. And it can't be watering, and trees don't
die like that from inadequate fertilizer: I doubt anybody in Siberia runs around spreading
dung on them.
Even the lilacs that we planted a couple of
months ago are not looking happy. They started off growing, but now the biggest one looks
decidedly unhappy:
The more I look at it, the more I think that there's something wrong with the soil.
Potentially it could be the layer of clay at 80 cm depth, but my experience with
the Hellebores over the last few months
suggests that the issue might be closer to the surface. In April one of them kept trying to shoot,
and then died off again:
But what is it? The geology is not local to this plot of land, but I've already seen that
the lilacs are doing better on the Marriott's property, and on the other side the Swifts
have some conifers that are doing well:
They're not the only things to die, though I suspect there are different reasons for the
others. Three of the five rose bushes that we bought three months ago have done well, but one looks on
its last legs, and another is dead:
The sweet peas that we incautiously
bought at a garage sale in
April are growing and flowering, though the damned things don't seem to want to climb
up the arch against which they're planted:
How big is the new microwave oven? 25L! It tells you that, but not the power output (until
you look relatively closely). Then it's either 1600 W input or 900 W output. This is the
first time that I have seen both figures, and it suggests an efficiency of only 56%. Is
that typical? I would have expected much more.
So this morning I used it to thaw out some baked beans. I know how long it takes in my 1100
W Panasonic oven: 1 minute to thaw, 80 seconds to warm. So I tried 90 seconds on the new
oven. And the results were still partially frozen! Not a very scientific test, of course;
I should check how long it takes to boil water. But my guess is that that “900 W” is a lie.
But wait! There's more! “25L” clearly is intended to mean 25 l, and that's easy to
measure. For other reasons, I measured the volume of the heating chamber. 32 cm deep, 31.5
wide, and 20 cm high. 20.16 l. How did they get 25 l? Probably by measuring from
underneath the bottom heating element to above the top one.
In the evening, we had a good use for a combined microwave oven and grill: reheat pizza.
After looking at the instructions, put the whole thing into the “too hard” basket. How do
you balance the heat? I don't know, and it seems that the makers of the oven don't either.
The best I can think of is first to heat with microwaves, then grill. That save the second
device, but not much else.
Some time ago I tried creating a custom ring tone for my old Android phone, the first
few bars of Carl Maria von
Weber'sAndante e rondo ongarese. Time to install it on the new phone: I never found out how
on the old one.
After the usual pain moving data around to mobile phones, it worked almost without any
problems at all. Problem: it's not loud enough. That's in the original, not the phone.
Now I need to find a way to recode the original. I had expected that mencoder could do that, but all attempts failed
because it wanted a video stream as well.
Yvonne had another appointment for a follow-up EUS and (potentially)
FNA, the same
thing as six months ago.
This time I had the opportunity to measure time and distance. The total distance is 140 km,
and interestingly the first stretch,
via Mount Mercer
to Shelford, was 32 km, over
20% of the total distance, during which we saw 4 cars. Then traffic got denser, and we
reached the freeway after almost exactly half the distance after 55 minutes. Made good time
until the Melbourne Ring Road, after
126 km and about 85 minutes. And then, once again, we ran into trouble:
From there to the Victoria Market we took
another 35 minutes for the final 14 km. How I hate Melbourne traffic!
At the market, met up again with Kevin Teather, who I think is the owner of the cheese stall
in the middle of the delicatessen section (and thus called “The Corner Larder”) after one of his
assistants suggested Jarlsberg
when I asked for Swiss cheese. In Australia you can get almost
only Gruyère (which you have to
pronounce “Swiss Gruyere”)
and Appenzell, at least for
fondue, though they did have
a Tête de moine, which also comes
from Switzerland. He asked me what other cheeses I would like, and of course I couldn't
think of anything except for Vacherin.
But he says he can get anything I like (I'll believe that when I see it!) if I give him a
couple of weeks' notice. Got his card: phone number is 9329 8607. And I'll take him up on
the offer.
Somehow the Victoria Market is changing. I didn't hear a single cryer, and more and more
stalls are operated by (and apparently for) East Asian people:
The cookbook shop has closed down. I wish I had had time to look through more carefully
last time I was there.
Then off to Richmond and
dropped Yvonne at the Epworth Hospital, then on
to Alphington to a new
location of the Casa iberica in the
hope that I could get a parking space more easily. Yes, that worked, though not as easily
as I had hoped. And the place is really in a pretty run-down part of town:
But I got what I wanted, including
numerous chorizos of their own
manufacture, and then on to Box
Hill, as last time, this time finding a parking space inside, not without difficulty.
First, where's the entrance?
How do I get out of the place? There are no signs at all. In the end I followed
people who went round to the right of this photo, and where I no longer needed it, found
this sign:
On the way out, paying for the parking, I had a strange experience: the small print was in
German, something about a „Stellplatz“ (parking place). Why that? Checked when the next
person paid, and it came up in English (though round here Chinese would have been more
appropriate). I was so surprised that I didn't read what the text said.
By this time Yvonne had called and told me that she would be
ready round 15:00, so back to the hospital
via Kew and what I knew as Studley
Park, though now it seems to be
called Yarra Bend Park. I saw
the parking space too late, so just carried on
through Fitzroy
and Abbotsford. Did I
remember the way past the old Abbotsford Brewery? Yes, I did, but I had forgotten what I
had been looking for last time I was there, so on to the hospital, where I found one of the
most emetic parking meters I have seen for a long time:
I had to give my rego (license plate number!). What if I don't know it? While I was
thinking about this, another bloke came along with exactly the same problem. He had to go
back and check his license plate. I ended up paying—$8 for two hours!—and discovered that I
had absolutely nothing to confirm that I had paid. No printout, no transaction number. I
paid by credit card, so in case of doubt I could use that, but the other bloke, when he came
back, paid by coins. He had nothing to prove that he ever paid! If he had made a typo in
his rego, he would have no recourse. I gave him a card in case he ran into trouble.
Could he run into trouble? Definitely! The three cars to the left of the machine all had
tickets:
Looking at the first, though, it seems that it was justified: it had been issued over three
hours previously.
