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| Greg's diary |
| December 2016 |
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| Thursday, 1 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 1 December 2016 |
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scammer.lemis.com
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
After my scammer experience on Tuesday, I noted a button to report abuse to logmein123.com, so reported that, along with the code, which might help. And I got a reply:
Thank you for contacting LogMeIn Customer Care, and for sharing the recent experience you had with a third party using our LogMeIn Rescue product. We encourage anyone who believes that someone is using LogMeIn software maliciously to report it, as we investigate each claim filed. We take abuse of our software very seriously and would appreciate collecting more information from you in efforts to identify who was attempting to initiate that Rescue session.To help us better understand your interaction with someone you believe was misusing our software, can you please provide some details about your interaction? How did you become in contact with these people? How did they gain access to your computer? What did they say or do during your interaction that makes you believe they are scammers?
So I pointed them at the article; hopefully this will help.
The other thing I planned to do was to install a virgin FreeBSD virtual machine, which I call scammer.lemis.com. That went relatively smoothly, except that once again I had trouble
sigh. This is an out-of-the-box install of X and firefox. People, you should be able to do better than that.
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Recovering dumb phone videos
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Topic: technology, multimedia, photography, opinion | Link here |
So yesterday I managed to sideload Yvonne's video from her dumb phone to my new Android tablet. Uploading it to a real computer was no more pain than usual, though the image quality is appalling:
There are a couple of reasons there. First, it wasn't taken well, but the rolling shutter effect is amazing. But then we never bought the phones for such purposes. If Yvonne had had her camera with her, she could have got reasonable quality images.
But what about the USB interface on the phone? Tried that out and got:
But the system didn't identify any partitions. I wonder what the format is.
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Ethernet relay card
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My complaint to the eBay seller of the Ethernet relay card, asking for documentation, didn't bring much in the way of a result:
Please don't worry,I have submit your question to the product department,they will reply us in 1-2 working days.
Could you kindly contact us after 2 working day?We will try our best to solve the problem.
I can see that's going to be a dead end.
So, what do I have?
Clearly the black boxes at the bottom are the relays. Power is at top right, and the metal box to the left of that is the Ethernet connector. In between there's a jack marked RESET, which looks ominous. But there's more. What's the purpose of the contact block at top left? And then there are contacts, not connected (and here rotated 180° to make it more legible) on the extreme left of the board:
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Other things, including taking these photos, kept me busy enough that I didn't get round to connecting it to the network.
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Still more wildflowers
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Down to the house forest again today, where I found still more flowers that I can't identify. I've decided that this one could be a Leptospermum, of which we have many on the property:
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But I couldn't find it today.
The various peas are still difficult to classify, but there are others too that I haven't really looked at. Here a couple of Drosera flowers and what I thought was called onion grass, but that's pink. The yellow flowers still have onion-like bulbs at the bottom, but I need to find out what they're called:
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And then there are these buds, which I don't recognize:
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Presumably they'll become more recognizable when they flower.
Peter Jeremy commented that these look more like seed pods than buds, and I agreed with him. This became clear a couple of days later.
And finally I have this flower:
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The flowers are about 1 cm across. I feel I should know it, but it still doesn't ring a bell.
| Friday, 2 December 2016 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 2 December 2016 |
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Eureka Hostel again
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Topic: general | Link here |
Off with Sasha to Eureka Village Hostel again today, since Nikolai's wound still hasn't healed. Bill, my guide, is better again and was able to take me around for the first time in weeks. I think Yvonne is right: Sasha enjoys it more than the other two dogs. And I don't think anybody noticed that he wasn't Niko.
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Finger ultrasound
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Topic: health | Link here |
Barely back home from Eureka Village Hostel, I had to return to Ballarat to have my fingers inspected with Sonography. Quite a detailed process: the X-rays I had last week only took a couple of minutes, mainly setting up the machine, but this took over half an hour, with the sonographer (who introduced himself as Andrew) spending lots of times comparing what he saw with a crib sheet on finger anatomy and also with my other hand. When he was done, he took his images (about 20 of them) to some specialist, and returned saying that nothing further was required. Next step is on Monday, when I see Paul again.
