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| Greg's diary |
| August 2024 |
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| Thursday, 1 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 1 August 2024 |
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Completing teevee
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
Now that hydra is running relatively smoothly, I can turn my attention to teevee, the replacement for tiwi that I have been working on for nearly two months. It was happily running in my office, but moving it to its correct place was complicated by the cabling and my requirement to keep things running throughout.
My concerns with the cabling were justified, but after that things came up smoothly, and it Just Ran.
Well, of course there were a few details. I still need to migrate to fvwm3 and modify my .Xdefaults, but that's the same issue as with hydra, and for the time being things work well. One surprise is the mouse settings that I discovered last month. In my initialization files I have:
MOUSEID=$(xinput | grep -m 1 "Telink 2.4G Mouse" | sed 's/^.*id=\([0-9]*\)[ ].*$/\1/')
# Set side buttons to 8 and 9
if [ "$MOUSEID" != "" ]; then
xinput set-button-map $MOUSEID 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 2 2 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
xinput set-prop $MOUSEID 286 -0.5
fi
But that doesn't work on teevee. On tiwi, the set-prop 286 refers to this parameter:
libinput Accel Speed (286): 0.000000
But on teevee, an identical mouse returns:
libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled Default (286): 0
...
libinput Accel Speed (296): 0.000000
Why is that?
In passing, it's worth noting that all these settings get lost if I remove and replug the dongle. I should find a way to run the configuration automatically.
And then watching TV I discovered that the on-screen texts are much smaller. Here the same file displayed by mpv with the same parameters, first tiwi, then teevee (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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The text is tiny, of course. Here top left and bottom centre:
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How can that happen? I can work around it, of course, but somehow it's untidy.
Another surprise was the output volume to the amplifier. On tiwi it was weak enough that I had to set vol and pcm to 78 and 100, and for that the amplifier had to be set to 60, the highest it's happy to save between sessions. But on teevee with similar settings the amplifier is happy with 45. Why?
Apart from that, what do I need to do? Get my weather station software working on teevee, and that's about all that I can think of.
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Waking distress
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Lately I've been having slight trouble accessing distress, one of my Microsoft boxes. I access it by rdesktop, but first it needs to be woken. That's what wake(8) is for: it sends a Wake-on-LAN packet to the machine, which is listed in /etc/ethers.
Problem: hydra has two network interfaces. Under those circumstances, wake wants to know which interface to use, so I run wake re1 distress. But lately that hasn't worked:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/18) ~ 42 -> wake re1 distress
wake: write(): Network is down
wake: Cannot send Wake on LAN frame over `re1' to `distress': Network is down=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/18) ~ 43 -> wake distress=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/18) ~ 44 ->
And yes, the second invocation works, the one that shouldn't work. What's the issue there? On eureka, which also has two interfaces, things work as described:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/10) ~ 40 -> wake distress
wake: Failed to determine ethernet interface: Device not configured=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/10) ~ 41 -> wake em0 distress=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/10) ~ 42 ->
On hydra, sending a packet over re0 works fine. Could this be something to do with the proprietary driver for re1 (/usr/ports/net/realtek-re-kmod)?
In passing, this only works for me because I have the setuid bit set on wake.
| Friday, 2 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 2 August 2024 |
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Tidying up teevee
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
Slow day today. Spent some time playing around with teevee, though there wasn't much to be done. I'm still puzzled by the difference in font size that mpv demonstrates between tiwi and teevee. Could it be in the configuration files? They're in ~/.config/mpv/. But no, they were the same.
But somewhere I recall reducing the size years ago. How did I do it? It's not in my wrapper script. Somehow I'm missing something here.
OK, RTFM. “No manual entry for "mpv"”. Oh. Only recently did I discover that ports man pages have been moved from /usr/local/man to /usr/local/share/man, and I had had to update my MANPATH accordingly. But no, only some man pages have moved there. On a freshly installed system I have both!
Thank $DEITY for less(1)! The “page” has 17,907 lines. At 60 lines per page, that's just shy of 300 pages. And sure enough, there's a parameter --osd-font-size, so I now have:
SIZE="--sub-font-size=30 --osd-font-size=20"
That works, but why did I need to change it?
Also took first steps towards migrating the weather station software. After installing MySQL, I didn't run into any of the problems I had with teevee. But I didn't get as far as connecting the weather station.
| Saturday, 3 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 3 August 2024 |
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Mail corruption
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Seen this morning on my mail screen (Mutt):
17 + 02-08-2024 To Greg Lehey ( 22) Yvonne Lehey + GateKit
18 + 01-08-2024 To grog@freebsd ( 23) mailman-owner@ + └─>mailing list memberships reminder
The second message, typical at the start of the month, looks to be a follow-up to a private message from Yvonne. Huh? Take a look:
From MAILER-DAEMON Thu Aug 1 22:02:31 2024
Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2024 05:00:02 -0700
From: mailman-owner@
To: groggyhimself@freebsd.org
Subject: mailing list memberships reminder
Message-ID: <mailman.630.1722513602.810421.mailman@>
In-Reply-To: <20240802002858.GB15490@lagoon.lemis.com>
But that's impossible. I received the message from Yvonne long after this one:
From yvonne@lemis.com Fri Aug 2 10:31:08 2024
Between the two messages there was an automatic backup, so I was able to compare the message as it arrived and as it is now:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/18) ~ 79 -> diff -wu /var/tmp/grog-orig /var/tmp/grog-changed
--- /var/tmp/grog-orig 2024-08-04 12:31:45.000000000 +1000
+++ /var/tmp/grog-changed 2024-08-04 12:32:04.739135000 +1000
@@ -75,6 +75,7 @@
PREVIOUSLY_DELIVERED(0.00)[grog@freebsd.org];
PRECEDENCE_BULK(0.00)[]
X-Rspamd-Queue-Id: 4WZSJK6zbRz3x7P
+In-Reply-To: <20240802002858.GB15490@lagoon.lemis.com>
Status: RO
Content-Length: 1023
How did that happen? It must be a mutt bug.
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I hate cables!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Much of my computer rearrangement recently has been impeded by cable issues: wrong length, inadequate quality (especially these horrible HDMI cables, which have already cost me a TV, and which seem inadequate for my 4K monitors), hard to trace the other end.
Today I had a case: turn on the monitors for eureka. No display. After a while, discovered that the left-hand one had the wrong HDMI cable connected. Connect the right one and it works. But I couldn't get the right-hand one to run. It was connected to one of two DVI cables, but it wouldn't display with either of them.
Yes, I can find out what the problem is, but I'm fed up to the back teeth with this kind of issue. Today I took the easy way out: just one monitor.
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I want my air conditioner!
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
Now that the old (ducted) air conditioner is working again, we no longer run the new one. And the temperature in the house is much more even. Definitely ducted systems are preferable.
Unless you're Bruno. He used to sit in the output of the new unit, and now that it's no longer running, he's clearly unhappy:
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| Sunday, 4 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 4 August 2024 |
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Jing mian?
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Topic: food and drink, language, opinion | Link here |
I've been working on my Beijing “fried sauce” noodles for a while, and somehow I'm still not overly happy with them. As I have noticed, they're quite similar to KL Hokkien Mee. OK, start from that end and see what I can do.
What should I call them? They're both from capital cities. Capital noodles? 京麵, jing mian? Google Translate tells me that that means “Beijing Noodles”, though I don't see why: Beijing (北京) means “northern capital”, Tokyo (東京, Dong Jing) means “eastern capital”, Nanjing (南京) means “southern capital”. Clearly 京 (jing) means “capital”. Am I missing something here, or is Google Translate?
In any case, it was a bit of a non-event. Last time I made the dish, I made a number of changes that effectively mirrored what I did today. And somehow it was much more liquid than I had expected:
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The surprising thing is how much difference the julienne vegetables make. Here basically the same quantity of KL Hokkien Mee and Jing Mian:
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The big issue that I have with the dish is that the beans are so salty. But how serious is it that the sauce is not as firm as in the recipes I've seen? In any case, I'm still not really convinced.
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Apple mail fail?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the many things that really get on my nerves is email written in HTML only. Apart from the fact that Mutt handles it badly, it makes it very difficult to reply to without resorting to ad-hoc commercial solutions. It also makes it difficult to follow mail threads.
One of the relatively frequent participants in the Hugin mailing list has been sending out such mail, using iPad mail and iPhone mail. I thought I might have some input, so I sent him a message asking him to at least set multipart-alternative. He wasn't upset, but he didn't know how to set it up.
After some searching, none of us on our IRC channel could work it out either. It seems that it's typical Apple: “do it our way”. Can that really be true?
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Air conditioner problems through the ages
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Topic: Stones Road house, history, general | Link here |
Another cold night last night, minimum temperature 0.1°. And once again our air conditioner struggled. I turned it on at 5:30, and it took until 10:00 to come up to temperature. Up to 8:30 The graph shows typical de-icing steps:
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And the power consumption graphs show that it's only heating less than half the time (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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In the 34 minutes between 6:44 and 7:18 it only heated for 15 minutes, a duty cycle of 44%. I had thought that these excessive de-icing times went away with the repair 4 years ago. I'll have to keep an eye on that.
In passing, it's surprising how many air conditioner problems I have noted over the years. On 3 August 1969 I helped my father with some unspecified issue. On 2 August 2004 we thought, fortunately incorrectly, that the compressor had failed. In August 2009 I complained, not for the first time, about our horrible Fujitsu air conditioners. Ten years ago I started going through the pain of deciding on the unit we're now using, which took several months. And that's only at almost exactly this time of year.
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Trump running scared
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
It's no secret that I despise Donald Trump, and the thought of him becoming US president again fills me with horror. Anything would be better, and that's the way I thought four years ago when Joe Biden was his opponent.
And now Trump is standing again! But Biden has bowed out and left the stage to Kamala Harris. Who's that? The vice-president of the USA, of course. But the press has been very quiet about her. That has changed, and in particular Trump is paying a lot of attention. Today he cancelled the planned debate for next month and replaced it with a challenge to do one in front of a studio audience with Fox News (or is that “Faux News”?). He published a diatribe on his social network, Truth Social. Time to take a look and add a comment, so signed up, apparently for the second time: even my associated email address was already there. And I had to choose at least 3 people to “follow”. Trump, of course, but surprisingly also Kamala Harris. I didn't recognize anybody else, but I found somebody with the name “catturd2”, which sounded about right for the platform, so I chose it.
So, Trump, running scared? That was my comment, but it seems that it was anything but original.
