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| Greg's diary |
| February 2025 |
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| Saturday, 1 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 1 February 2025 |
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Vitamin B₆ again
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
My investigations into Vitamin B₆ have been interesting. While I don't think that there is any cause for concern, do I really need the magnesium supplement in the first place? My recollection was that I started taking it after the results of my DEXA test 2 years ago. And since then I have been feeling less active. One of the symptoms described here is “lack of muscle control...”. Is that what I had two years ago, only slightly later? Could it be related? But the Mayo Clinic article goes on to mention ataxia, definitely not what I have.
Just to confuse the issue, it seems that I was taking magnesium supplements 7½ years ago. I'm pretty sure that I stopped in between, but I don't recall any issues then.
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Trump causes heart problems
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Topic: health, politics, opinion | Link here |
Today Yvonne pointed me at this video, on Facebook of course. It shows signs of having been published elsewhere, but I can't find it. <conspiracy-theory>Could it have been removed?</conspiracy-theory> It's quite interesting: it was published just after the US elections, but it describes almost exactly what Donald Trump is now doing to establish power and become a dictator. Once again I'm wondering how resilient the US democracy is, and whether some important US government building will be seriously damaged in about 3 weeks' time.
But it worries Yvonne. For the first time in nearly 3 weeks she has tachycardia again. Bloody Trump! As if he hadn't done enough other damage.
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Wikipedia Library
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
Tidying up my notifications on Wikipedia, I found a 3 year old note: “Congratulations! You are now eligible for The Wikipedia Library".
What's that? “an open research hub, a place for active Wikipedia editors to gain access to the vital reliable sources that they need to do their work and to be supported in using those resources to improve the encyclopedia”. That sounds interesting, but I'll have to put it off until I can investigate in more detail.
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Tailor-made spam
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yet Another scam email today trying to steal my email password (what's that?). But this one was tailored to an address that should never have seen the light of day:
<div>
<div><p style="font-size: larger;"><span style="font-weight:300;font-style: italic;">Hydra</span><span style="font-weight: 600;">Mail</span></p>
<p>Hi Grog</p>
<p>Please note grog@hydra.lemis.com authentication expires 01 February, 2025.</p>
<p><table><tr><td style="background-color: cornflowerblue;color: white;padding:5px 7px;border-radius: 3px;"><a style="color:white;text-decoration: none;" href="https://ipfs.io/ipfs/Qma8kStn7DAiwSWLoPeQRBU1GBEWSUDSLQbKkVb16TJoDd/#grog@hydra.lemis.com">Continue</a></td></tr></table></p>
<p>Please continue to keep or change your password.</p>
<p></p>
Regards,<br>
Hydra Mail </div>
</div>
</div>
I like the “Hydra Mail”. Not so https://ipfs.io/ipfs.
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More fisheye fun
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Spent some time today investigating the panoramas that I took yesterday with the 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. There were surprises. The project files that I created with my mkpto script were completely broken, presumably because of incorrect assumptions that it makes. In particular, it didn't know the focal length of the lens: it has no electronics, and the other fisheyes report the length.
OK, use the Hugin GUI. Here the three images that it had to merge:
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When I loaded them into the GUI, I got:
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What's that? It was consistent: the second image had this fleur-de-lis crop. It didn't matter which image it was, just the second to be loaded. I could add the image again, and it would work, but I wasn't able to come close to stitching a panorama.
OK, try de-fishing. I had done this before with sample images, and the results are acceptable if not good. Today I did some playing around with the first images I took:
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That's better, but nowhere close to good. I need to follow up on other defishers.
In passing, came across this strangeness:
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Where does it get that angle of view from? According to my field of view program, a 4 mm fisheye lens has a (theoretical) horizontal field of view of 247.8°. It can't be assuming rectilinear; then it would be 130.4°. So where did it get the value from? Could that be part of the problem?
While pondering that, I saw this:
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That's correct! Well, close enough. But that's the same lens, and the supplied parameters are the same. Could it be that I have messed up the Exif data?
| Sunday, 2 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 2 February 2025 |
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Still more fisheye fun
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
Spent some more time trying to stitch the panoramas I shot with my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. I failed.
After some consideration, it seems that the problem lies with the incorrect angle of view calculation that I saw yesterday. And the Exif data causes the problem: images that don't contain a focal length result in a popup that asks for the focal length and may calculate the angle of view correctly as a result. If the focal length is in the Exif data, it doesn't need to, but it seems to calculate the incorrect angle of view. It also assumes a rectilinear lens.
How can I fix that? I could change the lens type, but I couldn't find anything that would allow me to specify the field of view. Where is it stored? I recall something about a lens database. There!
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20250131 3014 -> l ~/.hugindata/
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 94.208 19 Jan. 13:21 camlens.db=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20250131 3016 -> sqlite3 ~/.hugindata/camlens.db
sqlite> .tables
CameraCropTable LensCropTable TCATable
DistortionTable LensHFOVTable VignettingTable
EMORTable LensProjectionTable
sqlite> select * from LensProjectionTable;
OLYMPUS M.8mm F1.8|2
OLYMPUS M.12-200mm F3.5-6.3|0
Pixel 8 Pro back camera 18.0mm f/2.8|2
LUMIX G 20/F1.7|0
NIKON|COOLPIX L1|0
sqlite>
No mention of the 7Artisans lens. But of course not: it was last modified on 19 January. But what a lot of other junk in there! Nikon Coolpix L1. “Pixel 8 Pro”. Where did that come from? And the copy on eureka contained hundreds of duplicates. Still, not what I'm looking for. I really don't know what I am looking for. Time to ask for help.
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Stuffed capsicum and courgettes
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
It's been nearly 9 years since we last cooked “filled vegetables”, typically aubergine, capsicum and courgettes. Somehow the filling wasn't as tasty as I liked, and today I made significant improvements, mainly more herbs:
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Kangaroos
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Topic: animals | Link here |
We've seen evidence of a lot of kangaroos in the garden, but we don't see many animals. Today Yvonne saw a couple, only 10 m from the verandah door:
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| Monday, 3 February 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 3 February 2025 |
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Evil Bill Gates!
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Topic: politics, general, opinion | Link here |
This morning Yvonne showed me an article on Facebook: 11 years Bill Gates recommended vaccinations to reduce world population. Bad Bill Gates!
Huh? That doesn't make sense. But she believed it. All the post showed was somebody holding a newspaper clipping with some similar claim. Where's the backup information? Off to check and came up with many results, in particular a screenshot of the article, with this quote:
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According to the image, the article appeared in the 4th edition of the “Sovereign Independent”, a publication so obscure that Google can't find it. But it has a domain name: sovereignindependent.com. And that currently belongs to a domain squatter. So not surprisingly, it's a hoax. But it's sad that Yvonne believed it.
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Corymbia ficifolia in flower
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
I've been keeping an eye on my Corymbia ficifolia, which should be flowering now. It's been a dry start to the year, no rain at all for the last 3 weeks, but last night we got 9 mm rain. And bang! the buds flowered:
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The dry lawn in the first image show how bad things are.
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More cardiology
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Topic: health | Link here |
Unexpected phone call for Yvonne today at 10:00: Can you be at St John of God at 12:00 to speak with Professor Peter Kistler?
She originally had had an appointment with him tomorrow, but that had been postponed until next week. But given the experience of the past couple of days, it was welcome. Only: 2 hours, including breakfast and travel. Can we do it later? Yes, 13:30 would do too, so we took that.
Took along the KardiaMobile 6L and phone with the readings in the hope that the ECG nurse would help explain things to me. But no, she knew of them, but had apparently never seen one, and she was also not able to help interpret the readings, though she did uncover a history function that made viewing the ECGs marginally easier. “Show it to Peter, he likes that sort of thing”.
And so it was. I said “here's our toy ECG device”, and he replied “I like that kind of toy”, and spent some time looking at the results of the weekend. Only he wasn't able to help me understand the ECGs. It seems that the only use is to show them to specialists.
He confirmed that the recovery from November's ablation was not what he had hoped—in some cases it can take up to 6 weeks for symptoms to decline, but the New Year was the latest for that scenario. It seems that up to 20% of such ablations require further treatment. So she'll need another ablation, of a different kind. I forgot to note the term, but it could be pulsed field ablation. And that will happen Real Soon Now, probably later this month. And there, too, there's a 10% risk that it won't be the last.
One interesting insight is what the long-term effects of atrial fibrillation are. As long as it's not continuous, it doesn't have an overly dangerous effect on the heart; the real danger is a stroke. But the apixaban prevents that. Me: “Does it prevent them completely or mainly?”. Peter: ”For you, I would say mainly”. I think he has recognized me.
| Tuesday, 4 February 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 4 February 2025 |
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Dentist again
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Topic: health | Link here |
Into town to see Mario Cordioli, the dentist, today. As I feared, it looks as if he will need to remove the Bernd Doroschan monument, the bridge that has caused so much trouble over the years. That will happen next month.
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A new car?
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Topic: general | Link here |
While in town, took a look at a used car lot that Leigh had recommended. Not encouraging. Apart from the fact that he had nothing that I would consider, the prices were astronomical. Eleven years ago I bought my current Hyundai Elantra for $4,750. It was built in 2002 and now has 187,000 km on the clock. Chris offered a Mazda that looked similar in size for $8,000 (before negotiation). But it was built in 2005 and had 175,000 on the clock! It's barely better than what I want to replace!
That's only one yard, of course, but Leigh tells me that people have bought there and were satisfied. Hopefully that's not an indication of what's in store.
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Blue camera
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Topic: general, photography | Link here |
Found on the back seat of my car when I got home:
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What happened? An ALDI carrier bag is disintegrating for some reason. Fortunately it was easy to wipe off.