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Second guessing Ethernet relay board
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Finally got round to connecting up my Ethernet relay board to the network. It was wise to wait until I had some time.
How would a generic board with no instructions connect to an unknown network? That's what DHCP is for. Of course, there's the question how normal users can then know the IP address of the device, but I wasn't too worried about that at the moment. I just connected it up and checked with arp:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/41) ~ 1 -> arp -a
I know all of them. No new address there, and the dhcpd logs showed nothing interesting. OK, second guess: private network address? And if so, which? Set up an alias on eureka's internal interface and ran nmap, which came up with:
192.168.123.231 was the address I assigned to emo, so I was left with not one, but two new addresses. Is one of them the relay board? And what is the other? Round about this time Peter Jeremy, who had been following the fun on IRC, came up with this page, which gives some information on what is clearly the same device:
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So the address is 192.168.1.166. And hopefully the web pages aren't all in Chinese. But why doesn't it respond to a ping? tcpdump shows:
Does it only want to talk to 192.168.1.1? I can arrange that, but not today. And I also need to find out what 192.168.2.10 is.
What is it that embedded programmers smoke?
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Trump upsets international applecart
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday Donald Trump spoke with Tsai Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan, a country that the USA does not recognize. This severely irritated China, a country with which the USA does recognize. This was to be expected.
This may seem like a little thing, and maybe the Chinese leadership is able to see it in perspective; after all, they have been trained to do their jobs, and they'll see that, in all likelihood, they just need to wait 4 years and Trump will be gone again. But wars have been started by smaller things.
It's interesting to note that the biggest international issues facing us today come from the Middle East: the rise of the so-called “Islamic State”, the atrocities in Syria, and much more. The USA blames this on the locals. But the locals blame it on the USA, and their heavy-handed approach to the situation—talking about Crusades, for example—have made the matter worse.
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Identity theft: the proof
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Found in my spam folder today:
| Saturday, 3 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 3 December 2016 |
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Talking to the relay board
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday I got as far as seeing evidence of my relay board on the LAN: it was trying to talk to 192.168.1.1, and wouldn't talk to anybody else. So I changed the alias on eureka's em0 interface, and sure enough, I could talk to it. First, I needed to log in, but fortunately this page tells me the details: user admin, password 12345678. After that, I got an encouraging screen:
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So at least I got a possibility of an English interface, where I was able to set more sane IP addresses. But there are some really puzzling things, like this part of the configuration menu:
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What do those fields mean? For once, Google Translate came to my aid with a translation of the Chinese original:
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But there are still a number of questions to be answered there. What's Touch Input? Input and Output correlation? And where did they get their name server addresses from? traceroute to one of them peters out with:
What does that have to do with China? Edwin Groothuis thought it might have something to do with my /24 address block, but this board is far too stupid to know that: these values were stored into it at build time.
Went to the settings pages. What a pain! Yes, it's nice to have a web interface, maybe. But all I really want to do is to set individual relays. I could do that with an 8 bit bit mask, one bit per relay, and that's the way I did it Twelve years ago. Now I have a page like this:
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I have to do it manually! No timer, nothing! Unless I can hack this interface, I would have to get up at 4:00 and manually turn the things on and off! Progress, thy name is stupidity.
But there's a possibility: the settings page also mentions a TCP port 1234, configurable. nmap tells me:
I suspect that the service name is bogus; it was just a convenient number, like the password 12345678. So I tried talking to it, but it didn't reply.
How do you establish what protocol a specific port expects? Juha Kupiainen came up with this page, whose URL looks as if it could change at a moment's notice. It shows a housing which clearly contains one of these boards, as another image shows:
The box in the first image also contains interesting information, like IP address, user name, password, and power supply requirements. It also shows the inputs at bottom right. That may explain some of the configuration details, but it's still obscure.
