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| Tuesday, 1 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | next | last |
First thing this morning was to change the bandage on my thumb, which had been there since Sunday evening. Blood everywhere! For whatever reason, it hadn't healed adequately. Quite possibly I pulled off the developing scab along with the bandage, but clearly I still need medical attention.
Off to Ballarat to the UFS Urgent Care Clinic at Level 1, 1010 Sturt Street, where I discovered that they only ever have one doctor in attendance. Fortunately the place was almost empty, so I was in and out within half an hour. First Julie, the nurse, took off my bandage and cleaned the wound, which had gradually stopped bleeding:
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Then Ben, the doctor, came in and took a look. Yes, too late to stitch or stick, but it would probably not have been necessary anyway. Bandage and it should heal. I forgot to ask how long it would take. So Julie came back and bandaged it, and gave the advice to maintain pressure on the surface if it started to bleed again.
Only after I left did it gradually dawn on me that I have been there before and even confirmed it at the time with the address. That was nearly 14 years ago, and at the time it was a Tristar clinic, since bankrupted and reborn as Family Doctor, one of the places I considered calling yesterday. Why didn't I recognize it earlier?
I had intended to take photos of my thumb while at the clinic. Bring a macro lens for my Olympus E-PM2? No, my phone should do it.
Well, not quite. I had thought that the phone could come quite close, but not close enough. This was as close as I could come, and then I discovered that it was still out of focus:
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So: still no substitute for a Real Camera.
| Wednesday, 2 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
My thumb seems to be recovering well, though I'm concerned about changing the bandage after yesterday's problems. Spent most of the day processing old photos (much of 1980 and from July 1994 to April 1997), with marginally better results in some cases.
While processing photos, heard a strange mechanical noise. Did it come from eureka? A dying disk, maybe? Got up, but it stopped. It started a little later and kept going long enough for me to walk about and find it following me. Outside the office? Dish washer?
No, it was outside the house:
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The Spiteris are having their water tank cleaned. Why now, when the tank levels are at the lowest of the year? And why was it so difficult to localize the source of the noise?
| Thursday, 3 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Into Yvonne's bedroom this morning with intent to let Bruno out into the dog run. But it was overrun with red-browed finches, which even congregated directly on his hiding place. They didn't leave until I got my camera.
Currently the run looks like this:
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So neither reflective strips nor bells have worried them. How has the species survived?
More processing old photos today, including considerable improvements on some of the photos I took during the 1967 Asia Trip. Stupidly, I had taken the photos on Ektachrome and developed them myself in substitute chemicals. Given the once-in-a-lifetime nature of the trip, I should have taken them on Kodachrome.
To make matters worse, on at least one film I messed up the clearing bath stage, resulting in a pink tinge on the photos, like here:
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To my surprise, a simple white balance change fixed it (run the cursor over an image to compare it with the previous version):
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I had expected it to be some kind of second order cast.
I also had the exposure notes, so I was able to set the Exif data accordingly. This one was labeled “Donkey”:
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Where's the donkey? Not the (out of focus) person in the foreground. He just walked into the photo at the last minute, and until today I never realized that I had missed the donkey.
And then I found a number of missing directories that weren't missing at all. They were just missing from the directory list file. One was relatively recently. Off to check. The file is called /home/grog/public_html/photos/dirlist, and it consists of a pair title, description, like this:
20001122 Mike Smith Memorial Room, Greg's office
20001130 Yana in gum tree
I keep it under RCS, so it was relatively easy to see what happened; I just needed to compare each revision with the previous one:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20250126 4392 -> for i in `jot 100 9830`; do j=`expr $i + 1`; echo rcsdiff -wur1.$i -r1.$j dirlist; rcsdiff -wur1.$i -r1.$j dirlist; done | less
And how about that:
--- dirlist 2025/02/13 02:06:59 1.9838
+++ dirlist 2025/02/13 02:23:19 1.9839
@@ -3,7 +3,6 @@
19561226 Kota Bharu
-19571101 Grattan Street, Carlton
19620912 Bev and Greg before leaving for England
@@ -13,14 +12,11 @@
19640421 Netherton House
-19640601 Sir Alec Douglas-Home at Kings College, Taunton
19640608 Shahram Akhavan
-19640611 Bath festival, Kings College kitchens
-19640816 Swimming Sports at Lake Club
19640822 Kemaman, ferry
@@ -30,11 +26,6 @@
19640913 Greg on TV
-19640924 England, Exeter Cathedral, King's College
-19640927 England, Exeter Cathedral, King's College
-19641009 Ricky Cookson
-19641029 Half term holiday, music, King's College
-19641105 Kings College, Taunton
...
-20250213 Cockatoos and corellas, strange papaya
+C
In fact, the damage is much more extensive:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4378 -> rlog -r1.9839 dirlist
...
revision 1.9839
date: 2025/02/13 02:23:19; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +1 -881
Automatic checkin
881 removed lines! How many are left?