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Still more fisheye experiments
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I've been trying to stitch my office panorama for 3 days now, and I'm no closer. Time for a message to the Hugin group. And how about that, I got a reply from Bruno Postle, who was able to stitch the panorama:
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Yes, it's not perfect, but nobody expected that. In particular the camera wasn't mounted in the correct position, so there's parallax. But somehow the answer raised more questions than it answered, and I need to think about it. We're still not out of the woods.
| Wednesday, 5 February 2025 | Dereel | |
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Trump, the ethnic cleanser
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
It has been 16 days since Donald Trump was sworn in as the President of the United States of America. In that time he has done more damage than most presidents have ever done. The only comparison I can think of was Adolf Hitler, though I don't think that even Hitler came close. I've been trying to get my head around it, but he keeps coming out with more atrocities. Close down whole government departments, leave international organizations, repeal environmental protection legislation. I don't understand how, under US law, he can get away with it. Hitler needed the Ermächtigungsgesetz to do what Trump is doing.
But today took the cake. Standing next to Bibi, he announced that the USA would take over Gaza and send the population to Egypt and Jordan—neither of which, of course, were aware of his intentions. Instead he would turn it into a tourist destination.
That's almost the definition of ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity even in the USA and Israel. Under the circumstances, the international protest took longer than I had expected, but it came.
I can agree with some of his arguments: Gaza is a ruin. Never mind that that's the combined fault of the USA and (especially) Israel; it needs to be rebuilt, and that would be easier if what's left of the population (about 97%) were not there. But they could move the people out of the north to the south (for the umpteenth time) and rebuild the north, then move all north and rebuild the south. But one way or another there's no space for tourist resorts: the strip has a population density of 6,000 per km². Still, who believes what Trump says? I hope it wasn't serious.
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A new car?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
For some reason Yvonne has taken up the challenge of finding me a new car—on Facebook! She found one that had been advertised for $3000, and which was now being offered for free. That's interesting, but of course there's no way to select cars based on my preferences.
Off to ask Google Gemini, which pointed me to a couple of sites. Discovered that they're all not very well sorted. On one site, after selecting “Victoria only”, the first hit I had was in New South Wales. But gradually I whittled things down to what I'm looking for: Front Wheel Drive, manual gearbox, price $5000 to $8000. And to my surprise almost all the hits were Holdens! One caught my eye: a 2014 Holden Cruze, 91,000 km, 3 year warranty(!), for only $6,990:
That's a far cry from what I saw yesterday. But I recognize that place. Yesterday my car was parked exactly where the front of this car is in the image. It's the same place. So why didn't he tell me about it, when it ticks all the boxes? My guess is because it has long since been sold. And somehow a 3 year warranty on a car of this age seems completely implausible. Sent a message and received no reply—not what I would expect of a used car salesman.
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A new lagoon
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Topic: technology | Link here |
It's time for more systems upgrades. Not only is Yvonne's machine, lagoon.lemis.com, way down-rev, it also doesn't have enough memory to satisfy firefox, and I recently saw disk errors.
So: start again with a new machine and one of the many SSDs that I have lying around. How do I do it? Upgrade, in principle, starting with the current disk contents. Boot from SD card, enter shell, partition the disk (thoughtfully wiped by Peter Jeremy) in the same way as the one on lagoon, copy, boot.
Well, a couple of issues. First I needed mount points, and the SD card is read-only. It didn't occur to me that there's probably a /mnt directory exactly for this purpose: instead I used the second UFS partition (later to become /home), and mounted the root file system there.
On booting, it couldn't find the kernel. I don't yet understand why, but for some reason it tried to boot from /dev/ada0p4, the /home file system. Why? I don't know. After changing loader parameters, I got it to work, but it paniced during boot and was far too polite to display the trace for even a fraction of a second.
Next attempt: installed a real system from the SD card onto /dev/ada0p4 and told it to boot from ada0p2 (which is to become the real root file system). That worked, at least for the kernel, but I still ended up with the root file system on /dev/ada0p4.
This is all because of the strange way I chose to set up the system, but it should have the advantage that upgrading will be easier. More fun tomorrow.
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Gardening!
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
I've done almost nothing in the garden for years, and it shows. But the Fuchsia in the hanging baskets in front of the house entrance were on their last legs, so I've finally repotted them and one of the ferns:
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| Thursday, 6 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 6 February 2025 |
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Upgrading lagoon
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So why did I end up booting dereel (the current name for the new lagoon) from the wrong partition, /dev/ada0p4 instead of /dev/ada0p2? Simple: that's what was in /boot/loader.conf from lagoon. Fix that and it booted fine, though of course I managed to forget the network configuration and had to disconnect and reconfigure on the fly. That had the interesting result that rwhod still claimed to be lagoon, so the ruptime display for lagoon alternated between 244 days and 7 hours.
OK, build a new FreeBSD 14 world. After some hours,
stable/14/amd64.amd64/tmp/obj-tools/lib/libz -lz -L/usr/obj/hydra/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable/14/amd64.amd64/tmp/obj-tools/lib/libthr -lpthread -legacy
ld: error: undefined symbol: pthread_getname_np
>>> referenced by assert.c:136 (/hydra/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable/14/sys/contrib/openzfs/lib/libspl/assert.c:136)
>>> assert.o:(libspl_assertf) in archive /usr/obj/hydra/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable/14/amd64.amd64/tmp/obj-tools/cddl/lib/libspl/libspl.a
cc: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
*** [ctfconvert.full] Error code 1
One of these days things will happen without problems. But I was trying to upgrade from release 12-1. What happens if I try to install release 13 on the way? At least a long delay, of course, so I didn't manage anything further today.
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Bruno catches another bird
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne into my office today with a sad object: a dead estrilid finch, brought in from the enclosure by Bruno. The enclosure may keep him in, but it doesn't keep birds out. So far $500 expenditure and he's still killing birds. I suppose we're going to have to cover it from above as well.
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No Cruze for Groggy
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Call back from Chris Polkinghorne of Ballarat Auto Group today: yes, as expected, the Holden Cruze that I was looking at yesterday has been sold, but he hadn't got round to updating his listings. But the interesting thing is that it really did have a 3 year warranty: up to $1000 on any repair, and up to the sale value of the car. If he offers that on other cars, it might be worthwhile. And I'm in no hurry.
| Friday, 7 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 7 February 2025 |
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More lagoon update
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yesterday's upgrade to lagoon, from 12.2 to 13.5-PRERELEASE, worked as is intended. And the upgrade to 14.2-STABLE? Just as easy! The only issue was that I managed to set the same address on two network interfaces: for some reason, this machine has three of them.
Now for the hard part: upgrading ports. And of course it didn't work out of the box. As always, it removed Emacs (why?), but also most of the other things needed. And in the second or third iteration I found:
pkg: libglvnd-1.7.0 conflicts with mesa-libs-18.3.2_3 (installs files into the same place). Problematic file: /usr/local/include/EGL/egl.h
What do I do there? I don't know either of them. Remove one of the, I suppose, but which? It proved that only mesa-libs-18.3.2_3 was installed. Removing that removed about everything else, or at least 142 packages. But in the end it was done, and some ports were still there. To my surprise, emacs, firefox and Chromium all installed easily and almost instantaneously, in less than a second—what problems are hiding there? But that's as far as I got today.
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More migraine
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
I don't get migraine very often, and when I do it doesn't last long. But it doesn't seem to be that long since the last attack, and today it hit me round 15:00 and just wouldn't go away. In the end I went to bed early, round 20:30, not before measuring a systolic blood pressure of 160. Hopefully that will go away.
| Saturday, 8 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 8 February 2025 |
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Back to normal again
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Topic: health | Link here |
Up this morning feeling relatively normal, though still with a bit of cotton wool in my head, but that dissipated by midday, and my blood pressure dropped to normal.
This isn't the first time I've had an episode like this. I thought it was the most severe, but I'm not even sure of that—I had something similar in Schellnhausen decades ago. Probably the biggest difference is that I'm paying more attention now.
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A new kind of exploit?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Seen in my mail today:
5 N + 28-01-2025 To groggy@lemis ( 21) Lemis Cloud N + Audio recording REC#282025-284656056.wav Transcript
“Lemis Cloud” indeed. Clearly it's some kind of exploit. But what kind? Mutt tells me:
A 2 38seconds__AudioRecording__lemis__REF213 [image/svg+xml, base64, 0.6K]
Is that an appropriate format for audio? I wouldn't think so, but svg+xml confuses me. And the entire content was:
<svg height="100" width="1500" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<a href="http://www.acutenet.co.jp/cgi-bin/lcount/lcounter.cgi?link=https://pub-a5c97ae7527f4347b0e2c5dd533728fd.r2.dev/Voice5.html?folder=zooG4sMlQ#groggy@lemis.com" target="_blank">
<text x="50%" y="50%" fill="blue" font-family="Arial" font-size="30" text-anchor="middle" alignment-baseline="middle">
Click here to play to Audio note
</text>
</a>
</svg>
How dangerous is that?
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More fisheye fun
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
House photo day again today. It went as smoothly as I had known it, but in the process I decided to try the 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens again. And that was interesting.
The first issue is, as ever: how do I mount it? Traditionally you mount the camera on a slide that can move it backwards and forwards to get the entrance pupil over the axis of rotation of the tripod. Where is the entrance pupil? The general consensus is that there is no clearly defined entrance pupil for a fisheye lens. But it seems to be reasonable to guess that it's somewhere near the back of the front element.
OK, mount on a rail. Oh. There's no way to position the camera on a rail in a way that the rail doesn't get in the way of the field of view. Fake it with a long mounting plate?