How I hope that Harris makes it.
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Configuring studio flash
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
For some time the slave flash trigger on one of my Godox studio flash units, a “Smart 300 SDI”, didn't work. I worked around it with an external trigger, but is it really defective?
Played around with the buttons on the back, tastefully symbols to cater for illiterate people, but not for people like me who don't understand the meaning of what appears to be an eye. Pressed on the button. It lit up red. Test with another flash. Yes, fires! So it's the slave mode.
Pressed it again to turn off. But it stayed on, just now lighting blue. What's the difference? RTFM time.
Oh. Where's the manual? Off searching for godox smart 300 sdi instructions. Ended up at the Godox site, which was singularly useless, a good example of how not to implement a web site. Searches went round in circles, and it didn't find the Smart 300 SDI (or any useful component of that term) at all.
Then I found this YouTube clip: “godox smart 300wsdi strobe flash and lighting stand REVIEW”. How different is the 300wsdi from the 300 SDI? Not at all. The w is the incorrect abbreviation for Watt, in the mistaken assumption that the 300 in the name stands for Watts (it's really Joules, and the output is something like 240 kW, a reason why people don't measure flash units in Watts). And that's indicative of the clip quality: it's singularly useless; I don't think the producer understood the concepts of flash triggering.
Finally I found this page, tastefully formatted as a fake video
Slave Trigger ModelThis model offers three choices which can be set by the optical control and anti-preflash switch (5).
And yes, that seems to be the original text. In every case, read “mode” for “model”. But the content is important. Why is it so difficult to find?
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Lamb shank tagine
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
To make up for the morning's Chinese experiments, cooked a lamb shank tagine this evening, mainly to use up the last of the lamb shanks that Chris Bahlo gave us five years ago. Somehow my heart wasn't in it, but about an hour after starting Mohammed Ifadir showed up on IRC for the first time in nearly a year. He comes from Marrakesh, and in the past we discussed tagines at some length.
He didn't have much to say about the tagine, but he mentioned a “Tangia of kangaroo”. What's that? A Google search brought me to this recipe, which potentially could be amusing. But the real discovery was the Tangia, a tagine-like dish made in Marrakesh, always by men, and the main ingredient is lamb shank. I should have known that yesterday.
And how was the tagine? Somehow I don't like the recipe, so I wasn't too unhappy to somewhat change the content. The shanks were smaller than usual, only 635 g for both of them, but I used roughly the normal amount of the other ingredients. The result:
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This was also the first time to try out the preserved lemons that I started in late June:
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They last a long time. The not-quite-empty jar of commercially preserved lemons expired over 10 years ago:
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The new ones aren't as powerful. I think I'll have to get used to them.
| Monday, 5 August 2024 | Dereel | |
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Understanding cable problems
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My new 3 m DisplayPort cable is here already. Installing it isn't as easy as it seems. Yes, physically attaching it is straightforward enough, but using it properly means braving nvidia-settings and of course restarting all my X sessions. Still, I should check that it works, so I connected monitor 3 via the new cable to the output for monitor 2, and connected the identical monitor 2 with the existing HDMI cable to the output for monitor 3.
All worked. By rights the flashes and dropouts that I had had before on monitor 3 should now have occurred on monitor 2. But they didn't. Why? One possibility could be that there was something wrong with monitor 3, but my guess is that it's an issue with the HDMI cable standard itself: it's far to easy to plug in the cable at a slight angle, and that could give rise to suboptimal connections, causing the effects I have seen. Reconnected the cables the other way round again, paying attention to the correct angle, and see what happens. So far there have been no further issues.
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More flashes on TV
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Topic: multimedia, technology | Link here |
Watching an old programme on ZDF this evening, „Freunde für's Leben“. And once again I got these strange flashes that appeared to be due to the video source confusing the TV. Even when I pressed “Pause”, the flashing continued. Even describing it is difficult. Dark sections of the image flash white. How do I track it down? An obvious start would be to recode the file and see if the recoded version also causes the effect. If not, at least we have a workaround.
| Tuesday, 6 August 2024 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 6 August 2024 |
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Catching rats
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Topic: Stones Road house, animals, general | Link here |
Where are all my mousetraps? I can't find any of them, only a conventional rat trap. Yesterday I baited it and put it in the ceiling. This morning it had sprung, but nothing was there except for the original bait. I think modern rats are too clever for conventional traps, and the other traps I have are for mice. Based on the noises I hear, not to mention the length of the hair that came from the air conditioner duct, I'm pretty sure that these are rats. So we need another solution.
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Bruno and Mona
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Seen this afternoon:
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They're not exactly lying together, but they're coming close. It seems that the aloofness is due to Mona, not Bruno, not what I had expected. After these photos, she got up and walked away.
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Into town again
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Topic: health, animals, general | Link here |
Into town in the afternoon to have my 6-monthly dental checkup, with nothing of interest to report. Then on to Bunnings, where I bought some rat “poison”. In fact it's not poisonous: it seems that it suppresses the rodents' thirst, thus causing them to dry up and die. For that it takes several days, so it comes out considerably more expensive than conventional poison. Also bought a couple more door latches; some are bound to fail soon.
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Flickering video display, again
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
More playing around with the flickering/flashing display that I had investigated yesterday, with little progress. Tried recoding it like this:
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/12) /spool/Series/Freunde-fuers-Leben/01 7 -> ffmpeg -i 01-04-Pillengluck.mp4 -c copy foo.mp4
The result? Still flashes. Even the root screen flashes! An obvious further investigation occurred to me later: try displaying it with tiwi. Both computers are connected to the TV, so it's as simple as changing the input. Mañana.
| Wednesday, 7 August 2024 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 7 August 2024 |
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Pancreas MRI results
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Topic: health | Link here |
Today Yvonne had an appointment with Mr. Kontoku Shimokawa to discuss the results of last week's MRI. They were potentially serious—last time there were significant concerns, which Yvonne had tried to play down, so I went along as well.
Good news: hardly any change. No new MRI for another year, and not then if Yvonne has any say in it.
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Powercor vandalism
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
I've had disputes with Powercor, our electricity supplier, almost since I met them. They have people who come by and trim trees that, in their opinion, could pose a hazard for power lines. Their opinion is more than dubious, but by default they have the right to enter people's properties and do their damage. As a result I have prohibited them access to my property, and they respect that: yesterday somebody knocked me out of bed and asked if he could look around. No trimming? No. So yes, OK.
A good thing, though. Today I saw this:
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That's an Acacia melanoxylon in front of the Swifts' house. Yes, a power line runs within about 20 m of it, but there are much higher trees behind. Clearly the trimmer couldn't reach them, so he picked on the low-hanging fruit. Here another case, the tree in the foreground:
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How can they get away with that kind of mutilation? It's a good argument for burying the power cables.
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teevee progress?
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Somehow I'm not making much progress with teevee. Some reasons are clear: messing around with cables, especially HDMI, is stress-inducing, potentially it could take more time than I am willing to expend, and “if it works, don't fix it”. But it needs to be done, and today I was reminded forcefully that there's still an issue with fvwm 2:
Aug 7 18:02:59 teevee kernel: pid 25117 (fvwm), jid 0, uid 1004: exited on signal 6 (core dumped)
Aug 7 18:02:59 teevee kernel: pid 25118 (fvwm), jid 0, uid 1004: exited on signal 6 (core dumped)
Aug 7 18:02:59 teevee kernel: pid 25119 (fvwm), jid 0, uid 1004: exited on signal 6 (core dumped)
For reasons I don't understand, fvwm(2) just didn't want to talk to the X server. I've seen this before, and it's the reason that I'm migrating to fvwm3. But this suddenly makes it more urgent.
| Thursday, 8 August 2024 | Dereel | |
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If it ain't broke, don't fix it
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Topic: technology | Link here |
It's time to reconfigure my X displays Yet Again, so that the LG 27UP850 monitors are both connected via DisplayPort. But the flickering has stopped, so I moved on to other things, notably trying to update my X configuration. And I didn't even manage much of that.
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Chasing the TV flickering
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
What I did manage was to compare my flickering video output between teevee and tiwi. Surprise, surprise. It doesn't happen on tiwi. Same video file. Same software (mpv), though a slightly older version. Same TV. About the only thing that comes to mind is the display card. That would also explain why the flickering extends to other windows, including the root windows.
The other thing that I noticed was that the flickering went away when I repositioned the video stream and then returned to the same place. I don't know what to make of that.
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Baiting rodents
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Yesterday I put a container in the ceiling with some of the rodent bait that I bought on Tuesday. Did they eat it? There was still a lot left when I checked today. But yes, they ate more than half of it, about 35 g. The instructions suggest 10-15 g for mice or 40-60 g for rats, and I had put in 60 g. It's not really clear what that means one way or another.
| Friday, 9 August 2024 | Dereel | |
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The daily X pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been dragging my heels on updating my X configurations. What do I do first? I want minimum down time, particularly on hydra. And it's becoming clear that I have to do something to rearrange my resource names. Currently I give my xterms names that have “just growed”: xterm-rs, xterm-r, xterm-rx, xterm-rsx, xterm-rsxa, xterm-rsxd, xterm-rsxp, xterm-rsxrad, xterm-rsxrap, xterm-rsxraz, xterm-lx and xterm-lsxraz. What do they mean? The -l and -r refer to left and right sides, the s probably to a root shell. And the rest is a case of UTSL. It seems that some aren't even used! Time for better names that reflect the class of system to which they refer. The intention is that the window borders and icons have different colours, and that the windows get placed in different places on the screen (thus “left” and “right”). So how about names like xterm-tv-r for an xterm running from teevee or tiwi and being placed on the right side of the screen? Then we need colours like (as a first cut):
| systems | left | right | root | |||
| teevee, tiwi | green/black | green/black | black/chartreuse | |||
| lagoon | green/black | green/black | white/purple | |||
| hydra | yellow/black | yellow/black | white/violetred | |||
| eureka | yellow/black | yellow/black | white/orangered | |||
| test boxen | ? | |||||
In the meantime, though, there's this clipboard interface. On this page I read:
xterm*VT100.Translations: #override \
Shift <Key>Insert: insert-selection(SELECT) \n\
Ctrl Shift <Key>V: insert-selection(SELECT) \n\
Ctrl Shift <Key>C: copy-selection(SELECT)
OK, that's straightforward enough. Copy into .Xdefaults and load it. No reaction! c-s-c just generated a c-c and passed it to the shell.