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20250126 4394 -> wc -l /home/grog/public_html/photos/dirlist
5615 /home/grog/public_html/photos/dirlist
A sixth of all entries! What do these have to do with anything? Clearly it's not random damage, since it's the loss of specific entries, but why? Looking at them, it seems that many of them have been changed relatively recently. But that would have been a change, not a new entry. So far I can't work out what went wrong. About the only clue I have is that the entry for the day has gone away and been replaced by a line with just the letter C. Could it be that I aborted the process somehow? I still don't seen how that could have caused that damage.
And how can I recover? The obvious thing to do would be to repeat the way I created them:
dirlist:
if [ -f Makejpeg ]; then \
DIRLIST=~/public_html/photos/dirlist; \
BASEDIR=`basename \`pwd\``; \
co -l $$DIRLIST; \
grep -v $$BASEDIR $$DIRLIST > dirlist.tmp; \
echo -n "$$BASEDIR " >> dirlist.tmp; \
head -1 ~/Photos/$$BASEDIR/Makejpeg >> dirlist.tmp; \
sort dirlist.tmp > $$DIRLIST; \
rm dirlist.tmp; \
ci -u -m"Automatic checkin" $$DIRLIST; \
fi
That works, up to a point, but I introduced Makejpeg only about 13 years ago. What about the other ones? And how did this happen in the first place?
Gradually the bandage on my thumb has reached its use-by date. Time to remove it and hope that there won't be lots of blood again.
No:
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So that problem seems to have gone away.
| Saturday, 5 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Seen at the entrance to the dog run outside Yvonne's bedroom:
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Larissa killing Bruno? No, they're just playing:
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How do I recover my seriously broken ~/pubic_html/photos/dirlist? It should have round 6,500 entries, one for each directory in ~/pubic_html/Photos/. But at least 880 entries are missing. I can't automatically rebuild the entries with my current method, because the infrastructure is missing for the older entries.
OK, manual it is. Find the log messages where more than 2 entries had been deleted, and create diffs from the previous
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4449 -> rlog -r1.7655 dirlist
revision 1.7655
date: 2020/10/08 03:47:35; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +1 -38
Automatic checkin=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4450 -> rcsdiff -wur1.7654 -r1.7655 dirlist
===================================================================
RCS file: RCS/dirlist,v
retrieving revision 1.7654
retrieving revision 1.7655
diff -wu -r1.7654 -r1.7655
--- dirlist 2020/10/07 01:08:41 1.7654
+++ dirlist 2020/10/08 03:47:35 1.7655
@@ -326,7 +326,6 @@
20010322 LUGS in Singapore
20010323 Eating satay with LUGS and rms
20010324 Harish and Groggy, Bukit Timah Saddle Club
-20010325 Shierlaw Street house sold
20010403 Fluffy as baby
20010405 Thursday, 5 April 2001
20010411 Yana
@@ -368,7 +367,6 @@
20020104 Mick and Diane Lehey
20020117 Grashopper, new Mitsubishi Magna
20020131 Bushfire at Diane Saunders', Wantadilla house
-20020202 Household computers
20020207 Convert to BSD
20020210 Big steak, Mobilestar breakage
20020215 BSDCon dinner in San Francisco
...
Then collect all the deleted entries, marked by a dash (-) in column 1:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4449 -> for i in 7655 4501 4404 3985 3301 2825 1440 1297; do j=`expr $i - 1`; rcsdiff -wur1.$j 1.$i ~/public_html/photos/dirlist; done|grep ^- > dirlist-add
The result gave a number of duplicates, of course, most of which I was able to remove with sort(1):
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4409 -> sort -u dirlist-add > dirlist2=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4410 -> l dirlist-add > dirlist2=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4411 -> sort -u dirlist-add > dirlist2=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4412 -> l dirlist-add dirlist2
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 204.647 4 Apr. 16:15 dirlist-add
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 54.808 4 Apr. 16:15 dirlist2=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4413 -> wc -l dirlist-add dirlist2
4473 dirlist-add
1113 dirlist2
5586 total
But they only removed identical entries, and I had to go through the list and tidying up things like this:
19810924 Oktoberfest in München
19810924 Oktoberfest in München
19810924 Oktoberfest in M\374nchen
That wasn't helped by the fact that Emacs didn't want to believe that the document was UTF-8 because of the breakage. I started with 6,700 entries, and after some hours I made my way through 7% of the file, reducing it to 6,523 entries. That was round mid-2006, and I hope that it represented most of the breakage. But it's a surprisingly slow business.
In passing, the entry for 20010325 is interesting:
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That's the mystery photo that I had been puzzling about only last week. It's the house that my aunt Audrey and family had lived in since about 1950, 13 Shierlaw St, Richmond SA. The photo is almost unrecognizable, and looking at Google Maps “street view”, it seems to have been torn down and replaced with something modern.
| Saturday, 5 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
We've had Bruno for two years now. At the time we got him, he was ideal: a male chocolate Burmese, 3 months old—just my specifications. And he was just round the corner, the only one West of Melbourne.
But somehow he didn't develop the way I had hoped. He's still so hyperactive, and we can't be sure that he won't catch another bird. On the other hand, he's not the only cat we've had who caught birds. Sixteen years ago Lilac caught and ate a crimson rosella, and I didn't even bother to mention it in the diary:
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I still don't want Bruno to catch birds, but maybe we're becoming more sensitive.