Walked around a bit, and by chance found a Fromagerie across the road in Bridge
Street at what proved to be the Richmond Hill
Cafe & larder. Took a look inside, and how about
that, they have a number of interesting cheeses, all at prices that are easy to resist. It
was interesting to note how many were related to places with which we have a
connection: Sankt
Gallen, Pyrénées,
Somerset,
Adelaide Hills. It might be
interesting for next time we're here.
Then back into the hospital, where I waited until 16:35 for a call before finally asking at
the reception whether they had my correct phone number. 6 months ago they had had the old
number, and though I had asked them to correct it, it's quite possible that they had not
done so. But no, Yvonne had only just been finished; it
seems that there was some issue that delayed the start of her examination.
The results, though, were good: no change. So whatever it is, it's not malignant, and we
won't have to come back here in the foreseeable future.
Off at 17:25 into this horrible Melbourne rush-hour traffic. After the pain we had
last time, I decided to
follow the advice of the GPS navigator after all. And how about that, it took me down some
relatively empty roads and dumped me at the east end
of Flinders Street,
where signs told us that it would take us forever to get to St. Kilda Road, all of 600 m
away.
Damn that! Clearly I need to take routes that aren't on the standard maps. North via
Carlton? Turned up Exhibition St and got as far as Victoria St, where the navigator wanted
to take me through the next set of immobile cars. Made it as far as Cardigan St and finally
made it up to Grattan St, all relatively quickly. But they have blocked Grattan St west of
Bouverie St, so I had to go down to Bouverie St, meaning that I ended up at Elizabeth St
with the only option to go in the wrong way.
From there on things went to hell. Note to self: avoid Flemington Road like the plague in
rush hours. Finally we made it through, and we were taken back to the
bloody West Gate Bridge. By the
time we got over the bridge, it was 18:35—70 minutes for 11 km, and 25 minutes longer than
last time. A brisk walk would have been faster.
Things weren't over then either. Yvonne wanted to stop for a
toilet break somewhere
round Laverton, and I
discovered that the “service area” was on an exit ramp without corresponding entrance. I
had to leave the freeway area altogether and observe a roundabout at its absolute worst:
cars from three different directions all wanted only one exit, onto the freeway. The ones
coming from the rightmost road had no difficulties. The ones from the middle, which entered
the third road, filled any gaps. And we, in the third road, had no chance.
Set off in other directions, but everything seemed blocked. I later looked at the map and
discovered that this appears to be deliberate: lots of streets that are blocked in the
middle. Somehow this happens too often round Melbourne.
Finally went several kilometres and ended up at the same roundabout, but on the first road,
where we got through with no difficulty. Why do people build roundabouts?
Once upon a time earthworks were cheaper than traffic lights, but I can't believe that
that's still the case.
Finally back home at 20:30 after a little over 3 hours. 11½ hours away from home, 5½ on the
road, and 5 hours at the hospital for Yvonne. How I hate Melbourne traffic!
Another minor bit of good news: the car fridge worked without incident. I wonder why.
I try to make this diary as transparent as possible when reporting in it; I describe other
things, but not the diary. That's not always possible, of course: it takes time, and today
was particularly bad, since I had both Monday's flower photos and yesterday's trip
to Melbourne to document.
It took me all day. It would probably even take an hour to read: if I can estimate
correctly, it's worth about 15 pages of print. Is it worth it? Yes, I think so, not for
now, but for later, and probably only for me.
Decades ago I learnt Malay—I
thought. Recently I visited Malay
grammar and discovered things that I had never really understood: apart
from prefixes and suffixes to extend
nouns, it also has infixes.
And today I'm reminded of that when I hear the name of
the Australian Prime
Ministerde jour: Scott
Morrison. He already has the distinction of being the only Australian Prime Minister
whom I can't recognize at sight. I still can't:
But recently he has come out with statements that blow my mind. He suggested
that Australia might be open to follow
Donald Trump's stupid ideas
and move the embassy to Jerusalem, and
also reject the JCPOA. As a non-signatory,
Australia can't do more in the case of the JCPOA.
But what absolute stupidity! Does the man have a brain? There I'm reminded of infixes: the
infix is “is”, and the main word is “Moron”.
Discussing this on IRC, the opinion was that he wanted to sway the results of the Wentworth by-election this
coming weekend. It seems that 13% of the 100,000 odd electors are of Jewish background, and
this might help them win the election.
Win the election, lose the plot. How many Muslims will be infuriated by this statement?
I'm hearing them already. There's a Federal election coming up soon. When? We follow the
British system where the Prime Minister can decide on a date that seems propitious, but
various analysts think it'll be some time round May. 2.6% of Australians are Muslims
(compared to only 0.4% for Jews, for what difference that makes). If their leaders get up
and condemn Morrison's party for being anti-Muslim, as they're almost certain to do, it will
have a much stronger effect on the Federal election.
I would be fully in agreement; since the current Government came to power in
2013,
I can't see any good things that they have done. I'm sure that they're there, but none of
them have benefited me. On the other hand, the National Broadband Network has fared badly during their tenure, and their continued
violation of human rights, such as the Nauru Prison Camp,
leave a bad taste in my mouth. About the only thing that speaks in their favour is the
opposition doesn't seem to be much better.
For once, my opinions aren't that different from the mainstream, as this article, this one and this one show. Sadly, Australia's image abroad is projected by the likes of
Morrison.
Off to Ballarat again today to have the
filling replaced that had been identified last week. It seems that it was
related to the tooth I had extracted two years ago: the filling was adjacent
and now subject to more pressure. Hopefully the new one will hold better.
Somehow I didn't find much else to do in town. Sometimes those 30 km seem amazingly far.
At school and university I used
various analytical balances,
some of the most complicated machines I had encountered. If I recall correctly, the ones at
school had an accuracy of 0.01 g, while the master's balance had an accuracy of 0.001 g.
They looked something like this:
In each case, weighing was a slow business. You couldn't wait for the scale to stop
swinging—that would have taken several minutes, and you needed to add or remove weights
several times—so you had to measure the sweep of the indicator to estimate the mid point.
Then about 14 years ago I bought some digital scales for
brewing. Up to 50 g, in increments of 0.01 g, and only US $46.42. That's the same
resolution as the balances we had at school. I was so impressed that I didn't bother to
mention it in my diary.