This page also shows another thing, such as a time display, which I need to analyse, as it's all in Chinese; I don't see anything corresponding in the English version. It suggests that I can, indeed, set up to 8 timers:
The site also includes a number of downloads which I need to investigate. Some promise source code, which might bring light into the darkness of port 1234.
Weren't things simple before the web?
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More wildflowers
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Down to the house forest again today. Not much change. As Peter Jeremy had assumed, my “buds” were seed pods, and they have now opened. Here two days ago (first image) and today:
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The Drosera have also formed seeds:
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And my assumption that this plant was a Leptospermum seem to have confirmed themselves, though the one flower I found wasn't worth photographing.
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And now we have another plant that may or may not prove to be interesting:
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Clearly it, too, has flowered and seeded.
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Bright star
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Letting the dogs out, I saw a particularly bright star (or planet):
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It's in the top left corner, and it was surprisingly bright. Venus? It looks like it's a bit far from the horizon for that. But Magda Delva is coming for lunch tomorrow, and she will know.
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E-M1 Live View Boost limitations
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
One of the nice things about the Olympus OM-D E-M1 viewfinder is called “Live View Boost”: the viewfinder shows the subject as clearly as possible, even under conditions where an optical DSLR viewfinder would be almost completely dark.
But there are limitations, and I found them tonight. The view of the night sky was almost completely black, and the attempt to make it visible smeared to such an extent that I couldn't focus. I need to remember how to turn it off when necessary.
| Sunday, 4 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 4 December 2016 |
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Visit from Magda, Nele and Nelson
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Topic: general | Link here |
Magda Delva and daughter Nele Kömle along for lunch today, something of a “Christmas” tradition—Magda lives in Graz and only comes once a year, usually round Christmastide.
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Magda has spent her professional life researching Venus, and was thus in a good position to confirm that our bright “star” last night was indeed Venus.
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More political instability
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
One of the discussions at the table was today's presidential election: given the catastrophic results of recent elections, we were seriously concerned that Norbert Hofer might become president. It turns out that Magda, as a Belgian citizen, isn't eligible to vote, but we're all agreed that any sane person would vote for Alexander Van der Bellen (and yes, that's Van and not van; after all, he is not Belgian).
The conversation diverged. It seems that Magda grew up in a Walloon enclave somewhere in Oost-Vlaanderen, 50 metres from the language border, and she described in some detail how her family had been unable to get official documents in Flemish. And if they applied for a passport in French (the only language in which the documents were avalable), they were listed as French speaking. And I had thought that my exerience in Brussel/Bruxelles/Brüssel/Brussels was not typical of the country as a whole.
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Trump: clumsy oaf
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Early in the day I started a page describing my fears about Donald Trump. In the initial revision I wrote:
It seems that he will nullify the treaties with Iran, probably as soon as assuming office. What will the result be?
But I didn't need to wait long to hear the answer. The congress of the United States of America has voted to renew sanctions against Iran for ten years, in violation of the treaties they signed. The Irani parliament is now debating a bill to resume nuclear development. Bravo, USA! Bravo, Trump!
On a lighter side, people are coming up with all sorts of (usually derogatory) nicknames for Trump. Yvonne has come up with the best one yet: „Trampel“. That's pronounced like “Trump-el”, and in German means “clumsy oaf”. Nomen est omen.
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Mobile phones and batteries
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Maybe because of the way I talked about it the other day, my mobile phone has decided to die in the way that most do: the battery won't recharge. After a couple of days on charge, it has enough charge to boot up, present the message “Low battery shutdown”, and do just that.
Should I replace the battery? It's not a mainstream phone, so even if I could find one, it would probably cost more than the phone is worth. So I'll keep the phone in case Yvonne's identical phone gets damaged, in which case we could use the battery from that phone.