Spent a little time this morning continuing with my dirlist reconstruction, but I didn't have much time. And then it occurred to me: each directory has a file description with the content of the header, though I no longer seem to use it. But that's exactly what I need for my Makefile target:
dirlist:
rm -f dirlist.new
for i in [12]*; do \
if [ -e $i/description ]; then \
(echo -n "$$i "; cat $$i/description) >> dirlist.new; \
fi; \
done
But I didn't have time for that today. The good news is that I could just check in the flaky dirlist that I have, and that it worked, sort of, at least better than before.
Today Yvonne made the mistake of taking a video from horseback using her mobile phone. And she held it in portrait orientation!
Once I got it onto a sane machine, I discovered that avidemux, at least as installed on lagoon, has no provision for rotating video clips. It saw it as landscape, and there was nothing I could do to fix it.
I've hated avidemux since I first installed it over 13 years ago. To add to that, my Google Gemini query failed, producing just random junk on the screen. lagoon's system is over 4 years old, and it is clearly in need of upgrading.
So how do I do it this time? Every time I do an upgrade I find things that fail without good reason, and I still haven't finished the install on hydra that I started 1½ years ago. But something has to be done. I had already started an install on an SSD a couple of months ago. Bring it up to date, and then I can install it beside the old lagoon, so that Yvonne can fall back to it if something unexpected shows up. Today I got as far as bringing the system up to date.
| Sunday, 6 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
I've decided that avidemux's days are over. A quick Google Gemini search gave me a list of others to try: kdenlive, openshot and blender. As feared, they dragged in a whole slew of dependencies:
===== Sun 6 Apr 2025 13:58:57 AEST on dereel.lemis.com: pkg install kdenlive openshot blender
The following 183 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):
New packages to be INSTALLED:
ImageMagick7: 7.1.1.26_6
...
Number of packages to be installed: 183
The good news is that they installed cleanly. Now to run them. But for that I need X.
So dereel in its incarnation as a copy of lagoon is up and running. Start X? Fails: it had the xorg.conf file for the real lagoon, and the hardware is different here. OK, remove it and see what happens. Starts, bla[cn]k screen.
Oh. Window manager not running. This is due to the transition from fvwm2 to fvwm3 that I started over a year ago. OK, install fvwm3 and continue.
Multiple issues with the configuration files. For years the configuration on lagoon has Just Worked, as the .Xdefaults files show:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/8) ~ 123 -> l ~yvonne/.Xdefaults-*
-rw-r--r-- 1 yvonne home 3,664 6 Jul 2002 /home/yvonne/.Xdefaults-battunga
-r--r--r-- 1 yvonne home 732 1 Nov 2007 /home/yvonne/.Xdefaults-lagoon
Those config files are 23 and 17 years old! One of the reasons for my global changes: I want a central set of configuration files so that any changes I make will apply to all systems. So I have put them in the /home/local/X hierarchy. /home/local is NFS mounted across all systems.
Except on lagoon. For reasons I have forgotten, some of the programs in /home/local/bin are different for lagoon, so it has its own local /home/local. I needed to add a symlink from (local) /home/local to (remote) /home/local/X.
Looking back, it seems clear that I need a further layer in my PATH, something like
That's a surprising number, and the last three have two subdirectories, bin for normal programs and sbin for administrative programs. But any such change is for another day.
Finally got the files where I wanted them:
Finally got all that put together and tried—once again.
X.Org X Server 1.21.1.14
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Current Operating System: FreeBSD dereel.lemis.com 14.2-STABLE FreeBSD 14.2-STABLE #2: Sun Apr 6 10:59:34 AEST 2025 grog@dereel.lemis.com:/home/obj/hydra/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable/14/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC amd64
/home/local/X/.Xdefaults-dereel:1:3: error: invalid preprocessing directive
1 | # $Id: .Xdefaults-lagoon,v 1.4 2007/11/01 06:13:58 grog Exp
| ^
/home/local/X/.Xdefaults-dereel:24:12: warning: empty character constant [-Winvalid-pp-token]
24 | ! Why doesn''t this work?
| ^
/home/local/X/.Xdefaults-dereel:25:14: warning: empty character constant [-Winvalid-pp-token]
25 | ! Why - doesn''t this work?
| ^
2 warnings and 1 error generated.
xrdb: "*VT100.translations" on line 23 overrides entry on line 5
What's that? It seems that X has become pickier in the course of time. # was never a valid delimiter, but it's not clear why it now objects to text in comments. It appears to go through cpp, and that has changed. But that's easy enough to fix.