But that balance seems to be showing the effects of time. It no longer wants to run on
rechargeable batteries, and it's only a matter of time before it no longer wants to work
with non-rechargeable batteries.
So I ordered a new one, which arrived today. Up to 100 g in 0.001 g increments! That
matches the master's balance at school. And that for AUD $23.09, currently less than half
the cost of the old one:
It required calibrating, but after that confirmed the weight every time to within 1 mg. I
wonder if the scale is as linear as it should be. About the only real issue is that the
thing is so tiny that it's difficult to read the display when there's something on it.
pH 4.1! That's about as acid as it can get. No wonder the birch died.
Problem: that was the soil round the birch that has survived. Round the dead one I got a
reading of 5.2, still not good, but much better than anywhere else I measured with the
exception of the pile of topsoil that I have. And
the Paulownia kawakamii also
has a reading of pH 4.0. No wonder it isn't growing.
So is that the only issue? Clearly I need some lime, but will that be enough? Is the soil
maybe even worse further down? That would explain why the biggest tree died first. And it
doesn't explain why the Camellia
japonica is also looking so sick. There the pH is round 5.0, not that bad for
Camellias. It's not even clear that it's a good idea to lime it.
Who says that
the Liberals are behind
the times? Our valiant Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has recently shown the dangers of letting your domain name expire.
In cahoots with Jack Genesin he let his domain name expire, and then Jack set up a fake web
site with links to an analysis of the dangers of letting your domain name expire:
In the process, of course, he increased the number of hits on his web site by several orders
of magnitude, prompting an overload on the server.
Here are the current details:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/13) ~ 81 -> whois scottmorrison.com.au Domain Name: SCOTTMORRISON.COM.AU
Registry Domain ID: D407400000011040941-AU
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.auda.org.au
Registrar URL:
Last Modified: 2018-10-18T05:16:04Z
Registrar Name: DROP.com.au Pty Ltd
Registrar Abuse Contact Email:
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone:
Reseller Name:
Status: serverRenewProhibited https://afilias.com.au/get-au/whois-status-codes#serverRenewProhibited
Status: transferPeriod https://afilias.com.au/get-au/whois-status-codes#transferPeriod
Registrant Contact ID: DS513272521773
Registrant Contact Name: Archer Corbin
Tech Contact ID: DS51327252229
Tech Contact Name: Archer Corbin
Name Server: NS2.SYRAHOST.COM
Name Server: NS1.SYRAHOST.COM
DNSSEC: unsigned
Registrant: GENESIN, JACK
Registrant ID: ABN 96701187815
Eligibility Type: Sole Trader
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/13) ~ 82 -> host scottmorrison.com.au scottmorrison.com.au has address 203.170.84.9
scottmorrison.com.au has IPv6 address 2404:8280:a222:bbbb:bba1:90:ffff:ffff
scottmorrison.com.au mail is handled by 0 mail.scottmorrison.com.au.
Clearly this is in agreement with Morrison; apart from the music (“Scotty doesn't know”), it's not
offensive, and it's still there two days later. What was I thinking when I rewrote his name
as “Is Moron” a couple of days
ago? Bravo Morrison!
Yvonne off to see Mr. Kon Shimokawa in Ballarat this afternoon. As
expected, he gave her a clean bill of health, and also (apparently) the information that
such distension of the pancreas as she
has is no longer considered as dangerous. That's a relief.
While in town, Yvonne stopped off at Formosa Gardens nursery to buy some lime.
How hard can it be? But no, the sales assistant wanted to know all sorts of details, so she
called me and I spoke to the assistant. Yes, I know what I'm doing, I have acid soil and
need some lime to neutralize it. How
acid? pH 4. OK, how about
some dolomite? No, I don't
need magnesium, only lime.
OK, garden lime? What's that? What are the ingredients? It's 95% NV. Huh? What kind of
marketing gibberish is that? Ah, it's also 92.5% calcium. That corresponds to
129.5% CaO or
231% CaCO₃.
Dammit, can't anybody talk straight any more? I can't make any sense out of that. So we
didn't buy anything; probably not a bad idea anyway. My recollection is that lime costs
about $20 a ton, and we need several tons for the whole garden. This would have been a 25
kg sack at most, and it would definitely be much more expensive.
Discussed the matter on IRC, and Juha Kupiainen came up with the answer: NV stands for
“neutralising value”, one of those fundamental units of physics, along with ENV (“effective
neutralising value”; clearly NV isn't effective). Or is it? From the link above, and
admire the missing full stops:
Effective Neutralising value (ENV) is a measure of the effectiveness of the neutralising
substances. So, the higher the ENV, the more effective the lime will be at increasing pH
However, as the ‘softer’ limes from southern Victoria are more soluble than the ‘harder’
limes of other regions, the NV is a better indicator of neutralising value than ENV
Liming materials are compared to pure calcium carbonate. For the purposes of comparison
calcium carbonate is given a neutralising value of 100; ideally NV should be over 95
In other words, a complete lack of understanding on both sides. A Google search showed
relatively conclusively that this is yet another example of bad language.
But the link is interesting after all. It relates to
the Corangamite area
(Electorate?
Shire Geology?
They're too polite to say), which is round here, and it discusses the various kinds of lime
that are available. And maybe I should reconsider dolomite. Who says that the soil is not
also deficient in magnesium?
We've had some discussion about ransomware and such on IRC, and I expressed the opinion that
you don't need to break in to a system to get a ransom. As if to prove the point, I
recently got a ransom demand myself, exposing my perverse secrets. It's worth looking at
the entire message, including the headers (only modified to point to the
normal groggyhimself):
From MAILER-DAEMON Wed Oct 17 18:10:17 2018
Return-Path: <>
It's interesting that there's no domain name on this From line. I wonder why.