More searching. Yes, of course, that's for xterm, and my xterms have names like xterm-rsrad. Try starting a new xterm without a name. Still no reaction! Somehow this parallels my experience with autocutsel, and I'm beginning to wonder if the real issues aren't in xclipboard. After a lot of messing around, I got it to copy somewhere with c-s-c and paste it with c-s-v, but xclipboard didn't want to know.
Maybe that's enough. xclipboard is really just a workaround. What I really want is to be able to copy from Microsoft and web browsers. But that requires still more messing around. And it looks as if I'll have to repeat this for every name I give to the windows.
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More git pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
A few days ago I reinstated my Makefile patch for editors/emacs-devel and “committed” it (locally). That seemed to have satisfied git to the point that it was happy to update the tree anyway.
Until today. Now it complains again. Please push or stash. But pushing didn't work: it returned an error 403. Presumably that's the HTTP “forbidden” error. Why?
OK, stash:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/6) /usr/ports/editors/emacs-devel 59 -> git stash
Saved working directory and index state WIP on main: 844c0c7d6849 x11/xclicker: new port: autoclicker for x11
What does that mean? I've never even heard of autoclicker. But after that I was able to access the tree.
Sometimes I think that I'm getting too old for this stuff.
| Saturday, 10 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 10 August 2024 |
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“Wise”: unwise choice?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
I've been using “Wise”, the stupidly renamed funds transfer company, for 6 years now. They haven't improved. At the time they had the name “Transferwise”, so they trimmed their name by discarding the descriptive part. And lately I can't even contact them. As far as I can see, there is no way at all any more.
As if that weren't enough, they have decided to annoy their customers by making them solve particularly annoying CAPTCHAs. I complained about this earlier this year, but they're still there.
This week they offered me protection against the Dark web. Oh, sorry, our mistake:
Yesterday, we emailed you offering free dark web monitoring. This was sent in error, so please disregard it. Instead, we’re offering you free credit monitoring — you’ll find more information below, including the URL you’ll need to enrol.
Can I trust them? The message points at https://www.equifax.com.au/protect. Is the message even kosher? That was the reason for me to log in, and once I had passed the hurdles, there was no information at all on the site.
OK, time to find an alternative.
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Learning X
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Fixing my X resources is not easy. Apart from the issues regarding the clipboard interface, still not solved, there's the question of the sheer number of resource definitions needed in .Xdefaults. Adding another 12 names for xterms will blow that list up by over 100 entries. Surely there must be some kind of inheritance.
After much searching, found: yes. There are resources and classes, and a whole lot of other things that I didn't know about. Chapter 9 of the X Window System User's Guide for X11 R3 and R4 of the X Window System, one of the books that I recently sent to Cornelius Keck, describes them. Clearly I have had the documentation, but by comparison with most modern documentation, it's so extensive that I still haven't got round to reading it all. It seems, though, that a resource described by a “name” inherits the resources of the class, so I can set the class (XTerm) for the resources that don't change from one name to the next. Time for experimentation, probably, but then there's the question of maintaining a smooth transition.
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Converting subtitles
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
We have a series of videos with a new subtitle format, DFXP. And for some reason mpv can't understand that.
See the entry for 11 August for the explanation.
There must be some program that can handle them. A web search found a number of online services, presumably requiring you to upload and download every file manually. There must be an easier way.
Yes! Netflix-to-srt, as they title it, claims to do exactly that. OK, download and try:
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/6) /spool/Series/The-Marvelous-Mrs-Maisel/01 7 -> python3 /usr/local/bin/to_srt.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/bin/to_srt.py", line 216, in <module>
main()
File "/usr/local/bin/to_srt.py", line 212, in main
f.write(to_srt(text, fn[-4:]))
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "/usr/local/bin/to_srt.py", line 73, in to_srt
return xml_to_srt(text)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "/usr/local/bin/to_srt.py", line 165, in xml_to_srt
content = re.search(content_re, s).group(1)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'
Not what I was looking for, not even close. The last thing I need is debugging Perl, especially since I have a guess that the program is broken.
And then there's ttml2ssa, which puts me off before I even start with the statement:
Note: ttml2ssa is not a full-featured TTML-to-SRT converter and only works on a small subset of TTML documents.
That doesn't sound any better than ttml2srt, which I already have. Maybe they're related.
OK, what do we have in the FreeBSD Ports Collection?
==== /usr/ports/multimedia/gaupol/pkg-descrGaupol is an editor for text-based subtitle files. It supports multiple subtitle file formats and provides convenient means of correcting texts and timing subtitles to match video. The user interface is designed with attention to batch processing of multiple documents and convenience of translating.
I could try that. But it seems to be the only possibility.
| Sunday, 11 August 2024 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 11 August 2024 |
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Overheated saucepan
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
It had to happen some time. I forgot to turn off the induction cooker after pouring out the contents of a saucepan, and then I put it back on the induction field:
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No great harm done, at least because I saw it in time. Could it have happened with other technology? Probably not with gas, since the flame is visible. And other electric? Probably. The big difference is probably just that I put the pots back on the cooktop, because they're cool.
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Die, rat, die!
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
The rats (or whatever they are) in the ceiling have decided that they like the rat bait that I have been offering them. So far they have eaten 170 g of it, leaving only 50 g over. That won't be enough to hold out until Tuesday, when Yvonne goes shopping. And it's important not to stop until they're dead. So into town today to buy some more.
It's expensive! Over $30 for a metric 454 g packet, and I needed 2. That certainly relativizes the cost of the electric mouse traps (round $40-50) that I have bought in the past. Hopefully the quantity will be sufficient.
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DFXP deciphered
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
More investigation into the DFXP subtitle format. To my surprise, Wikipedia redirects to TTML, where I read:
Timed Text Markup Language (TTML), previously referred to as Distribution Format Exchange Profile (DFXP),
Oh. I can do TTML. Why am I having trouble with DFXP? A quick look at it with Emacs is surprising:
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That doesn't look like any form of XML. Is it encrypted? What does less say?
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-16'?>
<tt xmlns="http://www.w3.org/ns/ttml" xmlns:xml="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace" xml:lang="en" xmlns:ttp="http://www.w3.org/ns/ttml#parameter" ttp:frameRate="25" ttp:frameRateMultiplier="1 1" ttp:timeBase="media">
<head>
<styling>
<style xml:id="Swift" xmlns:tts="http://www.w3.org/ns/ttml#styling" tts:color="white" tts:textAlign="left" tts:extent="720px 576px" tts:fontFamily="Arial" tts:fontSize="18"/>
That looks more normal. What is Emacs complaining about? That UTF-16 header? Let's change it to UTF-8:
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/14) /spool/Series/The-Marvelous-Mrs-Maisel/01 5 -> sed 's:UTF-16:UTF-8:' < 01-05_-_Doink.en.dfxp > 01-05_-_Doink.ttml
But for some reason it came up with an error message that I didn't write down, and which I couldn't repeat. In the end I used vi. And yes, the TTML file was readable, but mpv didn't want to know. I first had to convert it to srt format, after which things worked.
Why is this all so complicated?
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More video flashing
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
This strange flashing (or flickering) on video output continues. So far I had only seen it on ZDF content, but this evening I saw it on another German channel. What's causing it?
So far I have established:
So what should I investigate now? teevee and tiwi are almost identical, both ThinkCentres running FreeBSD. They both have Nvidia display cards, though a different model. Could it be an issue with the card or driver? I suppose I should try a different (non-proprietary) driver for the card and see if it still happens.
| Monday, 12 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 12 August 2024 |
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Revisiting the house forest
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
I suppose it's an indication of my laziness that it has been over two years since I last recorded visiting the “house forest”, the westernmost 4000 m² of our property, the part that is covered in trees.
Finally persuaded Yvonne to let me take the dogs down there to walk today: it seems that a mob of kangaroos has taken up residence there, and they were in evidence today, enough that we couldn't let the dogs off the line.
We still have bracken down there, but the attempts to limit it have been quite successful:
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The second photo shows our property on the right of the fence, and the neighbours on the left.
Apart from that, though, there's little to be seen. No orchids or mushrooms, unlike in previous years.
| Tuesday, 13 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 13 August 2024 |
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Mee goreng mamak, done?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I've made mee goreng mamak a number of times now, but I've never been really happy with it. OK, search the web for recipes, of which there are now many more. The recipe I have is from Wendy Hutton's “Singapore Food”, which I have found to have a number of good recipes. What else is out there?
Nothing much, it seems. Somehow many omit the basic ingredients. As one said, “omit this ingredient and you just have plain mee goreng”. For me, the important additional ingredients are potatoes and curry leaf. A surprising number of the recipes omitted potatoes, and all the ones I looked at omitted the curry leaves.
So: why am I not happy with the recipe as it stands? Not enough spices? Today I addressed that issue. Here the quantities before and after:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 150 → 180 g | Hokkien noodles or similar, cooked | 1 | ||
| 30 → 45 g | onion | 2 | ||
| 10 → 15 g | garlic | 2 | ||
| 30 → 48 g | squid tubes | 2 | ||
| 60 → 78 g | firm dofu | 2 | ||
| 60 → 88 g | fresh tomato | 2 | ||
| 60 → 84 g | cooked potato | 2 | ||
| 30 → 36 g | soya sauce | 3 | ||
| 10 → 15 g | dark soya sauce | 3 | ||
| 15 → 25 g | sambal ulek | 3 | ||
| 15 → 18 g | tomato sauce | 3 | ||
| 1 | egg | 4 | ||
| oil | 5 | |||
| 60 g | taugeh | 8 | ||
| 2 fronds | karuveppilai (curry leaves) | 8 | ||
| spring onion leaves | ||||
| lime segments | 8 |
And how about that, that made a difference:
But the total serving size was more than I really wanted to eat, so for next time I'll I'll probably leave them unchanged next time.
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Musk's X server issues
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Topic: politics, technology, opinion | Link here |
Today was another big day for Elon
Musk, interviewing Donald
Trump on TwitterX.
But things didn't go according to plan. It seems that his X servers got a DDoS. I suppose that's a different problem from the ones I have with my X servers.
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More system upgrades
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
This flashing on hydra monitor 2 still isn't going away, so it's finally time to reconnect the monitors: swap monitor 0 (DVI via DisplayPort) and monitor 2 (HDMI). They have different resolutions, and I was expecting a bit of fun, so I started X server 4 to do the configuration on.