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That doesn't really work either: the lens is too far forward, and it's offset to the right. But maybe it will do for the next set of experiments. In the process, discovered another issue. The aperture lever goes below the camera and fouls the plate:
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Removed that, off and took my photos. It seems that the mounting plates were the least of my concerns:
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The black areas at the bottom of the image are part of the mounting shoe at the very bottom, and then the rotator. And there's no way to get rid of them on a normal tripod.
Effectively there's no way to fix this for this kind of panorama. But then I didn't want to, and I don't need to: I already have the Olympus m.Zuiko 8 mm f/1.8 fisheye PRO. Still, it would be interesting to see how well it stitches.
This time I tried a different approach to specifying the angle of view. Previously I have had three different ways of setting the field of view:
But there are other possibilities. Why not just tell the popup the angle of view directly, 225°? Sure, no problem, that's a focal length of 0.08 mm. Oh, sorry, did you mean circular fisheye? In that case your 0.08 mm are 13130.89 degrees. Oh, you really want 225°? That's 4.4 mm.
And that aligned with a relatively satisfactory 8.4 pixel maximum error. But once again I got these strange artefacts, though this time they looked less like a fleur-de-lis:
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Should I continue? I will probably never use this lens for panoramas, but somehow the bug hunter in me makes me try to find a solution.
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Historical accuracy in film
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Topic: multimedia, history, opinion | Link here |
The fourth and (mercifully) final season of Sisi is out. In the first episode, Max in Bayern, Sisi's father, dies, clearly showing us that we're in 1888. Sisi can't be there, because she had had a severe riding accident in Corfu, where she first settled in 1890, though she never had a serious riding accident.
All sorts of people came to Maxens funeral, including his nephew Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, who, like Sisi's mother in law Princess Sophie of Bavaria, had risen from the grave to be at the event after having been dead for 2½ and 16 years respectively.
This is a series praised for its historical accuracy? It makes “The Crown” look like the word of God.
| Sunday, 9 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 9 February 2025 |
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How to delete 7 TB of important data
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
There's a funny noise coming from eureka, a “chunk-a-ka-chunk” about every 2 seconds. What is it? It's really difficult to establish, but I was sure that it was coming from a disk. Gradually it became clear that it was /Photos, the 8 TB disk with all my photos on it.
OK, I was half expecting this since August last year, and I have a new 16 TB disk just waiting to be installed. But the copy is a little out of date. So I installed it in dereel, currently my test box, and brought it up to date:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /Photos 31 -> cd /Photos && mailme rsync -Havx --delete-after . /newphotos 2>>/tmp/foo
That ran its time, and at the end I had:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /Photos 28 -> df /newphotos
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ada1p1 15,257,008 903 15,103,534 0% /newphotos
Aaargh! Empty! The 903 MB (!) are the soft updates journal. I didn't have eureka:/Photos mounted on /Photos: it was on /eureka/Photos! 60 years' worth of photos gone!
Well, of course not, though some people on IRC thought so. Apart from the slightly flaky copy on eureka, there are also two backups. So I started the copy again, this time with tar. The disk confirmed that it was causing the “chunk-a-ka-chunk” by modifying it while copying. And that took its time. For reasons I didn't understand, it only copied about 40 or 50 MB/s, sometimes dropping way below that.
Is this because of the flaky disk? Mounted one backup disk on dereel and restored /Photos/grog (not yet reached by the other one) directly. Yes, up to 160 MB/s (nearly the capacity of an IBM 3330-11 pack in a second!). But that's still an overnight job.
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Five years of Corymbia
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Five years ago I bought a Corymbia ficifolia to replace one that had died. And I've been keeping a careful eye on it ever since.
The good news: it's growing, and it's in flower, as it was when we got it. But these two photos, taken 5 years ago and now, show the difference mainly because of the background trees:
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It must be 50% bigger than it was when we got it.
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ZDF pain
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
ZDF seems to be having trouble this weekend. Apart from (surprisingly short) timeouts, I ended up with messages like
Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "http://www.zdf.de/" on this server.
Reference #18.50981002.1739068938.96225329
https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.50981002.1739068938.96225329
What's that? The URL (not a link) led to nothing useful. I found that I could access it via a proxy in Germany, but in principle it should be accessible anywhere in the world. Have they picked on me for downloading too much content? That, too, should be allowed. For the time being I'll put it down to blunders on their part.
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Steak and kidney again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
We eat steak and kidney “pie” from time to time, but I don't know when we last made the filling: I make enough for multiple times, and today was the day. The recipe was unchanged, but the filling looked particularly dry:
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That's what was in the recipe, but I decided that it wasn't enough. Liquid to just below the surface of the mixture? On the positive side, the meat (chuck steak) was tender enough after only a little over an hour's cooking, something that I hadn't been sure about.
The other thing is the serving quantities. I've been dropping them over the years, but now even our smallest portion seems far too big, and only ate half the portions. I think we'll have to reduce them further by up to 50%.
| Monday, 10 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 10 February 2025 |
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Completing the photo restore
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The restore of my photo disk completed shortly after I came into the office this morning. It wasn't completely successful:
x grog/19640401/pass2/Untitled-Scanned-19.psf
tar: (null)
x grog/19640401/orig/Untitled-Scanned-02.jpg
tar: (null)
...
I've never seen that message before. What does it mean? Do I care enough to UTSL? It's not serious in itself, since the tar run was just to read in the first 99.5% of the files, to be followed up with an rsync from the dying disk. But yes, if this is on the backup disk, I should follow up. And in this particular case, there was nothing wrong with the copy on disk. So what does it mean?
The subsequent rsync also had its surprises:
could not make way for new symlink: grog/www/forsalad/Pano/embed
could not make way for new symlink: grog/www/forsalad/Pano/gimp
...
cannot delete non-empty directory: grog/www/forsalad/Pano/embed
What's that? An old, worn-out directory, for one. It relies on the now-obsolete Adobe Flash. But why is rsync complaining? Comparing my three copies (old (dying) disk, backup and new disk) I have:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/pts/6) ~ 7 -> ls -l /eureka/Photos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/ /mnt/Photos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/ /newphotos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/
/eureka/Photos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/:
lrwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 58 31 Mar 2013 embed -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/embed
lrwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 63 31 Mar 2013 index.html -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/index.html
lrwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 73 31 Mar 2013 SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf
/mnt/Photos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/:
drwxr-xr-x 2 grog lemis 512 5 Feb 2012 embed
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 859 29 May 2012 index.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 52405 5 Feb 2012 SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf
/newphotos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/:
drwxr-xr-x 2 grog lemis 512 5 Feb 2012 embed
lrwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 63 31 Mar 2013 index.html -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/index.html
lrwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 73 31 Mar 2013 SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf
Each disk has different contents in the directory! Why? I need to check more carefully, but it seems only to happen in these (multiple) Pano directories. And in each case, the original symlink has been replaced by a real file, so no data is lost—quite the contrary.
Still, I now have a complete copy of the /Photos disk. Time to replace the disk in eureka? So far it's not broke, eureka is the central machine in our network, and I like to have lots of time for reboots in case something goes wrong, so I'll do it on Wednesday when Yvonne is in town.
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Hamas starves Israeli hostages!
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Seen in my mail today:
14 N 08-02-2025 To Reader (2689) Times of Israel Dail N 3 hostages freed suffering serious malnutrition; outrage in Israel at their condition
Outrage! Because of three hungry hostages! Why didn't Hamas give them enough to eat? Why didn't Hamas feed its own starving people? Excuses that they had no food? Who would believe that?
I'm disgusted, particularly because it seems that the average Israeli can't see what's going on. It's all the stranger because Hamas really did “mistreat” the hostages by making them recite pre-prepared statements about how well they had been treated.
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Ermächtigungsgesetz: done?
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
The other horror that has been unfolding for the past few weeks is Donald Trump. I've been continually comparing his behaviour to that of Adolf Hitler 92 years ago, which led me to predict significant damage to an important public building in the next week or two, leading to his empowerment (Ermächtigungsgesetz).
But I have missed something important. Hitler needed the Ermächtigungsgesetz to rise above the law. Trump already has it: Trump v. United States (2024). Yes, Congress should keep him in check, but they're not doing their job.
What next? Concentration camps? Yes, they're on their way, in a place that former president George W. Bush referred to as a tropical Gulag. Tents! Even the Nazis put their inmates in real buildings! The parallels are terrifying.
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PHP programming again
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Topic: technology, photography | Link here |
I have a PHP script (createexif.php) to update the Exif data in my photos. It's currently useful to add information about my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. But the interface is via the Makejpeg file that I use to do the photo name mapping (one line per image), and that's inconvenient. For example, I would have to update the Makejpeg file like this, run createexif.php and select the output lines:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Photos/20250131 976 -> cat Makejpeg
A1310643_DxO Fisheye-test-1 l 48 f 4=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Photos/20250131 978 -> createexif.php -c
,,,
exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile Fisheye-test-1.jpeg '-all>all' -title=Fisheye-test-1 -author='Greg Lehey' -copyright='Greg Lehey' -fnumber=4 -lensmodel='7Artisans fisheye' -lensserialnumber='43035' -focallength=4 Fisheye-test-1.jpeg
...
OK, fix the interface, so that I can write:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Photos/20250131 980 -> createexif.php -f Fisheye-test-1 l 48 f 4
exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile Fisheye-test-1.jpeg '-all>all' -title=Fisheye-test-1 -author='Greg Lehey' -copyright='Greg Lehey' -fnumber=4 -lensmodel='7Artisans fisheye' -lensserialnumber='43035' -focallength=4 Fisheye-test-1.jpeg
Straightforward, right? It turns out that the best way to do that is to pass the parameters in an array. Clearly here they're in argv [3] to argv [6]. With the file name it starts at argv [2]. In C that's trivial: pass &argv [2]. But PHP doesn't have an & operator. And my PHP-fu is not very good, and I haven't seen Rasmus on IRC for years.