X-Original-To: groggyhimself@eureka.lemis.com
Delivered-To: groggyhimself@eureka.lemis.com
Received: from eureka.lemis.com (eureka.lemis.com [192.109.197.137])
by eureka.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9D9B14494B0
for <groggyhimself@eureka.lemis.com>; Wed, 17 Oct 2018 18:10:14 +1100 (AEDT)
X-Original-To: mailer-daemon@lemis.com
Delivered-To: groggyhimself@lemis.com
Received: from www.lemis.com [208.86.226.86]
by eureka.lemis.com with POP3 (fetchmail-6.3.26)
for <groggyhimself@eureka.lemis.com> (single-drop); Wed, 17 Oct 2018 18:10:17 +1100 (AEDT)
Received: from 187-162-48-90.static.axtel.net (187-162-48-90.static.axtel.net [187.162.48.90])
by www.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0F6271B72837
for <mailer-daemon@lemis.com>; Wed, 17 Oct 2018 07:05:19 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <BEBFFB08C5FA4C363773804D72C4BEBF@XQAEUIB2M>
These last few lines clearly identify where the message came from. It's interesting because
it's apparently a static address, which should enable abuse@axtel.net to identify
the perpetrator. I wonder if they did anything with my complaint.
From: mailer-daemon@lemis.com
To: mailer-daemon@lemis.com
Subject: mailer-daemon@lemis.com is hacked
Date: 16 Oct 2018 19:18:52 -0600
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="windows-1252"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.5931
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.5931
Status: RO
Content-Length: 1868
Lines: 36
Hello!
My nickname in darknet is timmie39.
I hacked this mailbox more than six months ago,
through it I infected your operating system with a virus (trojan) created by me and have been monitoring you for a long time.
If you don't belive me please check 'from address' in your header, you will see that I sent you an email from your mailbox.
Heh. Who believes the From: address?
Even if you changed the password after that - it does not matter, my virus intercepted all the
caching data on your computer
and automatically saved access for me.
What does that mean? He has finally managed to create a virus that attacks FreeBSD machines? Give that man a medal!
I have access to all your accounts, social networks, email, browsing history.
Accordingly, I have the data of all your contacts, files from your computer, photos and videos.
All 5 TB of photos! He's been busy. Of course, he could more easily have got them from the
web site.
I was most struck by the intimate content sites that you occasionally visit.
You have a very wild imagination, I tell you!
Probably not as wild as his one-size-fits-all imagination.
During your pastime and entertainment there, I took screenshot through the camera of your device, synchronizing with what you are watching.
Oh my god! You are so funny and excited!
Dammit! He got a camera to work and didn't tell me!
I think that you do not want all your contacts to get these files, right?
Wrong. Everything I do is open, and I go to great lengths to let people know what I do.
If you are of the same opinion, then I think that $514 is quite a fair price to destroy the dirt I created.
No. I hate destroying data. But if he insists, he can pay me for the inconvenience.
Send the above amount on my BTC wallet (bitcoin): 1DBMVxzSPZ95FDyZfopwHgxncFEsp89uuS
As soon as the above amount is received, I guarantee that the data will be deleted, I do not need it.
Sorry, I don't do bitcoin. Send the
money to my PayPal account.
Otherwise, these files and history of visiting sites will get all your contacts from your device.
Also, I'll send to everyone your contact access to your email and access logs, I have carefully saved it!
It seems that everybody has my email address anyway. I wonder what logs he was thinking of.
Since reading this letter you have 50 hours!
After your reading this message, I'll receive an automatic notification that you have seen the letter.
This part could at least theoretically be correct, via DSN. But I don't see any evidence
in the headers.
I hope I taught you a good lesson.
Do not be so nonchalant, please visit only to proven resources, and don't enter your passwords anywhere!
Good luck!
I don't know about a “lesson”, but it was interesting to analyse the message. Basically he
confirms my claims: he doesn't need to break in to my system; a well-formulated message can
scare enough technically inexperienced people into paying money to him. This sort of thing
really should be pursued by the authorities, and in this particular case (yes, the source
address is correct) it should be relatively easy to find the perpetrator.
Finally got round to processing the sausage meat that I bought
in Melbourne on Tuesday. The first question was: are
my casings still OK? I had last used them two years ago, and I had frozen both
the end of the casing I had used then, as well as the unused casings. But yes, they looked
unchanged, so we were able to use them.
Or so I thought. It's not easy to get the start of the casing onto the filling tube of the
sausage filler, distinctly reminiscent of fitting a condom:
But this time it was almost impossible. In the end I had to oil the filler tube, after
which it still took nearly 20 minutes to pull the 16-odd metres of casing over the tube.
And things didn't stop there. Filling the sausages was much easier, but we had no less than
four sausages that burst while filling. I've never had that before, not even with the much
weaker collagen casings. I'm guessing that this happened as the result of freezing them.
Given the cost of the casings, I think I'm going to have to match future sausage production
to the capacity of the casings.
In any case, things worked well this time, though the sausages are rather thicker, probably
because of the difficulty filling.
How much does it cost to make sausages? My Bratwurst are made from 2 parts of pork shoulder (about $8 per kg) and one part of
pork belly (paradoxically, about $12 per kg), making an average price about $11 per kg. On
top of that come the casings, roughly 2 m per kg, or about $3, for a total of about $14 per
kg, not including the work involved.
And this weekend ALDI have sausages on
special: $3.30 per kg. How can they manage that price? It's barely more than the cost of
my casings. But then, these will be collagen casings, which only cost about $0.60 for 2 m.
But they're really not as good, and I can confirm that ALDI sausages like to burst. Still,
that only leaves $2.70 for the filling. What is it? I shudder to think; I can't even buy
dog food for that price.
Turnbull did what I can absolutely understand: at the age of nearly 64, he decided to
retire, leaving his seat vacant and the government without a majority in parliament.
Yesterday
a by-election was
held, in which the Liberal candidate lost to an independent candidate, and leaving the
government still without a majority.
Why? Wentworth was one of the safest Liberal seats in the country, having never been won a candidate from
another party. I'd like to think that it was Morrison's boundless stupidity
in suggesting moving the Australian Embassy
in Israel
to Jerusalem. But that's not the sort
of thing that causes a 20% swing away from the Liberals. The ghost of (still very much
alive) Turnbull overshadowing the elections?
I had thought that it was the same kind of masa that I bought at Casa ibericafive years ago and a couple of times
since. But no, it's different again, and requires even more water, probably a rate of
1.6:1. And, sadly, it doesn't taste as good. Time for a web page on the subject.
Sadly, not all plants look that good. The box elder that we planted a couple of
years ago looked relatively happy until a couple of weeks ago, but now it looks as if it
will die if I don't do something soon:
Wiener Schnitzel for dinner
tonight, a good opportunity to try out the “digital air fryer” that Yvonne bought on special last week.