I got my fun. Things froze completely. All X servers were in state D (short-term disk wait), but they didn't use any CPU time. The mouse was dead, and there was no way to switch away from the server. I could access the system from eureka, but I couldn't stop the X server. It seems that the 3 X servers deadlocked:
=== root@hydra (/dev/pts/29) /home/grog 17 -> ps alx | grep Xorg
0 31576 31575 14 20 0 26145684 701752 os.sema_ D v0 54:01.40 /usr/local/libexec/Xorg :0 -config xorg-0.conf -logverbose 6 -listen tcp -auth /home/grog/.serverauth.31555
0 38500 38499 28 20 0 25967316 448592 nvidia-m D 13 23:14.48 /usr/local/libexec/Xorg :1 -config xorg-1.conf -logverbose 6 -listen tcp -auth /home/grog/.serverauth.38479
0 95170 1 13 20 0 30288 19200 os.rwloc D 28 0:00.01 /usr/local/libexec/Xorg :4 -config xorg-4.conf -logverbose 6 -listen tcp -auth /home/grog/.serverauth.95149
0 95263 95237 18 20 0 12868 2344 piperd S+ 29 0:00.00 grep Xorg
Nothing for it: reboot. At least that worked, and I was able to fight nvidia-settings to configure things. This time it didn't want to give me relative positioning, try as I might. It just complained about saving absolute positions. Somehow this Nvidia software is really buggy. I've had crash on boot (CrowdStrike syndrome). Hang on server start. Different nvidia-settings behaviour depending something that I haven't identified yet. Maybe the cause of the flashes in TV video output? I should try running the free nv driver on teevee.
Still, I had the old and new xorg.conf files, so I could apply the changes that I really needed:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/9) /etc/X11 16 -> rcsdiff -wur1.7 -U 1 xorg-0.conf
===================================================================
RCS file: RCS/xorg-0.conf,v
retrieving revision 1.7
diff -wu -U 1 -r1.7 xorg-0.conf
--- xorg-0.conf 2024/07/29 02:00:12 1.7
+++ xorg-0.conf 2024/08/13 02:44:56
@@ -115,5 +115,4 @@
DefaultDepth 24
- Option "nvidiaXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-0"
Option "Stereo" "0"
- Option "metamodes" "DP-3: nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
+ Option "metamodes" "HDMI-1: nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
Option "SLI" "Off"
@@ -132,3 +131,2 @@
Option "Stereo" "0"
- Option "nvidiaXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-1"
Option "metamodes" "DP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
@@ -148,4 +146,3 @@
Option "Stereo" "0"
- Option "nvidiaXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-3"
- Option "metamodes" "HDMI-1: nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
+ Option "metamodes" "DP-2: nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
Option "SLI" "Off"
The metamodes are clear. But what's this nvidiaXineramaInfoOrder? They seem to be forgotten entries for (wait for it) Xinerama. But they were only there for 3 of the 4 monitors, and Xinerama was disabled. Another untidy corner.
The good news: after that, everything worked as I had hoped. But why is this always so difficult?
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Configuration: so nice, so nice, we do it twice
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I still had time, so how about finally migrating teevee to fvwm version 3? Brought it into the office for that purpose, which proved to be helpful. And with only a couple of stumbles managed to get it up and running. Only somehow the .Xdefaults don't seem to work as specified. Have I forgotten to update a configuration file? Somehow included the wrong one? Now that the main work is done, I have time to check things through at my leisure.
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Jane Ashhurst visits
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Topic: general | Link here |
Jane Ashhurst along today for a week's visit. This is planned to be a regular thing, now that Carlotta is back here.
| Wednesday, 14 August 2024 | Dereel | |
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The pain of upgrading
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've had hydra for 10 months now, and I'm almost done. But there are still a number of issues that I need to clarify, most of which don't have that much to do with the hardware, now that I have my monitors installed the way I want.
By now eureka should have been degraded to Internet server roles such as mail and web servers. But I'm still using it for my day-to-day work. I can't use MediathekView on hydra because the newer versions have some weird Java (programming language) incompatibility. I still don't have a complete set of X fonts. VirtualBox doesn't work reliably, so one of the reasons for my ridiculous amount of memory has gone away. And somehow there are issues marking text with the mouse, possibly related to the strangenesses of reconciling cut buffer and clipboard: while marking, the start point frequently resets, and I have to start again. I can't even use Emacs all the time because of this weird Multi_key issue. Other issues crop up that I manage to forget about until they bite me again.
Today I investigated the Emacs issue. I didn't find a solution, only more problems. The Multi_key issue doesn't crop up in teevee, which is still using Emacs 29.4, but on start I get a message:
(emacs:4836): dbind-WARNING **: 14:34:56.509: Couldn't register with accessibility bus: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
It doesn't seem to be serious, and it looks like it's some Linux-related pain, but I didn't have it before.
And Multi_key? I had the issue last December, but I worked around it by installing the development version, which then brought the issues with sporadic crashes because of the “pure-GTK” configuration. And now that I have removed that, Multi_key no longer works.
And this time web searches don't help. One page suggested:
(keymap-global-set "<Multi_key>" iso-transl-ctl-x-8-map)
That gets rid of the message, yes, along with any functionality that went with the key.
And then there's VirtualBox. I'm still running release 6, and looking at this bug report, it looks like an upgrade to the current version 7 is in doubt. Is this an indication that FreeBSD is in trouble?
I've been running eureka for 10 years now, almost unchanged, and during that time I've had little trouble. No wonder I didn't want to upgrade it.
| Thursday, 15 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 15 August 2024 |
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Flying, then and now
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Topic: history, opinion | Link here |
Sixty years ago today my father and I flew from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore and back. Nowadays that would involve hours of checking in and security in the airport. But we made it there and back in roughly 12 hours, including significant shopping in Singapore. We somehow made it to Singapore within 2 hours of getting up, including driving across KL, something that now takes between 36 minutes (on roads that didn't exist at the time) and 56 minutes. But we were there in 35 minutes.
No wonder I don't want to fly any more.
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More proof of life
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
A letter from Info retraite today, apparently a successor institution of CNAV, the French pension fund, claiming « Le site officiel qui simplifie la retraite » (“the official site that simplifies retirement”). They want to know if Yvonne is still alive. In principle that's normal, but in the past we have had untold communication problems. And once again the letter was nearly a month old—dated 27 July—though the post mark showed that it had been posted in France (Paris only two days later, so they must have found the cheapest postage method.
On the whole, things look a lot more professional, but one thing was interesting: an on-line access, reminiscent of the German POSTIDENT. That was a disaster. Is CNAV any better? After fighting my way through particularly obscure instructions, it seems that the only way for Yvonne is via a password-protected account. Ha ha, only joking:
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“Creation of a password-protected account is currently being updated. Please choose FranceConnect". And that doesn't seem to work at all: first you need to choose a kind of account, none of which match pensions. So it really seems that they're trying to copy POSTIDENT.
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Guillotining Greg
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Topic: general, health, technology, opinion | Link here |
Baking bread today, which involves lining the bread form with baking paper. And what better to cut it with than with the guillotine that I bought for photographic purposes in December 1967? That's the way I always do it, but today, for some reason, I raised my hand inappropriately after putting the paper in place. After treatment, it looks like this:
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The mess on my thumbnail is adhesive from the plaster.
That means, of course, that the thumb is covered:
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And in turn, that means that I can no longer authenticate myself to my phone with it. For the first time I recognize the usefulness of a fingerprint instead of a thumbprint.
| Friday, 16 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 16 August 2024 |
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Eternal cooking
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Topic: food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
Having Jane here means that we're cooking more than usual. So far we have had two dishwashers full every day, and today was no exception.
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“Wise” scam?
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Interesting message my mail today:
88 + 16-08-2024 To groggyhimself@lem ( 593) W̲i̲s̲e̲ + Ticket (AU-K421004) : Enable 2FA and Verify Your Details by August 20
Bloody 2FA again! Somehow “Wise”, the money transfer people who used to have the too-descriptive name “Transferwise”, get on my nerves. How do I even know if it's kosher? Is there anything on their web site about it? No, but a week ago they sent me mail offering a service that really does look OK, but there's nothing about that on their web site either.
OK, what's in the message? Where does it link to? Lots of references to things like href="https://wise.com/send-money", which seems harmless. But then:
<a class="m_-5296111275490424039btn-accent" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://api.transferwise.com/v1/notification-flow/messages/9032ba97-85d0-48a2-b588-c4c8e3be23f2/deliveries/afb0987b-d852-4b3c-9c91-b06b1a4160e7/linkClicks?name%3Dverify%26link%3DaHR0cHM6Ly93aXNlLmNvbS9wcm9maWxlLWluZm9ybWF0aW9uLWNvbmZpcm1hdGlvbg%26hash%3D2827aacdcef328a08d277ed9f606d225&source=gmail&ust=1718018382513000&usg=AOvVaw03kJJjeepFA-fYNXJNvtLL" href="https://nadhihmeda.hosted.phplist.com/lists/lt.php?tid=fR8EU1NeVwAMVxlaBwVZGQFdAAtJV1FRAxwCDlRXA1YCVFZXBAUYBgUAV1pTA10ZV1oBUEkBAFRSHABfB1VPBlBVA1cDVFFVBgYFHgcFWQwBWwQHSQ0MU1QcVQ1RBE9VAQVRGwVVAFMFUlUAUgAAUg" rel="noopener" style="padding: 0px 48px; border-radius: 9999px; border: 1px solid transparent; border-image: none; width: 520px; height: 48px; color: rgb(17, 85, 204); text-transform: none; line-height: 48px; text-indent: 0px; letter-spacing: 0em; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 600; margin-bottom: 0px; word-spacing: 0px; vertical-align: middle; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; min-height: 48px; max-height: 48px; box-sizing: border-box; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-image: none; background-color: rgb(159, 232, 112); font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Wise.com/login</a></p>
What's that? A particularly obfuscated link that seems to have nothing to do with “Wise“. But maybe it's a particularly clever web programmer, and it's really kosher after all.
But they did one thing wrong: they sent it twice to two different mail addresses:
87 N 15-08-2024 To gurgly@lemis.com ( 593) W̲i̲s̲e̲ N Ticket (AU-K421004) : Enable 2FA and Verify Your Details by August 20
88 + 16-08-2024 To groggyhimself@lem ( 593) W̲i̲s̲e̲ + Ticket (AU-K421004) : Enable 2FA and Verify Your Details by August 20
And neither of those addresses should be known to “Wise”. I didn't receive a message on the correct email address. So clearly this is a scam.