Ask Google Gemini. Simple! Use the & operator. I hear H. L. Mencken laughing in the background. But with a reformulated question (“how do i create an array in php that contains the last n elements of another array?”) I got a different answer: use array_slice. And that did the trick. Shades of LISP.
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CSIRAC lives
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Topic: technology, history | Link here |
It's been over 20 years since I visited CSIRAC, but I was greatly impressed, and I was left wanting to know more. Today, while looking for something completely different, I came across this page, which includes much more detail, including something like a manual and an emulator. Now I just need time to read it all.
| Tuesday, 11 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 11 February 2025 |
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Garden work?
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Paul Donaghy around today to do some work in the garden. For once, it was only stuff for Yvonne, so I wasn't much involved.
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More induction cooker insights
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Cooking frijoles de la olla today, requiring long simmering. In this case, it took a particularly long time, but after about 6 hours I heard a piercing beep. It sounded like a grid power failure, but no, we still had power. Only the cooktop was unhappy, displaying a sequence H F 8 sequentially on the display for the cook field. The H presumably meant “hot”, like it normally does. And the F8? Off to look at the manual, which I appear to never have finished reading.
If a hotplate operates for an extended period and no settings are changed, the automatic safety shut-off is activated.The hotplate stops heating. F, 8 and the residual heat indicator h or H flash alternately in the hotplate display.
OK, that confirms my expectation, and it makes sense up to a point: we don't want to set fire to something. But it's irritating. There are also a number of configuration parameters. c5 sets the “time until automatic switch-off” in unspecified units from 01 to 99. Are they (presumably) hours? Should I turn it off? No, that's the default, so it's not clear what good it is. And it seems that there's nothing to disable their choice of maximum cooking time.
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A new rug for Yvonne
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Topic: general | Link here |
For reasons I don't really understand, Yvonne likes to have a rug over her legs when she watches TV, even if the surrounding temperatures are high. So she got Julie Donaghy to make a rug for her, with which she is well pleased:
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hubble down!
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Topic: history, technology, opinion | Link here |
I haven't heard from carneous (on IRC) for some time. He had a machine called hubble which was last booted on 2 March 2010. The last time I heard, two years ago, it had been up for a little over 13 years. Is it still up? Today he showed up, only carn nowadays, and gave the sad news: some time between mid-2023 and May 2024 the power supply died—clearly a machine that got a lot of attention. It would have reached 5000 days uptime on 9 November 2023. Did it? Carn is going to salvage the disks and take a look.
| Wednesday, 12 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 12 February 2025 |
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eureka disk swap
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
As planned, swapped over disk drives in eureka today: a newer SSD for swap to replace the older, failing one, and the new 16 TB photo drive for not only the old 8 TB drive, but also the even older, no longer used 4 TB drive before that.
All went well modulo my connecting the SSD to a non-functional power cable, requiring a change to a different cable. But somehow I get so stressed doing this kind of work. Somehow “keep it up” is becoming too much of a concern.
How old was the old disk? I put the 4 TB drive in on 31 January 2014, but I didn't clearly note when I installed the 8 TB drive. But with any luck this one will keep me going for a few years yet.
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A name for Trump's country
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
One of the sillier but less dangerous things that Donald Trump has done was to name the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America”, presumably in the mistaken impression that that was the name of his country, and not of the continent around it, and possibly also the mistaken impression that the gulf was named after the country México, founded some centuries later.
But that highlights a deeper (and also not dangerous) problem: his country has no name. Officially it's the United States of America, but that's just a description of the form of government and the location, and even Wikipedia drops the location. It's not even the only United States in North America: directly to the south are the United Mexican States. This confusion results in the current text in that page:
Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in North America. It borders the United States to the north,...
Of course, it's silly to rename the Gulf of Mexico. But neighbours can also be insulted, and recently Claudia Sheinbaum, the President of the United States, presented an extract from a map of the world made in 1607:
“America Méxicana” was the area now called the United States of America. Should they change the name? No, that would just cause much more confusion.
In passing, until Texas seceded from México in 1836, the shores of the Gulf of Mexico really did belong almost only to México.
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4 mm panorama: done!
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
It's been nearly two weeks since I got my new 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens, and I still haven't been able to stitch a proper panorama. There are a number of strangenesses that I haven't got my head around, including how Hugin measures focal length. Bruno Postle has sent some helpful emails, but I still don't understand what I'm doing wrong. There are a number of potential options. Today I set to comparing each approach, in each case with these three images:
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First, load the three files without Exif data and set the angle of view to 225°. This time Hugin chose a focal length of 4.4 mm. Align with the fast panorama preview, getting an average error of 3.5 pixels and a maximum of 7.9 pixels:
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Load the three files as before without Exif data and set the focal length to 4 mm. This time Hugin chose an angle of view of 247.52°. Align with the fast panorama preview, getting an average error of 2.9 pixels and a maximum of 9.8 pixels:
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It's not clear why the colour changed on the right in this version.
Set the focal length (4 mm) in the Exif data. Load the three files as before. Hugin changed the focal length to 2.903 mm; I don't know how to find its guess at the angle of view. Align with the fast panorama preview, getting an average error of 363 pixels and a maximum of 452.8 pixels:
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At this point I went back to Bruno's email:
This was completely new, but yes, under the Mask tab there's a second sub-tab Crop, which implicitly sets circular crops—exactly what I needed:
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I was able to increase and decrease the crop with the mouse, though I think I'm still missing some detail. But the crop circle was off to the right of the image, and I couldn't pull it back. Still, with otherwise the same parameters in the previous image, things looked better, with an average error of 5.0 pixels and a maximum of 20.0 pixels:
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Then I found the tick box “Always center crop on d, e”. Untick that and I was able to move the crop to where I wanted it, though it didn't make any difference to the pixel errors, and no obvious difference to the appearance of the panorama.
Finally I was on home ground. Mask out the junk at the bottom, move to centre on the front post of the hay shed, and I had a useful panorama:
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That compares with my normal house photo series panorama:
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It's interesting how much higher the 4 mm version is, but also how much is missing at the bottom. Potentially I could mount the camera on a monopod and get better results.
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New garage door opener
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Our garage door opener remote control is here. Two packages (one inside, from China, and one outside with an Australia Post sticker), and no instructions whatsoever as to how to pair it to the garage door. Out to take a look at the opener, which didn't help much. OK, there's a button “Door Code”. Press that. No travel, no response. Press a button on the remote control, which causes an LED next to the button to flash. Wait for a while. Flashing stopped.
Done? No, the thing still doesn't respond. The web to the rescue, which brought me to these instructions, which I saved as ~/Documentation/Household/Garage-door-opener/ATA-160037_00_GDO-11V1_Home_Owners_Manual_hires_nobleeds.pdf. It calls the operation “Coding Transmitters”. You need to press and hold “Door Code” until it beeps and the LED goes on. Then you press the remote control button for 2 seconds, release for 2 seconds, press for 2 seconds again, then release both buttons.
Problem: no beep from “Door Code”. After much examination, discovered that there was still a protective film over the buttons. Even after removing that, nothing much happened until I pressed really firmly. And then the “2 seconds” were made easier by a change in the LED display after each step. But without the manual I would have been lost.
| Thursday, 13 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 13 February 2025 |
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More cockatoos?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
The sulphur-crested cockatoo is one of the most numerous and most recognizable birds round our way. Here again today round the horse trough:
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Except that it's not a mob of cockatoos. Looking more carefully, I can only see one, along with a mob of long-billed corellas:
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Deformed papaya
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I eat a slice of papaya for breakfast most days. But today, for the second time recently, I have had one which appears to be deformed:
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There seemed to be nothing wrong with the flesh, but it was a nuisance to extract the seeds.
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Trump chairs the Kennedy Center?
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
One of the less horrifying news items from the USA today was that Donald Trump has become the chairman of the Kennedy Center, whatever that may be.
It proves to be a cultural institution. What does that have to do with Trump, as the US media also pondered.
A hollow voice intones „Entartete Kunst“.
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Time for new computers?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I have dozens of computers, including at least 8 ThinkCentres. Of those 8, four are in use, one is probably dead, two are in service to hold up my monitors number 0 and 3, and one has been moved into the shed. These last three are either also dead, or so old that it's not worth running them.
Now it's time to upgrade lagoon, Yvonne's computer. Fine, we don't really need both computers in the lounge room (teevee and tiwi). tiwi can go as soon as I migrate the weather application, which shouldn't be difficult. But on checking, it seems that tiwi is a model M58p, old and slow. I can't give that to Yvonne. The others are significantly faster M93ps. Where are they? lagoon, of course, teevee, distress (running Microsoft “Windows” 10) and... must have been dischord, running “Windows” 8 or so. But dischord died spectacularly a few months ago, and I want a reasonably fast Microsoft box, so I can't use distress. I could upgrade lagoon, but it's more comfortable to have a second machine to replace lagoon.
What do I do? Use the old tiwi after all? Move distress to a virtual machine, as originally planned but thwarted by bugs in VirtualBox? Maybe it's time to clean out and give away all these old computers. “Windows” 11 is here, and I don't have a machine to run it on. So how about Yet Another ThinkCentre with “Windows” 11? Then I can give the old distress to Yvonne. Ordered one, a model M710e. We already have a name for it: disdain.
Did I say that dischord was an M93p? Yes, but that was without looking at it. No, it was a much older and slower M71e. Somehow I'm missing an M93p. It's only in one of my two machine lists, and all I have left is a serial number: PC0240PE. I wonder where it went. But that's a clear indication that it's time to clean things out.
| Friday, 14 February 2025 | Dereel | |
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Mid-February: Late summer cleaning?