In the meantime, Chris Bahlo came up with a solution: her old smart phone died a death, but the one before that is still alive. From what's written in various private places, it's a Samsung GT-I9100T, though she tells me it's a Galaxy S2, and it was mine for the asking. I asked, and today she brought it, along with the suggestion that I first charge it. That was not as easy as it sounded: after some examination, it proved that the battery was dead as a doornail. Unlike the battery of my old phone, it showed not the slightest voltage across the terminals.
So, back to square one? To my surprise, the things still command a relatively good price: the cheapest model (used, of course) that I could find on eBay was $200. And batteries cost $12, including postage, so I ordered one. Hopefully I can make friends with the thing. One thing that is good about it is that the documentation is still available, and it's about as long as the documentation for my camera.
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More relay board fun
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Spent some time looking for documentation and code for my relay board, with insufficient success. There's a download page with various software, partially in source form (C#). Some of it was clearly unsuited—NTP server, for example—some was in Microsoft executable format, and others again required registration. But I couldn't find any registration.
In the end, found three packages that looked like they might make sense, but none of them had much source code. What I did find looked like this, from a file called Form1.cs
Somewhere in there I might be able to find something about the protocol, but it won't be easy.
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Backup disk woes
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
A couple of days ago /dump, the 2 GB external backup disk that I use for other machines on the local network, somehow went offline. Power cycling it and reconnecting it showed no errors, and GEOM created device nodes /dev/da2 and /dev/da2p1, but the system couldn't make any sense of the latter node. Damaged?
Today I tried it out on lagoon, Yvonne's machine. No difficulty recognizing it. Since lagoon is one of the machines that back up to it, it made sense to leave it there. And since I had missed the level 0 dump at the beginning of the month, decided to repeat it.
Estimated time 8 hours? It should take about 20 minutes! And then I saw:
1 MB/s transfers! That's archaic. I've seen it before, but not for a long time. What went wrong there? I have plenty of time to think about it; after backing up /, there's /home to do as well. That will take much longer.
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Slow cooked British curry
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
One of the things I hated most about my schooldays in England in the 1960s was the terrible food. Some British food tastes quite good, but we didn't get much of it to see. One of my particular horrors was what they called “curry”, typically a stew with lots of flour in the sauce and something curry-like that made the sauce go green. Sometimes it was just a stew with curry powder to sprinkle, garam masala like, on top. The predominant flavour—if there was one—was of fenugreek.
Thanks to immigration from “the Subcontinent”, those days are gone. And so when a few weeks back we bought some quick-and-dirty curry sauces, I didn't think any more of it, especially since they came from Pataks, who on the whole have a good reputation.
Today I tried one of them, a “Slow Cooker Rich & Hearty Beef Curry”, chosen mainly for Yvonne's sake because of the subtitle “Mild”.
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Our sous-vide cooker doubles as a slow cooker, though I've never used it like that. Still, the recipe is clear enough, though the requirement of 200 mL of thickened cream should have been a warning sign. But at least all ingredients are by weight or volume.
Did I say all? No, one onion, diced into 3 cm cubes. How much does an onion weigh? I've been there before: I came to a weight of 160 g. But that's the kind of onion we get here. I've seen others weighing 20 g, and again others weighing 1 kg or more. Which do they mean?
The size of the “cubes” gives a clue. My onions, once peeled, have a diameter of about 6 cm, so 3 cm chunks are eighths. But they're not cubes by any stretch of the imagination. To get something approximating to cubes of that size, you'd need an onion of at least twice the diameter, weighing in the order of 1.3 kg.
