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| Greg's diary |
| March 2025 |
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| Saturday, 1 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 1 March 2025 |
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Birthday dishes
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne's birthday today, and she had asked for sweet and sour fish for dinner. And while we're at it, why not asparagus and prawns?
Sweet and sour fish used to be a really difficult dish for me, but it has got so much easier. So much, in fact, that I underestimated the time it takes, and I started at least 20 minutes too late. I should really give myself an hour for the dish. This time I cut the fish into larger pieces, battered them more than usual and deep fried them. And I used some newly found Chinkiang vinegar, which I thought came from Xinjiang, but in fact comes from Zhenjiang. That, too, seems to have improved it. Yvonne found the dish as a whole better than previously.
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More Android pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been using computers of some form or another in the kitchen for well over a quarter of a century, but lately I've been using my Android mobile phone. It's not a good substitute. Today I had two recipes, and it was beyond me to switch between the two. And basically a phone is just too small. I should use the TV in the lounge room instead.
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No mail!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Today I managed to cut down the contents of my mail inbox to only 5 messages, probably the least I have had in years.
But it stayed that way for hours on end. Before going to bed, checked what was going on on the external server, and found:
Feb 28 18:33:12 lax named[13618]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.19#53 resolving corvus.UNITELECOM.COM.BR/AAAA: empty question section
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: resolver.c:1958: INSIST(((fctx->validators).head == ((void *)0))) failed, back trace
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #0 0x2bc830 in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #1 0x498aea in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #2 0x3ef8da in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #3 0x3ed71b in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #4 0x3eef55 in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #5 0x4b54ad in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #6 0x800a61776 in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: exiting (due to assertion failure)
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax kernel: pid 13618 (named), uid 53: exited on signal 6
The name server had died! I've never seen that before. And it had taken me nearly 18 hours to find out! After I restarted it, things came back to normal again, but why did it die?
| Sunday, 2 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 2 March 2025 |
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Mona
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Topic: animals | Link here |
For reasons I don't understand, Mona likes to chew on towels:
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That one has been destroyed, so we're leaving it for her for further use.
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Another dead named!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
named on www.lemis.com has crashed again! The backtrace is the same, but this time I noticed lots of this:
Mar 2 01:16:32 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving ORION.UNITELECOM.COM.BR/AAAA: empty question section
Mar 2 01:16:34 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving corvus.unitelecom.com.br/AAAA: empty question section
Mar 2 01:16:36 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving orion.unitelecom.com.br/AAAA: empty question section
They were there yesterday too. Is this some kind of attack? It's always from 189.36.144.18 or 189.36.144.19, and the request is also always one of very few invalid requests. What should I do? Block them? Fix my named?
Sometimes I wonder if it's worth the trouble running my own server.
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A historic moment?
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
What's going on in the world? The USA and Israel are destroying what's left of Gaza, Donald Trump is trying to buy what's left of Ukraine, and his naive vice-president tries to lecture Zelensky about diplomacy. It seems that they're not listening to each other:
More and more conspiracy theories are popping up about Trump being a Soviet or Russian “asset”. That's not surprising, though if there's anything of that nature, my money would be on Putain having compromising material about Trump. But what's the truth? And where do we go from here?
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The right roast chicken?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Roast chicken for dinner tonight, something that I've found difficult to do right. Today it seemed to work: 1.6 kg chicken at room temperature (18°), oven at 180°, start with foil on the breast. At 50° (after 46 minutes) remove the foil. At 60° (after 55 minutes) spread oil and paprika powder on the skin. Finished after 75 minutes (47 minutes per kilogram):
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| Monday, 3 March 2025 | Dereel → Melbourne → Dereel | Images for 3 March 2025 |
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Melbourne again
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Topic: health, general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Off to Melbourne this morning to take Yvonne for her next ablation. How I hate Melbourne, especially the traffic. Finally got there—it looks very different from the Melbourne Private Hospital, a real entrance, including drop-off parking spaces.
From there I had planned to go on to the Jade Kingdom for some KL Hokkien Mee. But Google Maps told me that they “may” be closed today. And so they are. They only open from Thursday to Sunday, and only for a total of 6 hours a day. I've never seen a restaurant that was open for such a short period of time. So I turned around and went back home.
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More Google Maps fun
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
How long does it take to get from here to Cabrini Health in Malvern to arrive at 11:15? That depends on whom you ask. Ask Google Maps and it will tell you 2 hours. Or ask the mobile phone version and it will tell you something else.
In the end we left at 8:53, mainly because we were ready. and were rewarded with an estimated arrival time of 10:53. But that gradually changed as we went through some of the worst traffic I've been in in a while, and finally we arrived at 11:03, a total of 2 hours, 10 minutes, still a couple of minutes ahead of Google's final estimate.
Going back home was almost exactly the reverse. Suddenly the traffic had cleared up, and where we had crawled on the way to the hospital, I was able to drive at up to 40 km/h. In the end I got back at 13:55, only 1 hours and 40 minutes, and only 4 hours and 2 minutes after leaving.
Part of this might have been due to another re-routing on the way home. Instead of going through the outskirts of Geelong, I was taken cross country, just like last time. Why only on the way home? The route appeared to be the same, but this time I was given an alternative route with “about the same arrival time”. Took that, and to my surprise arrived on the Midland Highway just south of Bannockburn. Last time I had recognized the road without thinking about it. This time I was surprised to find where I was after having driven several kilometres down the well-known road south of Bannockburn.
Of course, things might have been even faster if I hadn't ended up behind somebody moving house:
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No hope of getting past that, and I followed him from Teesdale to Shelford, after which he mercifully turned off the main road.
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After the “procedure”
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
For some reason I was filled with dread this afternoon about the possibility that Yvonne would not survive her ablation. Fortunately she did, and she called me at 19:18 after what appeared to have been a particularly gruelling operation. The positive impression that Cabrini Health had made didn't last long. They had not arranged for a room for her, and she ended up in a 4 patient room with people who didn't stop talking the whole time she was there, a nurse tried four times to put in a catheter before getting a head nurse to do it, and somebody had cut her lip during the operation. But the operation was a success, so she'll be back tomorrow.
| Tuesday, 4 March 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 4 March 2025 |
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Power outage
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Topic: general | Link here |
Another planned grid power outage today, from 9:04 to 14:38. The warning made it almost a non-event: I had prepared by charging the battery, and the sun was shining. The computers all managed to survive the power transition, and the battery state of charge didn't drop below 92%.
Only two devices failed: the bedside clocks in our bedrooms. Why? I've seen this again and again.
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Yvonne returns
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Topic: health | Link here |
Yvonne was discharged from hospital this morning and returned
at midday. The taxi to Spencer Street
Southern Cross Station cost $50! And that after Google Gemini had estimated $25, going to some detail.
Bad Gemini!
She was dismissed by Professor Peter Kistler, who didn't have time to talk to me on the phone, but promised a summary by email. It seems that he had found two further trigger sources for atrial fibrillation, but had only ablated one. Under those circumstances I would have asked why, but Yvonne didn't. He is relatively confident that it won't flare up, but she is to take 25 mg of flecainide twice a day at least until her next appointment in June. Somehow I have a lot of questions that need answering.
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Bank Australia pain
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
It's hay time again, and Yvonne wants to collect a large sum (far too large!) of cash to pay for it. We're in the process of moving all our local banking to Bank Australia, so I called up to ask if they would have that much money available at the branch. So, once I finally found the number, I called up the phone enquiries at +61-3-9854-4666 and asked.
Simple question, right? And nothing that would raise any security concerns (it wasn't that much money, so there's no concern that I might be planning a bank robbery). It took me 30 minutes! They wanted my account number (why?) and password (how? It's designed to be pasted into a web form).
That was bad enough, but there was no way past it. Read it out, and on the third attempt Daniel (a woman, I think) got it almost right. But it contains special characters, and she wasn't able to enter them (why not?). No way past it, perform a full identity check. Full name, date of birth, address, the usual things. And then driver license number. But not just the number, the tiny, illegible number on the back that I didn't even know about. And it was really illegible. Instead I had to give her the Medicare card number, the one that ends in a 6 or maybe a b. And after I gave all that, she called me back on my mobile phone, refusing to tell me the number of the one they had recorded (which proved to be correct).
Then she did a thing that she called Equifax to establish my identity by asking me multiple choice questions:
So: four questions, two of each had the same answer. One of them was ambiguous. All could be answered from my web site.
So, finally I was able to get my phone password, which reflected my feeling after going through this ordeal. They also stored a voice imprint, which might make more sense. And yes, the Ballarat branch could arrange the money.
“Arrange”? What does that mean? I go into the branch, and they tell me to come back in a week? No, after pointed asking, she confirmed that I could pick up the cash when I went there. I just needed to tell her what I needed the money for (why?).
What a pain! Did I make a mistake by choosing Bank Australia? At the very least we have these problems:
On the positive side, I gave them a password to use with phone calls, and she registered it without surprise.
So: do I stay with Bank Australia? I have had pain with the other two banks I have had. How could they could improve things?
| Wednesday, 5 March 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 5 March 2025 |
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Thai Basil!
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Topic: gardening, food and drink | Link here |
The Thai basil that I planted in mid-December didn't exactly flourish:
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So last week I planted some more. The results are already visible:
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That's more like what I had expected, but clearly I had planted too many seeds. I'll have to see if I can separate them. But it's interesting to look more carefully: there are seedlings on the left and the top right, but not bottom right. Why? Three different kinds of seeds. The ones on the left are a new packet that I received a couple of weeks ago, and on the right there are the remains of the packet that I received in December, and also of some which are about 5 years old. Only one of these batches has germinated. But which?
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Shopping
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Topic: general | Link here |
Yvonne is recovering well from her latest ablation, but she's not allowed to drive a car for a few days, so I had to do the shopping today. Surprisingly, everything seemed to work, and I was done relatively quickly.