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Topic: history, technology, opinion | Link here |
So I'm starting my next tidy-out of my old computer hardware, though I still haven't found my ThinkCentre serial number PC0240PE. But looking back through my old diaries, it seems to be the time of year to do this. Twenty years ago today I started planning a giveaway of old computer stuff, and ten years ago I gave away a lot of old computer stuff and also my old HP field service oscilloscope.
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More circular panoramas
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Now that I have my circular panorama stitched, time to reply to the message on the subject. But I didn't even manage that!
Bruno Postle had had more to say than I needed for this particular panorama:
When you do calibrate this lens, using four photos and rotating around the no-parallax point, you can ensure there are control points in the periphery, and you will get an accurate angle of view.
Also, when you calibrate the lens, there are other input fisheye types that might be a better fit for this lens, try them and see.
What's that? I've been using Hugin for over 16 years, and I had never heard of calibrating lenses, let alone setting other fisheye types. Off to look for information and came up with this tutorial, written by Terry Duell in 2008 and updated for Hugin 2013.0.0, which cheerfully announces that it is no longer needed, and the program calibrate_lens_gui would do the job. And yes, that is on my systems, and there's a man page that says that I should read the brief description online. There's also documentation for the lens correction model. Interestingly, Google Gemini came up with a relatively useful description that it kept secure just for me.
More fun ahead.
| Saturday, 15 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 15 February 2025 |
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Calibrating lenses for Hugin
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Spent much of today following up on yesterday's discovery of lens calibration procedures for Hugin, without coming to a conclusion.
First I tried the most promising approach, calibrate_lens_gui. Where are the instructions? There's a bare-bones description online, but it doesn't match what Bruno Postle wrote:
When you do calibrate this lens, using four photos and rotating around the no-parallax point,...
But the instructions for calibrate_lens_gui, like Terry Duell's tutorial, only talks about one image. Never mind: I can take four and try both approaches. Here the photos:
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The GUI is really bare-bones. This is what I get when I start it:
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Where do I go from here? First, of course, tell it what it can't know, that it's a circular fisheye lens with focal length 4 mm and maximum aperture (is that what it's asking for?) of f/2.8. To do anything more I need to select Add and discover that it doesn't respect the working directory from which I started it. After climbing the directory tree and selecting my images, select Find lines. That comes up with the information “Finished”. But it lies. It didn't find any lines, but it's too polite to say so. Not until I select Optimize do I see:
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OK, I'll bite. Which parameters? How should I change them? After messing around a bit, discovered that I had to drastically reduce the line length, from 0.3 to 0.05 (of the image width). Then I got barrel distortion (parameter b to which Bruno referred), but not the others:
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Oh, you want them all? Then say so. Select the boxes, changing barrel distortion in the process:
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That looks better. Save the “lens”. How about in /var/tmp? More tree climbing, and I had a description file that seemed to make sense, though it didn't mention the name of the lens. Save to database? Sure:
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Well, I can save the distortion, but not the vignetting. No worries. But Now the name of the lens is there! And it saves the information to the DistortionTable in the database (here a .dump):
CREATE TABLE LensProjectionTable (Lens TEXT PRIMARY KEY, Projection INTEGER);
INSERT INTO LensProjectionTable VALUES('7Artisans fisheye',2);
CREATE TABLE LensHFOVTable (Lens TEXT, Focallength REAL, HFOV REAL, Weight INTEGER)
INSERT INTO LensHFOVTable VALUES('7Artisans fisheye',4.0,354.665887987831695,10);
CREATE TABLE LensCropTable (Lens TEXT, Focallength REAL, Width INTEGER, Height INTEGER, CropLeft INTEGER, Crop Right INTEGER, CropTop INTEGER, CropBottom INTEGER, PRIMARY KEY (Lens, Focallength, Width, Height));
INSERT INTO LensCropTable VALUES('7Artisans fisheye',4.0,3456,4608,57,3398,595,3936);
CREATE TABLE VignettingTable (Lens TEXT, Focallength REAL, Aperture REAL, Distance REAL, Vb REAL, Vc REAL, Vd REAL, Weight INTEGER);
INSERT INTO VignettingTable VALUES('7Artisans fisheye',4.0,2.79999995231628417,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,10);
INSERT INTO VignettingTable VALUES('7Artisans fisheye',4.0,5.59999990463256835,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,10);
Some of that makes sense. But:
That HFOV (clearly horizontal field of view) 354.665887987831695 has nothing to do with the hfov=247.899 in the text version. But the latter value corresponds almost exactly to my fov program. Why the difference?
The values in LensCropTable have little to do with what I established on Wednesday. Width and Height are the raw dimensions of the image:
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I thought that VignettingTable had an error, but the values 2.79999995231628417 and 5.59999990463256835 are just Hugin's way of writing f/2.8 and f/5.6. They must come from different places: f/2.8 is the maximum aperture, and f/5.6 is the aperture that I have used for all photos so far. Potentially that's the result of me entering f/2.8 at the start. It's not even clear why there's an entry, since all the parameters are 0.
Where are my lens parameters? There's nothing there! They're there in the text version, but I don't see anything here. And as already mentioned, the text version omits the lens name.
On repeating the operation, I got completely different results. Here the first and second times:
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Nowhere did I see a method to select “fisheye type”.
Started trying to run the calibration according to Terry Duell's tutorial, but it wanted to select control points manually, something that's almost impossible with this lens.
So where are we? We seem to have at least three different ways to calibrate a lens, all incomplete:
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Panorama damage
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Topic: photography | Link here |
After taking my Olympus E-PM2 off the tripod, some pieces came off:
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Further investigation showed that it was from round the tripod mount:
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I had never expected that tightening the tripod screw could do that. It's not clear when this happened: the tripod plate has been on the camera for months, maybe years.
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Bloody Bruno!
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Bruno Postle isn't the only Bruno in town, of course. Our cat Bruno crowned himself in glory today by catching another superb fairywren.
What can we do with him?
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More possibilities with VirtualBox
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
A discussion about virtualization on IRC today. I mentioned that the only way I have got VirtualBox networking to work was with a bridged adapter. Callum Gibson uses some form of NAT, something that has never worked for me. It seems that I need a dedicated adapter for that: not a problem, since the machine has two adapters. I'll get details from Callum when he's back at work.
In the process, fired up despise for the first time in 9 months. Once again network problems, but they only started after the VM was up and running. Maybe that's a clue.
| Sunday, 16 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 16 February 2025 |
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Snow in summer
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
It hasn't been an overly hot summer, but tonight was definitely cool. The news media reported it: in Melbourne they recorded the lowest February temperature ever, 9.9°. But we outdid them by a significant margin with a lowest temperature of 2.8°.
Yes, that's not as low as some locations in the hills mountains, where they had
snow, but we're only 350 m above sea level. But it's 0.9° lower than the minimum measured
in Ballarat, which is usually
cooler.
Of course, why should anybody tell the truth? The Bureau of Meteorology can't make up its mind, reporting a temperature that is not only wrong, but also out of their own forecast range:
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And the lowest February temperature on record in Ballarat was -1.4°, on 03 February 1986, and in Melbourne the lowest temperature was 4.5° on 24 February 1924. But why should the media go to trouble to find out the real details?
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What use a rice cooker?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I've had this rice cooker from ALDI for nearly a month, and I haven't needed to cook rice. Today was finally the day. Previously I had noted that the scales on the cooking pot didn't make any sense, but of course I don't need to use them: 1.8 parts water to 1 part rice. So I put in 750 g of rice and 1.35 l of water:
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That barely submerged line represents 1.35 L, whatever that's supposed to mean. Yes, it's close to the volume of the water, but what about the rice? And I had already established that a “cup” holds 150 g, so that would also include 5 “cups”. But I had guessed (maybe with some backup) that the “cups” are “ALDI's guess at how much water you need to cook a “cup” of rice”. In that case, they could be correct. But basically these scales are useless at best, and also misleading.
OK, turn the thing on. It went through a surprising number of steps, including “stewed rice”, something that I wouldn't consider a recommendation:
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It produced a surprising amount of vapour:
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And at the end, the rice was cooked:
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It took 45 minutes! Mine would have been done in about half that time. Was it any better than mine? One issue I have is that the rice up against the pot tends to stick together. What about here?
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No, not much of an improvement.
When putting the rice into containers, I only managed about 10½ pots, more exactly 1.908 kg. That's about 92.7% of the weight of the ingredients. My own rice comes out round 98%, representing a weight difference of 111 g. Doubtless that's due to the extreme level of cooking evidenced by the steam coming out of the device.
Now the rice is cooked, how do I clean it? Yes, the pot comes out and can go in the dishwasher (I think), but what about the moisture in the device itself? Moisture accumulates in the lid, and also in the internal vents. The instruction manual includes 2 pages with 7 steps of how to clean it, including removing the plate above and also a steam vent, neither of which can be put in the dishwasher. That also seems to apply to the cooking pot itself, though I greatly doubt that that would be a problem. I'll certainly try it.
So, in summary:
Advantages
Disadvantages
Advantages
Disadvantages
It goes back, of course. But looking at that list, I wonder why anybody uses the things. Clearly I'm missing something.
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What do we do with Bruno?
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
We're not overly happy with Bruno. We just spent $500 to give him an outside area where he could keep away from birds, only to have the birds not keep their side of the bargain. He has now caught three superb fairywrens and what we think was an elstrid finch.
And though he now spends extended periods outside, he still runs around like a chicken with his head chopped off. What can we do? I'm gradually running out of ideas.
| Monday, 17 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 17 February 2025 |
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More VirtualBox fun
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Topic: technology | Link here |
As planned, Callum Gibson contacted me today with information about VirtualBox configuration. Ultimately it didn't help much: as he said, he uses NAT, and it had occurred to me that that really isn't appropriate in my home network: I want to be able to wake and connect to the VMs from outside.