But how do normal people find out about that? Use your “all my eggs in one basket” Google login and you have no hope. And the fact that there are foreign URLs doesn't mean that much any more. Neither, I suspect, does the lack of a mention on their own web site, and since I can no longer contact them, there's little that I can do to be sure. No wonder web scams are on the increase: idiots like “Wise” (idiot savant?) help them.
It wasn't until later that I checked the headers, which added further fuel to my suspicions:
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=yatescuela.com;
...
Authentication-Results: server1.simbolodigital.es;
spf=pass (sender IP is 195.210.28.81) smtp.mailfrom=fanox@yatescuela.com smtp.helo=vpsodakra.vps.wbsprt.com
Received-SPF: pass (server1.simbolodigital.es: connection is authenticated)
From: W̲i̲s̲e̲ <fanox@yatescuela.com>
In particular, the From: address seems to be a smoking gun.
| Saturday, 17 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 17 August 2024 |
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Cassoulet again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Cassoulet for dinner again today. We don't cook it very often—the last time was nearly 3 years ago—and I had to revisit the whole question of quantities and cooking times.
First, the beans. I had written that they can be cooked in an hour, but last time I cooked baked beans they took forever to cook. I really should start a bean cooking times page analogous to my noodle cooking times page.
Still, is there anything on the packaging of the beans themselves? Yes!
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Soak for 6 hours, cook for 35 minutes. That looks very short. And by chance I came across a bag of black beans from the same supplier. Clearly the text on the packaging was different: it includes the description of the beans. But the cooking instructions were identical. Sorry, McKenzies, I don't believe you.
In the end I soaked them overnight and then cooked them as always. They took about 2 hours to be cooked, still much shorter than my last baked beans.
And then there was the fat. To do it right I needed duck fat, and we had that. But it was rancid! Not once, but two different containers. We really should use it more frequently. So I had to use lard instead.
And apart from that? I had forgotten how simple the recipe is: meat, tomatoes, beans, a bit of garlic. And that's it apart from the gratin.
But: the recipe calls for cooking the beans in a saucepan and then transferring to the cassole. Did that:
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Oh. Looking more closely,
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The cassole cracked! We have only used it twice! Presumably the shock of pouring in the hot beans was too much of a shock. Growl!
And once again I couldn't get the gratin the way I wanted it. I had thought that by letting the beans cool down before putting them into the oven, they wouldn't boil so much. Not so:
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Somehow I still need to think things through.
The other thing to think about is the amount of salt. Originally I chose 55 g for this quantity of beans, but today I put in 45 g and it was almost too much. I think I'll go for 40 g in the future.
Jane liked the dish, so much so that she had to send Scott a photo taken with her mobile phone:
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Of course, maybe there was a little trouble:
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| Sunday, 18 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 18 August 2024 |
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Spring on its way?
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, gardening | Link here |
It's been a surprisingly cool, dry winter, or at least the past few weeks: in the last 3 weeks we had a total of 3 mm of rain. That changed yesterday, when we had 11.6 mm (or 11.0, depending the rain gauge). And that swept a lot of water towards the entrance, taking a large amount of acacia pollen with it:
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| Monday, 19 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 19 August 2024 |
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What am I doing?
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Topic: general | Link here |
The last few days I seem to have done almost nothing. Why? It's not as if I haven't been busy, but I've been doing a lot of cooking, and although Jane's presence doesn't have much direct influence on me, somehow I'm continually busy with nothing of interest to report.
She's leaving tomorrow. We'll see if that makes any difference.
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Warning from lemis.com
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Seen in today's mail:
11 + 19-08-2024 To groggyhimself@lemis.c ( 174) lemis.com + Security alert
Huh? From: address (after the length) lemis.com? Still, let's read...
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Looks just like one of those silly Google warning that I keep complaining about. When did it happen? What IP address? About the only thing that I can be reasonably sure of is that I didn't log in with a MacBook Pro.
It took a little while to sink in: it claims to come from lemis.com, specifically https://lemis.com/activity/notifications. That's simple: the URL doesn't exist, and I currently (still) don't do HTTPS. And indeed the headers show:
From info@qorkemconcept.com Mon Aug 19 21:39:05 2024
Return-Path: <info@qorkemconcept.com>
X-Original-To: grog@lemis.com
Delivered-To: grog@lemis.com
Received: from lax.lemis.com (www.lemis.com [45.32.70.18])
by eureka.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7AAD126359F
for <grog@lemis.com>; Mon, 19 Aug 2024 21:39:05 +1000 (AEST)
Received: from tac3.qorkemconcept.com (tac3.qorkemconcept.com [23.94.225.47])
by lax.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id B9D7A280CE
for <grog@lemis.com>; Mon, 19 Aug 2024 11:39:04 +0000 (UTC)
From: "lemis.com" <no-reply@accountprotection.lemis.com>
What worries me is that it didn't hit me immediately. These scams are getting more sophisticated, and once again they're abusing the vagueness of real security warnings.
| Tuesday, 20 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 20 August 2024 |
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Mona: four months
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Mona has been with us for 4 months now, and she still hasn't come to terms with the dogs—she still attacks Larissa when she comes too close. But things with Bruno are improving. Seen here in the middle of the night:
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It's not clear from this particularly bad first photo, but Bruno is licking Mona. By the time I returned with a flash trigger, the tide had turned. Still, a good sign.
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Colour balance: still not there
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
When I found Bruno and Mona, there was very little light, and the only camera at hand was the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-200 mm f/3.5-6.3, a combination that really wasn't up to the task: the image shown above was taken at 1/5 s, f/6.1 (maximum for that focal length) and ISO 3200/36°. The quality is accordingly bad. But what really gets me is that I can't adjust the white balance to match the second image. Is this just DxO PhotoLab, or am I missing something basic? In any case, I'll put the OM-D E-M1 Mark II with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 45 mm f/1.8, which should give 3½ stops more light. But that won't address the colour balance issues.
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Goodbye, Jane
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Topic: general | Link here |
Jane Ashhurst left round 9:15 this morning. It took her 10 hours to get home.
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The news, different views
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Topic: general | Link here |
Seen in my mail this morning:
25 N 20-08-2024 To courgroger@l ( 924) The Courier Drug dealer who drove into oncoming traffic at 100kmh, jailed
26 N 20-08-2024 To ninenow@lemi ( 519) nine.com.au Tributes for Aussie sports journalist killed in tragic accident
Somehow the two seem related, but of course they weren't. But how can somebody drive into oncoming traffic at 100 km/h and survive?
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Selling the lawn mower
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Topic: general, gardening, technology, opinion | Link here |
Spring is on its way, time to sell my old lawn mower:
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After the pain I have had selling things on eBay, I put the advertisement in Gumtree, the first time I have sold anything there. They don't make it easy, and after I finally submitted the advertisement (fourth attempt), I discovered that they had offered it for free! It seems that they don't like the $ symbol in their ads, and they're too polite to complain, so they just set the value to 0.
Maybe that's why I got this reply:
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What's that? Is it kosher? On the web site I saw:
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That really doesn't look plausible, but OK, I'm taking PayPal, so I sent him a payment request. That'll probably be the last I hear of it.
| Wednesday, 21 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 21 August 2024 |
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More cat accustomation
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Topic: animals | Link here |
It really seems that Mona and Bruno are finally coming together:
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But it always seems as if Bruno isn't completely comfortable with the idea.
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Microsoft: unexpected success!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Overnight distress.lemis.com had to reboot, because Microsoft said so. When it came up again, it seems to have been surprised:
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Of course, everything's relative:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/10) /dump/distress-Microsoft 151 -> l DISTRESS/Backup\ Set\ 2024-07-22\ 104007/
drwxr-xr-x 3 grog wheel 8,192 22 Jul 11:57 Backup Files 2024-07-22 104007
drwxr-xr-x 3 grog wheel 1,536 30 Jul 09:29 Backup Files 2024-07-30 091357
drwxr-xr-x 3 grog wheel 1,024 5 Aug 10:12 Backup Files 2024-08-05 100306
drwxr-xr-x 3 grog wheel 1,024 12 Aug 10:53 Backup Files 2024-08-12 104300
drwxr-xr-x 3 grog wheel 1,536 18 Aug 19:15 Backup Files 2024-08-18 190024
The last backup is 3 days old. I wonder why the intervals are so inconsistent.
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Developing Affinity
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Serif have brought out a new offer: 6 month extended free trial for their Affinity photo processing software. How can I refuse?
Well, it took me several weeks and a reminder before I finally installed it. After all, I did try it 7 years ago and came to the conclusion that it wasn't for me. But 7 years is a long time, so it's worth trying again. And once again I'm presented with a new, confusing interface and confusing terminology: no longer do I process a photo, it's a “document”. At least that presumably means that I won't have to “develop” it.
Started watching some videos that don't really tell me anything I want to know. Maybe it will improve, but so far I'm left with the feeling that the documentation is written by people who don't understand their target audience.
| Thursday, 22 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 22 August 2024 |
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Cats coming together
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
It seems that the cats have finally decided to stay together. Here in the middle of the night and then again later in the day:
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I think we can safely assume that they've finally found each other.
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Larissa trapped
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Looking out my bedroom window this morning, I saw:
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That's inside the fenced-off area. How did she get there? In principle, any dog of that size should be able to jump over the fence, but Larissa is a Borzoi, and they can't. Yvonne had to help her out. How she got in remains a mystery.
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KL to Singapore and back
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Topic: history, general | Link here |
I got some feedback about my trip to to KL 60 years ago from Ian Donaldson, who lives in Singapore. On 14 August 2024 he flew from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur and back. It's interesting to compare the times.
First, he corrected my assumptions about the time to get to the airport in 1964. I was assuming that we left from Subang airport, but that didn't open until the following year, so we would have gone to Sungei Besi airport. And I had also chosen the wrong starting point. In those days we lived in Lorong Kuda, and to my surprise the best route would be the same today as it was then: 18 minutes, and not the 36 to 56 minutes that I had estimated. That explains how we could have been at the airport 35 minutes after getting out of bed.
Still, comparing flights: we were in Singapore 85 minutes after arriving at the airport. Ian took as long for the flight alone, confirming my opinion that the flights themselves haven't got any faster.
Sixty years ago the 15:30 flight arrived at 16:50, 80 minutes, because (apparently) it had been behind schedule. Ian arrived at the airport at 17:48, but didn't land in Singapore until 20:39, nearly 2 hours later. His flight had also been behind schedule. But it's interesting to note that he cleared customs and immigration in 16 minutes, not bad for an international flight. Unfortunately, I didn't record the times 60 years ago (when it was a domestic flight; Singapore seceded from Malaysia only 2 years later.