Next,
Error: Can't open display: unix:0
Couldn't open /home/yvonne/.fvwm/fvwm_mfl_:0.0.pid because: Permission denied
Why can't it open the display? Hard to say. It's not even clear what produced that first line. But the second was more of a problem. I didn't know that fvwm3 wanted to create files in its configuration directory, and arguably that's wrong. But I wasn't able to set my symlinks so that user yvonne could write to it:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 2 -> ls -l ~yvonne/.fvwm
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root home 19 6 Apr 16:18 /home/yvonne/.fvwm -> /home/local/X/.fvwm=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 3 -> chmod 777 ~yvonne/.fvwm=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 4 -> ls -l ~yvonne/.fvwm
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root home 19 6 Apr 16:18 /home/yvonne/.fvwm -> /home/local/X/.fvwm
It took me some time to realize that you need a -h option to change the mode of the symlink itself:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 5 -> chmod -h 777 ~yvonne/.fvwm=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 6 -> ls -l ~yvonne/.fvwm
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root home 19 6 Apr 16:18 /home/yvonne/.fvwm -> /home/local/X/.fvwm=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 7 ->
But by then I had had other things to do.
Also ran my script to rebuild dirlist as planned yesterday. Things weren't quite as good as I expected: not all the description files contained what they should, and some were missing. Clearly a file whose time has passed. But now I have two different partial dirlists, both wrong. Maybe there's a little less work now, but I'll have to see. The diffs are remarkably large. Here the version I created yesterday (dirlist) and the one I did today (dirlist.new):
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html 4509 -> diff -wu photos/dirlist Photos/dirlist.new | wc -l
5661=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html 4510 -> wc -l photos/dirlist Photos/dirlist.new
6526 photos/dirlist
6437 Photos/dirlist.new
The diffs are nearly as big as the files, and some of the damage is surprisingly recent:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html 4508 -> diff -wu photos/dirlist Photos/dirlist.new
...
20250209 Steak and kidney
+20250210 Corymbia ficifolia
20250211 Yvonne's new rug
Yvonne bought some pre-prepared enchiladas at ALDI last week. They're wrapped in something vaguely resembling tortillas, but clearly made from wheat, and they're enormous!
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They didn't taste too bad, but I have a feeling we could do better ourselves. The big issue is the size of the tortilla—it's possible that ALDI is on the right track with these ones.
| Monday, 7 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Despite all the problems I've had with “Wise”, the unwisely named money transfer service, they remain the cheapest. And a couple of days ago I received mail from O'Reilly telling me that royalties had accumulated, and would I please fill out the enclosed form.
OK, what's my US account number? I had it written down, but they want the name of the bank, and I didn't write that down. Wise? Transferwise? Unwise? I should check on the web site.
Once again I couldn't find it! What a horrible web site! After multiple attempts, I found a way:
That gives a “Proof of account details”, as promised, but in PDF. It shows all that I need to know. Well, not quite. The details are completely unrelated to what I had written down. Different account numbers, different address. Does the old one still work? At one point I had intended to have my German pension paid into my “Wise” account. Would it suddenly have gone into a black hole? I'm continually horrified by “Wise”.
The other issue with my O'Reilly royalties was that I had to fill them out in a PDF document. Sure, I could print it out, write in the details and scan it again. But how 20th century! I've been able to modify PDFs before, I think with Open Office, but surely there's a standalone PDF editor.
Yes, of course. But not for FreeBSD! In the end I checked with Google Gemini, which pointed me to PDFgear for Microsoft. With only minor pain I was able to install it, and it seems to work. But what do I put in there? Should I trust “Wise”?
Yvonne is concerned that Larissa has problems with her left front paw. I don't see it:
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But she'll be seeing Pene Kirk tomorrow, so she can take a look.
Finally got round to my planned Laugengebäck today, using this recipe as a start. It was an experience. Here's my recipe.
A first for me was using milk and butter instead of water to make the dough. The quantities (280 ml milk, 40 g butter for 500 g of flour) proved far too little. In the end I put in 323 ml of milk, which was still not too much—I think. That gave a total of 883 g of dough, from which I was to make 9 buns of nearly 100 g each:
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The instructions are to roll the dough out into a triangle and then rolls it together:
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A lot of work, and it didn't seem to be much like the original, so I only made 3 like that and just formed the other 6 into longish buns:
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Let them rise again, after which they looked nothing like the original:
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Roll them in 200 ml of 4% NaOH, which proved surprisingly difficult, not just because of the rubber gloves. They tended to fall apart:
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Into the oven on programme 3 (heat from above and below) at 220°. Here they are after 6 minutes, 15 minutes (minimum recommended) and 17 minutes (maximum, and when I took them out):
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Clearly they look a mess, but they tasted OK.
What do I do next time?
One thing that I can't decide is how to put them in the NaOH solution. They seem to be just too soft at that point.
Making Laugengebäck requires sodium hydroxide, a particularly dangerous chemical. So the package I had was secured so that it can't be easily opened:
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This is almost illegible under normal circumstances; to take these photos I had to increase microcontrast to the maximum. Without that, it looks like this (run the cursor over the image to compare it with the enhanced version):
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There are plenty of lids where you have to press on the sides to open, but they're usually diametrically opposed. This one has two arrows 90° apart. How does that work? The lid must be intended to deform to allow this tab to pass the stop on the container, and for that you need to push on the lines at the bottom:
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But what if the user gets it wrong and applies force? The container could open suddenly, spreading caustic soda everywhere—exactly what they're trying to avoid. None of that for me: I cut off the tabs, and everything was normal.