But I did some more playing around. The last two times I tried to run despise (25 June 2024, 19 November 2024), I had the same problem. The VM talked on the network interface, but it wasn't listening. I got continuous repeats of:
12:15:37.799085 ARP, Request who-has eureka.lemis.com tell despise.lemis.com, length 46
12:15:37.799087 ARP, Request who-has eureka.lemis.com tell despise.lemis.com, length 28
12:15:37.799213 ARP, Reply eureka.lemis.com is-at bc:5f:f4:c9:9b:bf (oui Unknown), length 46
That also means that a ping won't work. But yesterday I found that I had had some ping responses, only they stopped after some time. Tried it again today, with the typical “not listening” response. I thought that it might be related to my logging in. So I hoped against hope that the Microsoft network “troubleshooter” might point to something. No, as usual it came up with a blank. “Give feedback”? For the fun of it I said yes, and it merrily tried to send a message across the network link that it had just found to be dead. And the window wouldn't go away!
OK, reboot the VM. The network link works! Log in as myself. It carried on working, but I couldn't enter anything. It seemed that the keyboard had given up. It wasn't this strange “VM grabs keyboard”: I couldn't use the keyboard at all, neither in nor outside the VM. After some concern, discovered that I had two instances of VBox running on two different displays. Stop them and all was well. But by this time I had decided that whatever my problem might be, it wasn't straightforward, and it would make sense to upgrade my system. I've had hydra for nearly 1½ years now, and I haven't done any updates in that time. So I'll create an updated version on my test box and test there first.
At some point I received a surprising email message:
We received your request for a single-use code to use with your Microsoft account.
Your single-use code is: 222340
Only enter this code on an official website or app. Don't share it with anyone. We'll never ask for it outside an official platform.
Thanks,
The Microsoft account team
That must have been the response to my feedback request, the one that didn't get out. I can only assume that it was sent after reboot.
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SSD speed improvements
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the few programs that runs on eureka and uses a lot of resources is MediathekView, a Java application. When I come into the office in the morning it's swapped out, and it takes a couple of seconds to come to life.
But lately it has been really slow to wake up. Why? After a bit of searching, found:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) ~ 36 -> dd if=/dev/ada2p3 of=/dev/null count=65536
33554432 bytes transferred in 155.345170 secs (215999 bytes/sec)=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) ~ 37 -> dd if=/dev/ada2p3 of=/dev/null bs=16k count=65536
1073741824 bytes transferred in 32.405464 secs (33134592 bytes/sec)
That's the swap SSD. 215 kB/s? That's closer to the speed of a floppy disk. This is the SSD that I put in to replace the one that was failing. It seems that this one has already failed. Another reboot to change disks!
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Bad language in video subtitles
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Topic: language, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
I usually enable subtitles where possible when watching TV. It saves a lot of guesswork when people mumble. And it brings out the proofreader in me: it's amazing how inaccurate or badly written so many of them. So far McLeod's Daughters has taken the cake: it was clearly subtitled by a US American bot that can't understand much of the mumbling either, and it comes up with sometimes hilarious mistakes.
But today we saw a recent episode of „Watzmann ermittelt“, a German series, where we saw:
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This is in a brewery, and Google translate translates it as “I left the house at 5 because the apple orchard was broken”. That's wrong too, of course, though it's not clear how to translate „Apfelanlage“. It does better with „Ich bin um 5 schon aus dem Haus, weil die Abfüllanlage war kaputt“ („Abfüllanlage“, “bottling plant” instead of „Apfelanlage“). My guess is that this, too, is a sound recognition system that comes from outside the German language space: the last two words are way they would be in English, but that's wrong in German.
| Tuesday, 18 February 2025 | Dereel | |
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Real Sichuan pepper
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Beijing “fried sauce” noodles for breakfast today. My old jar of Sichuan pepper ran out, and I started the bag I bought a couple of months ago:
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What a difference! I don't know how old the old ones were—Yvonne had written the label, without a date, suggesting that they could have been decades old—but the new ones bit my tongue off. I don't think I have ever experienced that particular spiciness before, and in that concentration (2.5 g) it was quite unpleasant. I'll have to tread carefully next time. 0.5 g to start with?
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Upgrading hydra
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've had hydra, my still-almost-new main computer, for nearly 1½ years, and I haven't updated the system software in that time. Time to do so. This time I'll create a new system on different physical hardware, and when it's done I'll just copy the disk image. Started on that, and how about that, it almost just worked.
Partition a new SSD with gpart, so that the root partition (50 GB!) is the same as the partition on hydra.
Compress the old hydra root partition to another partition on the SSD. If things go wrong, I can restore it to hydra. In passing, mount now brings a strange error message if there's no file system on a partition:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 14 -> mount /dev/ada1p4 /mnt
mount: /dev/ada1p4: No such file or directory
After newfs, it mounted normally.
Expand the root copy into the new root partition.
Modify /etc/fstab to reflect the local file systems as they will be after rebooting, add entries for NFS mounts of hydra.
Replace hydra net configuration with dereel's addresses and interface.
Bend the symlinks.
Symlinks continue to be an issue. What I need here is:
Set /usr/src and /usr/ports to point to the correct places in the git tree.
Create directory /home, add symlinks:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 13 -> ls -l /home
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 16 18 Feb 15:26 grog -> /hydra/home/grog
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 17 18 Feb 15:25 local -> /hydra/home/local
I'm not sure that it's a good idea to link to my entire home directory, but there are some files in there that I need to access, and I don't intend to log in as grog.
Some of this will require undoing before being transferred to hydra:
And after rebooting, all was well. I've seldom had such a smooth update. Even upgrading ports went smoothly, all 696 that it identified. It did want to remove ports as always, seven of them, but for a change nothing that I had installed, and presumably nothing that would do any harm. Left it downloading 689 ports, 6 GB in total.
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Your credit card has expired!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Email purporting to come from BUPA today:
From: BUPA <noreply@updates.bupa.com.au>
Subject: Mr Lehey, our records show your credit card is expired.
Your credit card is expired
Our records show that your credit card ending in 4352 is expired.
This credit card is used to make premium payments for your Bupa Health Insurance policy. To stay covered with us and be able to keep claiming after 26 February 2025 which is when your policy is currently paid to please update your credit card details today.
Spam? My credit card expires in May 2026. But the mail headers suggested that the message really does come from BUPA. My best bet is that they have messed something up. Never mind, I wanted to cancel that card anyway. But I should ring them and find out what's going on.
What a pain! You can't do anything without a mobile phone nowadays, and to add insult to injury they made me click on CAPTCHAs as well as typing in numbers received on the phone—just to make a phone call! In the end, they told me that I was in for a 25 minute wait, and would I like a call back? This number, or another? Given my problems with Aussie Broadband VoIP, it sounded like a better idea to give them my mobile phone number. Sorry, phone number is invalid.
Idiots! That's the one that they insist on sending PINs to! OK, leave it with the VoIP number. I didn't hear back.
Somehow communication with “service desks” is getting worse all the time.
| Wednesday, 19 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 19 February 2025 |
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cron: So nice, so nice, we do it twice
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Into the office this morning to find that my nightly source tree update had failed with strange messages that I had never seen before. Oh, it had also succeeded. My nightly cron job runs on hydra, but it got copied to dereel. Both jobs ran in parallel and tripped over each others' feet. The moral? Remove crontabs when building update machines.
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Bloody NBN outages again!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Message from Aussie Broadband today with their inimitable markup:
NBN are planning network maintenance between **Mon 17th March 2025 08:00 AEDT** and **Fri 21st March 2025 18:00 AEDT**.
As part of a national rollout to upgrade the Fixed Wireless network, nbn® will be replacing hardware in your area. The program will future proof sufficient capacity for new and existing customers on the network. As tower climbing is required, some of this work will be performed during the day. You will experience one to two interruptions for up to 9 hours from 12:00 am to 09:00 am on a weeknight and/or for up to 12 hours from 06:00 am to 06:00 pm on Saturday and/or Sunday.
Another 12 hour outage during the day time! When will it ever stop? There's a Federal election coming up some time in the next few months. Can we get the candidates to look at the issue?
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disdain for Microsoft
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My new ThinkCentre arrived yesterday, and Yvonne picked it up today. A good opportunity to rearrange the systems I have. Put dereel in its current incarnation to the left of my desktop and put in the old 4 TB drive that once held my photos.
Is there anything on the drive that might accidentally have been lost on later drives? Time to compare the contents. But how? My best idea was
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /Myphotos 35 -> find . | sort > /home/grog/dereel-photos
Then I can do the same on eureka and compare the results. But it ran for ever! iostat showed:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/pts/2) ~ 2 -> iostat 1
tty ada0 ada1 ada2 cpu
tin tout KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s us ni sy in id
....
0 307 0.0 0 0.00 0.0 0 0.00 16.0 146 2.28 0 0 0 0 100
0 159 0.0 0 0.00 0.0 0 0.00 16.0 151 2.36 0 0 0 0 100
The disk is ada2. 2 MB/s? What's wrong there? And then I saw in the system log:
Feb 19 17:12:18 dereel kernel: WARNING: /Myphotos was not properly dismounted
It shouldn't have even mounted the drive, and a dirty file system shouldn't slow it down. Still, ran fsck, which also took nearly 1½ hours and produced a message I have never seen before:
===== Wed 19 Feb 2025 17:22:45 AEDT on dereel.lemis.com: fsck -y /dev/ada2p1
** /dev/ada2p1
** Last Mounted on /Myphotos
** Phase 1 - Check Blocks and Sizes
** Phase 2 - Check Pathnames
UPDATE FILESYSTEM TO TRACK DIRECTORY DEPTH? yes
** Phase 3 - Check Connectivity
...