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Bloody NBN again!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
A while back I was severely angered by the National Broadband Network performing maintenance work that effectively took me off the net for a whole day. Fortunately—I thought—those days are over. But today I received mail from Aussie Broadband, who report, in their inimitable markup:
NBN are planning network maintenance between **Mon 23rd September 2024 06:00 AEST** and **Tue 1st October 2024 18:00 AEST**, for **540 min**., for **480 min**., for **600 min**.
NBN are planning network maintenance between **Wed 2nd October 2024 06:00 AEST** and **Fri 11th October 2024 18:00 AEDT**, for **600 min**.
That's 37 hours over less than 3 weeks, roughly a third of the weekly working hours! Why is this needed? I've never heard of anything remotely as bad anywhere else. And interestingly, the last time was almost exactly 5 years before the current planned outages. Is there a significance?
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Debugging house electrics
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Topic: general | Link here |
A couple of days ago Yvonne's bedside lamp failed. OK, change the globe, not helped by the fact that it seems to be the only lamp in the house with a bayonet socket. But Yvonne found a second globe and tried it out. No reaction.
OK, says Yvonne, buy a new lamp. All of $7 second hand from the Salvos, and with a touch sensor that eliminates a conventional switch. Yvonne was going to throw out the old lamp, but I wanted to take a look.
Removed the lampshade and found:
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What's that? Some kind of dead insect that I didn't think to examine more carefully. But clearly the lamp needed debugging:
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That looks better. Put in the globe, turned on. Nothing.
Further investigation showed that there was a second switch. One is an inline switch on the cable, and that's the one that Yvonne used, but there's also a switch on the bulb mount, and it was off. Turn that on and it worked. Probably the bugs weren't an issue, though the fact that they were there at all is presumably a consequence of using low temperature LED globes instead of the old hot tungsten globes.
Somehow I feel like Grace Hopper.
| Friday, 23 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 23 August 2024 |
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Garden flowers in late winter
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Topic: gardening, general, opinion | Link here |
A month before the equinox, time for the monthly garden photos. There's not much to be expected in late winter, and the photos reflect that. But looking back through the years, things look even worse than in previous years. An obvious choice are the roses: there are no roses at all, the first time I recall that happening in August:
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And my Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” looks even unhappier than it did a month ago:
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Even the Pelargonium outside the verandah seems to have given up:
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And the “mystery bush” that we planted a year ago, and which initially grew well, has died. Here a year ago—there's nothing left to show now:
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Is there anything positive to report? Well, the daffodils are flowering in force, along with other bulbs:
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Some were covered by the Abutilon in front of my bedroom, but that didn't stop them:
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But somehow that's not enough. I'm seriously considering giving up gardening. In Kleins Road it was work, but it showed results. Here I'm paying people considerable sums of money to maintain what basically looks terrible. I can't even get the weeds kept under control. Time to convert it all into a lawn?
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COVID: Over and done with
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
It has been nearly 5 years since COVID-19 first appeared. Time for it to go? The statistics say no. But what does the Australian Government care about statistics? COVID is no longer safe. Seen on my phone today:
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All the data collected will now be deleted. Does that include vaccination certificates? I've already grumbled about how we couldn't get the vaccinations registered in our WHO vaccination certificates. Now gone forever? No, they (or at least mine) are registered in this diary.
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NBN outages explained
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Talking about the planned NBN outages on IRC today. Juha Kupiainen suggested that there might be a calendar entry attachment. Yes!
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:ical
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:66c66cd9ee768
DTSTART:20241001T200000Z
SEQUENCE:0
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
DTEND:20241011T070000Z
SUMMARY:There is an nbn outage in your area
CLASS:PUBLIC
DESCRIPTION:As part of a national rollout to upgrade the Fixed Wireless net
work\, nbn?? will be replacing hardware in your area. The program will fut
ure-proof sufficient capacity for new and existing customers on the networ
k. As tower climbing is required\, this work must be performed during the
day. You will experience one to two interruptions for up to 9 hours from 1
2:00 am to 09:00 am on a weeknight and/or for up to 12 hours from 06:00 am
to 06:00 pm on Saturday and/or Sunday. Some towers may have up to three f
urther interruptions to remediate any faults from the upgrade works.
DTSTAMP:20240822T084025Z
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
Savour that “As tower climbing is required\, this work must be performed during the day. You will experience one to two interruptions for up to 9 hours from 1 2:00 am to 09:00 am on a weeknight”. Nine hours in a seven hour interval? No, they're too polite to write “12:00” without spaces. But they'll arrange for it to be daytime between 1 2:00 and 9:00!
But why these proprietary attachments? Oh, I discover, they're not proprietary at all. It may be called iCalendar (somewhere), but it's supported by a number of RFCs. Maybe that's even worthwhile. But what gets me is the mindset that can lead to this statement in the Wikipedia page:
iCalendar is designed to be independent of the transport protocol.
Oh wonder!
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Synonyms for the imprecise
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
I'm subscribed to the “synonym of the day” from thesaurus.com. Their definition of “synonym” clearly deviates considerably from mine. My definition is in the OED:
a word having the same sense as another (in the same language)
But admittedly, even OED gives in and continues
more usually, either or any of two or more words (in the same language) having the same general sense, but possessing each of them meanings which are not shared by the other or others
Thesaurus.com takes this definition and runs with it. In the last couple of days I have had:
Somehow I can't get used to that idea plan.
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Understanding Gumtree
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Another message from Gumtree today:
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What seems strange about this message? The obvious thing would be the strange markup, but it seems that this is typical of mail messages from Gumtree. Still, follow up...
Oh. User has been deleted, for reasons that Gumtree won't divulge, but which could include abuse. More strangenesses to get used to.
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Catching up with lost threads
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Somehow I've been lazy lately, and I've left lots of things lie that really need attention. Today at least I made a start: back to looking at the makefs bug, requiring me to start my virtual machines again. But I didn't get much further than that.
Then there's the question of these strange flashes in some videos, notably from ZDF. I had wondered if it might be a bug in the Nvidia driver—it wouldn't be the first. Drag out the nv driver supplied with X. How do I configure it? Simplicity itself:
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/9) /etc/X11 49 -> diff -wu xorg.?.conf
--- xorg.0.conf 2022-09-30 16:08:25.976728000 +1000
+++ xorg.1.conf 2024-08-23 16:26:34.647427000 +1000
@@ -79,8 +79,8 @@
#Option "FPTweak"
#Option "DualHead"
Identifier "Card0"
- Driver "nvidia"
+ Driver "nv"
BoardName "C61 [GeForce 7025 / nForce 630a]"
Option "UseEDIDDpi" "FALSE"
Option "DPI" "120x120"
And it works. Now when I experience the flashing I can switch to server 1 and see if it happens there too.
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Rats over the house
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
I've been feeding to the the animals in our ceiling since 7 August. The instructions state that it can take 2 to 5 days to take effect, and another 3 to 7 days to die. But that would mean a worst case completion date of 19 August, 4 days ago. And whatever is up there is merrily eating this expensive bait.
Why? Not rodents? Could they be possums? Or is the stuff just ineffective for roof rats? The stated method is to stop them drinking. But where do roof rats find something to drink anyway? It's time to call in a professional.
| Saturday, 24 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 24 August 2024 |
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Busy day
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Topic: general | Link here |
Somehow I was busy all day today, first with my diary (including the garden photos), and then with cooking. I didn't even get as far as watching the news.
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Dumplings again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I was going to cook a biriani this evening, but we found a leftover bean salad, so I changed my mind and decided on a gulasch instead. And for that we need not one, but two different kinds of dumplings, Kartoffelknödel for Yvonne and Semmelknödel for me.
The recipes aren't that complicated, but somehow the quantities for the Semmelknödel were all wrong. For 180 g of dry bread I had specified 125 g of milk, but after processing the mass was dry as a bone. In the end I added a total of 200 g of liquid.
But that was too moist, as I discovered when I tried to form them. The result was less than attractive, though they tasted alright. By comparison, the Kartoffelknödel were pretty much what I had expected, though they too showed a tendency to disintegrate:
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And at the end we discovered that the bean salad had gone bad.
| Sunday, 25 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 25 August 2024 |
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The morning after the night before
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Topic: food and drink, general | Link here |
Somehow yesterday seemed to be a lot of work, culminating in cooking the dumplings for dinner. They're relatively simple, but somehow they resulted in the kitchen looking like a bomb site:
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Brave New World!
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Topic: history, opinion | Link here |
From time to time I quote Aldous Huxley's “Brave New World”, but it's been decades since I read it. My recollection of the content is vague: 5 grades of humans, classified Alpha (best) to Epsilon (semi-morons). And at the end, the hero escapes to a prison camp somewhere in the North Atlantic that proves to be a relief for him. And the mental images that I have centre round our house in Kota Bharu, which we left 67 years ago.
Is it really that long? I was 8 at the time. Clearly time to read it again. I have a copy which we seem to have inherited from my niece Heidi, who had it as a set book in English classes at school, and which contains a number of pencilled-in comments in German. And now it seems very different.
First, it's clear that Huxley was not a science fiction writer. Apart from the genetic engineering, such as it is, of human reproduction, it's firmly set in the early 20th century. No electronics beyond radio (the main means of communication) and “television boxes” for reproduction of films. No computers. No robots (that's what the epsilons are for). Clothing made of acetate and viscose. Audio playback is via “sound-track rolls”. Despite their genetic engineering, they haven't found a way to eliminate the need for contraception, and since the contraceptive pill had yet to be invented, fertile women carried a “Malthusian belt” of uncertain function. And surface transport appears to have ceased completely: people move around with manually steered helicopters. One of the more amusing touches was to replace God (a useless concept) with Henry Ford, the inventor of the production line, maybe with the aid of Freud. I'm surprised that they didn't have a song “Mit Ford und Freud ich fahr dahin”.
And what's it about? At the end of the story, I don't know. Clearly social criticism, but about what? My guesses are that Huxley (whose family was made of biologists, not writers) was commenting on the technology of the time.
The book comes with an explanatory preface, which I deliberately haven't yet read. I wanted to (re)form my own opinions first. About the only other thing that I recall, almost an afterthought in the book, is that at the end two of the leading characters in the book, Marx and Helmholtz, get sent to Iceland because they didn't fit into society. So my recollection wasn't completely wrong.
Still, all in all a puzzling book. Maybe the preface and other commentaries will enlighten me.