What's wrong with these photos?
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Clearly the first one has pronounced shadows. Yet Another case where my slave flash didn't trigger. Is the receiver dying? I put in an external trigger for the second shot.
| Tuesday, 8 April 2025 | Today's diary | top | previous | next | last |
It has only been 1½ years since a remarkably slow and messy operation to remove a blockage in the drain from the kitchen sink, but over the last few weeks it has become increasingly blocked again. It still drained, but unacceptably slowly. And it blocked almost immediately after only a litre or so of water.
That can only mean that the blockage is in the downpipe. Removed it with remarkably little difficulty or mess to find no blockage. The downpipe into the floor also took 5 l of water with no problems. Put a 40 cm long brush down with no obstacles.
OK, reassemble. The blockage had changed: it was much worse! I can only assume that the blockage was just below the reach of my brush, and that I had managed to compress it. But why the quick filling under normal conditions? Air lock, maybe?
Still, I need professional help, so David is out of the question, but Black Hill Plumbing and Blocked Drains sound like the right address. Spoke to Slade, who said he'd be out tomorrow. I'll be interested to see how that pans out.
Bev Smith along today with a present, a rack for items in my shower:
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The old one was rusty and dripping rust into the shower basin, something that got on her nerves. So she bought a new one and didn't want to be paid. That was nice of her. There's still some rust on the tiles above the tap.
What do you call these things? I've decided on “shower rack”, though I'm not happy with that. The packaging for the new one says that it's a “Suction Rectangular Rack Black”, but that's newspeak.
Yvonne off with Larissa to Pene Kirk today for a regular injection. Pene took a look at her paw and diagnosed something like failed tendons, and there's not much we can do about it. It seems that it was the right paw, not the left one.
| Wednesday, 9 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Back to looking at my problems starting X on dereel, the new lagoon candidate. If I can't write to a remote .fvwm directory (why?), I need to make it local. So I did that, and it started. But I still had these strange error messages: “can't open unix:0”. In the cases I have seen in the past, the program was polite enough to give its name:
xterm: Xt error: Can't open display: unix:0
OK, search my configuration files. No mention of unix:0 anywhere! I'll have to run ktrace at some point. While trying to capture the output, tried to start X from an xterm on hydra.
/usr/local/bin/X: Only console users are allowed to run the X server
I've seen that before. I need a file /usr/local/etc/X11/Xwrapper.config.
OK, take two.
=== .xinitrc
access control disabled, clients can connect from any host
fvwm3 -display :0.0 -f /home/local/X/.fvwm/fvwm2rc-dereel:0.0
Error: Can't open display: unix:0
Identity added: /home/yvonne/.ssh/id_rsa (/home/yvonne/.ssh/id_rsa)
Error: Can't open display: unix:0
Still I get the default fvwm3 desktop! What's in /home/local/X/.fvwm/fvwm2rc-dereel:0.0? Nothing! It doesn't exist! And fvwm3 is far too polite to complain! Change it to the intended /home/local/X/.fvwm/fvwm3rc-dereel:0.0 and things come up more or less as expected, though there are still a large number of strangenesses.
One of them was the error message that I got on Sunday:
Couldn't open /home/yvonne/.fvwm/fvwm_mfl_:0.0.pid because: Permission denied
I worked around it by making .fvwm local instead of a symlink, right? Well, yes, maybe. But I don't refer to ~/.fvwm anywhere in the startup scripts. It's always /home/local/X/.fvwm/. So where did that message come from? My best bet, based on the results, is that it's part of the default fvwm3 startup procedure, and it's not needed now that it's using my configuration.
That was enough for today. There are still strangenesses: the keyboard mapping is still out. I need to look at the xmodmap configuration, which is still local. And xv wasn't installed. Not an X problem, but why did it get lost in the package upgrade?
Slade from Black Hill plumbing (as they're called now) along with his mate in the early afternoon to unblock out the kitchen sink drain. It took 3½ hours! He approached it completely differently from Mumpy Wallis, from the outside. And he found metres of fat in the drain. I was left with the impression that Mumpy had punched a hole in the fat but not removed it completely.
Certainly Slade made a better impression that he knew what he was doing. He approached from the outside and made almost no mess, which he then cleaned up again. But his bill was even higher! $830 today, $792 only 1½ years ago. Hopefully that will be the last time for a while.
And why did the cleaning take so long? Slade had to insert his camera and his cleaning jet from the septic tank end and find his way up the drains. Lots of 90° bends, and at least one 100 mm to 50 mm reduction, not to mention just finding the correct drain. He confirmed that kitchen drains clog up, and that there's little that can be done about it. So why aren't the drains laid out to make cleaning easier? It would also seem to be a good idea to have a pull rope installed so that they can get their tools in more easily.
The metal spatula that Yvonne bought last month proved to be almost exactly what I wanted, modulo Jim Beam logo and serrated edges. But there's only one, and sometimes it's in the dish washer when I need it. So today she bought a new one:
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At least it has one flat side. But clearly cooking's thirsty work:
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| Thursday, 10 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Saw an advertisement somewhere on the web today: solar (photovoltaic) installations for free. See if you qualify.