The idea seems to be that this thing can replace
a friteuse. I never believed that for a
minute: deep frying involves a sudden change of temperature that can only be caused by hot
fat or oil. Hot air just doesn't have the thermal capacity. Still, modern potato chips are
pre-cooked and somewhat oily, so maybe it would work with them. In addition, of course, the
Schnitzel themselves are deep-fried, though again I had the same reservation.
The device is strange, and the controls even stranger.
Where's the on-off button? Bottom centre, the one that looks like a lock. Hold it down for
Three Whole Seconds to turn it on. Adjust temperature with the arrows at the left, and time
with the symbols at the right (why different icons?), start with the button in the middle.
The ram's head at the top centre loads different presets, or, as it says on page 10 of the
relatively copious instructions, “function settings”, of which there are 6. Don't like that
term? Look on the opposite page (12), where they're called “preset functions”, described
all over again with non-overlapping details. Apart from displaying a hard-to-recognize
symbol on the display, they don't seem to do anything that the time and temperature buttons
don't.
OK, cook chips. Our standard weight is 170 g. Sorry, no can do. Weights must be between
200 g and 500 g. OK, ignore that. How long? In a friteuse it would take about 3 to 4
minutes at 180°. In this thing it takes (they say) 16 minutes! Elsewhere they say that the
time depends on the quantity, a clear indication of the low thermal capacity of the system,
so I decided to go for 12 minutes. At the end of that time, I had:
That would never have been that uneven out of a friteuse. And though the chips were edible,
they weren't as good as out of a friteuse.
But wait, there's more! I then put a piece of raw Wiener Schnitzel into the device for 8
minutes at 180°. When it came out it looked correspondingly pale (on the left):
OK, brown it in the friteuse, which I had left running for that eventuality. And how about
that, it actually tasted better than the one that had just come out of the friteuse! The
device is clearly no substitute for a friteuse, as I had expected, but potentially it has
some benefits. If I can make ikan
bilis in the thing without it stinking for ever after, it might be worth keeping.
Otherwise I can always return it, stinking or not.
Off to Ballarat this afternoon to get
some lime for the garden. To Dela in Laidlaw Drive, and discovered that they don't do bulk lime; all they had was 20 kg bags
of slaked (“hydrated”) lime at prices
resembling those that I paid for a ton in the (admittedly not very recent) past.
How did yesterday's liming work out? Off with my pH meter. Yes, indeed, looks much better, where I measured. But it
takes a minute or two to stabilize, so I didn't measure everywhere.
Then off to measure elsewhere. Surprise, surprise. Many places that I suspected of having
low pH were in fact relatively neutral, including the area round the water tanks, where
the Tropaeolum
and Senna are not looking happy.
Here the Senna in June and last week:
So what's the situation? Is it simply that the clay layer only 80 cm below the surface is
an insurmountable obstacle? Or do I have some other soil issue?
In the evening, planted some of yesterday's flowers in some baskets:
One thing was very different, though. Nearly all these pastes come in a foil package that
has to be squeezed out. But this time the content came out more quickly:
It's been remarkably cold overnight the last couple of nights. My weather station recorded
lows of 0.3° and 0.7°, and it seems that
our Paulownia kawakamii
recorded even lower temperatures:
We're planning for a visit from Ruth Viebrock next month. Time to write down her contact
details. Where? A couple of
weeks ago I discovered Google Contacts, which has the advantage of syncing to all my participating phones, one of the few
occasions where I really want everything the same everywhere.
OK, off to find Google Contacts. Last time I was told to select “Contacts” at the top left
of a GMail window, which proved to mean top
right. But this time I thought that I could find them without the help of my diary, which
proved to be incorrect. Finally I found them via a Google Search: http://contacts.google.com/.
OK, add a new contact. How? There's a menu on the left of the page, but it's too polite to
tell you everything you need; you first need to click on the “More” in the middle. Then you
get:
Where's “add new contact”? I couldn't find it. On IRC, Andrew Perry explained to me the
error of my ways. Ah, I'm looking in the wrong place. See that big
red at bottom right, about 35 cm from the others? Click on
that.
Clearly there's something missing above. The original markup reads “See that big red
<span style="color:red"></span> at bottom right”. But what was it? By 2023
Google had relented and added a clear “create contact” button at top left.
Obvious! At least to people with modern brain damage. Why do they do these things? Surely
even today it must violate all principles of user interface design. Maybe it's a result of
Android brain
rot.
The “Photo Editor” at bottom right is a “watermark” from a trial version of movavi photo editor. See below.
It's too polite to show the entire email address! While trying to correct it, I clicked
outside the window. That got its attention: Cancel or Save? No, I want to continue.
Cancel or Save? Dammit, maybe “Cancel” means something else. No, it meant cancel, and I
had to start all over again. And “Save” means save. If I accidentally hit anywhere outside
the entry window before I'm done, I have to save it (potentially syncing to all my
“devices”) and then edit it. I still haven't found out how to display the entire email
address.
Next, where's the address? Ah, again too polite to suggest that. Press MORE:
It took me a long time to find out how to get rid of that suggestion window (all suggestions
wrong): refresh window.
Last week I thought that I had finally found a use for Google services. Maybe I have, but
they're certainly not making it easy for me.
Why does it seem that I always complain about “modern” software? More to the point, why
does everybody else accept it? I can only imagine that it's lack of imagination on their
part.
I'm still looking for software to edit the kangaroo photos that I took two months ago. I tried one of the
many emails from Zoner explaining how to do it,
but the issue there is that they have moved to a subscription model, which is just too
expensive.
Never mind, I have a license for the predecessor version 18. Try the suggestions there.
But I couldn't make head or tail of their instructions; they seemed to be completely
unrelated to the software. After half an hour without being able to locate the tools that
they described, I gave up, not for the first time: I came to a similar conclusion 6 weeks ago.
That's really puzzling. Zoner produce quite a few documents about how to do things, so why
can't they write manuals that make it clear how to use the basic product? Part of the
problem, I think, is poor menu structure, an issue that is becoming more apparent to me in
various products. In Zoner's case, it's about the only explanation that I can find for
their continual change in user interface.
Recently I saw a video about another product, movavi Photo Editor (a name that seems
to suggest an assembler language instruction), which seems to offer a number of functions.