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Reading through the ages
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Topic: history, opinion | Link here |
I've been reading forever, as the previous article notes. And I've been communicating in writing for almost as long, writing letters on a frequent basis throughout my secondary schooling.
In my last year at university, I took a “speed reading” course, designed to increase the I/O rate of the act of reading. I wasn't overly convinced, but it worked: with practice you can fixate on the page of a smaller book (paperback, for example) and read the entire page without moving your eyes. By contrast, most people fixate on about 3 or 4 points on each line. Clearly the difference is significant, and at one point I was able to read an entire paperback in 5 minutes.
And the comprehension? Somewhat diminished, but only a little if you do it right. I don't know why I stopped doing it, but it was probably a combination of the reduced requirement to read large amounts of text after I left university and the fact that you need to keep in practice. Nowadays I spend a lot of time reading news on the screen, and it takes up a lot of time.
Because of the format? Partially. On-screen presentation can be painful. But there are still paperback novels around, like “Brave New World”. Not a big book—186 pages of chapters, which I could have read in 3 minutes at my peak. It has taken me a month.
Why? Clearly because I'm no longer in practice, but there's also the possibility that I needed to think of the implications, something that goes beyond I/O.
| Monday, 26 August 2024 | Dereel | |
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Understanding Affinity
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
So I've signed up for the 6 month trial of Affinity. After some searching, I've come up with this introduction:
Is it really an introduction? It starts by selecting a “document”, whatever that may be. And when I try, there are no documents. That's not surprising, but it also offers me more conventional menus at the top, something that doesn't appear in the tutorial. File offers me a relatively familiar Ctrl-o to open an image, and with some tree-climbing I can open an image.
And then? The display has almost nothing to do with the tutorial, though it does offer things like ”develop”. It took me some time to discover that “develop” means “convert raw image into some undefined internal representation”, after which I ended up in a display that looks similar to, but not the same as, the display in the tutorial. But at least the right-hand panel (which they confusingly refer to as a “studio”) is missing. Why? I have to follow the tutorial and go off at a tangent to discover that it's disabled. Maybe that happened while I was trying to navigate to the “document” view with the keyboard (H toggles “studio” visibility). So far my “experience” is so different that the tutorial is useless.
And while I was playing around with that, I accidentally pressed some key combination that completely reset the display. Just an empty cross-hatched area. I wasn't able to get rid of it. Tomorrow, maybe, but once again I'm left wondering why I bother: another thing that Affinity doesn't do is explain why (they claim that) it's better than the competition. And I'm only half way through an 8 minute tutorial. And it's full of strange uses of familiar terms. “Persona”, “liquify”, "studio", a use of “develop” that doesn't even seem to match the typical abuse of the term, and others which I have mercifully forgotten. And it complements them with lots of puzzling icons.
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Buying cheese online
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Topic: food and drink, technology, opinion | Link here |
We're out of Appenzeller cheese. How can we make a fondue? Well, we could make it out of only Gruyère, but we could also try to buy some more Appenzeller.
Campanas have already made clear that they can't (or won't?) get Appenzeller. Though they have a good choice of cheese, you wouldn't know it from their web site, which concentrates on their mainstream business, booze. So we'd have to order it in specially. Off to take a look at what Google suggests:
The first on the list also looked best: Alpine Express. They have a couple that I could accept, but they look a little young (silver label, four months old or less). I'd prefer surchoix (gold label, up to 6 months old). And yes, they have that on their list too.
Oh. Out of stock, which they only divulge when you select it. In fact, about half of the selection is out of stock. OK, move on.
Then there's Ninelife, which offers cheese for the discounted price of only $160.80 instead of $268. Normally a kilogram costs round $70 to $90, and that's what Alpine Express wants. But Ninelife is too polite to interest you with things like weights. I couldn't find out how much they're offering, only the dichotomy “Order within 12 hours and 16 minutes to get between September 16th - September 23rd”.
Still, they have other things on offer too. 1 lb (454 g in the real world) of cheese for only $205.50! Overnight delivery guaranteed.
Not enough? Hardly, especially at $450 per kilogram. But they can offer more: a whole wheel (about 15 lbs) for the special price of AU$ 1,096.80 instead of AU$ 1,828.00. That's still $160 per kilogram. But somewhere round here things become clear: this company is based in the USA, and they send everything here. Thus the strange units and time discrepancies. Move on.
The Artisan Cheese Room are clearly not gourmands: they sell a cheese at $95 per kg, but the maximum you can buy is 500 g.
Finally, Google gave me https://www.ubuy.com.kh/, which proves to be a Cambodian web site. Why? There's also https://www.u-buy.com.au/ (note the subtly different name), which offers me 4 lbs for only AUD 322 ($177 per kg). But in this case there's a catch: Note: Step Down Voltage Transformer required for using electronics products of US store (110-120). Recommended power converters Buy Now.
In summary: almost nothing. I can't find a gold label Appenzeller at all.
| Tuesday, 27 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 27 August 2024 |
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Yet another camera!
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
It's no secret that I have lots of cameras:
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But I hardly use any of them. In principle I could get by with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, but since I have others, it's convenient to use them too. I use the E-M1 Mark II for more complicated things, including the weekly house photos, while I keep the OM-D E-M1 Mark I with the M.Zuiko 12-200 mm f/3.5-6.3 zoom lens for less demanding photos. And then there's the E-PM2 that I carry in my handbag for unexpected shots, and Yvonne's OM-D E-M5 Mark III.
Enough? Well, of course, but things could be improved. I have been keeping the E-M1 (Mark I) in the lounge room for cat photos like this one:
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Not the best of results. It was relatively dark, and the lens limited maximum aperture to f/6.1, requiring 1/5 s at 3200/36° ISO, and I haven't been able to get rid of the colour artefacts. I could have got another lens, but then I could have missed the shot, as this attempt (with flash, only 2 minutes later) shows:
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What I need is a wide aperture lens. And of course I have at least two, the Leica Summilux 25 mm f/1.4 and the Voigtländer Nokton 25 mm f/0.95. The Voigtländer has the disadvantage of manual focus, so I chose the Summilux. I just need another camera, and for that I chose the E-PM2, which I replaced in my handbag with an E-PM1. And with the Summilux I could have taken the same image (still at 1/6 s, but f/1.4) at 200/24° ISO.
OK, do that, test:
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Yes, that works better, but look at that depth of field!
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Yvonne's face is in focus, but even the power point, only slightly closer, is clearly fuzzy. I'll have to pay particular attention to the focus point.
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Jing mian again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another attempt today at “jing mian” (capital noodles), an attempt to merge Beijing “fried sauce” noodles and KL Hokkien Mee:
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Not much difference: forget the michiu, use less water. And I'm still not convinced.
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VirtualBox again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been a while since I last tried to use my VirtualBox VMs. But I have this Ubuntu system that I installed a couple of months ago, and I wanted to look at the X fonts. Fired it up and... no networking!
What went wrong there? Did I forget to load the KLDs? No:
=== root@hydra (/dev/pts/12) ~ 23 -> kldstat | grep vbox
6 3 0xffffffff82c14000 590d0 vboxdrv.ko
7 2 0xffffffff82c6e000 4210 vboxnetflt.ko
10 1 0xffffffff82c82000 55b0 vboxnetadp.ko
That's all I need. Try again with tweedledum, a FreeBSD machine. No problems. And Microsoft? Fired up disaster and found:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/10) ~ 278 -> ping disaster
PING disaster.lemis.com (192.109.197.168): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.109.197.168: icmp_seq=0 ttl=128 time=0.181 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.168: icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=0.325 ms
...
That was the good news. But somehow it had decided to perform an update, something that I definitely didn't want. And when that was done, networking had gone away!
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/10) ~ 281 -> ping disaster
PING disaster.lemis.com (192.109.197.168): 56 data bytes
^C
--- disaster.lemis.com ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet loss=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/10) ~ 282 -> arp disaster
disaster.lemis.com (192.109.197.168) at 08:00:27:d4:23:94 on re0 expires in 1199 seconds [ethernet]
And somehow arp(8) kept showing expiry times of 1200 or 1199 seconds, suggesting that there had been some activity. Yes: tcpdump(8) showed continuous
15:36:07.573601 ARP, Request who-has eureka.lemis.com tell disaster.lemis.com, length 46
15:36:07.573605 ARP, Reply eureka.lemis.com is-at bc:5f:f4:c9:9b:bf (oui Unknown), length 28
Clearly disaster isn't receiving the reply from eureka. I've seen this before. What did I do then? Gave up.
Somehow there's something very strange about VirtualBox networking. All the problems I have are also network-related.
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Begone foul rat
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Clearly this horribly expensive “natural rat bait” doesn't kill rats. There are plenty of people who specialize in that, so did a web search and called up Southern and Beyond pest control in Sebastopol, mainly because they're the closest. The prognosis is not good: they'd just put in rat bait, though presumably the more effective poisonous kind.
I can do that too, of course. But yes, they confirmed that the poison can kill cats who eat the dead rats. But they can't get up into the ceiling. Never mind, maybe the rats come down from time to time. That would explain the droppings in the garage, and of course the cats' great interest in the garage.
So: I'm no further. How about a rat version of the cage that I have somewhere, and in which I once caught a mouse? Oh. I also once had a rat cage and caught a rat in it:
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Where is the cage? That was 13 years ago, and I can't recall having seen it since. Still, I should be able to find a new one.
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Chasing down the video flashing
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
Another video with “flashing” this evening, this time not from ZDF but from ARD. Just what I've been waiting for. Switch over to server 1:, running the nv driver and not the nvidia driver, view the same video at the same position. It flashes!
Oh. That's not what I had expected. But at least I have eliminated one potential culprit. What am I left with? It only ever happens on my TV and with some (mainly older) German videos. So we're left with three potential culprits: my Hisense A7G TV, the German videos and mpv, the video player. At least two of them must be in collusion, but which? I suppose I should install an unrelated video player (so MPlayer is eliminated) and see if that helps.
| Wednesday, 28 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 28 August 2024 |
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More VirtualBox fun
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday I was left with puzzles about the networking of my VirtualBox VMs. Today I tried to track it down.
I failed. Everything just worked. So what went wrong yesterday? I discovered that today I had booted from the “DVD”, but that shouldn't have made any difference. OK, reinstall.
And how about that, it installed a second copy of Ubuntu with differences that I don't understand. But the networking continued to be available, and with a bit of messing around I was able to install such basics as ifconfig, rwhod and NFS. Now I can look at those X fonts.