***** FILE SYSTEM MARKED CLEAN *****
...
fsck finished at Wed 19 Feb 2025 18:48:45 AEDT
It didn't occur to me until later that the drive was very nearly full, and that full UFS drives get very slow:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /Myphotos 41 -> df /Myphotos/
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ada2p1 3,814,382 3,773,827 2,411 100% /Myphotos
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Medical treatment clash
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne is due to have a reablation (which I think means repeat ablation) on Friday. I also need dental treatment, but I put it off until next month (6 March, 14:00) to be on the safe side. But today Yvonne received a phone call: sorry, Professor Peter Kistler has an emergency, we'll have to postpone. The new date? 6 March, arrive at 12:00. She'll probably be operated on round 14:00.
You can't win.
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disdain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne brought the new ThinkCentre back with her from Napoleons. It doesn't look very much like what was advertised (first image):
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In addition, it didn't have a power cable, which one would normally expect. More to the point, though, it doesn't work! Powering on causes a short burst of activity from the fan, and the power LED lights briefly, but then it stops and tries again a few seconds later.
It's broke! Dammit, it's a pain to send things back. But what can I do? Sent a return request and got a quick response suggesting that I try reseating the RAM. I haven't heard of that kind of problem for decades, but OK, mañana.
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Warning! Cat!
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Another thing that Yvonne brought back today was a collar and bell for Bruno so that he couldn't creep up on birds. To my surprise, he accepted it relatively quickly. Later I saw him outside in his hideaway:
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Yes, he's really in in there. Only when I saw him, a number of estrilid finches were sitting on top of the twigs. That doesn't exactly suggest that it's going to be very effective.
| Thursday, 20 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 20 February 2025 |
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More atrial fibrillation
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Topic: health | Link here |
Yvonne developed atrial fibrillation again today. Considering that she had been off her medication for 3 days, that's not surprising, but it's still irritating, and it lasted all day long.
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disdain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
First thing this morning I took a look at disdain, the new Microsoft “windows” box. First, what is it?
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A V520S. What did the listing say? An M710e! Or maybe a V520S, depending on where I look. Clearly the listing, which also showed an image of what is presumably an M710e, was badly prepared. That's a reason to return it, but I don't know if I care enough. The processor and storage are as described.
Is that still a ThinkCentre? There's nothing on the labels to say so. Maybe Lenovo have given up the term.
OK, why doesn't it run? Opened it up:
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Power on showed that the fan turned on and immediately stopped again. As soon as it stood still, the cycle repeated. That's pretty much what I had experienced, but the timing was maybe of inerest. The RAM seemed well seated:
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Still, take it out. One IBM SIMM, one Samsung. Replaced the IBM SIMM. It powered on. The seller was right. Samsung SIMM defective? Put it in, powered on. Worked.
So how can a well-seated SIMM cause that kind of problem? We had them in the 1980s, notably with Tandem's first terminal, the 6520, where a standard method for “fixing” a misbehaving terminal was to lift the keyboard about 15 cm off the desk and let it fall, thus reseating the DIMMs. But nowadays, in sockets where the SIMMs are locked in? Still, it works.
Well:
Error 1962: No operating system found. Boot sequence will automatically repeat.
Take a look in the BIOS setup. No obvious mention of a disk, though it was clearly there. Boot with a FreeBSD USB stick. No disk!
OK, what's wrong with it? Also badly seated? Tried to remove it, but I couldn't get the screw out:
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It seemed that it had been screwed down with a nut which was turning with the screw, and which I couldn't access. I couldn't loosen it, I couldn't tighten it. But I was able to push the stick in further into the socket:
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And how about that, it worked! So, it seems that at the very least the SSD had been badly mounted, and that the system must have been subjected to quite a shock during transit, surprising in view of the copious packing and lack of any evidence outside. But it works, though I don't see myself buying anything else from quigstar in a hurry.
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Microsoft “Windows” 11
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Getting disdain up and running was only half the pain, of course. Next was to make my first acquaintance with Microsoft “Windows”. Even before I started, I was wondering why I bothered.
First I was asked all sorts of silly questions. Do I want “Kiosk”? What's that?
Turn this device into a kiosk to use as a digital sign, interactive display, or other things
What on earth does that mean? I'm baffled. About the only thing I know is that I don't want it. What I do want is to incorporate it into my network, and for that I have a setup page. And they have changed at least the appearance of their setup menus again! Are they just trying to annoy people? Set up the system name (“must reboot for it to take effect”) and Ethernet interface seems to work, but I couldn't find any way to set the domain name. Finally found it where I would never have expected it: System → About → Advanced → Computer name → More, then set "primary DNS suffix of this computer". This, too, wants me to reboot!
Creating a new user was also confusing because they have changed their terminology—I think—but finally I got it done. But then I had to enter recovery methods, first a phone number, and then these STUPID “security questions”: What was the name of your first pet? Where were you born? What was your nickname at school? So I had to invent responses that don't match reality and write them down somewhere. 2FA may irritate me, but at least it often works, but these “security questions” really piss me off.
OK, reboot, which worked. Now seemed a good time to remove silly things like Copilot (what's that?) and Microsoft Store, which seems to have nothing to do with online storage.
Next set up remote desktop. That worked also, up to a point. It seems that rdesktop still doesn't support “Network Level Authentication”, so I need to disable that. But I couldn't find the button. Finally Google Gemini to the rescue, which told me:
Open System Properties:
Press Windows key + R, type sysdm.cpl, and press Enter.
Go to the Remote Tab:
In the System Properties window, click on the "Remote" tab.
Uncheck NLA:
Under the "Remote Desktop" section, uncheck the box that says "Allow connections only from computers running Remote Desktop with Network Level Authentication (recommended)."
Apply and OK:
Click "Apply" and then "OK."
Is that the only way? Probably not. My guess is that it's a direct access to some submenu that isn't easy to find. But it worked. Then, of course, I had issues on the other end: no fvwm menu entry and no /etc/ethers entry for disdain, but I was able to start rdesktop directly and connect to it.
That's some level of success. Left it there and came in some hours later to find the machine still running, apparently because of the rdesktop session. That was once the way I wanted it, but “Windows” 10 disabled it. Now we're back the the way “Windows” 7 used to do.
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The end of an era?
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Topic: history, politics, opinion | Link here |
For over 100 years, Europe and the have been allies, sort of. The US entry in the Great War in 1917 was instrumental in ending the war, and ever since Europe and the USA have been allied in the cause of maintaining peace and human dignity. After the Second World War they were involved in creating institutions like the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It wasn't always perfect, but it was continuous.
Now, it seems, this time is over. The USA, represented by their inimitable Donald Trump, are going their own way, not just ignoring Europe and NATO, but actively going against them and with Russia, once “the enemy”. They're planning to help Russia take over large parts of Ukraine (led by an illegitimate dictator), and Israel taking over what's left of Palestine (“what a marvellous piece of real estate!”). In the process, they're destroying their own claim to the moral high ground.
Does Trump believe the nonsense that he's spouting? That's not even important. At the rate he is going, he is going to tear up the whole fabric of international relations. Where will it end? Three groups: an alliance of USA and Russia, China, Europe? How will other nations align themselves? Even if some semblance of the old world order remains when Trump is gone, things will never be the same again.
Who will be the next superpower? My money is on China.
| Friday, 21 February 2025 | Dereel | |
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M710e or V520S?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So disdain is a Lenovo V520S, apparently not in the ThinkCentre line, and not the ThinkCentre M710e that I ordered.
But it works. What do I do? How do they compare in specifications? This time Google Gemini didn't help, so I went to DeepSeek instead. It didn't help very much, since it seems that the M710e comes in multiple versions, but the bottom line is probably:
ThinkCentre M710e:
Generally more expensive due to its rugged build and compact design.
V520S:
More affordable, targeting budget-conscious businesses.
On the down side, it would mean returning it. I still have time to think about it.
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Sign in for your hospital stay
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Topic: health, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne will have her “Re ablation” on 6 March, but this time in a different hospital, the Cabrini Health in Malvern. That's marginally irritating because it's on the other side of town, but a major annoyance is that the registration that caused me so much pain 4 months ago had to be done all over again. I suffered again from just about all the pain I experienced then, along with some new ones:
I find it amazing that they can make such a mess out of such a form. And why can't people had centralized health records that would make 95% of these questions unnecessary?
| Saturday, 22 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 22 February 2025 |
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Continuing AF
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Topic: health | Link here |
Yvonne's atrial fibrillation continued all day long, and she wasn't able to do much.
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Nothing much doing
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Topic: general, gardening | Link here |
Yvonne's condition and the coincidence of my weekly house photos and the monthly garden flower photos kept me busy most of the day. The unrelenting bright sunshine meant that I didn't complete the latter.
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Trump acknowledges mismatch
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Topic: politics, fiction | Link here |
People round the world have been complaining that Donald Trump is involving Vladimir Putain in his negotiations to end the Russo-Ukrainian War, but not Volodymyr Zelensky.
Fair's fair. He has changed the partners. Now the fate of Ukraine will be negotiated and decided by Trump and Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Who can complain about that?
| Sunday, 23 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 23 February 2025 |
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Another day of AF
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Topic: health | Link here |
Yvonne's atrial fibrillation still hasn't subsided. If anything, it's worse. What a pain that they had to postpone the ablation!
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Garden in late summer
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Summer is coming to a close, time for the monthly garden flower photos.
It hasn't been an overly hot summer, but it has been very dry, and a number of plants have suffered as a result, despite ostensibly being irrigated:
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The good news is the Grevillea robusta, which had been stripped by the horses last month. Here two months ago, last month and now:
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It will clearly survive, something that I can't say of all plants. In particular, my Clematis “Edo Murasaki” has problems:
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Looking more carefully, it seems that the tendrils that held it in place have died back:
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I've tied the first stem back, sort of:
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Even more concerning is that the other half of the plant seems to have died altogether. Here last month and now:
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Is that because it's so dry? To be on the safe side, I'm giving it more water. Hopefully that will be enough. What problems I have had with this plant!