So today I downloaded it, and how about that, parts of it are excellent. It's not really
that different from inpaint, but
somehow things were a little easier. Here before, with Inpaint, and with movavi:
Of course, being a Microsoft-space program, it has its quirks. It decides to downshift the
“folder” name, and then it can't save the
file, or even come up with an intelligible explanation for the problem. But I can work
around that. It also offers an automatic photo enhancement similar to that of Ashampoo Photo Optimizer, which continues to irritate,
so it might be worth the price that they are asking.
I get various feeds describing popular “TV” films and series, including one from Internet Movie Database, a somewhat US-centric but very
useful site. And I suppose the users' favourites are not their fault. But what horror!
Why these horrifying films? Why are they popular? They don't reflect the content on
European TV. Australian TV tends in that direction, but presumably only because of the
strong US influence here. Somehow that doesn't make a very positive statement about modern
life in the USA.
Mick the gardener along today and did quite a bit of tidying up. In the process, found some
interesting leaves growing between
the Euphorbia that he planted
three months ago:
Mick thought that they were remains of
the Hibiscus syriacus that he
had removed to plant it, but of course the leaves are completely different. It didn't occur
to me until later that they're
probably Vinca minor that stowed away
during the transplant.
The irises in the trough round the
“verandah” are starting to flower:
They're surprisingly hard to see. Maybe we should consider placing them elsewhere. And the
established roses, which I have neglected to prune, are back in flower already after
finishing early last month:
The tomato seedlings that I planted out into pots a month ago are growing like fury. I
hadn't planned to plant them outside until
after Melbourne Cup Day, but
one of them has fallen over, and so it seemed best to plant it outside:
If it gets bitten by the frost, there are 11 others waiting for a total of 3 or 4 places.
And even for this one, there are volunteers from last year waiting (on the left).
“Daddy, they followed me home, may I keep them?”? No, she had seen them wandering down the
road, and had collected them to ensure that they didn't get run over. She had left a card
on the door of the suspected owners, and they soon showed up and collected them, before I
could fight my way through a combination of firefox not wanting to show me any directory structure and Facebook choking on the size of the photos.
Good News! We were able to source your items earlier than originally indicated.
If you wish to keep your delivery date of 21 Nov 2018 then please disregard this email.
If you would like to schedule your delivery date earlier than originally selected, then
please choose one of the following options:
Change delivery date to 2018-10-29
Change delivery date to 2018-10-31
Simply click on the date you wish to select, this will pre populate an email that you can
then simply send to have your delivery date moved
“Simply click on the date”? Yes, it was a link to a web-style mail. What did it do?
Nothing, of course. I don't need no steenking web mail. Well, it seems, in this case I do,
but most certainly not by choice. Sent off a message to the support number and also faked
an email with the parameters (which included the only mention of the order number). But the
date I want, 29 October 2018, is Monday, and this message arrived at
16:10 on a Friday. What hope do I have?
Ruth Viebrock had another question for me: how does she access
her WhatsApp messaging system when she's
in Australia and using a
different SIM?
How do I know? But I felt a slight responsibility: after all, WhatsApp grew up inside the
FreeBSD project. Did some asking around and
came to the conclusion that the documentation doesn't want to address the issue. But one of
the people on IRC, one with a fantasy nick, tells me that you can do it. The problem is
that the user ID is tied to the phone number—not a good idea for a component that isn't
fixed to the phone—but you can log in from other numbers, though you have to keep ignoring
the nagging. We'll see how well that works. Maybe I should install WhatsApp just for the
fun of it (and the opportunity for grumbling).
Chris Bahlo is now well on her way to becoming a mediaeval knight, and one of the things she
needs is a helmet (“chicken”, it seems) with a motto on it.
There are plenty of birds, but what motto? And in what language? Latin seems possible, but
I thought that Middle High
German would be more appropriate. In the process, came up with some ideas that we put
against Google Translate. To my
surprise, it handled them pretty well, a far cry from my previous experience nearly 3 years ago.
OK, try to translate that page again. And how about that, still not good (and “Mar” (for
“March”) still gets translated as „Beschädigen“, and now they have also translated “15” (and
only “15”) into words:
But at least it's intelligible, though the two translations of “select” use a different
number. Can it be that this kind of ad-hoc translation really has a future? It would
probably further contribute to linguistic poverty: fewer and fewer people would learn
grammar, and thus various alternate usages would gradually disappear.
It's been nearly 2 weeks since we went to Melbourne,and I still
haven't got round to putting everything in its place. We just have too much stuff. I've
been trying to rearrange the pantry for some time now, and it's proving quite resistant.
We've only been here for 3½ years, but it's already overfull. Here after removing some of
the stuff we use less frequently:
No, not really. But how do I do it better? There's a basic limit on how wide an angle you
can take, and this definitely exceeds it. I spent some time trying to improve it with
different projections, but nothing seems to work.
We have had three different kitchen scales for some time: one measuring to 50 g in 0.01 g
increments, one measuring to 1 kg in 0.1 g increments, and one measuring to 10 kg in 1 g
increments. I had to replace the 50 g scale recently because there are indications
that the electronics are giving up the ghost. And now, after 14 years, the power switch of the 10 kg scale has disintegrated. Time for another
replacement.
As it happened, ALDI had something similar on
special—5 kg by 1 g—and Yvonne picked one up yesterday, for
the proud price of $6.99, considerably less than the $99.87 that I paid for the last one.
And what's it like? It's the one on the left. It looks nicer, and the weighing surface is
marginally bigger, which is an advantage:
But where's the on-off switch? There isn't one! I suppose that's one less thing to go
wrong. To turn it on you annoy the weighing surface, and it turns off by itself after a
while. But I don't like leaving things turned on longer than necessary, and clearly this
setup requires it to be ”on” all the time to detect the motion of the weighing surface.
Then today I tried weighing something with it, less than 24 hours after getting it. And the
readings were all over the place! That's not the first time I've had this issue, though
it's the first time in a long time. It worked again later, but how can I trust a device
that doesn't always show the correct information? I'm reminded of the German word for
scale, „Waage“, pronounced exactly the same way as „vage“, meaning vague.