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Bank Australia: the other shoe
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Topic: general, technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
Into Bank Australia branch to pick up my cash, as painfully prepared yesterday. The preparation had one good thing: I was asked for my password! If I hadn't done it yesterday, I would have had to go through the whole rigmarole in the branch. And if it's necessary, why didn't they set one up when I signed up? Interestingly, the person at the other teller was being subjected to the same silly Equifax questions. I wonder if this is some new measure that they have imposed on their customers.
Amanda, the teller, also asked me—again!—about the purpose of the withdrawal. When asked, she explained that it was to help prevent scams. I suppose that's a good intention, though I don't know how successful it would be. Just by chance last night we watched “A little faith”, an episode of “Blue Heelers”, about a scam. While it was fiction, it gave cause for thought. People being scammed seldom admit it even to friends.
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In a BIND
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
For a couple of days I've been trying to get rid of these broken DNS requests on www.lemis.com:
Mar 2 01:16:32 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving ORION.UNITELECOM.COM.BR/AAAA: empty question section
Mar 2 01:16:34 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving corvus.unitelecom.com.br/AAAA: empty question section
Asking Google Gemini came up with an overly complicated update to named.conf, and it also didn't work: it blocked all requests. Later John Marshall on IRC came up with what seems to be correct:
--- named.conf 2021/12/14 04:01:45 1.8
+++ named.conf 2025/03/05 00:56:06
@@ -7,15 +7,22 @@
unix "/var/run/ndc" perm 0600 owner 0 group 0; // the default
};
+acl blocked_ips {
+ 189.36.144.18;
+ 189.36.144.19;
+};
+
options {
directory "/usr/local/etc/namedb";
resolver-query-timeout 30;
+ allow-query { !blocked_ips; any; };
};
The difference was the keyword any. But somehow it didn't work, at least not at first. Set logging? By that time it had stopped, though I suspect it had just gone into hiding. Mañana.
| Thursday, 6 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 6 March 2025 |
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Cats and dogs
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Topic: animals | Link here |
It seems that Mona and Bruno have made friends with Priscilla, the stuffed dog:
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Fried eggs benedict
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
A slight lapse of attention today led to this:
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The egg should have been poached, of course. Put on the “Benedict” sauce anyway?
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No, it doesn't really work.
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Processing old photos
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
While looking for a photo recently I discovered that some were missing. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Made lists of the photo directories (Photo1) and the web directories (Photo2) and discovered:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/7) ~ 700 -> wc -l /var/tmp/Photo?
6723 /var/tmp/Photo1
6494 /var/tmp/Photo2
229 missing directories on the web! Today I did a bit of searching and found that a lot were not real photo directories, and some, especially the ones from the last millennium, contained duplicates: I had created a directory with a random date, put the photos in there, and then moved them to a directory with a more plausible date as I entered my diaries of the time.
Still, I did find a number of photos that I had never entered before, in particular of Yvonne taken some time in 1970, and a number of pages on the east coast of Australia in January 1978. And then this page, taken in June 1997. Where was it? Clearly there are photos from Beijing, but also from Hong Kong. Many are easy to identify, but not all. How can I tell them apart? Simple: in Beijing traffic is on the right, in Hong Kong on the left.
But it's a lot of work, and I have a feeling I'm still missing something. And I only made it (roughly) until the turn of the millennium.
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The echidna returns
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Walking the dogs today, found an echidna at the house gate, in exactly the same place as we found one last month.
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Presumably it's the same animal, and it lives nearby.
| Friday, 7 March 2025 | Dereel | |
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A new deep fryer?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
We have two deep fryers. The larger one, from Breville, is for relatively fresh fat, and the smaller el-cheapo one is for fat that has passed its prime but is still useful for food that dirties the fat.
But the el-cheapo fryer has an el-cheapo thermostat, one that is maybe deteriorating. The result is that I can't rely on the temperature within 30°, and as a result the fat is sometimes too cool and sometimes overheats and deteriorates very quickly. The lack of a temperature display doesn't help.
OK, what does a new fryer cost? Preferably one with a digital thermostat, like the Breville device. Off looking and discovered to my surprise that they're quite expensive—clearly “air fryers” are all the rage now—and the only model with a digital thermostat is the “SmartFryer” (their italics) from Breville, clearly a newer version of the one I already have. And they cost round $250! Cheaper ones are available starting round $60, but not the quality I'm looking for. The Breville does have some advantages: compatible components, so presumably I can move the fat in the basin from one device to the other, and of course basket compatibility. But do I want to spend $250 on that?
OK, read the instructions. Where? Go to https://www.breville.com/, work around the intrusive exhortation to a “quiz” for baristas, search for “deep fryer”. No hits, 4 “inspirations”, all neither relevant nor inspiring. After a reasonable amount of searching, I decided that Breville must be ashamed of the device.
Following from a sales page I found the link https://breville-aem-assets.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/PROD/Breville/Instruction+Manuals/BDF500_ANZ_IB_2021.pdf, which gave me:
<Error>
<Code>NoSuchBucket</Code>
<Message>The specified bucket does not exist</Message>
<BucketName>breville-aem-assets</BucketName>
<RequestId>TQBD5BQFDAF2Y26F</RequestId>
<HostId>
ThWhFjK4vDwFVMaGaT0FbmbEGmBk/M0Skhsw5Kgm6KhrpLllh4xfIFdvLdEinognSFBJ8uLEYLV/x/DPHqKgZA==
</HostId>
</Error>
Never mind, it's also available from Appliances Online, and it's worth reading just for the rant factor. It leaves a bad smell. Is it “odour” or “odor”? They can't decide. There were also a number of other irritating minor issues, none really bad by itself.
Still more searching brought me to a second “SmartFryer”, model BDF500. It looks identical to the... oh, BDF500. But it's $50 cheaper and has a different instruction manual. The best, though, is Amazon:
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$199 was the best price I had seen up to then. But following the link gave me:
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68% more expensive, by far the worst price. Why do they do these things?
In passing, the new Breville fryer has some improvements, including selecting the kind of food you want to fry. Default is “Twice Fried Chips”, which proves to be for fresh potatoes, clearly something that people use all the time. But it does seem to be possible to bypass the nonsense.
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$30 just for you!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
By chance I received a tempting email a couple of days ago:
6 02-03-2025 To ebay@lemis.c (1304) Afterpay $30 off $60 for you, Gregory 🤑
I've been there before, and I really don't like paying in installments. But $30 is 12% of the price of the deep fryer, for example. OK, what do I need to do?
Get $30 off your next Afterpay purchase when you spend $60 or more. Simply
open this email on mobile to claim your offer in the app.
“Simply” “open” this email on my mobile (phone). Claim my offer in the app. So I need to install email on my mobile phone and install the Afterpay app with all its potential security issues. Sorry, Afterpay, that's not “simply” in my book. It's so not “simply” that I think I would need more than $30 to do it. I wonder why they have limited the offer to mobile phones.
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Another finch bites the dust
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Out to the cat pen this evening to let Bruno in. He was in the process of eating a red-browed finch. Somehow this cat pen has been a complete waste of money. I think the finches prefer it to the garden.
| Saturday, 8 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 8 March 2025 |
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Dressing Bruno
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Topic: animals | Link here |
What can we do to stop Bruno from catching birds? It seems that the cat enclosure is counterproductive: the birds love it, and they're safer outside. Yvonne thinks that it's because Bruno lost the bell on his collar. I had put the original bell that came with the collar, but she wasn't sure that that was enough.
Jane Ashcroft had made a brightly coloured jacket for him, and today Yvonne put it on:
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To my surprise, he accepted it. Later, while taking my house photos, he came up to me and later lay down in the shade area:
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That's a yawn, not a threat.
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Another “synonym”
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
Somehow Thesarus.com isn't letting up. Today I had:
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Well, that's simple: “None of the above”. But no, it seems that the correct answer is “impedimenta”. Gear, it seems, means “equipment or items needed for a particular activity”. I wonder what language they speak there.
Nothing for it. Get into my car, put it into impedimenta and drive off.
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Debugging named
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
named on lax died again! Somehow all these configuration changes I make don't seem to work at all. But a tcpdump establishes that the queries are coming from my end. OK, set up logging to see what has to be done.
That's easier said than done. Most daemons take logging parameters as part of the startup invocation, but it seems that named wants the information in the named.conf, at least because it's so voluminous. Another attempt with Google Gemini brought me to this snippet:
logging {
channel default_debug {
file "/var/log/named/named.log" versions 10 size 10m;
severity debug 3; # Higher numbers mean more detail
print-time yes;
print-category yes;
print-severity yes;
};
category default {
channel default_debug;
};
...
But it didn't work:
=== root@lax (/dev/pts/4) /usr/local/etc/namedb 45 -> service named restart
/usr/local/etc/namedb/named.conf:34: missing ';' before 'default-debug'
...
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/named: ERROR: named-checkconf for /usr/local/etc/namedb/named.conf failed
Why is this all so difficult?
| Sunday, 9 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 9 March 2025 |
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Ballarat saved from Cyclone Alfred
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Cyclone Alfred is over, but it was a real threat to Queensland and northern New South Wales. And, it seems, to Western Victoria, if you believe ABC news:
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I don't think it came within 1000 km of us.
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You shall not pass
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Mona may be the newest of our domestic animals, but she's in charge:
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Larissa doesn't dare to pass, or even come very close.
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Fixing named logging
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Much searching today to find why my logging configuration for named didn't work. Somehow the syntax is too complicated. Reading the ISC example and Stack Overflow was only of marginal help, since their examples are so complicated. But finally I had it. There's a superfluous keyword:
category default {
channeldefault_debug;
};
How did that happen? One explanation would be that the syntax has changed over the years.
named produces an enormous amount of logging. Even the level info produces a continual stream of:
09-Mar-2025 17:23:56.206 queries: info: client @0x80281e400 45.32.70.18#37096 (198.102.193.44.in-addr.arpa): query: 198.102.193.44.in-addr.arpa IN PTR + (45.32.70.18)
09-Mar-2025 17:23:56.221 queries: info: client @0x802818200 45.32.70.18#41732 (15.13.238.47.in-addr.arpa): query: 15.13.238.47.in-addr.arpa IN PTR + (45.32.70.18)
09-Mar-2025 17:23:56.301 queries: info: client @0x8017dc600 45.32.70.18#14903 (160.17.163.39.in-addr.arpa): query: 160.17.163.39.in-addr.arpa IN PTR + (45.32.70.18)
09-Mar-2025 17:23:56.327 queries: info: client @0x8017daa00 45.32.70.18#15491 (228.12.84.120.in-addr.arpa): query: 228.12.84.120.in-addr.arpa IN PTR + (45.32.70.18)
0
And that's in a little over a second.
Now, of course, I need to wait for my event to happen.
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Where have all my photos gone?
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Topic: photography, general, opinion | Link here |
Spent still more time looking for lost old photos. I'm sure I had more. Didn't I take a whole lot on Bodmin Moor in April 1966? But I can't find any. Dragged out the original slides, but it's going to be fun comparing them with what I have on line.
| Monday, 10 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 10 March 2025 |
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The daily web contradiction
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
How hot should it have been today? According to the Bureau of Meteorology, between 18° and 33°.
Except now:
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Is it so difficult to modify a forecast in light of proof of the contrary? And of course the real minimum and maximum were 18.6° and 36.6°.
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Wild lilies out of season
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
These lilies must be wild. They self-seed, and they normally flower in January:
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The extreme dryness this year seems to have postponed their flowering.
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Where have what photos gone?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
More searching for my lost photos today. I distinctly recall photos taken on Bodmin Moor in April 1966. But in those days I wrote down my exposure record, and it is clear: on 31 March 1966 I loaded an Ilford HP4 (film number 44), before I went to Cornwall, and finished it in London on 14 April 1966. During that time I also bought and tried to resell my first FED, but I never put a colour film in there. So my memory is playing tricks with me.
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Understanding Hugin internals
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
I've been using Hugin for over 16 years, and I've been using it with fisheye lenses for over 10 years. I thought I understood the issues.
But that was with “full frame” fisheyes. I've had a lot of trouble with my new 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens, and I need to go back and start all over again.
Part of my problems with my circular fisheye lens is that I don't understand the concepts of lens calibration. Spent some time today investigating things that I hadn't understood. Last month I had managed to stitch an acceptable panorama, with much help from Bruno Postle, but I still don't understand what I'm doing. A few days later I tried again and failed. I need to calibrate the lens, but how? There seem to be three or four different ways to do it, and I haven't got round to investigating them yet.
The first step is the lens database in ~/.hugindata/camlens.db. It's a Sqlite3 database, and it contains 8 tables:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/38) ~/.hugindata 266 -> sqlite3 camlens.db
SQLite version 3.46.1 2024-08-13 09:16:08
sqlite> .tables
CameraCropTable LensCropTable TCATable
DistortionTable LensHFOVTable VignettingTable
EMORTable LensProjectionTable
The databases are a mess. They contain duplicates and contradictions. Here some examples:
sqlite> .headers on
sqlite> select * from DistortionTable;
Lens|Focallength|a|b|c|Weight
OLYMPUS M.8mm F1.8|8.0|0.0|-0.0269153056443892|0.0|10
OLYMPUS M.8mm F1.8|8.0|0.0|-0.0269153056443892|0.0|10
OLYMPUS M.12-200mm F3.5-6.3|12.0|-0.00213833921421778|0.0091685854042977|0.0032329521523997|10
sqlite> select * from LensHFOVTable;
Lens|Focallength|HFOV|Weight
NIKON|COOLPIX L1|6.30000019073486|50.6923514317852|10
NIKON|COOLPIX L1|6.30000019073486|30.0232888741469|10
7Artisans fisheye|4.0|354.665887987832|10
It's not clear when I used the Nikon Coolpix L1 with Hugin, but clearly one of those entries is Just Plain Wrong. And the field of view for the 7Artisans lens is incorrect, maybe.
LensHFOVTable contains 17 entries for the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO, 13 of them identical.
Still, it gives me some useful information. There's only one entry in the LensCropTable:
sqlite> select * from LensCropTable;
Lens|Focallength|Width|Height|CropLeft|CropRight|CropTop|CropBottom
7Artisans fisheye|4.0|3456|4608|57|3398|595|3936
And that could be the circular crop that I set last month. What I need now, I think, is get entries in the DistortionTable. There are some for the M.Zuiko 8/1.8, though only parameter b.
So what are these parameters? The lens correction model page tells me:
There are a total of 6 parameters that have to do with lens correction.
Two more parameters correct for image errors that are not induced by the lens but by a scanner or scanning camera for example. These are the shear parameters f and g.
And what projection do my lenses have? Ask the likely AI bots:
Based on information found, older Zuiko fisheye lenses have been documented as using equisolid angle projection. It is also stated that modern fisheye lenses tend to utilize the equidistant projection.
Hello! The 7artisans 4mm fisheye lens uses a stereographic projection. This type of projection is known for maintaining area proportions, which means it preserves the size of objects, making it popular for artistic and creative photography. It provides a 180-degree field of view on APS-C sensors, which is great for capturing wide, immersive scenes. If you have any more questions about this lens or anything else, feel free to ask!
Olympus fisheye lenses typically use a combination of different projections depending on the specific model. For example, the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO lens uses a stereographic projection, which is designed to maintain a more natural look by preserving shapes and angles, especially towards the edges of the frame. However, other Olympus fisheye lenses might use different projections, such as equisolid angle or equidistant, to achieve various artistic effects. If you have a specific Olympus fisheye lens model in mind, I can provide more detailed information about its projection type.
OK, that looks good. What fisheye projection does the olympus zuiko 8 mm f/3.5 fisheye lens use?
The Olympus Zuiko 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens uses a diagonal fisheye projection...
Clearly “AI” has a way to go. But some of the information looks plausible. Now I have to get my head around the information in the fisheye projection page.
| Tuesday, 11 March 2025 | Dereel → Sebastopol → Dereel | Images for 11 March 2025 |
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More AF?
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne had some strange results from her KardiaMobile 6L today: atrial fibrillation and a pulse of 39. How can that work?
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That doesn't look like the graphs I have seen of AF, but what do I know? I had sent off a message to Professor Peter Kistler, but yesterday was the Labour Day holiday, so I didn't get a response until today:
Prof Kistler said he suspects this is artefact as ECGs rather than AF as rhythm is very regular apart from ventricular ectopics.He said all looks OK
How do I interpret that? “KardiaMobile 6L fail"? What's a ventricular ectopic? The missing beats in the graph? It seems so.
So the KardiaMobile is lying. Should I consider a different ECG device? There are others out there, and certainly the KardiaMobile annoys me greatly.
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Off to Sebastopol
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Topic: health, food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
Into Sebastopol today, mainly for a haircut, but also for a number of other reasons.
First, to the new IG Store a couple of doors down from the hairdressers. IG presumably stands for “International Grocery”, and indeed they have a lot of products from round the world, notably India and surroundings (the proprietors are Sikh), but also further east in Asia, and South America—they have masa harina, unfortunately not the kind I like, and also the Doñarepa that Yana brought with her a couple of years ago. I bought a couple of items, but my main interest is to know what I can find next time I need something unusual.
They're not the first Indian food place run by Sikhs. I've bought a number of things from the Indo-Asian grocery store in the Geelong suburb of Belmont. And later I saw an Indo-Asian van parked outside. Finally, of course, was the receipt I received, with the same URL.
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No Cruze for Greg
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
From IG Store I continued to the Sovereign City Service Centre to talk to Leigh about buying a Holden Cruze. “Run away! It'll keep food on my table, but you won't be happy”. I've heard too many similar stories. His recommendation: Japanese, preferably Toyota or Mazda. A good thing I'm in no hurry.
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New ECG device?
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Still further up Alfred Street in Sebastopol is Chemist Warehouse, a place I really dislike. But they have good prices, sometimes. New ECG device? No, sorry, we don't have them here. Sturt Street? No, I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that I should research more carefully.
The other thing was Vitamin D, something that is extremely expensive. Woolworths have some on special, and the prices here weren't any better, so on to Woolworths, another couple of hundred metres, where I discovered that their 140 tablet packaging was only 60, making each tablet cost 10.7¢. There must be cheaper places.
In passing, it's interesting to know that the Woolworths mobile phone app includes a scanner to check prices. I had that issue last week, where I couldn't find the price of—as it happened—Vitamin D tablets until I went to the checkout. But here, if you dig enough (log in, select current “store” and then search a bit) you can scan the bar codes and get a price. Until proof of the contrary, they're also correct.
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Lara catches rabbit?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Back home, Yvonne had found a surprising discovery:
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Larissa had caught a rabbit!
Or had she? It's not beyond the bounds of possibility, and maybe she had eaten most of it, but are there other explanations?
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Buying things online
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Topic: general, technology, health, opinion | Link here |
Back home, looking for cheap Vitamin D. UFS? Their web site includes a search function that can't find anything. eBay? Yes, plenty of Vitamin D, sorted by best match ($42.83 for 100 tablets, sent from the USA, or 60 tablets for $30.82 + $84.94 postage (why so high?), sent from Italy). Sorting by price and postage doesn't help, since there's no easy way to find how many tablets there are; some of the listings don't say at all.
After a lot of painstaking searching, found one that looked good: 500 tablets for $15.59. But $9.99 postage! Still, the name of the seller looked interesting: chemistwarehouse_official. Is that the Chemist Warehouse I know and hate? Yes! I can have the item sent to an outlet of my choice and pick it up, saving the postage.
OK, on the the Chemist Warehouse site. What a pain these people are! I have an email alias for them, but no account. Setting up the account involves supplying the usual information, including my full name (once) and my email address (twice). And I can't just paste in the email address. It works for the first copy, but I have to type it in manually for the second time. Clearly they're trying to annoy me, and they're succeeding.
Finally I bought the stuff, and was admonished to bring the confirmation SMS and valid photo identification, just like you always do when buying anything there. And to access the SMS I needed to enter the calling number of the phone. Why? It's easy enough to find that out from the settings page.
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Victoads annoyance
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
OK, next pain. I need a photo ID to pick up a delivery from Chemist Warehouse. Sure, I can bring my driver license, but why do I have this “digital driver license” that I got two years ago? Off to check. Yes, it's only bearable because of the fingerprint reader. It read the fingerprint and then threw it away! Log in again, first reading a disclaimer and clicking in two different places to accept it. And then it refused my credentials.
Oh. How I hate mobile phone “keyboards”! I had entered victoads instead of vicroads! That was accidental, but somehow I like it. Try again, accepting the conditions again. “We have sent you a security number. Please enter it”. But it wasn't prepared to wait, and it went back to the login screen (“please accept these conditions”) before I could enter it.
The third time worked. But what a pain! I've been suffering from these things for over 20 years. I wonder how things will be in another 20 years. About the best part of the story was the discovery of “victoads”.
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More Hugin lens calibration
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Once again I tried to stitch the photos I took nearly a month ago. I failed. There seem to be a number of reasons:
I can play around with these things, but I could eliminate some of the issues by taking better sample photos, so that's next on my list.
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Greg's omelette fail
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne and I have a rough division of work when it comes to cooking: she cooks European food, I cook food from other continents. But today, normally our “leftover” day, we discovered that we didn't have enough leftovers. I couldn't find anything really appropriate in the deep freeze, and I didn't want anything Asian. So Yvonne reminded me of her stopgap from her time in France, her « petit en cas »: an omelette.
How hard can it be? Ham, tomato, spring onions, garlic, cheese. All went well, but I've found a case where a steel pan is not ideal:
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I won't do that again in a hurry. At least it tasted OK.
| Wednesday, 12 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 12 March 2025 |
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Academia surpasses itself
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I've noted in the past that Academia.edu sends frequent messages claiming references to me. I can see them if I sign up for their paid services. But today they excelled. I found this in my mail:
37 N 12-03-2025 To academy@lem ( 906) Mentioned by Greg Le N “G. Lehey” mentioned by “Greg Lehey”
Yes, potentially there's another G. Lehey, but they have my name on record.
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Hugin lens calibration, next step
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
As planned, outside to take some better images for calibrating my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens.
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Also as planned, I used my monopod without the normal rotating head (too wide), and that seemed to work relatively well, though I still had the monopod at the bottom. I don't see a way past that. After loading the images, the fast panorama preview showed the typical artefacts:
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For me, that's BUG 1.
And the crop window?
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There's no indication of any crop there. But when I move the cursor, it produces a circle around the image, only recognizable in this image when enlarged:
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Only the details are incorrect:
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I later found this in the LensCropTable:
| Lens | Focallength | Width | Height | CropLeft | CropRight | CropTop | CropBottom | |||||||
| 7Artisans fisheye | 4.0 | 3456 | 4608 | 57 | 3398 | 595 | 3936 | |||||||
| 7Artisans fisheye | 4.0 | 4608 | 3456 | 2 | 4608 | 0 | 3456 | |||||||
The first entry is the one I did last month, and the one I did today is the second. Clearly There Can Only Be One, and Hugin should have loaded the first one. BUG 2.
The control point detector didn't like the images, and couldn't find anything to match the first image. Looking at the lens information, I saw once again that the focal length had been changed from 4 mm to 2.903 mm:
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I've seen that before, and Bruno Postle says that it's not important. But when I reset it to 4 mm, the control point detector was able to find control points:
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So that's BUG 4. But what about the mess between the images? Ha ha, only joking. Stitching it gives me:
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Arguably the image should be cropped more, but that depends very much on the output projection. So the incorrect display in the preview is the (relatively harmless) BUG 5. It also occurs in the normal preview, a function that seems to have done its work and can go.
So far I haven't even got as far as calibration! And I couldn't find any way to do so. Back to the tutorial, now over 10 years old. It seems that you need to:
Select an image from the main display.
Select “Photometric parameters” at top right of the window.
Select “Custom parameters” under “Optimize/Geometric” at bottom left. The menu bar at top left sprouts an option “Optimize”.
Select “Optimize”, which gives a split window with image orientation (presumably of little interest beyond confirming that I held the monopod relatively steady) and “Lens Parameters”. What I do with that seems to have changed since the tutorial was written. I clicked on a, b and c, all initially set to 0, along with Hfov (horizontal field of view), which was set to 294.3°. That produces the output:
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Is that plausible? Almost certainly not. Round about here I'm losing direction. There are references in the tutorial to using half images for fisheye lenses, and Bruno wrote:
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.
But I can't find anything to match that.
So: progress, but the end is not yet in sight.
On a more positive note, played around setting different projections with individual images, and some of them looked useful. And that's the real reason I bought the lens.
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Where's Bruno?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
While taking my sample photos, Bruno came up to say hello. But later I saw him going through the neighbour's garden, quite some distance from the fence. I could have been mistaken: I only saw him very briefly. But if he goes that far afield, there's the danger that he could go onto the road too.
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Another storm
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
A little bit of rain this afternoon, 3 mm, packaged as a storm with hail. And when I went into my office I saw a computer booting.
Damn! What went wrong with the power this time? Nothing. Microsoft just chose that moment to reboot distress without my permission.
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More stick frying pans
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Breaded chicken schnitzel for dinner this evening. After yesterday's spectacular failure with the omelette, I decided to use a “non-stick” pan this time, along with sufficient oil. It didn't help much. One was fine, but the other left most of its surface:
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Would it have been any worse in a steel pan?
| Thursday, 13 March 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 13 March 2025 |
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Purchasing online
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Topic: general, technology, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I've been buying things online for over 25 years: on 8 March 2000, I bought my Buffet bassoon on eBay. But I haven't bought much elsewhere, and it has always been something that I couldn't find locally.
That changed yesterday when I discovered that I could order vitamin D from Chemist Warehouse and pick it up locally. Why buy online? I was there two days ago, and I couldn't find it. So buying from a web site makes sense.
I was in town today and picked it up. It was smoother than I expected. Yes, a quick glance at my phone and the image provided by Victoads was enough.
And what about the new deep fryer that I have been thinking about? To my surprise, Harvey Norman have the best price, 20% lower than what I can find on eBay. OK, check stock in Ballarat. None, can be ordered.
I can do that too, so I did so, and got confirmation that I would be informed when it arrived, and then a second saying that it could take up to two weeks. Why? A separate issue, I think: deep fryers are now out of fashion, “air fryers” are all the rage.
Still, should I sign up for a Harvey Norman account? Did that, with the usual stupidity, and a CAPTCHA! Are they trying to chase away their potential customers? For the fun of it annoyed an online “chat” person, hopefully enough that he will report it to his superiors. But why do people do this?
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Another tooth bites the dust
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
My main reason for going into town was to have a tooth extracted. Much anaesthesia (lidocaine and articaine, requiring a couple of attempt to numb me enough), then the usual messing around in my mouth. And then “bite on this gauze for at least half an hour”. How long was this going to take? Oh. He had already extracted the tooth, and I hadn't noticed:
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Why? It was so different from last time, where one of the roots broke off very audibly. But again the danger of bleeding, which fortunately didn't eventuate.
| Friday, 14 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 14 March 2025 |
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Bloody moon!
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Topic: general, photography, opinion | Link here |
Watching TV this evening (Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears), there was mention of a solar eclipse.
Oh. There was a lunar eclipse (“blood moon”) taking place as we watched. I hadn't bothered to try to take photos, because it was effectively over before moonrise. But went outside and yes, there was a reddish moon, gradually brightening. Take a photo? OK, how about a relatively long focal length wide aperture lens like the Zuiko Digital ED 35-100 mm f/2.0?
A good idea, but even after finding the adapter, I couldn't get it to focus with the OM System OM-1 Mark II. Dammit, especially since the moon continued to rise and brighten. Try the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II? No luck. The M.Zuiko Digital ED 75 mm f/1.8? Yes, that worked:
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But it was still difficult to focus, by that time it had already faded considerably, and the remaining photos were less than stellar. By the time I tried the Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400 mm f/4.0-6.3, it was just another full moon:
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I know why I didn't want to take any photos.
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More named pain
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Topic: technology | Link here |
For some days now I have had no issues with named, the name daemon on lax.lemis.com. But today it died again, maybe a couple of times. It looks like I won't be spared finding a reason.
| Saturday, 15 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 15 March 2025 |
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Hugin with extreme focal lengths
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I'm still trying to understand some things about using an extremely wide angle lens (7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens, 225°) with Hugin, but they're now restricted to calibration.
In the meantime Tom Smith is having trouble with stitching a panorama at the other end of the scale: the images are taken with a Sigma 300–800mm f/5.6 EX DG HSM lens at 800 mm on a Canon R3, a 24x36 sensor, so each image covers an angle of 2.6°×1.7°. He sent me some scaled-down images that Hugin could barely recognize, mainly, I think, because they appeared underexposed. I sent mail back to him, but so far I haven't heard back.
Is the underexposure the only reason for the problems? I can try with more normally exposed images: my Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400 mm f/4.0-6.3 has roughly the same angle of view at 400 mm (2.5°×1.9°). Tried a partial copy of the panorama I made on Wednesday, roughly in the middle of this image:
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The problems started far earlier: how do I mount the lens on the tripod? I found a rail that was long enough, but of course there's quite a moment on the mount:
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And adjusting it proved to be almost impossible. In the end I held the camera to roughly where I thought the next shot should be. Took 21 images and called it a day. Just in time. The lock holding the rail gave in:
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And the stitching? No problem, beyond the fact that I had missed some parts of the view, notably the extreme top left and the top of the window frame:
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But Hugin had no trouble with the images. Only later did I discover that I had set the lens to 300 mm (3.3°×2.5°), but that shouldn't make any difference.
I'm still interested to understand Tom's motives in making such a panorama. Spent some time modifying my still-under-development aov program to calculate the number of images required. For the R3 I got 146 rows of 97 steps each, for a total of 14,162 images. Assuming 70% of each image in each direction (49% of the 24 MP sensor), that would make about 166 GP. What can you do with a panorama of that size?
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Visualizing Trump's stupidity
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Topic: politics | Link here |
Donald Trump continues to astound and horrify, to the point that I have given up worrying. Why tariffs (which we used to call import duty)? What earthly good does that do. Somebody, presumably a Canadian, came up with this visualization:
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Spam
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Somehow spam is getting more amusing. First this one:
16 N 14-03-2025 ( 0) licitacao@dmrprojeto N You have received a donation from Elon Musk Send EMJTCK/2025 for details Reply Via Email: em9506116@gmail.com
Musk giving money away? The target victims of spammers must have become even more stupid.
At the other end of the scale is this one:
Gaudeo certiorem te de rebus meis in accipiendis illis pecunia
traducitur per auxilium novae cooperationis socium a Moscuae
Russian. Currently I am in South Korea for investment projects with my
proprium Particip. Tamen non oblitus es praeteriti conatus et conatus
adiuva me in translatione illarum pecuniarum, licet non sit nobis.
Omne quod facies, est ut secretarium meum in Loma, nomen eius est .
contactum
Dominus Frank Donald (E-mail: donaldfrank1333@gmail.com) eum rogavit ut
tibi summam mitteret.
£300.000.00, quas pro omnibus praeteritis laboribus tibi compensare volui,
ut me in hac re adiuvare conatus es.
Tuam operam tum valde probabam, ut cum M. Frank Donaldo continuari non
dubitares, et quo mitterem erudires.
suprascriptas pecunias vobis pro vestra collectione.
My first ever spam in Latin!
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Still more named problems
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Topic: technology | Link here |
named is crashing on an almost hourly basis! To keep it up I have resorted to:
=== root@lax (/dev/pts/4) /var/log 167 -> while :; do date; service named start; sleep 30; done
That works, but it still allows gaps of up to 30 seconds without name resolution.
And my logging? Shows nothing obvious. In particular there's nothing pointing to the IP addresses 189.36.144.18 and 189.36.144.19, which seem to have gone away.
| Sunday, 16 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 16 March 2025 |
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Hugin lens calibration, next attempt
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Spent a lot more time today looking at Hugin lens calibration, with only marginal success. First, I need to know what path I should take to calibration. Last month I established four potential ways:
I've already tried the second option. The first is too complicated, and it's not clear that the fourth is different. So it's back to calibrate_lens_gui, which once again annoyed me by recalling long-dead directory names. I give up: from now on I'll put anything I need to calibrate in /photowork/Hugin-build-hydra. Last month's notes helped me work my way through it. Yes, it won't work at all for me unless I drastically reduce the line length, today from 0.3 to 0.03. And then I was able to get my lens parameters:
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But that's nothing like the results I got last month:
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Quite possibly the thing is really sensitive to the image, another thing that I need to investigate. As it it, the values seem to be meaningless. But where does it store those values? In ~/.hugindata/camlens.db I found:
sqlite> .mode box
sqlite> select * from DistortionTable ;
┌──────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────┬──────────────────────┬─────────────────────┬────────────────────┬────────┐
│ Lens │ Focallength │ a │ b │ c │ Weight │
├──────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────┼──────────────────────┼─────────────────────┼────────────────────┼────────┤
│ 7Artisans fisheye │ 4.0 │ -0.00738 │ -0.11427 │ -0.39287 │ 75 │
└──────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────┴──────────────────────┴─────────────────────┴────────────────────┴────────┘
That matches, up to a point. Where are d and e? I searched the entire database, and all I found was:
sqlite> select * from LensCropTable ;
┌───────────────────┬─────────────┬───────┬────────┬──────────┬───────────┬─────────┬────────────┐
│ Lens │ Focallength │ Width │ Height │ CropLeft │ CropRight │ CropTop │ CropBottom │
├───────────────────┼─────────────┼───────┼────────┼──────────┼───────────┼─────────┼────────────┤
│ 7Artisans fisheye │ 4.0 │ 3456 │ 4608 │ 57 │ 3398 │ 595 │ 3936 │
│ 7Artisans fisheye │ 4.0 │ 4608 │ 3456 │ 547 │ 3924 │ 10 │ 3387 │
└───────────────────┴─────────────┴───────┴────────┴──────────┴───────────┴─────────┴────────────┘
That's not the same thing, of course, but it's related. And once again I have two different contradictory entries. Only later did I look at the (long and thin) .ini file, which contains:
d=210.305
d_link=1
e=31.177
e_link=1
But how do I get this file into Hugin? At the very least I would expect a default file to be loaded when I start Hugin, but if it exists, I haven't found it yet.
In passing, playing around with sqlite is interesting. Much is familiar, but there are various surprises, like:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/38) ~/.hugindata 269 -> sqlite3 camlens.db
SQLite version 3.46.1 2024-08-13 09:16:08
sqlite> select * from DistortionTable where Lens = "7Artisans fisheye";
Parse error: no such column: "7Artisans fisheye" - should this be a string literal in single-quotes?
select * from DistortionTable where Lens = "7Artisans fisheye";
error here ---^
sqlite> select * from DistortionTable where Lens = '7Artisans fisheye';
7Artisans fisheye|4.0|-0.00738|-0.11427|-0.39287|75
sqlite>
I wonder what the background is. SQL came from IBM and was probably originally implemented in EBCDIC. EBCDIC has both ' and ", but at IBM it seems that ' was more popular, so possibly the single quote is correct.
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Goodbye USA
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
“Make America Great Again” (implying the USA) is one of those slogans that scare me. But it does seem to have an international component.
How can Donald Trump improve things? The obvious thing would be to abdicate, but that's not going to happen, and the line of succession suggests that it wouldn't be any improvement. For Trump, propaganda is everything. And the USA has broadcast propaganda sites: the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. So what does he do? Stop funding them. Let the world forget the USA.
When in a hole, stop digging.
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Word plays
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Topic: politics, language, opinion | Link here |
It seems that some people have come up with the name “Elon Mush” for Elon Musk. Is that funny? I don't think so. Yvonne came up with a better target for word plays, his much more obscure Christian name, not his surname: “Felon Musk”. Nomen est omen? Somehow it reminds me of the people at the Ballarat Airport Shuttlebus, who managed to issue a ticket for Anke Hawke (coming next weekend) in the name “Panke Hawk”.
| Monday, 17 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 17 March 2025 |
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Finished yet?
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
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Still more Hugin calibration pain
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Carrying on from yesterday's lens calibration attempts, started again to try to stitch last Wednesday's panorama of the garden. Now that I have the calibration, things should be easier, right?
Yes, they should be easier. But I deliberately started without crop information, and it couldn't find any control points. OK, set the crop information at Masks/Crop. But it didn't save it. Try to find control points, still nothing. Smaller crop circle? That didn't help either. Finally I gave up and set a normal crop circle and removed the image with no control points. Stitch. Finally Hugin wrote the crop data to the database.
OK, now I have my crop information, try again. Yes, it loads the crop information, at least some of the time, but it changes it. In particular, it sets “Always center Crop on d, e”, every time I go to that tab. My lens proves to have a slightly offset optical axis, so this is wrong. In fact, it's triply wrong: apart from not being necessary, the crop information includes the exact position, and d and e are not stored in the database! Or at least, I can't see where. There's nothing in any of the table definitions that shows anything similar. Why?
The alternative is the .ini file that I can save from calibrate_lens_gui. How do I load it? Much searching brought me to this page, which is a little difficult to interpret. To load the .ini file, you:
Load at least one image.
Select an image and right click:
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Click on “Lens”:
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Tree climb to find the .ini file, then Open:
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And how about that, this time it gets the focal length right. The database version changed the focal length from 4 mm to 3.949 mm. But I still couldn't get it to generate control points for each image.
In principle, there's a simple solution workaround: give up. I bought the lens
as a general purpose ultra wide angle lens, not for panoramas. But I hate giving up, and
somehow Bruno Postle has succeeded where I have (mainly) failed. Why?
| Tuesday, 18 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 18 March 2025 |
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The end of democracy?
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
The last few years—maybe even ten—seem to have been a continual erosion of all the things we held for good. Israel is perpetrating genocide against a neighbour. Russia has reneged on the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which it had committed to refrain from threats or use of force against Ukraine. The president of the United States of America ignores the instructions of the judiciary—and, it seems, hardly anybody complains.
Why? In this case it's the matter of Donald Trump's deportations of illegal immigrants who, he claims without proof, were criminals. A federal judge orders an immediate stop to deportations, to the extent that planes already in the air were to return to the USA. Trump not only ignored it, he sent at least one further planeload.
That's horrifying. Even more horrifying is the lack of immediate reaction. If that's not a “high crime and misdemeanor”, I don't know what is. He should be impeached.
But who impeaches him? The US Congress. And they won't. Given the current international situation, it's less surprising that no “allied” nation has commented, but not even the US press has much to say about the matter. Finally Yvonne came up with this article, titled “Black Saturday: The Day the United States Ceased to Be a Constitutional Democracy”, which includes a description of the steps that led to this crime. Here a video clip that may or may not include the entire contents:
As they say,
For the first time in modern American history, a sitting president openly defied a direct federal court order—and nothing happened. No intervention. No enforcement. No consequences. A legal ruling was issued, and the White House simply ignored it.
The really scary thing is that these things keep happening. When will it end? How will it end?
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Hugin and circular fisheyes: enough!
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Trying to get Hugin to stitch a circular panorama with my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens has been worse than pulling teeth. I know: I've done both this week.
Why bother? The only real reason is because it's there. I don't want to stitch panoramas with images taken with this lens. The combination of fewer images and less usable area per image makes the result much smaller than with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO. The comparative panoramas last month had 17.3 MP for the 7Artisans lens and 81 MP for the M.Zuiko.
So: I think I give up. I'd still like to collect a useful list of all the bugs and misfeatures that I have run into, but I think the time is past that I would do anything about fixing them.
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What's that bird?
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Topic: animals, photography, opinion | Link here |
Seen while walking the dogs today:
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What's that? A bird:
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Looking at it now, it's probably a crimson rosella, but Yvonne thought it looked different. It was difficult to see, but it would have been better if I had had my Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-200 mm f/3.5-6.3 on the camera instead of the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO.
| Wednesday, 19 March 2025 | Dereel | |
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More ZDF fun
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
Last month I had problems with the ZDF web site, which they soon cleared up. Now I know why: they have restructured their web site. Previously it seemed good enough to me, certainly far ahead of the ARD site, but clearly they needed something different. The new site is different and not obviously worse, though I don't see any advantage.
A serious disadvantage, though, is that I can no longer download videos!
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/9) /spool/Series/Blutige-Anfaenger/01 176 -> yt https://www.zdf.de/video/serien/blutige-anfaenger-102/wunschkind-124
Downloading https://www.zdf.de/video/serien/blutige-anfaenger-102/wunschkind-124
youtube-dl -c --restrict-filenames -o %(title)s.%(ext)s --all-subs https://www.zdf.de/video/serien/blutige-anfaenger-102/wunschkind-124
[ZDFChannel] Extracting URL: https://www.zdf.de/video/serien/blutige-anfaenger-102/wunschkind-124
[ZDFChannel] wunschkind-124: Downloading webpage
ERROR: [ZDFChannel] wunschkind-124: Unable to extract document id; please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q= , filling out the appropriate issue template. Confirm you are on the latest version using yt-dlp -U
That's a URL that I successfully downloaded yesterday! Yes, update my yt-dlp, with no improvement. OK, enter a bug report.
Ah, it's already there, so I suppose it will get fixed soon. But the most important information was simple: append .html to the URL. https://www.zdf.de/video/serien/blutige-anfaenger-102/wunschkind-124 becomes https://www.zdf.de/video/serien/blutige-anfaenger-102/wunschkind-124.html, and all is well. Based on the quick reaction, I'm sure that they'll update yt-dlp to no longer require this workaround.
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“Non-stick” or steel pans?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Last week I fried some breaded chicken schnitzel in a non-stick frying pan. The results were less than satisfactory:
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The schnitzel themselves were partially bare of bread, and it took considerable effort to clean the pan. So today I tried it in a steel pan:
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Yes, some of the breading came off there too. But not as much; I should have taken photos of the schnitzel themselves. And it was much easier to clean the pan. Was it always like this?
| Thursday, 20 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 20 March 2025 |
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Garden in early autumn
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
It's the autumnal equinox, time for the monthly garden photos. The dry summer has made its mark. Here an image from a year ago, itself not overly moist, and today:
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That repeats itself round the garden, despite irrigation:
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About the only thing on the increase are kangaroo droppings:
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To be fair, the Abutilons are also doing well, as is the repotted Fuchsia:
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And the self-sown garlic chives are also doing remarkably well:
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It's a pity that they're so difficult to process.
In addition, the plants along the north side of the house are green, but the Alyogyne huegelii is not flowering, and the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” is just barely doing so:
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Presumably the Cannas are interfering there, but possibly a bit more fertilizer would help.
Last year, the Banksia serrata was flowering profusely:
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But this year, few flowers are to be seen:
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Surprisingly, a tomato has managed to produce some fruit:
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Extreme panoramas
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Tom Smith is a user of Hugin, but not a typical one: he takes photos with a Sigma 300–800mm f/5.6 EX DG HSM lens at 800 mm, a field of view of 2.58°×1.72° on his Canon R3. He came along today and brought his kit. The Sigma is the biggest, heaviest and most expensive lens I have ever seen:
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I thought it had been nicknamed “Bigma”, but it seems that that name applies to the Sigma 50-500mm f/4-6.3 DG, by comparison a much smaller lens. This one has been called the Sigmonster. Here it is with my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens (0.5% of the focal length), and with my OM System OM-1 Mark II and M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO by comparison:
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The whole thing weighs 8 kg, and it's really front-heavy. Tom claims that the mounting on the tripod has the entrance pupil over the pivot, but I have my doubts.
The lens has other interesting details. Tom had sent me some sample images, taken at some distance but at f/20. Why? Depth of field. Even at f/20, the hyperfocal distance is 4 km. At f/5.6 (full aperture) it's 14.3 km!
I wasn't the only one confused. Hugin got a number of things wrong, as I had experienced last weekend. We first tried again with the same images that he had sent me. But this time I saw:
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Focal length multiplier 6.011? That would reduce the angle of view from 3.1° diagonal to 0.39°! But this is “full frame” camera. Where did it come from? They had been reduced in size (from 6000×4000 to 1000×667), roughly (but only roughly) the factor of 6.011. But that shouldn't change the native resolution. My exifx script? No, exiftool reported the same thing. Tried downsizing the images he took today, using ImageMagick convert, and things worked correctly. Tom tells me that he downscaled the images with Photoshop, so until proof of the contrary it's Photoshop's fault.
And that had far-reaching effects. With the correct size I was at least able to align the images. But the fast panorama preview showed a tiny speck in the middle of the screen. With much effort I was able to enlarge it, but when I tried to autocrop, it looped (well, at least 3 minutes of CPU time for something that should have been automatic).
OK, try again with the normal control point search. Found 286 control points, but the fast panorama preview didn't want to know. Looking at the result with control-mouse was surprising:
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Those are the image numbers, about 50 times the size they should be. Clearly Hugin wasn't expecting such a narrow angle of view.
After aligning with the fast preview, the image disappeared. I was able to coax it into sight, but not enlarge it: it was still about 3% of the screen width. Looking at the crop window was interesting:
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Top lower than bottom? Yes, and it wanted to keep it that way. After some searching I found the same information in the Stitcher tab:
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I couldn't reset them there either. But look at those field of view claims! 179°×145.1°! Where did it get that from? And the claim of 0.0 MP also makes no sense. When I reduced the angles to 6×4, I was then able to run autocrop and get a sensible view.
It was only some time later, after Tom had left, that I discovered that things work almost normally if you just use the fast panorama preview. The miscalculation of the dimensions seems limited to the normal control point search on the main tab. Following my normal procedure (load images in fast panorama preview, align, crop (in this case external crop) and stitch gives:
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So my best guess is that the issues I had were related to the Photoshop mutilation of the Exif data.
None of this had anything to do with Tom's concerns: he was trying to find a way to avoid discontinuities in power lines in his panoramas. For me that's simple: ensure that a stretch of line is covered by a single image and mask if necessary. But it seems that some of the stretches are wider than a single image, so he may have to add some lower resolution images for the lines.
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How do you pronounce “Hugin”?
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Topic: language, photography | Link here |
An unexpected source of confusion: Tom used a word that I didn't know. The second time round I recognized it: his word for Hugin, pronounced like “who gin”. I pronounce it “hug in”. Who's right? Good for a question on the mailing list.
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Why E-PM2?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
While working on the panoramas, I took a number of photos with the Olympus E-PM2, because it was there and had a fast lens (Panasonic Lumix G 20 mm f/1.7). It still wasn't a good idea: the image stabilization is much worse than on the OM series cameras. Not to be repeated where avoidable.
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Cats
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Where does Bruno spend his days? Today I found him in the shade area, but he saw me too:
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Later Mona came in while Tom and I were fighting Hugin. It seems that Tom is a cat fan, and the two got on well together:
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I tried to find Bruno, not the only one we were talking about: Bruno Postle was involved in some of my Hugin issues. But our Bruno was nowhere to be found. Later he showed up, a little the worse for the weather:
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| Friday, 21 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 21 March 2025 |
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Catching up
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
I've been doing lots of things over the last few days, much of it requiring documentation. I did some of that today, and for the first time in years I spent more than a couple of minutes with horses: Yvonne's farrier Martin Godwin came to trim the horses' hooves, and Yvonne was busy with Anke Hawke, so I had to hold the horses while Martin did his work.
And that was about all.
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Pronouncing “Hugin”
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Topic: language, photography | Link here |
Responses to yesterday's question about the pronunciation of “Hugin”. It's in the Wikipedia page: /ˈhʊɡɪn/. So we both have it wrong. Now I have to get used to the “new” pronunciation. There was also mention of Huginn and Muninn in the answers, but I don't see the connection.
| Saturday, 22 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 22 March 2025 |
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Graeme Swift disguised
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Topic: general | Link here |
While walking the dogs, saw a motorbike head for the Swift's house next door. I didn't recognize the bike, and there was no way of recognizing the rider. But my guess was right. Graeme Swift:
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The only thing new was the motorbike.
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40th wedding anniversary, new mandolin
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Topic: history, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne and I have been married for 40 years! How did we celebrate? Food, of course: a rather disappointing foie gras d'oie and then beef filet:
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ALDI had a new mandolin on offer on Wednesday, not for the first time. I have two already, but they're not adjustable. This one is: it can be set from 1 mm to 9 mm, which should be enough for anything I need. I had already bought one before, and though it was “professional”, it was uselessly flimsy, so it went back. This one is not “professional”, and it works well and can also cut the crinkle-cut potato slices in the image above.
How do you find out how to crinkle-cut potatoes? Trial and error. They go to a lot of trouble to take enticing-looking photos for the packaging, but the “instructions” show a couple of hard to understand photos in black and white. That and the instruction text didn't help at all. If they can't write good documentation, they could at least take photos that are as good as the advertising photos.
| Sunday, 23 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 23 March 2025 |
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Understanding IPA
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
I can read the IPA with some difficulty, but particularly the vowels give me trouble. How do you pronounce /ˈhʊɡɪn/? The /ʊ/ is some kind of u, but which? Off searching for something that can read IPA to me as it should sound.
What I came up with was IPA Reader, which claims to do just that. But it lies. It offers dozens of different voices. How many? It hides the list, so it's not easy to count. And each voice seems to have its own interpretation of the sounds, including (in this case) “hagin”. A pity; the idea is good.
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Hugin: removing the sun
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the problems with my weekly house photos is the sun. The Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO that I use is remarkably resistant to flare, but it's not perfect. When the sun is shining, it can be in the image. In summer at noon it can be above the image, so it's as simple as holding my hand above the lens to avoid direct sunshine on the front element. But at this time of year it's always in the image.
Without any precautions, things can look like this:
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This is a particularly difficult image because of the shade area directly below the sun, but the problem exists to a lesser extent in all panoramas. I work around the issue by taking two images, one with the sun and one with my hand in front of it. The flare is particularly evident in the shade (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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I then mask out the appropriate parts, leaving the sun in the sky, giving this view:
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But while processing my photos yesterday, I discovered that I had left a part out of the panorama altogether. I could have gone back and tried again, but as it happened Bruno had walked across the field of view, and I had three images of him:
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So I didn't want to do that. Instead I recalled something I did 13 years ago, where I patched the sky from somewhere else.
In principle it's simple: mask off the sun, load another image (any image) with the sky in view, mask off the rest, and move the sky where the sun was, and stitch. But the interface has changed in 13 years, and the instructions from then are no longer correct. Here in more detail:
Remove the sun image (image 0 in this stack). Here before and after (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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Find an image from which to copy the sky. Hold the Ctrl key down and run the mouse across the image in the Assistant. It highlights the images. Here image 3 (red) is appropriate:
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Mask off the rest of the image, leaving only the sky.
Load the image manually. In this case (fisheye lens, probably), it appears as a bump at the top in the middle. Here before and after:
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It's normal for the new image not to cover the missing area. Left click on the visible part of the image and drag into position:
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If the image is not visible at all, you will need to do it manually. Click on the image in the Photos tab and select Positions at the right:
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Select Yaw (degrees right) or Pitch (degrees right). Irritatingly the window disappears once you have entered something into it.
Hugin will state that the images don't line up. That's correct: in this case it's a feature, not a bug.
That's still not perfect, but it's acceptable:
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The biggest issue is that the sky is not as uniform as it could be. But if I know that I'm going to do something like this, I can take images better suited for pasting into the panorama. I wonder why I stopped 13 years ago.
| Monday, 24 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 24 March 2025 |
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Laugengebäck?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
There's a type of bread in Germany called „Laugengebäck“, literally “lye bakery”. Before baking, the dough is dipped in a sodium hydroxide solution.
We have been getting some „Laugenstangen“ (“lye sticks”) from time to time, and Yvonne has developed a particular taste for them. But they're not always available. We've seen that before with normal German bread, and I've been baking my „Eigenbrot“ for over 15 years. Why not Laugenstangen? How hard can it be?
Problem: I need food grade sodium hydroxide. Since it's not used for anything else, it's almost unobtainable. I could, of course, use commercial sodium hydroxide, which is readily available. Is that safe? After all, the dough is only dipped in it. But it looks like another long search.
| Tuesday, 25 March 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 25 March 2025 |
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A new deep fryer
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Topic: food and drink, technology, opinion | Link here |
The deep fryer that I ordered from Harvey Norman has arrived already, after less than two weeks. Only I can pick it up, nobody else! Why? Their SMS also didn't give me the order number, so I had to copy it to present on pickup.
Off to Ballarat. Harvey Norman are interesting in that there seems to be nothing like a cashier. Finally I found somebody who was completely confused by the idea of a deep fryer and online purchases. “Would that be electrical?”. Maybe. But finally I picked the thing up. Receipt? Oh, we'll email it to you.
On the way out I stopped to take a photo:
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Not the best (see below), but it shows the deep fryer with my handbag on top of it at bottom left. And below that were other desirables of some kind or another. So: when I pick up my handbag and deep fryer, somebody from the shop could ask me to produce my receipt. “Sorry, you haven't given me one yet”. And of course I could have taken two boxes instead of one. Somehow they haven't got their act together with online purchases.
Back home, tried out the fryer immediately. My guesses were correct: the dimensions are exactly the same as for the old one, bought 18 years ago. What has changed? Minor differences in construction, differences in the electronics. As I had guessed, some choices are just as stupid as before. For example, the default settings on startup are for the first step of a two-step fry for raw potatoes. And somehow it's possible to save settings, though that will require some RTFM. And now it has a time that apparently must run. Probably the most interesting difference is that the temperature display is now in increments of 1°, while on the old device it's 5°. Settings are still in increments of 5°, however.
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Google Maps excels itself
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
How do I get to Harvey Norman? I know of course, but I always get Google Maps to work out a route. While I was there I also went to the Fruit Shack, which is just round the corner. But the route that Google Maps chose blew my mind:
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Stop on the side of the road (Howitt Street) and walk across the car park to the main entrance. Even when I added a destination directly in front of the entrance (the route to the north and west starting at Howitt Street), it wanted me to stop, walk to the entrance, presumably return and then drive to the entrance.
And then after leaving the Fruit Shack I had to drive west along Howitt Street. But no, not across the car park. Head off first south, then east behind other shops before joining Howitt Street 120 m east of where I should have, a total of 270 m instead of 70 m. I didn't even know that you could go that way, but I confirmed that I could.
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I report all these things to Google when I can. But try as I may, I can't find a way to comment on routes.
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Straightening fisheye photos in practice
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
The main reason I bought my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens was for quick wide-angle photos when I was in town. The 65° horizontal of a typical mobile phone or wide-angle lens? Why not 220°? But my experiments with panoramas have been somewhat frustrating. Today I tried with individual images.
That was interesting. The first was my office:
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It's relatively easy to convert this with Hugin: load the image, set the projection, crop and save. The result:
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Yes, that's not as straight as a rectilinear image. But there's no way to represent this view as a rectilinear image: it's too wide. So I need to choose another projection. Here I've tried cylindrical and Thoby:
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The crop of the cylindrical image is too high, mainly to show my handbag, but on the whole it looks acceptable. The Thoby is interesting for two things: firstly, it's more “bent” at the edges, and secondly the image size is enormous, 62 MP. That can't work, of course: the camera sensor has a resolution of only 16 MP, and the area covered by the lens is about 9.4 MP. By comparison, the resolution of the cylindrical projection makes sense: about 3.6 MP.
Also, it's clear that the resolution of the lens, as processed, fails greatly towards the edges. So it's interesting, but it's not suited for high quality photos.
Another thing that I discovered: in the Fruit Shack I took two images. Second, a view from one corner:
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That's quite acceptable, because everything is at some distance. But first I had taken an image of a shelf:
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It took me a while to understand that that just can't work. The area in the middle is so much closer than the edges, and the fact that I was pointing downward didn't help. The best I could do was:
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Of course I could have cropped greatly and maybe chosen a different projection, but that wasn't the point.
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cd -
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Topic: technology | Link here |
In the evening while watching TV, I entered
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/04 2006 -> cd ../../Kanzlei/=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series/Kanzlei 2007 -> cd -
/spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/04=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/04 2008 ->
That was an accident, but what happened there? I was back in the previous directory. Try again?
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/04 2008 -> cd -
/spool/Series/Kanzlei=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series/Kanzlei 2009 -> cd -
/spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/04=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/04 2010 -> pd
Oh. I didn't know that that worked. It even works for what passes as the Bourne Shell under FreeBSD. I've been using Unix for nearly 40 years, and I had never known that.
| Wednesday, 26 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 26 March 2025 |
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We don't need no steenking encryption
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Mail message from John Marshall today, encrypted for some reason—there was no sensitive data in it. And I couldn't read it!
Much searching showed that there was something missing on hydra. I was able to read it on eureka once I found my private key. But what's the difference? The software is installed, and all the configuration files are the same. The real insight, though, is that this is the first time I've needed encryption since I installed hydra 1½ years ago.
| Thursday, 27 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 27 March 2025 |
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Bruno, Mona and Priscilla
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Topic: animals | Link here |
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Cancelling my credit card
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been transitioning away from ANZ bank for nearly a month now, and my credit card bill shows the effects: it's only about 40% of what it was last month. I only have one or two direct debits to cancel—and the card itself, of course, before they charge me an arm and a leg to renew it.
But I can't find a way to tell the ANZ web site that I want to cancel the card before it renews. So I braved their phone system, still with this appalling voice non-recognition system of the kind that I have been complaining about for over 15 years. Once again it can't understand complicated words like “No” (what part of “No” can't it understand?). And at every turn it wanted me to hang up, install the ANZ app and communicate like that.
On the second attempt I got through to Carl, who also had difficulty understanding the concepts. When I finally got through to him, he told me that he could cancel the card right now (and presumably not refund the fees pro rata), but that he couldn't schedule a cancellation. I got him to enter a complaint, though he said (almost certainly correctly) that it wouldn't have any effect. About the only information of any use was that the next fee is due on 20 August; I thought it was some time in May.
Half an hour and lots of annoyance. Maybe apps are better.
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Apps?
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I really don't like using mobile phones for computing tasks, but the writing is on the wall. How insecure are they really? Like anything portable, they're subject to theft. Yes, there are security measures like PINs and thumbprint and face recognition, but they don't help if the phone is not locked, and I'm not sure how safe they are if the phone is locked.
On the other hand, how secure are phone calls like the one I made to ANZ today? Years ago (13 May 2007, but I didn't mention it in the diary) I established that it's surprisingly easy to tap into a phone line if you know how the lines are laid. Just remove the cover and find:
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But I really don't want to have to think my way through all the ways that mobile phone security can be breached. It's clear that I can't rely on the “experts”: things like people who send me 2FA confirmations to the same phone make it clear that they can't be trusted. I fear I'll have a lot of concerns in the future, but I hold to the principle that I should keep as little secure stuff on my phone as possible. Maybe an old phone without a SIM card, kept in my office just for that purpose, might be a possibility. It still doesn't address the appalling user interface.
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Where's that house?
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Topic: history, photography, general | Link here |
While tidying up old photos, today for 25 March 2010, I found this photo:
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But it doesn't belong there. The modification timestamp dates from December 2007, but it was taken with my Nikon “Coolpix” 880, which I stopped using much earlier. The phone number and the estate agent address show that it was taken in South Australia, but the Exif data doesn't include a date: the camera had an irritating habit of turning itself on in my handbag, so I took to removing the battery. But that caused the date to be lost. So after some searching I still don't know when the photo was taken, or why.
| Friday, 28 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 28 March 2025 |
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Another finch bites the dust
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
Early this morning, Bruno came back from the verandah proudly carrying a live red-browed finch in his mouth. I did the best to get it out of his mouth; it landed on the ground, where Mona promptly pounced on it.
Bloody cats! Locked both of them in the bedroom and took the bird outside
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He tried to recover, but didn't make it, though I didn't see any obvious injuries. That's at least the fourth bird that he has on his conscience, although one of them might have survived. Yvonne was devastated, and wants to get rid of Bruno. Reluctantly, I have to agree, if only because it causes her so much sadness. She spent some time calling around and also looking for a replacement—that seems currently only to be a lilac boy who may have the distinction of having the same birthday as Bruno and Piccola.
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Choosing spatulas
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I don't have a good name for one frequent kitchen utensil:
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I've always called it an egg-slice, but that's a silly name: it doesn't slice eggs. Still, the Oxford English Dictionary agrees with me, though the only reference is centuries old. In modern use it's quite possibly an Australian term. But how about spatula? For me that has other connotations, but I suppose it'll have to do.
Which of those above is best? For me, there are two basic requirements. It should have flat sides, so that it can be used in the corner of a pot, and a flat end, so that it's possible to scrape the bottom of the pan. This one seems ideal:
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But for some reason they're really difficult to find. Instead we have:
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These two have curved sides and bottom. Why?
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These two still have curved sides. But for some reason Yvonne likes it the first one. The second is useful for fried eggs, since it's so short.
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This one could almost do the job. Why did they angle the bottom? I suspect that there are situations where that could be a problem, though I suppose it could be of advantage with a pyramid-shaped pot.
All of these are of some plastic material. Can they withstand the temperature of steel pans? How about a steel spatula? The only one we had is this one, with the other disadvantages:
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Recently Yvonne found almost what I'm looking for in a second-hand shop:
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Yes, the silly advertising irritates me, and the edges could potentially scratch the pot, but otherwise it looks like just what I wanted. But why is this so difficult? Do the other spatulas have advantages that I haven't recognized?
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Thai basil in flower
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Topic: gardening, food and drink, photography | Link here |
The solitary survivor of the Thai basil that I planted over 3 months ago isn't very big, but it's flowering:
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Macropod jaw
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Walking the dogs today, Yvonne found this:
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Clearly the lower jaw of something like a kangaroo. But it's much smaller than the ones I have seen in the past. Wallaby? Baby kangaroo?
| Saturday, 29 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 29 March 2025 |
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Reprieve for Bruno?
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne was unsuccessful in finding a home for Bruno that she would approve. But Jane Ashhurst recommended that she hang a band with reflective strips across the dog run to scare off the birds:
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Does it work? So far no birds have come near him. But you can't prove the functionality of something like that, just its non-functionality if he catches another bird. Still, for the time being Yvonne is happy, so for the while he stays, though he's only allowed outside in the dog run.
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Steamboat again
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Topic: food and drink, language, opinion | Link here |
I've had this sachet of steamboat seasoning seemingly forever:
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It expired over 1½ years ago, so I'd guess that I've had it for the best part of 4 years. Finally time to use it for a steamboat. Where are the instructions?
There are none! None whatsoever! I can guess that it's intended to be boiled in water, but how much? It doesn't say. Even Google Translate doesn't help. All I get is:
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“Unexpected package”. In other words, nothing.
Inside there were two packets: one with dried ingredients and one with a white powder:
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The powder weighs 100 g, though the package claims 110 g (probably including the dried ingredients). How much water? After some experimentation, mainly based on saltiness, decided that 2 l is about right.
Mainly hidden behind the flap on the back of the outer package is the text
Dry material package ingredients:
So I boiled the ingredients in the broth, after which they looked like this:
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I can't discern any particular flavour from them. Maybe they would have been better before the expiry date.
In the end, the steamboat was as ever:
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Somehow I don't enjoy it as much as I once did.
And sometimes I wonder how much use Google Translate really is:
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Bloody technology!
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Topic: technology, general, photography, opinion | Link here |
Somehow technology got the better of me today. First I wanted to take a photo of the reflective strips that Yvonne had hung up. And the camera didn't work! Pressing the shutter release did nothing useful. After some investigation discovered a hash icon in the display which I think meant high-resolution. But how do I turn it off? This is the OM System OM-1 Mark II, and I still don't understand the menu system. After a while I discovered that some while back I had assigned the hi-res function to the red button that normally means “take video”. That was a mistake.
And then there's this Google Translate functionality in my phone. It's quite useful some of the time, but how do you save an image? Holding the phone in position above the bags, pointing down, simultaneously press the Vol-- and power buttons:
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Later I wanted to take photos of the steamboat on the table. And the flash didn't fire! In the olden days that meant a wasted frame on the film, and I still get upset when I end up with a dud. It took me four attempts to get it to fire: somehow the sync connector on the (stationary) flash unit in the dining room had got loose.
Done? No, our ancient table hot plate didn't want to work either. More contact problems, I think. Finally I got it to work, but it's probably time to look for an alternative: the thermostat has a ridiculous amount of hysteresis, and it also wanders in the course of the meal.
| Sunday, 30 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 30 March 2025 |
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Preparing for winter
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Jesse Walsh along today to spray the weeds. But it had rained and looked like more, so in the end he reworked the east end of the bed to the north of the house, removing myriads of cannas, hopefully making things better for the Alyogyne huegelii:
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Terre Napoléon?
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Topic: history | Link here |
Why did Western Australia become part of Australia? Why didn't New Zealand? Auckland is 2000 km from Sydney, and Perth is 3000 km away. Yes, there's land in between, but what kind of communication was there at Federation in 1901? Off looking for old maps of Australia. I didn't find anything that helped very much, but I did find
That dates from 1808, and it shows the south-east part of Australia, with no settlements at all. But the interesting part is this:
Terre Napoléon! It seems that it's really named after Napoléon Bonaparte, who was interested in having his slice of Australia between the Dutch in the west and the British in the east. There's a whole collection of maps here, showing an amazing number of French names for objects on the coastline. One in particular caught my eye:
That's Encounter Bay, south-east of Adelaide, where the British and French met shortly before this map was made. But the interesting one was the peninsula: « Presqu'île Fleurieu ». I know that name: today it's the Fleurieu Peninsula. Did the name endure? Not quite: it was reborn, it seems, in 1911.
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How not to slice potatoes
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Topic: food and drink, health, opinion | Link here |
I'm really quite happy with our new mandolin, and today we made wavy potatoes again:
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But to get there I had to slice the potatoes, and somehow I managed to get my thumb in the way. Much blood, and it bled again when I changed the bandage before going to bed. Not to be repeated.
| Monday, 31 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 31 March 2025 |
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Fix my thumb!
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Changed the bandage on my thumb this morning. It was still bleeding! Time to get a doctor to look at it.
Whom do I call? First Health First, my General Practitioner's service. Sorry, we don't have both a doctor and a nurse available at the same time. Try the Base Hospital.
That way madness lies. How about the new Ballarat Priority Primary Care Centre that I visited two years ago? It proves that they have both moved and changed their name (to UFS Urgent Care Clinic), though the phone number is unchanged, and they haven't implemented a redirect for the old URL. Search the web site enough and you can read
Our standard opening hours are 9am to 11pm every day of the year.
But then there's another caveat:
We also have a surge protocol in place, which may impact opening hours. Please scroll to the bottom of this page for a full explanation of the UCC surge protocol.
Never mind that they've lost the opportunity for another link: it seems that the surge protocol means that they can turn people away if they get overfilled. So I called them up and spoke to Pauline, who told me that they're closed today! She was the only person present.
How does that match the web site? Not at all. It turns out that today is Eid al-Fitr, and most of their doctors are Muslim, so they're off duty. Somebody would be there round 18:00, but clearly they'd then be overloaded. Pauline went to a lot of trouble to find whether somebody could look at me at one of UFS' other locations, but without success. And by 18:00 my thumb had stopped bleeding.
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What's wrong with my abutilon?
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
The Abutilon in front of the laundry is blooming much better than I had ever expected, encompassing another shrub in the process:
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But on the other side, individual branches have died off:
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Why? There's no obvious damage. As long as it doesn't get any worse, there's nothing to worry about, but it's puzzling.
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Finally photos with the ФЕД
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Topic: photography | Link here |
I've had my ФЕД (FED) 1 for nearly 3 years, and I haven't taken any photos with it. That's OK: it's a collector's item. But for some reason it has a film in it, and potentially there are some Ukrainian photos on it. I've been meaning to finish the film and have it developed for some time.
Problems:
Today was overcast—my exposure meter suggested 1/100 s for a 100/21° film. So off round the house and took:
| Subject | time | |
| Abutilons | 1/500 s | |
| Abutilons | 1/100 s | |
| Buddleja | 1/100 s | |
| Buddleja | 1/500 s | |
| House from entrance | 1/500 s | |
| House from entrance | 1/100 s | |
| Riding arena | 1/100 s | |
| Riding arena | 1/500 s | |
| House from north | 1/500 s | |
| House from north | 1/100 s |
And there's still more film. Time to drag out my Hektor 13.5 cm f/4.5 and see what I can take with that.
What a noise the shutter makes! I wonder if the Leica II was the same.
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