The Leucadendron that looked so sick after Nick Macdonald's visit seems to have recovered:
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About the only thing that really looks good is the Corymbia ficifolia:
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These bulbs in the house entrance are unexpected:
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Are they the ones that usually bloom a month or more earlier?
And the Mirabilis jalapa is doing well with no attention whatsoever, almost blocking the front door of the house:
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| Monday, 24 February 2025 | Dereel → Sebastopol → Dereel | Images for 24 February 2025 |
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Huevos a la tigre again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Huevos a la tigre again for breakfast, for the first time in a while:
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I don't cook them very often. The only reason was to get rid of some capsicum that I had lying around. And somehow they tasted boring today. What can I do to pep them up?
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Canada takes over USA
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Topic: politics, fiction | Link here |
Latest news: Zelensky and Trudeau have agreed that Canada will take over 49 of the 50 United States of America. They left Florida behind, presumably in the hope that Donald Trump will stay there.
Somehow I like it better than my scenario.
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Atrial fibrillation without end?
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne still has atrial fibrillation! Called up Professor Peter Kistler's reception and spoke to Sasha, subsequently sending ECGs. She forwarded them to Peter, and in the afternoon received a response: they'll try to put the ablation procedure forward, and they also sent an eScript for Metoprolol, which proves to be a beta blocker. No indication as to whether she should stop or reduce the flecainide.
Into town to UFS with a handful of other prescriptions, shopping across the road at ALDI while I was waiting. Matthew, the pharmacist, didn't know one way or another, beyond opining that there was no danger in taking both.
Back home, the stuff worked very quickly, and by late evening Yvonne was feeling much better, and the AF had gone away. Why didn't Peter prescribe it earlier? My guess is that it only works in some cases, and that Yvonne is one of those cases.
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Another echidna
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Seen while walking the dogs today:
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Another echidna. There are a surprising number of them round here. And somehow they disappear into the ground leaving almost no traces:
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| Tuesday, 25 February 2025 | Dereel | |
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Back to normality?
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne's atrial fibrillation seems to have subsided. She's still feeling weak, but it's a great improvement. We still haven't heard back from Professor Peter Kistler to confirm the dosage, so hopefully it's correct.
But somehow it's tiring, and I also felt exhausted for much of the day. Hopefully we can get this over and done with soon.
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Thai basil progress
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Topic: gardening, animals, opinion | Link here |
It's been well over two months since I planted some Thai basil seeds. The results are less than stellar:
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I have some other seeds as well: old ones that are probably even less viable, the remains of these seeds (about 20, roughly the number I had already planted) and a new packet. Planted them all today. If the current situation is anything to go by, I might have two or three plants ready for harvest by mid-winter.
| Wednesday, 26 February 2025 | Dereel → Napoleons → Dereel | Images for 26 February 2025 |
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Bradycardia!
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Topic: health | Link here |
Yvonne's atrial fibrillation is gone, but we're not out of the woods yet. Now she has bradycardia, a pulse of 43!
Call to Professor Peter Kistler's reception and spoke to Dylan, who promised to get back to me. Later (11:16) we had a call back: stop taking the flecainide. OK, that makes sense, but why has it taken until now to get that information? I asked on Monday (17:30). It seems that so far no harm has been done, though it would be nice to understand the issues involved
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Android causes panic
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Topic: technology, health, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne left to do her shopping in late morning. First she went to Pene Kirk to pick up some medication, and then headed off to Ballarat.
For about 900 m. Then, as Google Maps showed, she stopped on the Rokewood-Skipton Road. And stayed there for at least 10 minutes.
What's that? Tried calling her, multiple times, but no response. Has she had some kind of cardiac crisis? Called Pene, but she didn't answer either. Nothing for it, off to see what had happened.
But then she started moving again. Still no answer on the phone. Ambulance? Tried again and got a busy indication. Followed her, in the process discovering that Google Maps doesn't follow a person's location when you select “Directions”: it just takes you to where she was at the time. Finally, after another 20 minutes and near Smythesdale, I was able to contact her. Got her to stay where she was, which she did with no good humour: she was late for an appointment. And no, nothing was wrong. She didn't stop where Google Maps showed it, she was at Pene's the whole time and had left her phone in the car (bad Yvonne). And she had tried to call me and got no reply.
After getting back home, we compared notes. The one time that Yvonne tried to call me was while I was trying to call her, the time I got a busy signal. And at her end there was one ring tone and then silence. That's wrong at both ends: we should have got voice mail. I don't know what went wrong there.
And her location? She was also running the Mendhak GPS logger, which with some coaxing produced this map:
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She came from the south-east. Pene is at the westernmost point of the trace, and Yvonne left to the north-east. But that's that straight line? An attempt on the part of GPSVisualizer to join areas with no logging. Clearly she really drove along the roads. This is exactly the time when Google Maps reported her near the bridge over the river to the north-east of Pene's place. Presumably the phone didn't have a fix, and Google was too polite to complain. Instead it invented something, scaring the hell out of me and causing me to drive 60 km.
The moral of the story?
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Synonyms for the sloppy
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
I go to some trouble to choose my words, sometimes giving up and choosing an approximation. But it seems that others are less choosy. What's a synonym? For me, it's a word that has the same meaning as another word. But I have already discovered that that is too precise for many people.
Today, however, the synonym of the day from thesaurus.com was so imprecise that I couldn't guess it:
Which one is a synonym for basically?
variably
virtually
prudently
The answer's simple: none of them. But wrong out. It's
“virtually”. So, it seems, I can modify one of the quotes from the OED:
The basically democratic quality which belongs to a hereditary despotism.
The variably democratic quality which belongs to a hereditary despotism.
The virtually democratic quality which belongs to a hereditary despotism.
The prudently democratic quality which belongs to a hereditary despotism.
Arguably the worst match there is “virtually”, though all change the meaning. I can't make up my mind whether thesaurus.com deliberately chooses edge cases, or whether their viewpoint of language is so limited.
| Thursday, 27 February 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 27 February 2025 |
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Wrong dental treatment
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Topic: health | Link here |
Into town today to have a tooth pulled, as has been planned for some time.
It didn't happen. Once in the chair, I pointed out a slight gum irritation, and that was serious enough that he spent the entire time cleaning out the gums. The tooth will come out in two weeks' time.
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A new car?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
For some time I've been receiving email suggestions for “new” cars based on my stated criteria. Some of them are good, but the detail is appalling. Location? “VIC”. I really don't know where they are; they could be 500 km away. Today I asked Google, and to my surprise found almost exactly what I was looking for: a 2014 Holden Cruze with manual transmission, in Ballarat. Top of the line model with six speed box, GPS navigation, leather seats and even seat heating! Off to take a look, not helped by Google Maps.
Oh. The navigator is also 11 years old. You have to pay to update the maps. Why bother? The leather seats are somewhat uncomfortable in this climate, and even in Germany I never found the necessity for heated seats. About the only thing of interest was that my mobile phone fits almost exactly in front of the display for the navigator.
All this has its price, of course, but I don't need it. Under those circumstances the 170,000 km on the clock are more of a concern, more than any others I have seen. But it also points out that carsales.com.au is of little use, since they didn't know about it. My guess is that they only list postings from members, who pay a price for the privilege.
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Another Google Maps failure
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I always get directions from Google Maps, even when I know the way, so that I can give feedback. Today I asked “take me to Virginia Williams dentist”. The result:
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That's not what happens when I ask on a Real Computer. I had to explicitly state Ballarat to get the correct location. Why?
And driving on to the car sales place was even stranger. In the first 5 turns, it wanted to take me in the wrong direction, almost to the point where I thought that it had found the wrong direction. The first is a known one: from the Virginia Williams car park, it wants to take me east to the next road. Only there's no connection. But why all the other mistakes?
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San Choi Bao?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
A while back I bought a sachet of San Choy Bao seasoning from ALDI. What's that? I've never eaten it nor even seen it, but it looks interesting: meat and vegetables wrapped in lettuce. With a bit of research, came up with this recipe:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 155 g | onion, chopped | 1 | ||
| 30 g | garlic | 1 | ||
| 500 g | minced pork | 2 | ||
| 110 g | carrot | 3 | ||
| 50 g | water chestnuts | 3 | ||
| 1 sachet | ALDI San Choy Bao paste | 3 | ||
| 1 head | iceberg lettuce | 4 | ||
Fry onion and garlic until soft.
Add pork and fry until cooked.
Add carrot and water chestnut, then spice paste. Heat until hot.
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Separate lettuce leaves and serve, putting the filling into the leaves:
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The result? Interesting, but I'm not sure that I'd want to repeat it. One issue is the lettuce: the leaves are of different sizes, some too big, others too small.
| Friday, 28 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 28 February 2025 |
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Clearing out out computers
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
It's been two weeks since I thought about giving away my old computers, and Kevin Koster has shown an interest. Today he came by and took a dozen or so with him, along with the three monitors that have been lying around for ever:
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Surprisingly it wasn't as painful as I had feared, not even the old SPARCstations, nor the HP Z800 that I inherited from Bruce Evans. And my office doesn't look that much emptier.
As planned, that's the first 80%. He'll come by again later to pick up the other 80%.
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Another ablation date
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Topic: health | Link here |
Yvonne's pulse rate has hardly changed, still 45, well into the bradycardia range, and her blood pressure is up too, round 145/82. Mail to Sasha, who responded that it was no cause for alarm, but that she should stop the metoprolol unless “flutter” occurs.
It would have to hurry, though: she contacted me again and had a new date for the procedure, Monday at 11:30. Hopefully that will be the end of the problem.
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