OK, it goes back, but while taking the photos I found a clue:
The battery is already flat! And it's a
non-rechargeable CR 2032 battery.
Potentially this battery wasn't the freshest when installed, but why take the risk? As I
say, one of the best things about ALDI is that you can take things back if you don't like
them.
Almost as expected, I received no reply from Appliances Online about today's delivery.
OK, let's check the order status. Log in to the site. What was the password again?
Looking in my list, I discovered that I didn't have a saved password for the email address I
use with them, just an old one with my generic email address. Try logging in with that.
Fool! That's not only an old, worn-out magic word, it's too short and doesn't contain some
of the required characters. OK, forgot password. Sorry, we don't know your new email
address. Never mind that we sent you a message to it a couple of days ago.
Called up on the phone and was finally connected with mumble, whose name proved to be
Raphael. Mobile number from which I ordered, please? I don't order from no steenking
mobile phone. Oh, OK, landline number please... Order number, please? Sorry, wasn't
included in the message I received. Email address? OK, he found it, and confirmed that it
would be delivered on Wednesday. Why did the system not let me log in? Ah, it seems that I
don't need a password to order things, only to check the order status. Otherwise ring us.
OK, but why wasn't I informed about the change of delivery date? Why didn't I get a reply
to my mail
to support@appliancesonline.com.au?
“Ah, something must have gone wrong sending it. It never reached us”:
Oct 26 07:32:30 www postfix/qmgr[70084]: 734A21B72837: from=<groggyhimself@lemis.com>, size=2811, nrcpt=2 (queue active)
Oct 26 07:32:31 www postfix/smtp[78051]: 734A21B72837: to=<delivery@appliancesonline.com.au>, relay=aspmx.l.google.com[209.85.232.26]:25, delay=1.4, delays=0.34/0/0.45/0.62, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1540539151 a20-v6si7347103qtj.202 - gsmtp)
Oct 26 07:32:31 www postfix/smtp[78051]: 734A21B72837: to=<support@appliancesonline.com.au>, relay=aspmx.l.google.com[209.85.232.26]:25, delay=1.4, delays=0.34/0/0.45/0.62, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1540539151 a20-v6si7347103qtj.202 - gsmtp)
Oct 26 07:32:31 www postfix/qmgr[70084]: 734A21B72837: removed
Oct 26 07:35:17 www postfix/qmgr[70084]: 1DC461B72837: from=<groggyhimself@lemis.com>, size=998, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Oct 26 07:35:17 www postfix/smtp[78128]: 1DC461B72837: to=<delivery@appliancesonline.com.au>, relay=aspmx.l.google.com[209.85.232.26]:25, delay=0.65, delays=0.32/0.01/0.08/0.23, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1540539317 i68-v6si4386617qkf.268 - gsmtp)
Oct 26 07:35:17 www postfix/qmgr[70084]: 1DC461B72837: removed
In passing, it's interesting that they run their mail via Google.
Somehow this is all too messy. Why should I bother buying from Appliances Online? Asked
for a call back from their web people. Yes, will come. It didn't. About the only thing
that did come was a manually prepared message confirming that the item would arrive on
Wednesday.
Seriously, why buy from these people? I'm not sure that I will again.
Chris Bahlo over with a horse (Rev) and her new suit of armour this afternoon. She and
Yvonne insisted on donning it in some of the worst light I've
seen in a long while: mixed sun and dark shade, with strongly diverging white balance.
Lately I've had the impression that our microwave oven is not as powerful as it used to be.
There's a special for a new one this week. Should I buy it? First I need to know whether
the thing is really weakening.
How do you do that? It's an 1100 W unit, so it's easy to calculate the time it needs to
heat things. 200 g of water heated through 25° requires 200 × 25 × 4.19 J, or 20.95 kJ. At
1100 W that should take about 19 s. OK, put 200 g of water into a thin plastic container
(“negligible” thermal capacity) and try it out. Here's what I got with three different
microwave ovens:
Oven
Power
Weight
Time
Start
End
Power
Efficiency
(W)
(g)
(s)
Temp
Temp
(W)
Panasonic
1100
200
30
21.8
48
733
66%
300
199
120
28
63
244
81%
ALDI new
900
204
60
24
58
484
54%
ALDI old
700
204
60
25
59
484
69%
This wasn't overly surprising, but it did give me some interesting insights:
The real-life efficiency of a microwave oven is only about 70%. That's less than I had
expected.
There's nothing obviously wrong with the Panasonic oven.
There is something obviously wrong with the new ALDI oven (the one with the convection and grill
functions). Despite the claimed power output of 900 W (from 1600 W input), the
effective power is only 484 W, or 54% of the claimed output and 30% of the input power.
Maybe things like the grill element reduce the efficiency.
Walking the dogs today, I came across a surprising number
of Thelymitra pauciflora
(sun orchids). I spent most of last spring looking for them, but didn't find any worth
talking about. Back with much photo equipment and got some reasonable shots:
Email from my cousin Sandy Semmens, née Schaedel: her mother Audrey, my aunt, died on 30
August. She must have been 92, and she had been in a bad way for some time, but it's still
sad to see people go. My father was the first, nearly 10 years ago, followed
by Max earlier this year. That just leaves Freda, who will be 94 next January. Hopefully
she will make it.
I run a program called MediathekView,
which allows me to download German TV programmes. It uses a programme list that needs to be
reloaded from time to time, at least daily. And it won't do it automatically.