Oh. Once Linux and FreeBSD had relatively similar file hierarchies, but no longer. I wasn't even able to establish if the X server logged anywhere; certainly the way it was started looked very different:
1 1651 1651 1651 ? -1 Ssl 0 0:00 /usr/sbin/gdm3
1651 1657 1651 1651 ? -1 Sl 0 0:00 \_ gdm-session-worker [pam/gdm-autologin]
1657 1700 1700 1700 tty2 1700 Ssl+ 1000 0:00 \_ /usr/libexec/gdm-x-session --run-script env GNOME_SHELL_SESSION_MODE=ubuntu /usr/bin/gnome-session --session=ubuntu
1700 1704 1700 1700 tty2 1700 Sl+ 1000 0:02 \_ /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg vt2 -displayfd 3 -auth /run/user/1000/gdm/Xauthority -nolisten tcp -background none -noreset -keeptty -novtswitch -verbose 3
1700 1754 1700 1700 tty2 1700 Sl+ 1000 0:00 \_ /usr/libexec/gnome-session-binary --session=ubuntu
But after some searching found a directory /usr/share/fonts, which appears to have the kind of fonts I was looking for. Where do I put them? /usr/local/share/fonts/Ubuntu/ for the time being. Then to review the current way of making them visible to X, another thing that I have forgotten.
| Thursday, 29 August 2024 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 29 August 2024 |
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X font progress
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So now I have the Ubuntu X fonts in /usr/local/share/fonts/Ubuntu/. How do I tell X about them? There used to be something you needed to do, but I forget.
What I did recall was the Emacs function view-hello-file, which shows the expression for “Hello” in many languages and scripts. Last October it showed, inter alia,
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Check up. The fonts are all there! Well, nearly all of them. Makasar is still not there, possibly also not on Ubuntu. In fact, it's not even there in older versions of Emacs. Nothing to worry about right yet.
It almost seems that I just needed to put the fonts in the directory hierarchy and the clients find them automatically. Even Stefan Speck's Gothic examples are represented. And the saved email messages that I commented about earlier also render correctly. Only firefox didn't. Oh. Restart it, and that worked too.
Great. Copy the fonts to my other machines and continue. But at this point, Emacs on eureka crashed:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/8) ~ 3 ->
Backtrace:
0x51126e <???> at /usr/local/bin/emacs
0x50fc33 <???> at /usr/local/bin/emacs
0x802a38b6a <pthread_sigmask+0x51a> at /lib/libthr.so.3
0x802a3824c <pthread_getspecific+0xe1c> at /lib/libthr.so.3
emacs -display hydra:0.2 &
[3] 15695
You have new mail in /var/mail/grog
[1] Segmentation fault (core dumped) emacs public_html/diary.php=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/8) ~ 4 ->
It kept on crashing. After some examination, it seems that the fonts were to blame. Remove them and all was well. It didn't happen on the other systems, so I assume that the system on eureka was just too old. Still, a great improvement.
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Spring on its way
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Seen while walking the dogs today:
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Particularly the first one, with a Grevillea rosmarinifolia and some unspecified Acacia, caught my eye.
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hydra crash
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Topic: technology | Link here |
For no particularly good reason, I ran nmap against my /24 today. hydra crashed! It's not clear why; there was no evidence of a dump or anything. But somehow it's another indication that all is not well with the networking, and this time VirtualBox wasn't involved.
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PoS pain
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne forgot some things on her shopping trip yesterday, and she was going to go in again today to pick up the remainder. But some of the purchases, at the Fruit Shack, were things that I was interested in choosing, so I went instead.
First to Bunnings in Delacombe to look at rat traps, and only remembered that I had looked online yesterday and decided that they were far too expensive (by a factor of 2 to 3). On to the Fruit Shack, passing ALDI on the way, so did the remainder of the shopping there.
ALDI has self-serve checkout, and I've used it in the past. But this time it really showed itself from its worst side. I tried to pay with “savings”, and it went through the whole rigmarole, including PIN entry and card removal, before declining the transaction: no linked “savings” account. And as punishment I couldn't choose anything else. I needed an assistant to come and reset something.
OK, start paying. “INACTIVITY TIMEOUT”. Another assistant, who stayed there long enough to see a second timeout.
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How long were the timeouts? 30 seconds at the most, possibly only 10 or 15. Finally I paid by credit card, accepting their 0.5% surcharge. And as a bonus security measure, the printout included my PIN in plain text, displayed as “Card number”. My guess is that they're still trying to debug the device.
| Friday, 30 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 30 August 2024 |
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Cat insight
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
We've had Bruno for nearly 1½ years now, and Mona for over 4 months. They've been particularly in our sights because they're not allowed outside (though Bruno keeps escaping for up to a minute or two).
I think we made a mistake when we got Mona: we put both cats in the lounge room overnight to accustomize them to each other. That works, but how do we now move them to the laundry, where we really want to keep them? If we do that, it won't be in the immediate future. And in particular Bruno seems unhappy. Though they lie together at lot of the time, he wakes up frequently and meows loudly.
What should we do? He used to sleep in Yvonne's bedroom, in a cage to keep him from annoying her. Would he be happy in my bedroom, without a cage? Maybe, but there's still the annoyance factor. I tried it with the expected outcome: he was happy for a while, but then started investigating things. After a while I decided against it and put him outside again.
That didn't last long. Round 4:00 he was meowing again. OK, into the garage? Yes, please. For another couple of hours, and then he meowed again, proving in the process that the garage isn't overly sound-proof.
We're still not there, but it would be interesting to understand why he's so unhappy. Clearly the cats wake relatively early, 5:00 or so, when I frequently find them in front of the bedroom door. And their interest in the garage suggests that there could be mice in there. Can I leave them in there overnight?
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More Microsoft insights
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Topic: technology, photography | Link here |
Did some photo processing today. Try to fire up distress. Nothing happened.
That's from an fvwm menu, which, like all such things, is too polite to complain. Try starting the underlying script:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/11) ~ 8 -> /home/local/bin/dordesktop distress 3790x2110+0
Connecting to distress
ATTENTION! Found a certificate stored for host 'distress', but it does not match the certificate
received from server.
Review the following certificate info before you trust it to be added as an exception.
If you do not trust the certificate the connection atempt will be aborted:
Subject: CN=distress
Issuer: CN=distress
Valid From: Thu Aug 29 09:44:00 2024
To: Fri Feb 28 10:44:00 2025
Certificate fingerprints:
sha1: 6997782949cdf6f8e1db8a8056ebb46ae4506d11
sha256: 09225dcd1ca45eba670dfd3ac99f3271e4ea23bc4bce9b737f77a7109f16723a
Do you trust this certificate (yes/no)? yes
And after that things ran normally. That must have something to do with yesterday's crash. But where does the certificate come from? Where is it stored? Why is it a problem when hydra reboots? Why, is it a problem when hydra reboots? Yet another borderline issue.
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Recipe refinement
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
I had planned to cook some chicken with this spice paste today:
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It requires broccoli, so Yvonne had bought some on Wednesday. But not enough. So we needed to do something—almost anything—else. But I had already prepared the raw chicken, so it had to be something compatible.
To my own surprise, I managed to make chicken with cashew nuts, which I once considered one of my most complicated dishes:
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About the only thing of interest was a detail in the recipe:
Start 45 minutes before serving.
Put the shiitake in boiling water and soak for an hour or more.
But even that wasn't an issue in my timing.
| Saturday, 31 August 2024 | Dereel | Images for 31 August 2024 |
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Rats in the roof: Pene's verdict
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
Over to visit Pene Kirk this morning, and I took the fuzz from the ceiling for a vet's expert opinion:
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Her verdict: polyester. No animal content. And the dirt in the fuzz was just that, dirt, not mouse or rat droppings.
Oh. I suppose that makes sense, though, and it fits with my hypothesis that the rodents chewed their way through the ducting. The hole that they would have left is hardly worth worrying about. And Pene still didn't have a good solution to how to get rid of them (“good luck then”). She had used rat bait, but only because she knows that her cats wouldn't get near them.
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Skittish rodents?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
We've had enough issues with mice and rats in the house lately, but there are more. One of the many outstanding issues in my transition to hydra is the mouse: for reasons I don't understand, it seems to work intermittently. When marking text (left button down, move the mouse) it seems to reset the start point from time to time.
My fault? I was beginning to think so, but lately there has been a second issue: suddenly the mouse pointer will jump to another screen. That's not my fault, but whose fault is it? The mouse? X? The Nvidia driver? Even potentially fvwm?
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distress despair
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
House photo day today, involving lots of processing. And distress, my Microsoft 10 box, decided that it wanted to reboot. OK, what the hell, though I hate being told what to do. But after rebooting, things didn't work normally. DxO PhotoLab isn't a ball of fire at the best of times, but now it just hung. And other photo software wasn't much better.
Bloody Microsoft! While waiting for that, start processing on dischord, a Microsoft 7 box. It was also glacially slow! What's wrong with these things? Samba? How do you connect these things? Wasn't there some program I could use to test connectivity? smbclient? Is eureka even active? Check from hydra. Hang:
=== root@hydra (/dev/pts/4) ~ 20 -> ps lt11
UID PID PPID C PRI NI VSZ RSS MWCHAN STAT TT TIME COMMAND
1004 70313 18824 25 20 0 13344 2956 nfs D+ 11 0:00.00 ls C
Oh. Whatever it is, it's not Microsoft's fault. But clearly eureka was up, so I checked there. Hang:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/16) ~ 1 -> ps lt6
UID PID PPID CPU PRI NI VSZ RSS MWCHAN STAT TT TIME COMMAND
1004 5266 43366 0 20 0 16888 2476 suspfs D+ 6 0:00.00 ls -lbL, /Photos/
Oh. More and more, it became clear that the disk was not accessible. No error messages, just a hang. Force unmount? That hung the entire system. Big red button time, and the third reboot in 3 days
And fortunately the disk came up again. But it's clear that it's time to replace the disk. I've had it up and running for over 7 years. I had wanted to wait until the price of big SSDs dropped, but I don't think I can wait that long, so it's a new magnetic disk for me. 12 TB? 16 TB? The prices aren't bad, but strangely backup disks are more expensive. I need to think how to handle that.
And apart from that, most things came up well. Only my weather station software didn't. It kept reporting “MySQL server has gone away”, which was no longer the case. But it seems it doesn't handle that situation, so I needed to restart it.
And then distress told me that “drive” P: was disconnected. How do you reconnect it? I still don't know: surprisingly, it recovered by itself.
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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