If it's free, I'll take two. So I filled out the form, which ended up wanting too much data from me, including email and phone number. Still no indication whether I qualified. And at the end “we'll call you in the next 24 hours”. Really not what I wanted.
And sure enough, got a call from a Stephanos from Modern Earth Energy, explaining that yes, though I already have a PV system, they can upgrade it for “free”, meaning that I pay my power savings for five years. That seems reasonable, and I'll have a call with a specialist on Monday. I have little expectation that it will work.
One of the sillier things about my new Breville BDF500 deep fryer is that when powered on it always comes up in “Twice fried chips” mode. Who does that? It's easy enough to switch to what I want, but it's an unnecessary step, one that the old one didn't need.
Still, since it's there, why not try it out? My also-new mandolin has a setting for cutting chips:
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So today I made some twice-fried chips, in the process coming to a number of insights. First, the mandolin is really not well suited to cutting chips. The cutter blades are not long enough to cut through the potatoes:
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I needed a knife to finish the cut. And no, there's no adjustment to make the chips thinner. The chip cutter position is tied to a certain depth, and that's it.
Then the hand protector was also not able to reach the last piece of potato. It's designed to be flush with the rails of the mandolin, and it can't reach the last piece. Instead I used the protector from my old mandolin:
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And the fryer? As advertised, it heated to “130°”, warning that it would really be warmer to prepare for the drop in temperature when the chips are inserted. That proved to be closer to 160°, and it's not clear how well it would work with a different weight of chips or after been left at that “temperature” for, say, 15 minutes.
After the three minute “first fry”, the chips looked better than I thought:
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And only then did I realize that I was far too early. The second fry, requiring a confusing sequence of button presses, was 1½ hours later. It's preset to 5 minutes, which I thought would be far too short, but after 3 minutes they looked ready:
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But since this was an experiment, I continued until the fryer told me that they were done:
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And yes, they tasted good, but clearly they were overdone.
What do I take away?
One thing that I forgot to check: what weight? With pre-prepared chips I use 120 g. Today I used 250 g of potato. What did I end up with? To be checked next time.
In passing, while waiting for the device to heat up, read the instruction manual, which is only marginally well written. It has a couple of surprises:
No wonder deep fryers have gone out of fashion if people believe they need to do all that. That would correspond to roughly 500 ml of oil per use, a considerable expense.
| Friday, 11 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Call on my mobile phone today from an unknown number in Melbourne. “I'm Norelle from ANZ and want to talk to you about your recent complaint.
Alright, Norelle, can you authenticate yourself? “I'm Norelle from ANZ”! Yes, that's what scammers say too. “I sent you a text”. Do you mean an SMS? “Huh”? Yes, ultimately she said that she meant an SMS, but I didn't receive one. Based on the complete lack of preparedness for this kind of question, I assumed that she really was from ANZ. A scammer would have been better prepared. In the end she said that she would send me email, which she did. The punchline in her message:
Letting you know we are unable to schedule closure of your credit card for a future date due to government regulations that instruct all financial institutions to close credit cards as soon as the customer requests it.
OK, that makes sense—if it's correct. Should I follow up? She did include instructions on how to take things further. But is it worth it?
But why are banks so woefully prepared? Bank Australia isn't: they have what they call a “call-in password”, which they should quote if they ring me.
Where's my chip cutter? I looked again, but I still can't find it. But I recall that it cut relatively thick chips, and they're not expensive. Sure enough, round $21 on eBay, with cutters for two different chip sizes (½" and ⅓" if I believe one seller).
But how about AliExpress? That sounds like the kind of thing that they would sell. Off to look, marvelling once again at their amazingly badly organized search pages and constantly changing prices. But they had the same item for $17.29. OK, I can risk that. And while I was at it, found a couple of other things that I had been considering buying: a new multimeter (I don't trust the accuracy of the one I have) for $6.72, a battery tester for $2.68 and a quick USB charger for $2.59. Total $29.28.
But that's not the way AliExpress sees it:
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Three different sums! Add the 10% tax and I should get either $30.89 (based on the price of the individual items) or $29.77 (based on the subtotal at the top). By comparison the $30.94 total is almost correct. But I don't understand how they can continually show such incorrect information. And elsewhere it can be really dangerous: A while back I saw one item for under $3 which suddenly increased to round $70. Today I ended up paying the total, still 5¢ more than what it should have been.
And of course then I found my chip slicer on eBay for $17.53, here in Victoria, and without additional GST. But I can't buy it: they won't ship to me! Or at least that's what eBay claims. What kind of nonsense is that?
| Saturday, 12 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Jesse Walsh along today to do some more garden work, mainly spraying weeds, but also removing things like self-sown Valerian:
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Some idiot in the USA is imposing tariffs on the rest of the world. As the New York Times writes, “President Trump prefers to shoot before aiming”.
But what is a tariff? The Oxford English Dictionary states: “A classified list or scale of charges made in any private or public business; as, a hotel tariff, a railroad tariff”. And that's how I understood it. My first use of the word in this diary was on 29 August 1963: “Breakfast (which was on the tariff) was not as good as could be...”. In the course of over 60 years, I have used the word 79 times, most recently in September last year referring to ISP charges, something now called a “plan”. Without exception I used the term to refer to charges for some service.
And Trump's tariffs? For me, they're import duty. The OED knows this use too, and notes that the use is older (1592 as compared to 1751). But why has the usage changed? “Import duty” is much clearer and less ambiguous.
Another horror news from the USA today: the US Social Security Administration declared 6,100 people to be dead, over the protests and dismissal of Greg Pearre, a senior executive of the administration.
How can they do that? The DOGE and
the Stasi Department of Homeland
Security decided on it. Trump's team have done some strange things in their short
time in office, and this may not be the worst, but it's certainly another thing that should
have him removed from office immediately. Why is nothing happening?
Under the circumstances, it's fitting to discover that one of the dead is Felon Musk. Bureaucratic mixup? Revenge? Fake news? Who knows?
Baked ham again today. Somehow I started far too late and forgot to remove the net. And for 840 g of ham I needed 72 minutes. I'm still no closer to coming to a clear relationship between weight and cooking time; I currently have times between 75 and 125 minutes.
| Sunday, 13 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
It has still barely rained this year, and it shows. The roses are suffering, despite the dripper lines.
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Of course, it would help if they dripped near the plants:
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I never realized how difficult drippers are, though I've been using them for decades.
Due to misplanning we were left with 500 g of fresh Brussels sprouts that expire today. What should we do with them? We had planned to eat fish, but that doesn't match. With a bit of web searching (Google Gemini is my friend) I found this recipe: fry them and glaze them with honey and soya sauce:
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The usual issues, of course: the quantities. The recipe called for an avoirdupois pound of sprouts, close enough to 500 g not to make any difference. And of course the glaze was all in cups and spoons. 3 tbsp honey, 2 tbsp soya sauce, 2 tbsp of water and (watch carefully) 1 tsp of cornflour. How do I convert that to real units? A US tablespoon contains 15 ml, so the water and soya sauce are relatively clear. And the honey? It seems that a good median density is 1.41 (coincidentally √2), so my honey would be 63 g. I wonder how people measure honey with tablespoons.
The big surprise was how much of an area the sprouts take up. I had to use my largest frying pan, 36 cm, and barely got them all in:
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And of course they browned unevenly:
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I think that the next time I should make 250 g at the most, and that's what I've put in my recipe.
My Brussels sprouts recipe required 100 g ½ cup of sliced
onions. I thought finely sliced. Idea for a mandolin. But which one? My old slicer
(white plastic on top) is too fine, so I used the new one:
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Somehow it's hard to cut with it, and I was left with a lot of uncut onion:
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I was quite happy with the new mandolin, but its limitations are showing. Here underneath after cutting:
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The Brussels sprouts recipe refers to Brussel sprouts, not Brussels sprouts. That seems wrong to me. Is it an Americanism? Off to ask some AI bot, probably Google Gemini, and was told that yes, “Brussels sprouts” is correct. The city is called Brussels, not Brussel.
Oh. What a short-sighted answer. Presumably it's also never referred to as Bruxelles or Brüssel.
Only later did I look at the URL of the recipe: https://pupswithchopsticks.com/honey-glazed-pan-fried-brussels-sprouts/. And the recipe includes the gem
It's a bit counter-intuitive but when you are shopping for brussel sprouts, try to use fresh ones...
It goes on to say that they should also be small, and that's presumably what “counter-intuitive” refers to.
My Brussels sprouts recipe wasn't really enough for a dinner. Looking through my recipe index, came across this recipe for chicken and dòufu stir-fry. It seems that I was quite happy with it, but that was 10 years ago, and I don't seem to have made it since.
Today was the day. Yes, it tasted OK:
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But the balance is strange. Amazing quantities of oyster sauce and not much else. It's due for an overhaul.
| Monday, 14 April 2025 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
After last week's call, I had no fewer than three reminders of a call at 13:00 today to discuss upgrading our PV installation, two of them from a number (0483 909 812) that was reported as “DB Realty”. Today the call came as planned from a number that wasn't identified (0451 532 572). The caller identified himself as Andrew Parker and may have mentioned his affiliation, but I didn't get it. He wasn't from Modern Earth Energy, but some kind of consultant to help me avoid the fly-by-night (my term) nature of the industry. They would also not be doing the work: that would be some company in Ballarat.
He went on to say that based on my usage, I would need an additional 6.8 to 7.1 kW, generating an average of 32 to 35 kWh per day (optimistic based on my records; on a good day in mid-summer I get 50 kWh from my 10.8 kW array, and currently it's just shy of 30 kWh), meaning that I would have no electricity bills from October to April, and an average of $30 a month in the winter.
And that was the sum total of his analysis of the installation. No discussion of additional batteries, which are essential if I want to make it through the night.
The main issue was financing. It seems that I'm eligible to (another) state rebate of $1400 and a federal rebate of $3150. The rest will be financed by a weekly payment of $34.32 for 72 months, which will cover the system, installation, 20 year warranty and inspections. No indication if there's anything that it won't cover. That corresponds to about $1,785 per year, considerably less than the $2,450 that I currently pay for electricity.
And they could do all the work on Thursday! They don't even know what the work is! At no point did anybody ask me about what we have installed, though they were aware that there was something. And he expected it to get done on a single day, where it took Effective Electrical two days to do a normal installation! And he didn't ask who did the previous installation; all other things being equal, they should get the preference. Somehow the experts are missing. And (Maundy) Thursday! When do you not want to do potentially difficult work? On the day before a long weekend! In the end we put it down to next Tuesday, though my guess is that they won't do much more than take a look, scratch their heads and go away again to consider.
The installation will be underwritten by a company called Brighte, pronounced “bright”, and he needed personal details to make the application. The usual nonsense: name, address, date of birth, driver license number, including that completely illegible number on the back, credit card number. Damn, I don't give my card number over the phone! But clearly this bloke is legitimate, or doing a very involved scam. So I gave the old ANZ card number. I'll still have to monitor the transactions frequently.
As promised, almost immediately a call back from Brighte, which my phone refused to accept. No retry, just voice mail, which I had to listen to 4 times to get the details: call 1300 274 448, go through an endless list of voice menu choices and quote a six-digit number.
Somehow that worked, and I was connected to Nina, who went through all the things all over again and pointed out things that Andrew should have told me but didn't: they charge $2.30 per week for the financing (included in the quoted $34.32) and $75 at the beginning. The total sum to pay would be a suspicious-sounding $9,990, which on further calculation ($34.32 x 52 × 6) proves to be their way of saying $10,708. But on the whole things looked relatively professional, and I should save money. I'll be interested to see how things develop. There's a very good chance that the whole thing will fall through. A lot depends on what they intend to install and how close they come to their claims.
After that, lots of emails, including one asking me to set a password. Did that, logged in and found:
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And that's all. If they have a real web site, they have blocked it. What a horrible idea being forced to communicate in writing by mobile telephone, quite apart from the security implications!
The letter S is strange. Over the centuries it has had a number of different forms: in many languages, including English, lower-case s was written ſ in the middle of a word up to the early 19th century. It's only a rumour that the change came to avoid things like Where the bee ſucks there ſuck I.
In Greek, it Σ is still written σ in the middle of a word and ς at the end of a word. In German it's even worse: apart from s and ſ, there's also ß, a double s whose usage has changed over the years and geographically (typically not used in Swiss German). The ſ has disappeared from modern German as the script changed from Fraktur to Antiqua.
But that wasn't so long ago, and people seem to have forgotten it. The Sprach-Brockhaus dictionary that I bought nearly 60 years ago was set in Antiqua, but it included the long ſ where appropriate. But now even things set in Fraktur frequently use the short s where the long ſ is required. Don't people know any better? A typical case is the word „Gaſtſtätte“, which increasingly is being spelt „Gaststätte“. Here (from the German Wikipedia page) an example of incorrect spelling (above) and correct spelling (below):
Today we watched another episode of „Sisi“, a series apparently designed to make “The Crown” look historically authentic. In this episode King Ludwig II (died 1886) proposes to Sophie Charlotte in Bayern (in 1867), the daughter of deceased Max in Bayern (died 1888). But in one scene I saw:
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„Die Begleitung deſ Königſ ſorgt für Furore“. Ouch! That hurts much more than „Gaststätte“. It should be „Die Begleitung des Königs ſorgt für Furore“ of course, though nowadays people would write „Die Begleitung des Königs sorgt für Furore“ (“The king's companion causes furore”). One ſ, two s. I can only assume that the people who made the series did recognize that s can sometimes be long in Fraktur, but they all (and there must have been a number involved) didn't know when or how. And it seems that it's not an isolated case, as this section shows. Sic tranſit gloria mundi.
| Tuesday, 15 April 2025 | Today's diary | top | previous |
It's not always fun sitting back and watching the stupidity that Donald Trump has exhibited, and it's not clear where things will go. The most interesting thing is China's retaliation by restricting the supplies of rare earth elements. That will hurt the USA more than just about anything else. And it could have the positive side effect of speeding up the resolution of the Ukraine conflict: they are now in a position to be firmer in negotiations about the supply of rare earths to the USA.
But I have only just discovered another thing, which seems to have a positive effect on exchange rates, at least for Yvonne and me. The exchange rate of the Australian dollar seems to (currently) closely follow the exchange rate of the US dollar, but both have dropped significantly against the Euro. We get a significant part of our income from European pension funds. In September last year the exchange rate of the Australian dollar was 0.6132 €, and we received a total of $3,510.16. Last month it dropped considerably, from 0.5930 € at the beginning to 0.58 € at the end, and for the same sum in € we received $3,679.17.
But there's more: since Trump started his latest antics, the exchange rates have dropped significantly. Currently the exchange rate is 0.5596 €, though it has been as low as 0.5422 €. We've only had one pension payment so far this month (the others are due at the end of the month), but it's 6% more than last month. If that continues for the other payments, we'll get round $3,900 this month. $400 a month isn't to be sneezed at.
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