Lately I've been having difficulties. After a long time I get a typical modern message:
Well, thanks for details. You want details? We have details, we're just too polite to
vomit all over your screen. But start it from an xterm and we're much more detailed:
. Alte Liste erstellt am: 06.10.2018, 17:15
. Anzahl Filme: 251125
. Anzahl Neue: 20436
. Filmliste laden (auto)
. Filmliste laden von: https://rtr.mdthk.de/Filmliste-akt.xz
. Liste Filme lesen von: https://rtr.mdthk.de/Filmliste-akt.xz
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
java.net.SocketTimeoutException: timeout
at okio.Okio$4.newTimeoutException(Okio.java:227)
at okio.AsyncTimeout.exit(AsyncTimeout.java:284)
at okio.AsyncTimeout$2.read(AsyncTimeout.java:240)
at okio.RealBufferedSource.indexOf(RealBufferedSource.java:325)
at okio.RealBufferedSource.indexOf(RealBufferedSource.java:314)
at okio.RealBufferedSource.readUtf8LineStrict(RealBufferedSource.java:210)
at okhttp3.internal.http1.Http1Codec.readResponseHeaders(Http1Codec.java:189)
at okhttp3.internal.http.CallServerInterceptor.intercept(CallServerInterceptor.java:67)
at okhttp3.internal.http.RealInterceptorChain.proceed(RealInterceptorChain.java:92)
at okhttp3.internal.connection.ConnectInterceptor.intercept(ConnectInterceptor.java:45)
at okhttp3.internal.http.RealInterceptorChain.proceed(RealInterceptorChain.java:92)
at okhttp3.internal.http.RealInterceptorChain.proceed(RealInterceptorChain.java:67)
at okhttp3.internal.cache.CacheInterceptor.intercept(CacheInterceptor.java:93)
at okhttp3.internal.http.RealInterceptorChain.proceed(RealInterceptorChain.java:92)
at okhttp3.internal.http.RealInterceptorChain.proceed(RealInterceptorChain.java:67)
at okhttp3.internal.http.BridgeInterceptor.intercept(BridgeInterceptor.java:93)
at okhttp3.internal.http.RealInterceptorChain.proceed(RealInterceptorChain.java:92)
at okhttp3.internal.http.RetryAndFollowUpInterceptor.intercept(RetryAndFollowUpInterceptor.java:120)
at okhttp3.internal.http.RealInterceptorChain.proceed(RealInterceptorChain.java:92)
at okhttp3.internal.http.RealInterceptorChain.proceed(RealInterceptorChain.java:67)
at okhttp3.RealCall.getResponseWithInterceptorChain(RealCall.java:179)
at okhttp3.RealCall.execute(RealCall.java:63)
at mSearch.filmlisten.FilmlisteLesen.processFromWeb(FilmlisteLesen.java:245)
at mSearch.filmlisten.FilmlisteLesen.readFilmListe(FilmlisteLesen.java:207)
at mediathek.filmlisten.ImportFilmliste.urlLaden(ImportFilmliste.java:207)
at mediathek.filmlisten.ImportFilmliste.access$200(ImportFilmliste.java:33)
at mediathek.filmlisten.ImportFilmliste$FilmeImportierenAutoThread.suchenAktListe(ImportFilmliste.java:134)
at mediathek.filmlisten.ImportFilmliste$FilmeImportierenAutoThread.run(ImportFilmliste.java:94)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748)
Caused by: java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out
at java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead0(Native Method)
at java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead(SocketInputStream.java:116)
at java.net.SocketInputStream.read(SocketInputStream.java:171)
at java.net.SocketInputStream.read(SocketInputStream.java:141)
at sun.security.ssl.InputRecord.readFully(InputRecord.java:465)
at sun.security.ssl.InputRecord.read(InputRecord.java:503)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.readRecord(SSLSocketImpl.java:983)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.readDataRecord(SSLSocketImpl.java:940)
at sun.security.ssl.AppInputStream.read(AppInputStream.java:105)
at okio.Okio$2.read(Okio.java:138)
at okio.AsyncTimeout$2.read(AsyncTimeout.java:236)
... 26 more
Sigh When will people give useful error messages? It's a timeout with a positively
bizarre error number. But at least it gives me the URL of the film list: https://rtr.mdthk.de/Filmliste-akt.xz. How about trying it manually?
And that has worked every time that I have tried it, at quite reasonable speeds. Has the
author of MediathekView written his own fragile download code? The good news is that
there is a provision for loading from a local file, so I can work around this bug.
Things aren't that simple. A
couple of days later I had exactly the opposite experience.
Somehow I still don't know how to make the right gestures at an Android device. The more I
try, the more I think that a raised middle finger is the appropriate gesture. Today I tried
to call Yvonne (in town), and, as almost always, got her
voice mail. And then the phone said “beep beep”.
Why? A message? Where are the messages hidden? There are always a couple on the home
screen:
A settings screen? No, of course not; that's the link at bottom right. What is it? It's
too polite to have a title, and nobody else could tell me either, though it seems to be a
standard screen. Settings summary? Who knows?
One of the reasons that I bought this phone was because in the past I had issues with
Samsung's user interface, and this one has an absolutely standard Google Android interface.
And people still can't tell me how to use it.
While I was doing this, I got a call from Yvonne. Answer the call? The display was
different, and I pressed on the symbol. Once again the call was rejected, presumably
because it didn't like my gestures. This is all fine and good for people who have found out
how to make the correct gestures, but it seems that it's still so difficult that they can't
describe to others it how to do it.
In the meantime, a message did arrive, telling me that Yvonne had tried to call me
and failed. Was that the “beep beep”, significantly in advance of the message itself?
Android places (far too much) stock on voice misinterpretation systems. Why can't it speak
instead of beeping? That really can't be the slightest problem. But it got me to thinking
about enabling voice input. Tried that, and ended up with a double display, with a modified
date, but still with a time without seconds, which seem to no longer be modern:
In fact, the voice recognition was surprisingly good, but of course the one word that could
have made the difference (“this”) was rendered as “us”. And the answer was completely
useless. Until proof of the contrary, I think that's inherent in the fuzziness of voice
input.
So why the double display? Quite possibly it's intentional. After all, we're living in
modern times.
How did that happen? I've seen it before, and after some consideration it seems to be a
situation that modern dish washers can't handle. The pan had been used for refrying beans
(frijoles refritos), which requires
lard, and it seems that the temperatures and detergent in modern dish washers don't handle
that well.
The herbs in the garden are doing differntly well. Over a month ago I had noted that
a basil plant was not looking good, while
one planted from seed was doing better. A month on and my suspicions are confirmed:
That patch in the middle of the first photo, near the dripper head, is all that's left of
the basil. The one grown from seed is still small, but it looks healthy. That's the last
time I buy basil in pots unless I want to eat it immediately.
More surprising, though, was the fate of a self-seeded dill plant. One seems to be almost
completely dead (second image), while another, almost next to it, is doing fine:
Why did that happen? It's no great loss. The stuff pops up all over the place. But what
happened to it?
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.
button. Did that. Dammit, no reaction.
OK, RTFM:
