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| Greg's diary |
| April 2025 |
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| Tuesday, 1 April 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 1 April 2025 |
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Bloody thumb!
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Topic: health | Link here |
First thing this morning was to change the bandage on my thumb, which had been there since Sunday evening. Blood everywhere! For whatever reason, it hadn't healed adequately. Quite possibly I pulled off the developing scab along with the bandage, but clearly I still need medical attention.
Off to Ballarat to the UFS Urgent Care Clinic at Level 1, 1010 Sturt Street, where I discovered that they only ever have one doctor in attendance. Fortunately the place was almost empty, so I was in and out within half an hour. First Julie, the nurse, took off my bandage and cleaned the wound, which had gradually stopped bleeding:
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Then Ben, the doctor, came in and took a look. Yes, too late to stitch or stick, but it would probably not have been necessary anyway. Bandage and it should heal. I forgot to ask how long it would take. So Julie came back and bandaged it, and gave the advice to maintain pressure on the surface if it started to bleed again.
Only after I left did it gradually dawn on me that I have been there before and even confirmed it at the time with the address. That was nearly 14 years ago, and at the time it was a Tristar clinic, since bankrupted and reborn as Family Doctor, one of the places I considered calling yesterday. Why didn't I recognize it earlier?
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Mobile phone cameras: the limitations
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I had intended to take photos of my thumb while at the clinic. Bring a macro lens for my Olympus E-PM2? No, my phone should do it.
Well, not quite. I had thought that the phone could come quite close, but not close enough. This was as close as I could come, and then I discovered that it was still out of focus:
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So: still no substitute for a Real Camera.
| Wednesday, 2 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 2 April 2025 |
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Slow day
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Topic: health, photography | Link here |
My thumb seems to be recovering well, though I'm concerned about changing the bandage after yesterday's problems. Spent most of the day processing old photos (much of 1980 and from July 1994 to April 1997), with marginally better results in some cases.
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What's that noise?
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Topic: general | Link here |
While processing photos, heard a strange mechanical noise. Did it come from eureka? A dying disk, maybe? Got up, but it stopped. It started a little later and kept going long enough for me to walk about and find it following me. Outside the office? Dish washer?
No, it was outside the house:
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The Spiteris are having their water tank cleaned. Why now, when the tank levels are at the lowest of the year? And why was it so difficult to localize the source of the noise?
| Thursday, 3 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 3 April 2025 |
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Stupid finches!
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Into Yvonne's bedroom this morning with intent to let Bruno out into the dog run. But it was overrun with red-browed finches, which even congregated directly on his hiding place. They didn't leave until I got my camera.
Currently the run looks like this:
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So neither reflective strips nor bells have worried them. How has the species survived?
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Where have my photos gone?
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Topic: photography, technology, history, opinion | Link here |
More processing old photos today, including considerable improvements on some of the photos I took during the 1967 Asia Trip. Stupidly, I had taken the photos on Ektachrome and developed them myself in substitute chemicals. Given the once-in-a-lifetime nature of the trip, I should have taken them on Kodachrome.
To make matters worse, on at least one film I messed up the clearing bath stage, resulting in a pink tinge on the photos, like here:
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To my surprise, a simple white balance change fixed it (run the cursor over an image to compare it with the previous version):
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I had expected it to be some kind of second order cast.
I also had the exposure notes, so I was able to set the Exif data accordingly. This one was labeled “Donkey”:
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Where's the donkey? Not the (out of focus) person in the foreground. He just walked into the photo at the last minute, and until today I never realized that I had missed the donkey.
And then I found a number of missing directories that weren't missing at all. They were just missing from the directory list file. One was relatively recently. Off to check. The file is called /home/grog/public_html/photos/dirlist, and it consists of a pair title, description, like this:
20001122 Mike Smith Memorial Room, Greg's office
20001130 Yana in gum tree
I keep it under RCS, so it was relatively easy to see what happened; I just needed to compare each revision with the previous one:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20250126 4392 -> for i in `jot 100 9830`; do j=`expr $i + 1`; echo rcsdiff -wur1.$i -r1.$j dirlist; rcsdiff -wur1.$i -r1.$j dirlist; done | less
And how about that:
--- dirlist 2025/02/13 02:06:59 1.9838
+++ dirlist 2025/02/13 02:23:19 1.9839
@@ -3,7 +3,6 @@
19561226 Kota Bharu
-19571101 Grattan Street, Carlton
19620912 Bev and Greg before leaving for England
@@ -13,14 +12,11 @@
19640421 Netherton House
-19640601 Sir Alec Douglas-Home at Kings College, Taunton
19640608 Shahram Akhavan
-19640611 Bath festival, Kings College kitchens
-19640816 Swimming Sports at Lake Club
19640822 Kemaman, ferry
@@ -30,11 +26,6 @@
19640913 Greg on TV
-19640924 England, Exeter Cathedral, King's College
-19640927 England, Exeter Cathedral, King's College
-19641009 Ricky Cookson
-19641029 Half term holiday, music, King's College
-19641105 Kings College, Taunton
...
-20250213 Cockatoos and corellas, strange papaya
+C
In fact, the damage is much more extensive:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4378 -> rlog -r1.9839 dirlist
...
revision 1.9839
date: 2025/02/13 02:23:19; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +1 -881
Automatic checkin
881 removed lines! How many are left?
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20250126 4394 -> wc -l /home/grog/public_html/photos/dirlist
5615 /home/grog/public_html/photos/dirlist
A sixth of all entries! What do these have to do with anything? Clearly it's not random damage, since it's the loss of specific entries, but why? Looking at them, it seems that many of them have been changed relatively recently. But that would have been a change, not a new entry. So far I can't work out what went wrong. About the only clue I have is that the entry for the day has gone away and been replaced by a line with just the letter C. Could it be that I aborted the process somehow? I still don't seen how that could have caused that damage.
And how can I recover? The obvious thing to do would be to repeat the way I created them:
dirlist:
if [ -f Makejpeg ]; then \
DIRLIST=~/public_html/photos/dirlist; \
BASEDIR=`basename \`pwd\``; \
co -l $$DIRLIST; \
grep -v $$BASEDIR $$DIRLIST > dirlist.tmp; \
echo -n "$$BASEDIR " >> dirlist.tmp; \
head -1 ~/Photos/$$BASEDIR/Makejpeg >> dirlist.tmp; \
sort dirlist.tmp > $$DIRLIST; \
rm dirlist.tmp; \
ci -u -m"Automatic checkin" $$DIRLIST; \
fi
That works, up to a point, but I introduced Makejpeg only about 13 years ago. What about the other ones? And how did this happen in the first place?
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Thumb on the mend
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Topic: health | Link here |
Gradually the bandage on my thumb has reached its use-by date. Time to remove it and hope that there won't be lots of blood again.
No:
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So that problem seems to have gone away.
| Saturday, 5 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 5 April 2025 |
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Dog eats cat
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Seen at the entrance to the dog run outside Yvonne's bedroom:
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Larissa killing Bruno? No, they're just playing:
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Recovering dirlist
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
How do I recover my seriously broken ~/pubic_html/photos/dirlist? It should have round 6,500 entries, one for each directory in ~/pubic_html/Photos/. But at least 880 entries are missing. I can't automatically rebuild the entries with my current method, because the infrastructure is missing for the older entries.
OK, manual it is. Find the log messages where more than 2 entries had been deleted, and create diffs from the previous
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4449 -> rlog -r1.7655 dirlist
revision 1.7655
date: 2020/10/08 03:47:35; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +1 -38
Automatic checkin=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4450 -> rcsdiff -wur1.7654 -r1.7655 dirlist
===================================================================
RCS file: RCS/dirlist,v
retrieving revision 1.7654
retrieving revision 1.7655
diff -wu -r1.7654 -r1.7655
--- dirlist 2020/10/07 01:08:41 1.7654
+++ dirlist 2020/10/08 03:47:35 1.7655
@@ -326,7 +326,6 @@
20010322 LUGS in Singapore
20010323 Eating satay with LUGS and rms
20010324 Harish and Groggy, Bukit Timah Saddle Club
-20010325 Shierlaw Street house sold
20010403 Fluffy as baby
20010405 Thursday, 5 April 2001
20010411 Yana
@@ -368,7 +367,6 @@
20020104 Mick and Diane Lehey
20020117 Grashopper, new Mitsubishi Magna
20020131 Bushfire at Diane Saunders', Wantadilla house
-20020202 Household computers
20020207 Convert to BSD
20020210 Big steak, Mobilestar breakage
20020215 BSDCon dinner in San Francisco
...
Then collect all the deleted entries, marked by a dash (-) in column 1:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4449 -> for i in 7655 4501 4404 3985 3301 2825 1440 1297; do j=`expr $i - 1`; rcsdiff -wur1.$j 1.$i ~/public_html/photos/dirlist; done|grep ^- > dirlist-add
The result gave a number of duplicates, of course, most of which I was able to remove with sort(1):
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4409 -> sort -u dirlist-add > dirlist2=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4410 -> l dirlist-add > dirlist2=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4411 -> sort -u dirlist-add > dirlist2=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4412 -> l dirlist-add dirlist2
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 204.647 4 Apr. 16:15 dirlist-add
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 54.808 4 Apr. 16:15 dirlist2=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4413 -> wc -l dirlist-add dirlist2
4473 dirlist-add
1113 dirlist2
5586 total
But they only removed identical entries, and I had to go through the list and tidying up things like this:
19810924 Oktoberfest in München
19810924 Oktoberfest in München
19810924 Oktoberfest in M\374nchen
That wasn't helped by the fact that Emacs didn't want to believe that the document was UTF-8 because of the breakage. I started with 6,700 entries, and after some hours I made my way through 7% of the file, reducing it to 6,523 entries. That was round mid-2006, and I hope that it represented most of the breakage. But it's a surprisingly slow business.
In passing, the entry for 20010325 is interesting:
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That's the mystery photo that I had been puzzling about only last week. It's the house that my aunt Audrey and family had lived in since about 1950, 13 Shierlaw St, Richmond SA. The photo is almost unrecognizable, and looking at Google Maps “street view”, it seems to have been torn down and replaced with something modern.
| Saturday, 5 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 5 April 2025 |
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Whither Bruno?
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
We've had Bruno for two years now. At the time we got him, he was ideal: a male chocolate Burmese, 3 months old—just my specifications. And he was just round the corner, the only one West of Melbourne.
But somehow he didn't develop the way I had hoped. He's still so hyperactive, and we can't be sure that he won't catch another bird. On the other hand, he's not the only cat we've had who caught birds. Sixteen years ago Lilac caught and ate a crimson rosella, and I didn't even bother to mention it in the diary:
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I still don't want Bruno to catch birds, but maybe we're becoming more sensitive.
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Fixing dirlist
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Topic: photography, technology, general | Link here |
Spent a little time this morning continuing with my dirlist reconstruction, but I didn't have much time. And then it occurred to me: each directory has a file description with the content of the header, though I no longer seem to use it. But that's exactly what I need for my Makefile target:
dirlist:
rm -f dirlist.new
for i in [12]*; do \
if [ -e $i/description ]; then \
(echo -n "$$i "; cat $$i/description) >> dirlist.new; \
fi; \
done
But I didn't have time for that today. The good news is that I could just check in the flaky dirlist that I have, and that it worked, sort of, at least better than before.
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Rebuilding lagoon
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Topic: multimedia, technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Today Yvonne made the mistake of taking a video from horseback using her mobile phone. And she held it in portrait orientation!
Once I got it onto a sane machine, I discovered that avidemux, at least as installed on lagoon, has no provision for rotating video clips. It saw it as landscape, and there was nothing I could do to fix it.
I've hated avidemux since I first installed it over 13 years ago. To add to that, my Google Gemini query failed, producing just random junk on the screen. lagoon's system is over 4 years old, and it is clearly in need of upgrading.
So how do I do it this time? Every time I do an upgrade I find things that fail without good reason, and I still haven't finished the install on hydra that I started 1½ years ago. But something has to be done. I had already started an install on an SSD a couple of months ago. Bring it up to date, and then I can install it beside the old lagoon, so that Yvonne can fall back to it if something unexpected shows up. Today I got as far as bringing the system up to date.
| Sunday, 6 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 6 April 2025 |
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A new video editor?
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
I've decided that avidemux's days are over. A quick Google Gemini search gave me a list of others to try: kdenlive, openshot and blender. As feared, they dragged in a whole slew of dependencies:
===== Sun 6 Apr 2025 13:58:57 AEST on dereel.lemis.com: pkg install kdenlive openshot blender
The following 183 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):
New packages to be INSTALLED:
ImageMagick7: 7.1.1.26_6
...
Number of packages to be installed: 183
The good news is that they installed cleanly. Now to run them. But for that I need X.
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A maze of twisty little symlinks
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So dereel in its incarnation as a copy of lagoon is up and running. Start X? Fails: it had the xorg.conf file for the real lagoon, and the hardware is different here. OK, remove it and see what happens. Starts, bla[cn]k screen.
Oh. Window manager not running. This is due to the transition from fvwm2 to fvwm3 that I started over a year ago. OK, install fvwm3 and continue.
Multiple issues with the configuration files. For years the configuration on lagoon has Just Worked, as the .Xdefaults files show:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/8) ~ 123 -> l ~yvonne/.Xdefaults-*
-rw-r--r-- 1 yvonne home 3,664 6 Jul 2002 /home/yvonne/.Xdefaults-battunga
-r--r--r-- 1 yvonne home 732 1 Nov 2007 /home/yvonne/.Xdefaults-lagoon
Those config files are 23 and 17 years old! One of the reasons for my global changes: I want a central set of configuration files so that any changes I make will apply to all systems. So I have put them in the /home/local/X hierarchy. /home/local is NFS mounted across all systems.
Except on lagoon. For reasons I have forgotten, some of the programs in /home/local/bin are different for lagoon, so it has its own local /home/local. I needed to add a symlink from (local) /home/local to (remote) /home/local/X.
Looking back, it seems clear that I need a further layer in my PATH, something like
That's a surprising number, and the last three have two subdirectories, bin for normal programs and sbin for administrative programs. But any such change is for another day.
Finally got the files where I wanted them:
Finally got all that put together and tried—once again.
X.Org X Server 1.21.1.14
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Current Operating System: FreeBSD dereel.lemis.com 14.2-STABLE FreeBSD 14.2-STABLE #2: Sun Apr 6 10:59:34 AEST 2025 grog@dereel.lemis.com:/home/obj/hydra/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable/14/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC amd64
/home/local/X/.Xdefaults-dereel:1:3: error: invalid preprocessing directive
1 | # $Id: .Xdefaults-lagoon,v 1.4 2007/11/01 06:13:58 grog Exp
| ^
/home/local/X/.Xdefaults-dereel:24:12: warning: empty character constant [-Winvalid-pp-token]
24 | ! Why doesn''t this work?
| ^
/home/local/X/.Xdefaults-dereel:25:14: warning: empty character constant [-Winvalid-pp-token]
25 | ! Why - doesn''t this work?
| ^
2 warnings and 1 error generated.
xrdb: "*VT100.translations" on line 23 overrides entry on line 5
What's that? It seems that X has become pickier in the course of time. # was never a valid delimiter, but it's not clear why it now objects to text in comments. It appears to go through cpp, and that has changed. But that's easy enough to fix.
Next,
Error: Can't open display: unix:0
Couldn't open /home/yvonne/.fvwm/fvwm_mfl_:0.0.pid because: Permission denied
Why can't it open the display? Hard to say. It's not even clear what produced that first line. But the second was more of a problem. I didn't know that fvwm3 wanted to create files in its configuration directory, and arguably that's wrong. But I wasn't able to set my symlinks so that user yvonne could write to it:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 2 -> ls -l ~yvonne/.fvwm
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root home 19 6 Apr 16:18 /home/yvonne/.fvwm -> /home/local/X/.fvwm=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 3 -> chmod 777 ~yvonne/.fvwm=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 4 -> ls -l ~yvonne/.fvwm
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root home 19 6 Apr 16:18 /home/yvonne/.fvwm -> /home/local/X/.fvwm
It took me some time to realize that you need a -h option to change the mode of the symlink itself:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 5 -> chmod -h 777 ~yvonne/.fvwm=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 6 -> ls -l ~yvonne/.fvwm
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root home 19 6 Apr 16:18 /home/yvonne/.fvwm -> /home/local/X/.fvwm=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 7 ->
But by then I had had other things to do.
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Rebuilding dirlist, try 3
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Also ran my script to rebuild dirlist as planned yesterday. Things weren't quite as good as I expected: not all the description files contained what they should, and some were missing. Clearly a file whose time has passed. But now I have two different partial dirlists, both wrong. Maybe there's a little less work now, but I'll have to see. The diffs are remarkably large. Here the version I created yesterday (dirlist) and the one I did today (dirlist.new):
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html 4509 -> diff -wu photos/dirlist Photos/dirlist.new | wc -l
5661=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html 4510 -> wc -l photos/dirlist Photos/dirlist.new
6526 photos/dirlist
6437 Photos/dirlist.new
The diffs are nearly as big as the files, and some of the damage is surprisingly recent:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html 4508 -> diff -wu photos/dirlist Photos/dirlist.new
...
20250209 Steak and kidney
+20250210 Corymbia ficifolia
20250211 Yvonne's new rug
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ALDI enchiladas
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Yvonne bought some pre-prepared enchiladas at ALDI last week. They're wrapped in something vaguely resembling tortillas, but clearly made from wheat, and they're enormous!
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They didn't taste too bad, but I have a feeling we could do better ourselves. The big issue is the size of the tortilla—it's possible that ALDI is on the right track with these ones.
| Monday, 7 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 7 April 2025 |
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“Wise”: Now you see me, now you don't
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Despite all the problems I've had with “Wise”, the unwisely named money transfer service, they remain the cheapest. And a couple of days ago I received mail from O'Reilly telling me that royalties had accumulated, and would I please fill out the enclosed form.
OK, what's my US account number? I had it written down, but they want the name of the bank, and I didn't write that down. Wise? Transferwise? Unwise? I should check on the web site.
Once again I couldn't find it! What a horrible web site! After multiple attempts, I found a way:
That gives a “Proof of account details”, as promised, but in PDF. It shows all that I need to know. Well, not quite. The details are completely unrelated to what I had written down. Different account numbers, different address. Does the old one still work? At one point I had intended to have my German pension paid into my “Wise” account. Would it suddenly have gone into a black hole? I'm continually horrified by “Wise”.
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Which PDF editor?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The other issue with my O'Reilly royalties was that I had to fill them out in a PDF document. Sure, I could print it out, write in the details and scan it again. But how 20th century! I've been able to modify PDFs before, I think with Open Office, but surely there's a standalone PDF editor.
Yes, of course. But not for FreeBSD! In the end I checked with Google Gemini, which pointed me to PDFgear for Microsoft. With only minor pain I was able to install it, and it seems to work. But what do I put in there? Should I trust “Wise”?
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Larissa: paw problems?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Yvonne is concerned that Larissa has problems with her left front paw. I don't see it:
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But she'll be seeing Pene Kirk tomorrow, so she can take a look.
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Laugengebäck
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Finally got round to my planned Laugengebäck today, using this recipe as a start. It was an experience. Here's my recipe.
A first for me was using milk and butter instead of water to make the dough. The quantities (280 ml milk, 40 g butter for 500 g of flour) proved far too little. In the end I put in 323 ml of milk, which was still not too much—I think. That gave a total of 883 g of dough, from which I was to make 9 buns of nearly 100 g each:
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The instructions are to roll the dough out into a triangle and then rolls it together:
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A lot of work, and it didn't seem to be much like the original, so I only made 3 like that and just formed the other 6 into longish buns:
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Let them rise again, after which they looked nothing like the original:
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Roll them in 200 ml of 4% NaOH, which proved surprisingly difficult, not just because of the rubber gloves. They tended to fall apart:
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Into the oven on programme 3 (heat from above and below) at 220°. Here they are after 6 minutes, 15 minutes (minimum recommended) and 17 minutes (maximum, and when I took them out):
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Clearly they look a mess, but they tasted OK.
What do I do next time?
One thing that I can't decide is how to put them in the NaOH solution. They seem to be just too soft at that point.
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Securing dangerous chemicals
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Making Laugengebäck requires sodium hydroxide, a particularly dangerous chemical. So the package I had was secured so that it can't be easily opened:
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This is almost illegible under normal circumstances; to take these photos I had to increase microcontrast to the maximum. Without that, it looks like this (run the cursor over the image to compare it with the enhanced version):
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There are plenty of lids where you have to press on the sides to open, but they're usually diametrically opposed. This one has two arrows 90° apart. How does that work? The lid must be intended to deform to allow this tab to pass the stop on the container, and for that you need to push on the lines at the bottom:
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But what if the user gets it wrong and applies force? The container could open suddenly, spreading caustic soda everywhere—exactly what they're trying to avoid. None of that for me: I cut off the tabs, and everything was normal.
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More flash pain
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
What's wrong with these photos?
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Clearly the first one has pronounced shadows. Yet Another case where my slave flash didn't trigger. Is the receiver dying? I put in an external trigger for the second shot.
| Tuesday, 8 April 2025 | Dereel | |
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More blocked drains
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Topic: general | Link here |
It has only been 1½ years since a remarkably slow and messy operation to remove a blockage in the drain from the kitchen sink, but over the last few weeks it has become increasingly blocked again. It still drained, but unacceptably slowly. And it blocked almost immediately after only a litre or so of water.
That can only mean that the blockage is in the downpipe. Removed it with remarkably little difficulty or mess to find no blockage. The downpipe into the floor also took 5 l of water with no problems. Put a 40 cm long brush down with no obstacles.
OK, reassemble. The blockage had changed: it was much worse! I can only assume that the blockage was just below the reach of my brush, and that I had managed to compress it. But why the quick filling under normal conditions? Air lock, maybe?
Still, I need professional help, so David is out of the question, but Black Hill Plumbing and Blocked Drains sound like the right address. Spoke to Slade, who said he'd be out tomorrow. I'll be interested to see how that pans out.
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A new shower rack
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Topic: general, language, opinion | Link here |
Bev Smith along today with a present, a rack for items in my shower:
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The old one was rusty and dripping rust into the shower basin, something that got on her nerves. So she bought a new one and didn't want to be paid. That was nice of her. There's still some rust on the tiles above the tap.
What do you call these things? I've decided on “shower rack”, though I'm not happy with that. The packaging for the new one says that it's a “Suction Rectangular Rack Black”, but that's newspeak.
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Larissa's problems
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Yvonne off with Larissa to Pene Kirk today for a regular injection. Pene took a look at her paw and diagnosed something like failed tendons, and there's not much we can do about it. It seems that it was the right paw, not the left one.
| Wednesday, 9 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 9 April 2025 |
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Overly polite X software
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Back to looking at my problems starting X on dereel, the new lagoon candidate. If I can't write to a remote .fvwm directory (why?), I need to make it local. So I did that, and it started. But I still had these strange error messages: “can't open unix:0”. In the cases I have seen in the past, the program was polite enough to give its name:
xterm: Xt error: Can't open display: unix:0
OK, search my configuration files. No mention of unix:0 anywhere! I'll have to run ktrace at some point. While trying to capture the output, tried to start X from an xterm on hydra.
/usr/local/bin/X: Only console users are allowed to run the X server
I've seen that before. I need a file /usr/local/etc/X11/Xwrapper.config.
OK, take two.
=== .xinitrc
access control disabled, clients can connect from any host
fvwm3 -display :0.0 -f /home/local/X/.fvwm/fvwm2rc-dereel:0.0
Error: Can't open display: unix:0
Identity added: /home/yvonne/.ssh/id_rsa (/home/yvonne/.ssh/id_rsa)
Error: Can't open display: unix:0
Still I get the default fvwm3 desktop! What's in /home/local/X/.fvwm/fvwm2rc-dereel:0.0? Nothing! It doesn't exist! And fvwm3 is far too polite to complain! Change it to the intended /home/local/X/.fvwm/fvwm3rc-dereel:0.0 and things come up more or less as expected, though there are still a large number of strangenesses.
One of them was the error message that I got on Sunday:
Couldn't open /home/yvonne/.fvwm/fvwm_mfl_:0.0.pid because: Permission denied
I worked around it by making .fvwm local instead of a symlink, right? Well, yes, maybe. But I don't refer to ~/.fvwm anywhere in the startup scripts. It's always /home/local/X/.fvwm/. So where did that message come from? My best bet, based on the results, is that it's part of the default fvwm3 startup procedure, and it's not needed now that it's using my configuration.
That was enough for today. There are still strangenesses: the keyboard mapping is still out. I need to look at the xmodmap configuration, which is still local. And xv wasn't installed. Not an X problem, but why did it get lost in the package upgrade?
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Removing drain blockage
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Slade from Black Hill plumbing (as they're called now) along with his mate in the early afternoon to unblock out the kitchen sink drain. It took 3½ hours! He approached it completely differently from Mumpy Wallis, from the outside. And he found metres of fat in the drain. I was left with the impression that Mumpy had punched a hole in the fat but not removed it completely.
Certainly Slade made a better impression that he knew what he was doing. He approached from the outside and made almost no mess, which he then cleaned up again. But his bill was even higher! $830 today, $792 only 1½ years ago. Hopefully that will be the last time for a while.
And why did the cleaning take so long? Slade had to insert his camera and his cleaning jet from the septic tank end and find his way up the drains. Lots of 90° bends, and at least one 100 mm to 50 mm reduction, not to mention just finding the correct drain. He confirmed that kitchen drains clog up, and that there's little that can be done about it. So why aren't the drains laid out to make cleaning easier? It would also seem to be a good idea to have a pull rope installed so that they can get their tools in more easily.
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Multipurpose spatula
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
The metal spatula that Yvonne bought last month proved to be almost exactly what I wanted, modulo Jim Beam logo and serrated edges. But there's only one, and sometimes it's in the dish washer when I need it. So today she bought a new one:
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At least it has one flat side. But clearly cooking's thirsty work:
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| Thursday, 10 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 10 April 2025 |
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More photovoltaic energy?
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Topic: general | Link here |
Saw an advertisement somewhere on the web today: solar (photovoltaic) installations for free. See if you qualify.
If it's free, I'll take two. So I filled out the form, which ended up wanting too much data from me, including email and phone number. Still no indication whether I qualified. And at the end “we'll call you in the next 24 hours”. Really not what I wanted.
And sure enough, got a call from a Stephanos from Modern Earth Energy, explaining that yes, though I already have a PV system, they can upgrade it for “free”, meaning that I pay my power savings for five years. That seems reasonable, and I'll have a call with a specialist on Monday. I have little expectation that it will work.
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“Twice fried chips”
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
One of the sillier things about my new Breville BDF500 deep fryer is that when powered on it always comes up in “Twice fried chips” mode. Who does that? It's easy enough to switch to what I want, but it's an unnecessary step, one that the old one didn't need.
Still, since it's there, why not try it out? My also-new mandolin has a setting for cutting chips:
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So today I made some twice-fried chips, in the process coming to a number of insights. First, the mandolin is really not well suited to cutting chips. The cutter blades are not long enough to cut through the potatoes:
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I needed a knife to finish the cut. And no, there's no adjustment to make the chips thinner. The chip cutter position is tied to a certain depth, and that's it.
Then the hand protector was also not able to reach the last piece of potato. It's designed to be flush with the rails of the mandolin, and it can't reach the last piece. Instead I used the protector from my old mandolin:
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And the fryer? As advertised, it heated to “130°”, warning that it would really be warmer to prepare for the drop in temperature when the chips are inserted. That proved to be closer to 160°, and it's not clear how well it would work with a different weight of chips or after been left at that “temperature” for, say, 15 minutes.
After the three minute “first fry”, the chips looked better than I thought:
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And only then did I realize that I was far too early. The second fry, requiring a confusing sequence of button presses, was 1½ hours later. It's preset to 5 minutes, which I thought would be far too short, but after 3 minutes they looked ready:
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But since this was an experiment, I continued until the fryer told me that they were done:
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And yes, they tasted good, but clearly they were overdone.
What do I take away?
One thing that I forgot to check: what weight? With pre-prepared chips I use 120 g. Today I used 250 g of potato. What did I end up with? To be checked next time.
In passing, while waiting for the device to heat up, read the instruction manual, which is only marginally well written. It has a couple of surprises:
No wonder deep fryers have gone out of fashion if people believe they need to do all that. That would correspond to roughly 500 ml of oil per use, a considerable expense.
| Friday, 11 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 11 April 2025 |
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ANZ Bank complaint handling
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Call on my mobile phone today from an unknown number in Melbourne. “I'm Norelle from ANZ and want to talk to you about your recent complaint.
Alright, Norelle, can you authenticate yourself? “I'm Norelle from ANZ”! Yes, that's what scammers say too. “I sent you a text”. Do you mean an SMS? “Huh”? Yes, ultimately she said that she meant an SMS, but I didn't receive one. Based on the complete lack of preparedness for this kind of question, I assumed that she really was from ANZ. A scammer would have been better prepared. In the end she said that she would send me email, which she did. The punchline in her message:
Letting you know we are unable to schedule closure of your credit card for a future date due to government regulations that instruct all financial institutions to close credit cards as soon as the customer requests it.
OK, that makes sense—if it's correct. Should I follow up? She did include instructions on how to take things further. But is it worth it?
But why are banks so woefully prepared? Bank Australia isn't: they have what they call a “call-in password”, which they should quote if they ring me.
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AliExcess again
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Topic: food and drink, general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Where's my chip cutter? I looked again, but I still can't find it. But I recall that it cut relatively thick chips, and they're not expensive. Sure enough, round $21 on eBay, with cutters for two different chip sizes (½" and ⅓" if I believe one seller).
But how about AliExpress? That sounds like the kind of thing that they would sell. Off to look, marvelling once again at their amazingly badly organized search pages and constantly changing prices. But they had the same item for $17.29. OK, I can risk that. And while I was at it, found a couple of other things that I had been considering buying: a new multimeter (I don't trust the accuracy of the one I have) for $6.72, a battery tester for $2.68 and a quick USB charger for $2.59. Total $29.28.
But that's not the way AliExpress sees it:
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Three different sums! Add the 10% tax and I should get either $30.89 (based on the price of the individual items) or $29.77 (based on the subtotal at the top). By comparison the $30.94 total is almost correct. But I don't understand how they can continually show such incorrect information. And elsewhere it can be really dangerous: A while back I saw one item for under $3 which suddenly increased to round $70. Today I ended up paying the total, still 5¢ more than what it should have been.
And of course then I found my chip slicer on eBay for $17.53, here in Victoria, and without additional GST. But I can't buy it: they won't ship to me! Or at least that's what eBay claims. What kind of nonsense is that?
| Saturday, 12 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 12 April 2025 |
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More garden work
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Jesse Walsh along today to do some more garden work, mainly spraying weeds, but also removing things like self-sown Valerian:
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What's a tariff?
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
Some idiot in the USA is imposing tariffs on the rest of the world. As the New York Times writes, “President Trump prefers to shoot before aiming”.
But what is a tariff? The Oxford English Dictionary states: “A classified list or scale of charges made in any private or public business; as, a hotel tariff, a railroad tariff”. And that's how I understood it. My first use of the word in this diary was on 29 August 1963: “Breakfast (which was on the tariff) was not as good as could be...”. In the course of over 60 years, I have used the word 79 times, most recently in September last year referring to ISP charges, something now called a “plan”. Without exception I used the term to refer to charges for some service.
And Trump's tariffs? For me, they're import duty. The OED knows this use too, and notes that the use is older (1592 as compared to 1751). But why has the usage changed? “Import duty” is much clearer and less ambiguous.
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Elon Musk officially dead
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Topic: politics, general, opinion, fiction | Link here |
Another horror news from the USA today: the US Social Security Administration declared 6,100 people to be dead, over the protests and dismissal of Greg Pearre, a senior executive of the administration.
How can they do that? The DOGE and
the Stasi Department of Homeland
Security decided on it. Trump's team have done some strange things in their short
time in office, and this may not be the worst, but it's certainly another thing that should
have him removed from office immediately. Why is nothing happening?
Under the circumstances, it's fitting to discover that one of the dead is Felon Musk. Bureaucratic mixup? Revenge on South African immigrants? Fake news? Who knows?
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Baked ham again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Baked ham again today. Somehow I started far too late and forgot to remove the net. And for 840 g of ham I needed 72 minutes. I'm still no closer to coming to a clear relationship between weight and cooking time; I currently have times between 75 and 125 minutes.
| Sunday, 13 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 13 April 2025 |
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Drought!
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
It has still barely rained this year, and it shows. The roses are suffering, despite the dripper lines.
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Of course, it would help if they dripped near the plants:
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I never realized how difficult drippers are, though I've been using them for decades.
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Using Brussels sprouts
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Due to misplanning we were left with 500 g of fresh Brussels sprouts that expire today. What should we do with them? We had planned to eat fish, but that doesn't match. With a bit of web searching (Google Gemini is my friend) I found this recipe: fry them and glaze them with honey and soya sauce:
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The usual issues, of course: the quantities. The recipe called for an avoirdupois pound of sprouts, close enough to 500 g not to make any difference. And of course the glaze was all in cups and spoons. 3 tbsp honey, 2 tbsp soya sauce, 2 tbsp of water and (watch carefully) 1 tsp of cornflour. How do I convert that to real units? A US tablespoon contains 15 ml, so the water and soya sauce are relatively clear. And the honey? It seems that a good median density is 1.41 (coincidentally √2), so my honey would be 63 g. I wonder how people measure honey with tablespoons.
The big surprise was how much of an area the sprouts take up. I had to use my largest frying pan, 36 cm, and barely got them all in:
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And of course they browned unevenly:
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I think that the next time I should make 250 g at the most, and that's what I've put in my recipe.
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More mandolin insights
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
My Brussels sprouts recipe required 100 g ½ cup of sliced
onions. I thought finely sliced. Idea for a mandolin. But which one? My old slicer
(white plastic on top) is too fine, so I used the new one:
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Somehow it's hard to cut with it, and I was left with a lot of uncut onion:
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I was quite happy with the new mandolin, but its limitations are showing. Here underneath after cutting:
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Brussels sprouts or Brussel sprouts?
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
The Brussels sprouts recipe refers to Brussel sprouts, not Brussels sprouts. That seems wrong to me. Is it an Americanism? Off to ask some AI bot, probably Google Gemini, and was told that yes, “Brussels sprouts” is correct. The city is called Brussels, not Brussel.
Oh. What a short-sighted answer. Presumably it's also never referred to as Bruxelles or Brüssel.
Only later did I look at the URL of the recipe: https://pupswithchopsticks.com/honey-glazed-pan-fried-brussels-sprouts/. And the recipe includes the gem
It's a bit counter-intuitive but when you are shopping for brussel sprouts, try to use fresh ones...
It goes on to say that they should also be small, and that's presumably what “counter-intuitive” refers to.
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Chicken and dòufu recipe revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
My Brussels sprouts recipe wasn't really enough for a dinner. Looking through my recipe index, came across this recipe for chicken and dòufu stir-fry. It seems that I was quite happy with it, but that was 10 years ago, and I don't seem to have made it since.
Today was the day. Yes, it tasted OK:
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But the balance is strange. Amazing quantities of oyster sauce and not much else. It's due for an overhaul.
| Monday, 14 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 14 April 2025 |
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More PV power?
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
After last week's call, I had no fewer than three reminders of a call at 13:00 today to discuss upgrading our PV installation, two of them from a number (0483 909 812) that was reported as “DB Realty”. Today the call came as planned from a number that wasn't identified (0451 532 572). The caller identified himself as Andrew Parker and may have mentioned his affiliation, but I didn't get it. He wasn't from Modern Earth Energy, but some kind of consultant to help me avoid the fly-by-night (my term) nature of the industry. They would also not be doing the work: that would be some company in Ballarat.
He went on to say that based on my usage, I would need an additional 6.8 to 7.1 kW, generating an average of 32 to 35 kWh per day (optimistic based on my records; on a good day in mid-summer I get 50 kWh from my 10.8 kW array, and currently it's just shy of 30 kWh), meaning that I would have no electricity bills from October to April, and an average of $30 a month in the winter.
And that was the sum total of his analysis of the installation. No discussion of additional batteries, which are essential if I want to make it through the night.
The main issue was financing. It seems that I'm eligible to (another) state rebate of $1400 and a federal rebate of $3150. The rest will be financed by a weekly payment of $34.32 for 72 months, which will cover the system, installation, 20 year warranty and inspections. No indication if there's anything that it won't cover. That corresponds to about $1,785 per year, considerably less than the $2,450 that I currently pay for electricity.
And they could do all the work on Thursday! They don't even know what the work is! At no point did anybody ask me about what we have installed, though they were aware that there was something. And he expected it to get done on a single day, where it took Effective Electrical two days to do a normal installation! And he didn't ask who did the previous installation; all other things being equal, they should get the preference. Somehow the experts are missing. And (Maundy) Thursday! When do you not want to do potentially difficult work? On the day before a long weekend! In the end we put it down to next Tuesday, though my guess is that they won't do much more than take a look, scratch their heads and go away again to consider.
The installation will be underwritten by a company called Brighte, pronounced “bright”, and he needed personal details to make the application. The usual nonsense: name, address, date of birth, driver license number, including that completely illegible number on the back, credit card number. Damn, I don't give my card number over the phone! But clearly this bloke is legitimate, or doing a very involved scam. So I gave the old ANZ card number. I'll still have to monitor the transactions frequently.
As promised, almost immediately a call back from Brighte, which my phone refused to accept. No retry, just voice mail, which I had to listen to 4 times to get the details: call 1300 274 448, go through an endless list of voice menu choices and quote a six-digit number.
Somehow that worked, and I was connected to Nina, who went through all the things all over again and pointed out things that Andrew should have told me but didn't: they charge $2.30 per week for the financing (included in the quoted $34.32) and $75 at the beginning. The total sum to pay would be a suspicious-sounding $9,990, which on further calculation ($34.32 x 52 × 6) proves to be their way of saying $10,708. But on the whole things looked relatively professional, and I should save money. I'll be interested to see how things develop. There's a very good chance that the whole thing will fall through. A lot depends on what they intend to install and how close they come to their claims.
After that, lots of emails, including one asking me to set a password. Did that, logged in and found:
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And that's all. If they have a real web site, they have blocked it. What a horrible idea being forced to communicate in writing by mobile telephone, quite apart from the security implications!
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Illiteracy!
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Topic: language, rant, history, opinion | Link here |
The letter S is strange. Over the centuries it has had a number of different forms: in many languages, including English, lower-case s was written ſ in the middle of a word up to the early 19th century. It's only a rumour that the change came to avoid things like Where the bee ſucks there ſuck I.
In Greek, it Σ is still written σ in the middle of a word and ς at the end of a word. In German it's even worse: apart from s and ſ, there's also ß, a double s whose usage has changed over the years and geographically (typically not used in Swiss German). The ſ has disappeared from modern German as the script changed from Fraktur to Antiqua.
But that wasn't so long ago, and people seem to have forgotten it. The Sprach-Brockhaus dictionary that I bought nearly 60 years ago was set in Antiqua, but it included the long ſ where appropriate. But now even things set in Fraktur frequently use the short s where the long ſ is required. Don't people know any better? A typical case is the word „Gaſtſtätte“, which increasingly is being spelt „Gaststätte“. Here (from the German Wikipedia page) an example of incorrect spelling (above) and correct spelling (below):
Today we watched another episode of „Sisi“, a series apparently designed to make “The Crown” look historically authentic. In this episode King Ludwig II (died 1886) proposes to Sophie Charlotte in Bayern (in 1867), the daughter of deceased Max in Bayern (died 1888). But in one scene I saw:
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„Die Begleitung deſ Königſ ſorgt für Furore“. Ouch! That hurts much more than „Gaststätte“. It should be „Die Begleitung des Königs ſorgt für Furore“ of course, though nowadays people would write „Die Begleitung des Königs sorgt für Furore“ (“The king's companion causes furore”). One ſ, two s. I can only assume that the people who made the series did recognize that s can sometimes be long in Fraktur, but they all (and there must have been a number involved) didn't know when or how. And it seems that it's not an isolated case, as this section shows. Sic tranſit gloria mundi.
| Tuesday, 15 April 2025 | Dereel | |
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Profiting from Trump
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Topic: politics, general, opinion | Link here |
It's not always fun sitting back and watching the stupidity that Donald Trump has exhibited, and it's not clear where things will go. The most interesting thing is China's retaliation by restricting the supplies of rare earth elements. That will hurt the USA more than just about anything else. And it could have the positive side effect of speeding up the resolution of the Ukraine conflict: they are now in a position to be firmer in negotiations about the supply of rare earths to the USA.
But I have only just discovered another thing, which seems to have a positive effect on exchange rates, at least for Yvonne and me. The exchange rate of the Australian dollar seems to (currently) closely follow the exchange rate of the US dollar, but both have dropped significantly against the Euro. We get a significant part of our income from European pension funds. In September last year the exchange rate of the Australian dollar was 0.6132 €, and we received a total of $3,510.16. Last month it dropped considerably, from 0.5930 € at the beginning to 0.58 € at the end, and for the same sum in € we received $3,679.17.
But there's more: since Trump started his latest antics, the exchange rates have dropped significantly. Currently the exchange rate is 0.5596 €, though it has been as low as 0.5422 €. We've only had one pension payment so far this month (the others are due at the end of the month), but it's 6% more than last month. If that continues for the other payments, we'll get round $3,900 this month. $400 a month isn't to be sneezed at.
| Wednesday, 16 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 16 April 2025 |
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Subtitles: the pain
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Topic: multimedia, technology | Link here |
I've found a source of Upstairs, Downstairs in good resolution and quality, and with subtitles—all 140 GB of it! The subtitles are good for both of us, but particularly for Yvonne, who has difficulty with unfamiliar English accents. OK, now that we have unlimited data, why not download the whole thing?
But where are the subtitles? None! Searches revealed:
Opensubtitles.org, with a list of all episodes and confusing links. None appear to be subtitles. The first takes me to an equally confusing search page, which may or may not offer subtitles, or maybe just a link to unrelated advertising. The second proves to download a Zip file with multiple subtitles, which may or may not be useful.
This page, also from Opensubtitles.org, contains a confusing list of URLs for more Zip files.
This page, from subtitlecat.com, is the only one that I have found that offers direct subtitle download—in hundreds of languages. It seems that it includes a translator, though clearly the English version is available.
All of these pages require immense pain to download a single subtitle file. And there are something like 67 to do. Why?
After much searching, it seems that I can take the episode list and extract the URLs for the Zip files, download them, unzip them and then decide which ones to use—after renaming. But what a pain!
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The new PV array
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Mail from Modern Earth Energy today, addressed to the throwaway email address that I had asked them to change and attaching an image:
---Attachment: Lehey_29StonesRoad: application/octet-stream (1%)
%PDF-1.4
%••
1 0 obj
<</Creator (Chromium)
/Producer (Skia/PDF m91)
/CreationDate (D:20250416063001+00'00')
/ModDate (D:20250416063001+00'00')>>
I recognize that magic number. It's a PDF file, but they're too secure to set the correct content type. Change it to application/pdf and it calls itself an “Energy Yield Report”, though it's not clear why. It shows bare-bones information about a PV system and layout on the roof:
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It took me some time to discern that there are 7 panels facing north (in fact, 8°) and another 8 facing east (98°). Those last panels will not see direct sun after midday, and in winter they'd only see sun at all for 4½ hours maximum. Given the layout, it seems to be reasonable that these 15 panels are in series, so the array would almost never deliver full power (rated at 6.6 kW).
And the batteries? None! How am I going to weather a night without more batteries? And without that, how will I reach Andrew Parker's promise of no power bills in the summer?
It also included an estimated energy output (²) of 9665 kWh. That corresponds to an average of 4 hours insolation per day, something that wouldn't happen even the panels were all pointing north. I only get that in the height of summer. At the current 28¢ per kWh, that corresponds to $2706 savings per year. If that were to work, it would be worthwhile. But I already end up with excess power in the daytime; adding to that would hardly make any difference in the summer.
It continued with what appears to be a contract. “Energy yield report” indeed! I was relatively impressed by the discussion on Monday, but this suggests that they don't know what they're talking about.
| Thursday, 17 April 2025 | Dereel | |
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More PV considerations
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Woke up round midnight and lay awake for what must have been 2 hours thinking about the PV system that I had been quoted. Possibly the most interesting insight was that maybe it is possible to run two PV systems. I had thought about running them in parallel, which is pretty much a non-starter, but what about running them in series? One inverter feeds the house, the second feeds the first inverter.
And the grid feed-in? That would be alright for the second inverter, the one connected directly to the grid, but would it accept feed-in from the first inverter? It's possible, I suppose, but it would depend on the individual inverter. A question to ask somebody if I can find somebody sane to talk to.
The other insight: 6.6 kW is all I get. No battery storage. And that for $9,990 after $4,510 rebates. That seems very expensive. When I got up, I asked Google Gemini:
Q: What is a typical price for an installation of a 6.6 kW PV in a residential house near Ballarat?A: The typical price for the installation of a 6.6 kW PV system in a residential house near Ballarat can vary depending on several factors, including the quality of the components used, the complexity of the installation, and the specific installer you choose. However, based on recent data, you can expect a price range between $4,800 and $7,400 after government rebates.
Much as I thought. $9,990 is far too high without some good reason. It did break the pricing down: $3,000 to $4,000 for el-cheapo systems, $5,000 to $7,500 for mid-range systems and $7,500 to $9,000 for premium systems.
But no battery? That's a non-starter. Far from reducing my electricity bills to $0 from October to April, it's likely to have almost no effect in that time, even if they do align the panels correctly: that's the time where I have enough power in the daytime. Without batteries, another 6.6 kW will make almost no difference. In the winter it would, but how much? From 16 June 2024 to 22 June 2024, a time with apparently a lot of sun, I generated 105 kWh of power. On a sunny day at this time of year it appears that I can get 19 kWh. Three weeks earlier it was 70 kWh. So it would seem to be reasonable to expect 12 kWh per day at this time of year from a 10.8 kW array.
That corresponds to 7.64 kWh from a 6.6 kW array. Over, say, 200 days that's about 1.5 MWh, or $412 saving per year. But for that I pay $1,784. As I guessed, without a battery it doesn't add up.
Looking at it from a different perspective, spent some time investigating my electricity bills. One thing that Andrew Parker completely dismissed was the “Service to property” charge, about $100 per quarter. That applies whether I draw any current or not. He had the documents available, so his claim of no charge in the summer is Just Plain Wrong.
So what do I stand to gain? In the summer (1 December to 27 February) we consumed 1611 kWh and paid $435.58 for it. During this time I can't really expect an additional array to save more than 2 kWh per day, or 180 kWh. Saving: $50 at best.
In the winter (3 June to 1 September) we consumed 4,104 kWh and paid $1,109. Of that, I estimated that I could save 720 kWh, saving $194. Arguably I could extend this over 9 months, so an absolute best-case saving would be 194 × 3 + 50 = $632. Either way, it falls way short of what I would have to pay.
And with a battery? Looking at other records, it seems that the current battery (6.4 kWh) is drained in between 3 and 4 hours after sunset. In the summer that still leaves round 10 hours, so I'd need another battery with a capacity of about 20 kWh. Gemini again, summarizing:
A 20 kWh battery system could cost anywhere from approximately $19,400 to $27,000 for the battery itself and its installation. Some specific 20 kWh battery kits are listed around $13,000 to $26,000.
And that's not worth it. But clearly batteries are not relevant to the current offer.
Did I get a call back from Mabel as requested yesterday? No, of course not. Instead I got an SMS (how I'm beginning to hate SMSs) from a Yasmin on 0451 403 837: “Confirming your installation date for 22/04”.
Well, no. There's nothing to install yet. Sent her a message, and she replied: “Are you available at any time for a call with one of our engineers?”. That sounded like a good idea. Yes, that's what I had asked for yesterday. To be fair, she had probably not been in contact with Mabel.
And then another message: you missed a call. That's the second time in this connection. Tried to call from my house VoIP line, but the ATA had hung itself up again. Rebooted it and also my phone, after which things worked, but it's beginning to look like I should really do periodic reboots of the ATA. Why is VoIP hardware so unreliable?
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Rain!
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Topic: general | Link here |
It's been very dry all year, and the weather forecast saw nothing coming until Saturday. But in the last 24 hours we had 13 mm of rain!
Is it that difficult to forecast the weather?
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Chinese food reassessed
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Finished off the food that I cooked on Sunday. Not as pleasant as I recall. Somehow a honey-soya glaze is not my thing. The idea of frying Brussels sprouts is interesting, but it needs further investigation.
And the chicken and dòufu? No, not at all good any more. Even at the time I had my doubts, but I don't know how to overhaul it without completely losing its identity. I think it's one for the “one night stand” category, even if we have eaten it twice.
| Friday, 18 April 2025 | Dereel | |
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ATA pain
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
What's wrong with my ATA? My take is that it's badly designed, implemented and maintained. Most people don't enable syslog on their ATA, but I do, and I get ridiculous numbers of messages like:
Apr 16 01:01:24 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]PROVISION: could not download https://fm.grandstream.com/gs/cfgc074ad3766d8
Apr 16 01:01:25 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]PROVISION: unable to download config data
Apr 16 01:01:25 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]PROVISION: config update not completed
Apr 16 04:13:30 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]CallRecord::writeCDRFile, No space! current file size =51158bytes, need extra 79 bytes.
Apr 16 05:52:57 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]SIPStack(0)::parseMessage: Failed to parse the sip message
Apr 16 06:03:02 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4] nvram_data: no new data saved, no need to flush flash
Apr 16 06:03:02 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4] user_data: Saving User Data...
Apr 16 06:03:09 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4] user_data: Saving User Data... Done
Apr 16 06:03:09 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4] user_data: Blocks Used ( 20 / 128 )
es.
Apr 18 11:31:49 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]CallRecord::writeCDRFile, No space! current file size =51158bytes, need extra 80 bytes.
Apr 18 11:31:49 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]SigCtrl::SigRemoteConnect, Cannot take the call because too many call dialogs at port 0
These are sent at priority LOG_ERR or higher, and they drown out all other messages—13340 in the past couple of days. The first show basic issues accessing firmware updates, which might solve some of the other issues if they were accessible. But they fail with error numbers like
https://fm.grandstream.com/gs/cfgc074ad3766d8 download: error code: 910
OK, nothing for it. It has a configuration setting to reboot at regular intervals, itself an admission of the bugs it has. Let's set it to reboot in the middle of the night.
Oh. It was already set for that. That's where the download error messages come from. What do I do? It's clear that VoIP is on its way out. Buy a new ATA with different bugs? That costs money. Digging around, found the old Mitron MNFMV1 that CJ Ellis received over 10 years ago. Should I use it instead? More work to do. Since we now use VoIP only for calling out, the other option is to check for a dial tone before calling and reboot if there is none. That should be the simplest workaround.
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What's a nugget?
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
Read in a news mail today:
Lab-Grown Nuggets, OpenAI, and Time's Most Influential People
Lab-Grown Nuggets? What does that mean? Took a look (https://join1440.com, who are too polite to include a direct link), and read
Researchers in Japan have produced nugget-sized chunks of chicken using animal cells, signaling a breakthrough in lab-grown food production.
OK. I'll bite. How big is a nugget? As big as the Welcome Stranger? Or the typical barely visible nugget people used to find round here when there were nuggets to be found?
But no, of course they were talking about chicken nuggets, as should have been clear from the context. Only I have barely registered the term. I'll go with the OED definitions:
It seems that chicken nuggets figure under 4.b., so it's not completely wrong. But how can people limit their view that they consider “nugget” synonymous with “chicken nugget”, whatever that may be, let alone understand the size of such an object? Somehow it's like the concept of a football field. I had to ask Google Gemini to learn
The size of a chicken nugget can vary depending on the manufacturer and specific product. However, here are some general measurements to give you an idea:Weight: The average weight of a single chicken nugget is around 15-25 grams. Some sources state an average of about 16 grams or 21 grams.
Length: The average length is around 5 centimeters (approximately 2 inches).
Other Dimensions: One study mentioned the size of a commercial nugget as roughly 5 cm (length) x 3 cm (width) x 1 cm (thickness).
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Downloading subtitles
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
On Wednesday I established that subtitles are available for a number of videos that don't include them, but they have made it so hard that it's hardly worth the trouble—unless you scrape the web pages.
Tried that today, and in a very short space of time I had:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /spool/Series/White-Queen/subtitles 1310 -> fetch https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/ssearch/sublanguageid-all/idmovie-153691
fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/ssearch/sublanguageid-all/idmovie-153691: size of remote file is not known
idmovie-153691 93 kB 314 kBps 00s
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /spool/Series/White-Queen/subtitles 1311 -> grep /download/ idmovie-153691 | sed 's~.*/downl~fetch https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/downl~; s:.>.*::'|sh
fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/download/s/sublanguageid-all/pimdbid-2372220/season-1: Not Found
fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/download/s/sublanguageid-all/imdbid-2398016: Not Found
...
Oh. It worked yesterday.
What happened? Something appears to have discovered that I had downloaded them and decided that I was a bot, requiring me to access it with a web browser and then presenting me with CAPTCHAs and other obscenities. So I have more issues to deal with. Another simple solution broken by “security”.
Still, I have the files. They're in Zip format, so the next step is:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /spool/Series/White-Queen/subtitles 1318 -> for i in imdbid*; do unzip $i; done
Archive: imdbid-2398016
extracting: The White Queen S01E01 HDTV.x264-FoV.srt
extracting: The White Queen - 01x01 - In Love With The King (Pilot).UNCUT-EVOLVE.English.C.orig.Addic7ed.com.srt
...=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /spool/Series/White-Queen/subtitles 1321 -> ls -1 *.srt|wc -l
63
63 subtitle files for 10 videos! The next step will be to decide which to use.
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Yana returns
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Our daughter Yana back today with her incontinent cat Squeaky, or maybe Quietchi. Much talk.
| Saturday, 19 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 19 April 2025 |
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A new camera for Yana
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Topic: photography, animals | Link here |
Yvonne and Yana over to see Chris Bahlo today. I gave Yana my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I in addition to Yvonne's Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III and a couple of lenses to take some photos, and she certainly did that, 227 of them, all with the M.Zuiko Digital 45 mm f/1.8.
One of the reasons I gave her both cameras was the fact that I don't really need the E-M1 Mark I any more. I only bought it 11 months ago, but since buying the OM System OM-1 Mark II I don't really need it.
So I asked her to compare the two cameras and tell me how she liked them. She preferred the E-M5 Mark III. On reflection, that was because of the shutter noise. I tried and had to agree with her: the E-M5 Mark III is much softer and quieter in sound.
But that's no reason to look a gift horse in the mouth, and she had been meaning to buy a “DSLR” anyway, so she'll take it. She'll also get the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-150 mm f/4.0-5.6 and the Olympus Zuiko Digital 35 mm f/3.5 Macro. What she still needs is a fast normal focal length prime, of which I have none to spare, and a wide angle lens. She wasn't too keen on the Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/3.5 fisheye, and since DxO PhotoLab can't defish it (it can't even recognize it, claiming despite Exif that it's a Panasonic), it's not clear that that will do the job.
As a result, along with my house photos, the horse photos and the cooking photos, we ended up taking a total of 375 photos today.
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FED film: finished!
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Topic: photography | Link here |
Did I say 375 photos? No, more! Showing off my old FED 1 to Yana, I finished off the film. OK, rewind and see what it is.
Oh. Rewinding on these cameras is a pain at the best of times, but after much turning, I still hadn't succeeded. It was difficult to turn, and I'm left wondering if something inside is damaged, though it's not clear what that could be. What do I do now? Remove as it is in the dark and rewind manually? The design of these cameras doesn't make it any easier.
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Opensubtitles pain
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
So why can't I download subtitles from https://www.opensubtitles.org/ and more? It seems that they track the number of downloads and stop after a while.
OK, sign up. If I can. After half an hour of claimed incorrect user names and passwords and interminable CAPTCHAs I gave up. Even after being sent a password reset link, it wouldn't accept the link. Possibly this was its own way of saying “your password doesn't fulfil our unspecified requirements”.
As if that wasn't enough, it started spamming me, and I couldn't find a way to get it to stop!
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Somehow it's difficult to believe in their good will. All the more reason to find a way in that they didn't intend.
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Cooking orgy
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne and Yana did the cooking today. The pièce de la résistance was a soufflé au fromage:
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Somehow I ate far too much.
| Sunday, 20 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 20 April 2025 |
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Camera software for Yana
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
So we've come to a conclusion: Yana gets my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I with the M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-150 mm f/4.0-5.6, the Zuiko Digital 35 mm f/3.5 Macro and the Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/3.5 fisheye. She still needs a fast normal focal length prime and a wide angle lens, both of which I have none to spare.
And, of course, she needs software to process the photos. OM Workspace is free, about what it's worth, and I have old licenses for DxO PhotoLab 2, 3 and 4. But I couldn't find the downloads online—previously they were available, but I couldn't find them. The only install image I had locally was for PhotoLab 2, which Yana's laptop didn't want to know about.
Incompatibility? That was Microsoft “Windows”, right? Which version? Yana didn't know, and it looks so different that I wasn't able to find the hardware information page. I have to assume that it's “Windows” 11, and the difference in the menus is horrifying. But my guess is that the software was for a 32 bit system.
So we installed OM Workspace and had great difficulty with it. For reasons that I don't understand, the download took a couple of minutes to start. When it arrived, we couldn't do much with it, at least because the view on the laptop was so difficult. So I updated the version on distress, coming to the startling discovery that it no longer wanted to know about network “drives”, a significant regression from the older Olympus Workspace. And once again I had great difficulty getting it to do anything useful. They seem to have engaged in that favourite Microsoft space pastime, changing the GUI to suit their underwear.
Why is it so difficult to work with Microsoft? The photo software is designed for it, and
over the years I have built workarounds to live with it. But today it became clear that
these workarounds weren't because I use FreeBSD, but because the Microsoft environment is so horrible. What does Yana do when she has
processed the photos? How does she give them names? Where are they? Much of our
searching today was to establish where the originals were (something
like C:\Users\yana\Pictures\OM Workspace) and where the converted
“exported” images were; on reflection
they were probably in the parent directory, but it wasn't obvious.
And what do you do then? In my workflow, they get put into a hierarchy of web pages. And Microsoft users? I'm really out of my depth, but I'm beginning to understand why programs like DxO offer alternative export functions, to Flickr for example. And none that I know of offer the option of adding a title; if they do, my guess is that it would need to be set individually for each photo.
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A year of Mona
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Topic: animals | Link here |
A year ago today we picked up Mona. She has settled in well, in some senses. She still has issues with the dogs, though today Elena was able to come up to her (sitting on my lap) and sniff at her from a distance of only 1 or 2 cm. The only problem is that she was supposed to be Yvonne's cat, and she spends most of her time with me.
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Yana and Squeaky
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Yana's cat Squeaky has been here a couple of days already, and caused a couple of machine loads of washing, but Yvonne still hadn't seen her. Here she is:
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Ikan goreng and rendang
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Yesterday Yvonne and Yana made dinner. Today was Yana and my turn: ikan goreng and this “Rendang” paste:
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I had eaten it before, but I had forgotten. I really need to check my diary before using these things.
In this case it didn't make much difference: it was pretty much as the last time. Somehow, though, it doesn't seem like rendang.
And of course the inevitable photos:
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Somehow that's getting boring.
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Photo problems
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Topic: photography | Link here |
What's wrong with this photo?
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It's clear: it's completely out of focus. The Exif data gives a focus distance of 17 to 22 cm, pretty much as close as the lens can come. But why? My guess was that it was taken before the lens could focus, and the camera (the OM-D E-M1 Mark I) was set to allow that, not helped by the fact that it was taken with remote control. So I turned off the feature on the camera.
Problem solved? Today I took more photos, this time with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II and the M.Zuiko DIGITAL ED 7-14 mm f/2.8 PRO. While setting up the tripod, I discovered that once again I had difficulty focusing.
Why? I really don't know. The cameras were different, but both E-M1 models, and the lenses were also different, but both PRO models. The workaround was simple: set manual focus, since the distance won't change. But why is that necessary?
The other thing, mainly for Yana's sake: which perspective is best here?
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It's the same photo with a different projection. In the second one, the table looks elongated and Yvonne has been pulled apart. Which is which? It's cropped from these two renditions:
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It's taken with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO. The first image is natural, the second has been “defished” to a rectilinear projection. Yes, the straight lines are straight, which they're not in the fisheye projection, but at what cost?
| Monday, 21 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 21 April 2025 |
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Goodbye Yana
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Topic: general | Link here |
Yana off again this morning on the long journey back to Adelaide. It's been a fun weekend, but tiring, and we made it an early night.
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How much PV power do we get?
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Last week I did some thinking about how much power my PV array generates on average and came to no really clear conclusion, only that the offer I have is unreasonably optimistic. Power generation is measured in terms of hours per day at nominal generation capacity, and round here it's quoted at 3.5 hours per day: a 6.6 kW array should generate an average of 23.1 kWh per day over the year. My offer claims 4 hours (26.4 kWh).
But it occurred to me that I have quite good records: my current inverter tells me that I have used 57,665.57 kWh of “green” energy since the system was installed, coincidentally almost exactly 5 years ago. That's 31.49 kWh/day on average from my 10.8 kW system, or 2.9 hours per day equivalent. A lot less than the claims, but then they're optimistic. But that means that 6.6 kW system would generate an average 19.2 kWh per day—if the panels were oriented correctly. Clearly the offer isn't worth considering. I'll be interested to hear from the people and what they have to say.
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Garden flowers in mid-autumn
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
It's mid-autumn, or at least a third of the way to the June solstice, time for the monthly garden photos.
The dryness continues, and even the little forecast rain hasn't arrived. Things are correspondingly bad. I don't know how many of these roses will survive, despite irrigation:
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Clearly the irrigation is part of the issue, but I'm no longer in a position to look at it myself, and it seems to be beyond the comprehension of people who help me. Other plants are also suffering:
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Some, however, are not. To my surprise, my Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” is flowering happily:
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And the Abutilons, despite some issues with the watering, are flowering happily:
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The one near the laundry door has almost completely eclipsed the “fly spot” bush that I had planted—I thought—next to it:
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And the Strelitziae reginae are looking happier than they have been in a while. One even seems to be producing a flower:
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Can it be that the soil has been too moist for them?
And the Grevillea robusta is finally growing, after only 6 years:
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And the Solanum laxum that I had thought dead has come back. It's difficult to see in the second image, but it's creeping up the fence post:
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Maybe I should plant it elsewhere.
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Finding the missing DxO PhotoLab
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
It was frustrating that I couldn't find a version of DxO PhotoLab for Yana yesterday. After she left, I did some searching in this diary. What I really wanted was PhotoLab 4, the last version before the one I'm currently using. No mention, but I did find some URLs that gave me a clue, like https://download-center.dxo.com/PhotoLab/v2/Win/DxO_PhotoLab2_Setup.exe. That's not much use, since it's the version that I already have, and which Yana's laptop refused to look at. And I can't go to the directory, because it's 403. But how about https://download-center.dxo.com/PhotoLab/v4/Win/DxO_PhotoLab4_Setup.exe? Yes! It's still there and can be downloaded. So, presumably, are things like https://download-center.dxo.com/PhotoLab/v6/Win/DxO_PhotoLab6_Setup.exe, but they don't help, since I don't have a license key.
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Opensubtitle spamming stopped
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Bloody opensubtitles.org! It continually spams me:
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How is it gaining access? Via the web browser? A bit of searching showed: yes. Apparently it set a cookie to allow it to continue presenting notifications even when it didn't have a page open. For Chromium, go to Settings / Privacy and Security / Site Settings / Notifications and disallow them. In this case, I also deleted the cookie.
I suppose that's normal nowadays, but it's the first time I've seen it.
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Subtitle download insights
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
Now opensubtitles.org have really annoyed me with their spamming. How do I download the rest of my subtitles? Tried again and got the usual
fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/download/s/sublanguageid-all/imdbid-2398016: Not Found
OK, can I download it from the web browser? No! First I need to select the language. When I do that in the browser, I get a page that looks the same but has different links. And then I was able to download the files.
Well, some of them:
...
imdbid-762006 148 kB 180 kBps 01s
fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/download/s/sublanguageid-eng/imdbid-738030: Not Found
fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/download/s/sublanguageid-eng/imdbid-737988: Not Found
Another check with the web browser gave me the message:
You are not logged-in. Try to login - this will help in most of cases
(not logged-in). subs_subtitle d IP: 121.200.11.253 exceeded. If you will continue trying to download, your IP will be blocked by our firewall. For more information read our FAQ or contact us, if you think you should not see this error. This deny will be removed after around 24 hours, so be patient.
OK, I can live with that. Presumably access from a different location would do so too. Mañana.
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Brollie
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
Found an article in ABC news today extolling the virtues of free video streaming. Nothing new to me: ABC themselves have iview, and SBS has “on demand”. But they had a third one: “Brollie”. OK, try them out. A fair selection, including a number of Australian films. I have been looking for Sunday Too Far Away for some time, so it was worth trying to download it.
First, though, another one that looked interesting: Mushrooms. Download went very quickly, but I discovered that there were only 2¼ minutes out of 90 minutes, apparently in very low resolution (though the video itself was 1024×768, presumably upscaled) and apparently only a cropped part of the image. And no subtitles. Total loss.
OK, how about Sunday Too Far Away?
ERROR: [youtube] jIy4hcrXoKo: Video unavailable. This video contains content from Umbrella Entertainment, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds
Dammit, idiots, I'm in Australia, and you're an Australian company. Which IP address did you look at?
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/49) /Video/spool/Videos 114 -> host hydra
hydra.lemis.com has address 192.109.197.129=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/49) /Video/spool/Videos 115 -> whois -h whois.cymru.com " -v 192.109.197.129"
AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name
4764 | 192.109.197.129 | 192.109.197.0/24 | AU | ripencc | 1991-05-01 | WIDEBAND-AS-AP Aussie Broadband, AU
The column CC (presumably “country code”) gives the location. So what are they thinking? In any case, how about doing it the way they want, via a web browser?
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What? They want to dictate which browser and operating system you use, and they don't support Linux at all? The statement that Chrome may work suggests that their software is extremely buggy, and probably they've never even heard of FreeBSD. Goodbye, Brollie. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
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Portuguese CAPTCHAs
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
While looking at some old web pages, came across a web site that I didn't know, Olympus Passion. Want to sign up? Sure, why not?
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Não sou um robô? I know enough Portuguese to understand that, but why Portuguese? In any case, I have my answer to “why not?”. I'm getting more and more turned off by CAPTCHAs, though it might have been interesting to see what terms they use for “crosswalks”, and what their fire hydrants look like.
| Tuesday, 22 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 22 April 2025 |
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Pad see ew?
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Topic: food and drink, language, opinion | Link here |
Recently I found a recipe for Pad See Ew. What's that? I had never heard of it. The recipe explains: Thai Rice Noodles.
Well, I've eaten plenty of Phat Thai, and the name sounds to me like a word I know from Malaysia: “see yau”, meaning soya sauce. And how about that, it really does translate as “soya sauce noodles”.
The trick in the dish appears to be the caramelization of the noodles. And they want really wide fresh rice noodles. I found some frozen fresh noodles in the deep freeze, and I used them, though they were much narrower, and they fell apart while cooking:
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Still, an interesting dish. Maybe I'll be able to add it to my breakfast menus.
Interestingly, the Wikipedia page states that the full name is kuaitiao phat si-io. That comes even closer to Malaysian and Singapore usage: kuaitiao is a more correct spelling of (Char) kway teow. Interestingly, the Malay page Char kway teow states that the correct spelling is Kuetiau. I had always assumed that Thai food is very different from Malaysian and Singapore food, and I'm still not convinced that this is a Thai dish: there's no mention of it in my old cookbooks.
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Politicians kill sovereigns
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Topic: politics, history, opinion | Link here |
The Pope is dead. Rather suddenly, as people were gradually expecting him to recover from his recent illnesses. But he did it in no uncertain way, on Easter Monday, with both a stroke and a fatal heart attack. The world mourns.
But he was only 88 years old. 2½ years ago Queen Elizabeth II died at the ago of 96. Much of the world mourned.
At the time of the Queen's death, I had wondered whether her last official act, appointing Liz Truss as prime minister, might have been in part responsible. Liz Truss lived down to my low expectations, and I can imagine the dread that the Queen must have felt when appointing her.
And the Pope? Less than 24 hours before, he had met with another politician, JD Vance. He, too, is beneath contempt. Did he also have the Pope's death on his conscience? No, I don't think he has one.
Of course, I wasn't the first person to come to this conclusion. This YouTube video came out while I was planning the article:
It even includes a very brief reference to Liz Truss. I wish it were not quite that horrible.
| Wednesday, 23 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 23 April 2025 |
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Food safety, US style
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Did a food safety quiz from the Washington Post today. I wasn't expecting to do well: I answer these things according to my opinion, and I've discovered that US Americans are particularly concerned about food safety. But I got 8 out of 10 “right” (in other words, the quiz agreed with me. Of the others, one was a question of the colour of guacamole, open to interpretation. But the other was surprising:
You make chicken soup for dinner. The next morning, you discover that the pot is still sitting on the stove and was not refrigerated overnight. Should you … Put it in the fridge. A: As long as it still looks and smells fine, it's fine. B: Boil for at least 10 minutes before serving. C: Dump it. It's been out of refrigeration for too long to be safe.
A, of course. We do this all the time, and you can't really do anything else: when it's hot, it shouldn't go into the fridge. But they answer:
It breaks my heart to urge throwing away a pot of soup. But here’s the thing: This soup has spent many hours in the bacteria-friendly “danger zone” of 40 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit [5° to 60°]. While trace amounts of certain bacteria are a normal part of our environment and typically leave us alone, if they reproduce enough — which they could do enthusiastically in a moist, warm, nutrient-loaded soup — your odds of gastrointestinal distress go up dramatically. If active pathogens are present, boiling will kill them, but some bacteria leave behind illness-causing, heat-resistant toxins.
But that appears to ignore the fact that the soup was boiled in the first place. The window of opportunity for the bacteria is just during the serving. I'll certainly think about it, but over 50 years of experience and the lack of alternatives suggest that this isn't the issue that they make it out to be. It would be different, of course, if the pot had not been covered, but they include an image showing that it was covered.
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What's that lizard?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
The cats haven't caught any birds for some time now, at least as far as we know. But today they came in with this lizard, along with its tail:
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What is it? I don't know. Google's image tells me that it's a Cercosaura, endemic to South America. I'll believe that when they prove it.
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What's going on with Elon Musk?
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Topic: politics | Link here |
A while back Yvonne asked me what had happened to Elon Musk. It seems that the reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. But he has been keeping quiet, possibly brooding over the 71% drop in Tesla sales in the last quarter.
Searching brought some strange results: he is leaving the White House by the end of the month. He is giving up running DOGE. And some others. But none of this was reported in the mainstream US media. Certainly it would be good if he were to go away—and take Donald Trump and JD Vance with him. Who would be US president then?
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New toys
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Topic: technology, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne back from shopping today with the package of goodies from Aliexcess:
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Staple foods in the 21st century
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another thing that Yvonne brought back with her was lard, rendered pork fat, which we use for at least two dishes: huevos rancheros and KL Hokkien Mee. She had forgotten it for a couple of weeks, but it's a staple, so we always have a reserve. But we used the last of it over the weekend.
And how about that, she couldn't find any! Woolworths confirmed that they were out of stock in all locations in Ballarat. She finally found some at Sinclair Meats, a place I try to avoid because of their high prices.
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I joked “I suppose it was double the normal price”. She: only $22.95. OK, a joke's a joke. How much was it really? $22.95! That was really the price. Yes, it's 500 ml rather than the normal 250 g, but at a typical density of 925 kg/m³ that's still $12.40 for 250 g. My guess would be that 250 g normally cost between $3 and $4. And at $50 per kilogram it's more expensive than beef fillet—elsewhere. We really need to find a replacement for Sinclair.
But how much does it really cost? Most grocers have an online presence, so I went looking. Yes, Woolworths seem to be out of stock, so they didn't mention a price. Coles had never even heard of lard, and wanted to sell me “land” instead. Or Did you mean: lardass, lardass black garlic cultured butter, lardass garlic herb cultured butter, lardass roasted fennel seed cultured butter, lardass salted cultured butter?
What's lardass? It sounds like a US American insult. They don't know either. All the links were dead. Goodbye, Coles, you're dead for me too.
And other grocers? No, nothing. It seems that lard has gone the way of the past. Is it antisemitic, maybe? At that price I should buy my own pork fat, render it and have the greaves (chu yau cha, 猪油渣) that I need for KL Hokkien Mee.
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Self-cooked chips, try 2
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I had planned to try frying chips tomorrow, but of course I was interested in the new cutter:
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It's blue! Well, no: it has blue plastic foil that is almost impossible to remove:
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Hopefully it'll come off in the dish washer.
So: cut a single potato (175 g) in the 64 chip position (8 mm). That was difficult: the cutter is quite flimsy, and I'm not sure that the arms won't bend. But it worked this time.
Set the deep fryer to twice-fried chips. First fry: 3 minutes at 130°, according to the instructions. What I measured was:
Under those circumstances the thermostat is almost completely useless.
Then the second fry, at 180°.
At the end, I was left with 98 g of somewhat soggy chips, 56% of the starting quantity. I'm still not happy with the results. I tried some for another 2½ minutes, not helped by the fact that I couldn't get the fryer to 190°: the fat was at 180°, and that seemed good enough for it. Another try tomorrow, with photos.
| Thursday, 24 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 24 April 2025 |
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Samba: long in the tooth
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Samba is coming on 21 years old, relatively old for a horse: she's getting long in the tooth. Today Nick Bompas, the equine dentist, came to look at an issue that she had. That proved to be stuff stuck between her teeth:
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I wanted to get some photos of what long teeth looked like. I failed. She's normally docile enough, but today she was very upset, and she reared continually—something that I also didn't manage to get.
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Nick suggested sedating her for next time.
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Soup past use-by date
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yana brought some food with her when she came last weekend. One was some kind of Chinese-like soup, which I had planned to eat for breakfast. But I decided against it:
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I don't know what that film is, nor how old the soup was, but not only recalling yesterday's food safety considerations, I decided against it.
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Twice-fried chips, the second
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
As planned, another attempt at twice-fried chips this evening. Here the process:
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This time I stuck to the 3 minutes at “130°” for the first fry, but did the second fry at 190° instead of their intended 180°:
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Again it took 3 minutes, and there really wasn't much difference from last time. They were still relatively soggy. My best bet is that it's the kind of potatoes. I don't really want to buy more suitable potatoes, because I'm likely to end up with lots left over. Maybe I should try thicker chips.
And the measurements? The temperatures in the first fry were pretty much the same as last time, except that the thermostat cut in round 1¾ minutes instead of 2½. In the second, the temperature dropped to 169° after one minute and back to 184° after two. I then removed the chips until the fat was back to temperature and gave them another minute.
I started with 210 g of potatoes and ended up with 105 g of chips, exactly 50%. Why the difference from last time's 56%? Probably related to the cooking time. And of course I have never measured the difference for pre-processed, deep frozen chips. They, too, will lose weight during frying.
| Friday, 25 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 25 April 2025 |
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I don't want a review
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Topic: history, language, opinion | Link here |
My cousin Sandy Semmens née Schaedel has been working on some documents about the history of our common family in what is now Germany: the Lohmanns (the paternal side of our grandmother's family) and and the Rieplings (the maternal side). They're currently in draft stage, and I've been working my way through them.
Two questions: first, Sandy doesn't speak German, and doesn't understand that Munder and Münder are two different words. Secondly, the document refers to places that are now in Germany. But what was the country when they were born? Sandy prefers to use an approximation to modern addresses, giving rise to addresses like Kessiehausen, Bakede, Bad Munder, Hameln-Pyrmont, Lower Saxony, Germany (one place). But she leaves Königsberg as Konigsberg, Germany rather than Kaliningrad, Russia.
My suggestion is to use the addresses and nationalities as they were at the time, and add a section somewhere describing where they are nowadays, something like
Kessiehausen and Bakede are now parts of Bad Münder. Since 1949 they are in the Hameln-Pyrmont district of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) in Germany. Adenstedt is now a part of Ilsede in the Peine district of Lower Saxony.
But no, she wasn't looking for criticism, only content. It's her document, and it will stay that way, misspellings and all. Schadel.
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Laugengebäck again
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
My last batch of Laugenstangen is finished, time for more. I made a real mess of rolling up the dough last time, so I asked Yvonne to do it for me this time:
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Stupidly, I didn't get a photo of her rolling them up.
In the meantime I rolled them in the lye:
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Stupidly again, that wasn't what the recipe stated. I should have let them rise for 20 minutes first. But I left them for 20 minutes after dunking them, and the results were much better than the first time. Here last time and today:
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I think that Yvonne has a permanent position here. And they were so tasty that Elena stole one from the table.
| Saturday, 26 April 2025 | Dereel | Images for 26 April 2025 |
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Can't read your diary
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Make from Mike Jeays today. He can't read my diary. He gets error 500: internal server error, and it only affects the page .
OK, check. I don't get a server error message, but I don't get a display of the page anyway. And yet it's exactly the same as the local copy, which displays normally.
After some searching, came up with:
[Sat Apr 26 01:41:15.333015 2025] [php7:emerg] [pid 73885] [client 121.200.11.253:22896] PHP Parse error: Invalid indentation - tabs and spaces cannot be mixed in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/diary.php on line 590
Huh? The page content stopped at line 298 with a <?php exit (); ?>. But I keep notes about the following days after the exit, and somehow they have grown over the years; the total length of the file was over 1000 lines. The trouble is that I need to check each individual note and decide whether I can remove it or whether I should act on it. Time to move older entries to a separate file. But on reflection, it seems reasonable that the parser should continue. And it seems that something, probably a misguided Emacs, had indented a lot of these notes. That's irritating in itself, and worth restoring the entry of two days ago.
But why does PHP refuse the combination of tabs and spaces? They occur all the time in other languages, and even in my PHP source. It must only be an issue in a specific context. What's it really complaining about?
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Tracing territorial changes
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Topic: history, language, opinion | Link here |
Where was Conrad (Konrad) Friedrich Christian Lohmann, my -great- grandfather born? Sandy's draft history says that he was born on 7 Dec 1857 in “Kessiehausen, Bakede, Hameln-Pyrmont, Lower Saxony Germany”.
That's inaccurate, of course. The Kreis Hameln-Pyrmont, the Land Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) and the country Germany all first came into existence in 1949. And Bakede is just an Ortsteil (“suburb”) of Bad Münder, so the probable address would be Kessiehausen, Bad Münder.
But what was the “country”? For my great-grandfather I thought that it would be clear: the German Confederation. Oh. But until 1949 (after Yvonne's birth) nationality was a matter of the Land, not the country. Yvonne was born a citizen of Thüringen, not any higher-order state. So where was Conrad born? My guess is in Hannover, but maybe an outpost of Hessen-Kassel.
That wasn't even what I was looking for. The family appears to have lived in Kessiehausen for at least 50 years prior to that. What was that? As it happens, Kessiehausen is still on the map. Google Maps shows:
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Somehow that reminds me both of Schellnhausen, where we lived from 1991 to 1997, and Ködderitzsch, the ancestral home of Yvonne's family, though Ködderitzsch is considerably larger. Even an address that I saw on the maps rings a bell: „Kessiehausen 2“, just the name of the settlement and a house number. We had „Schellnhausen 2“.
Where was it when Conrad's grandparents married in Badeke in 1809? The far-too-small map on page 111 of my „Kleiner Atlas zur deutschen Territorialgeschichte“ shows that Münder was on the edge of several states, including Hannover, maybe Braunschweig, Lippe-Detmold or Kurhessen. How can I ever find out? This map, from Wikipedia, eliminates Lippe-Detmold:
Bad Münder is not marked, but it's at the very north-east, well into Hannover territory. But it was dated 1918. Had the borders been stable for over 100 years?
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
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