So I attributed this to carelessness on the part of the recipe writer, and cut the onion into pieces about 1.5 cm across. As instructed, put all the ingredients in the pot, including 200 ml of yoghurt to replace the cream that I most certainly will not add:
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How is that going to work? I added the 50 mL of water that they required, but that's not a sauce, not even with the yoghurt. Without it it would be almost completely dry. How are the potatoes going to cook? Added another 200 ml water and things looked reasonable:
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Why do people come up with recipes with quantities that are Just Plain Wrong? And the smell of the stuff! Yes, it's not 1960s green curry, but they haven't forgotten their love of fenugreek. The proof of the curry will be in the eating, tomorrow, but I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that the British still know ways to destroy Indian food. I should have taken notice from Mridula Baljekar.
| Monday, 5 December 2016 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 5 December 2016 |
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Flowering Artemisia
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
The two Artemisia species growing at the entrance to the house have progressed very differently. One has been flooded all winter, and it's not clear (to me, anyway; Yvonne disagrees) that it's going to survive:
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But the one on the other side of the driveway is 5 times the size and has now started flowering, looking something like a thistle flower:
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More doctor stuff
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Topic: health | Link here |
Into town yet again today to see Dr Paul Smith. The results of Friday's ultrasound were as to be expected: an osteocyte limiting the function of the tendons. What do to? It could break off, but it looks like a visit to an orthopaedic surgeon.
As if that wasn't enough, there seem to be signs that I might be in an early stage of retinal detachment, so I have Yet Another Referral to an opthalmologist on Thursday.
Not to let me off too lightly, he also gave me a pneumococcal vaccination (penumovax, I think) with the warning that it might be painful for a day or two. One of these days I'll get back to a normal medical schedule.
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British curry: proof
of the pudding
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Ate our British curry today. After cooking it looked like this:
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Notably, there's not enough juice to cover the ingredients. And despite 8 hours of slow cooking, the potatoes were still crunchy. If that's typical of slow cooking, we can forget it. The curry itself was Just Plain Boring. Yes, it's mild, but a slight flavour of chili is still barely evident. And that's all! The last time I buy anything like that from Pataks, and I'll be doubly careful what else I buy from them.
| Tuesday, 6 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 6 December 2016 |
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The pain of modern software, part 1
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Somehow I spent most of the day today fighting modern software. I've ranted about this before countless times, but far from going away, the problem gets worse.
The first issue was one of the basic problems of graphics software, at least the way it is currently implemented: all programs get started from the same environment. In X it's the Window manager; other environments seem to be so amorphous that I can't say what part starts them. In either case, the concept of working directory is lost. So programs like firefox note the last used directory and offer it again. I'll use firefox as the example here, but it's by no means unusual in its behaviour.
That's particularly stupid because it ignores basic Unix conventions. It will even start a search for executables in the same saved directory. Doesn't the window manager pass its environment, including PATH?
As if that weren't bad enough, firefox handles the situation badly: it produces a list of the files in its chosen directory, only:
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How do you get to where you want to go? You click on a component of the path name. In my case, I was looking for /Photos/grog/20161206/DxO-customize-2.png. To get there, I have to click multiple times, on the way passing monstrosities like this:
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Look at that scroll bar (if you can find it)! Once it was possible to conjure up an input field where you could just type the path name, but no longer, it seems. On IRC, Juha Kupiainen pointed to a key combination Shift-G, but that seems to only allow entry of a file name in the current directory; it gave up both with .. and /Photos.
This seems to be a regression. Why? File name completion has been around for decades, and firefox even uses it for URL completion, a significantly more complicated task. Is there no space in the 700 MB process image for plain old file name completion? I went looking for “add-ons” matching “file name completion”, and came up with 402, conveniently limited to a view of 20 at a time. Of the first 20, not a single one matched “completion”. I got the message and gave up.
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The pain of modern software, part 2
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I was just about calming down when, also on IRC, Andy Snow mentioned that his father (retired software engineer, 70 years old, so pretty much the same demographic as myself) has just got a new smart phone. Curious, I asked what he thought of it. Not much, but Andy is sure that he will get to like it when he sees all the nice things he can do with it, including sending photos.
My own experience with sending photos has been one of intense pain, so I carried on the discussion. Like most people, Andy is doomed to moving around a lot, so having something to play with while he's on the move makes sense—I use my Android tablet for the same purpose, for example in doctor's waiting rooms. As he puts it, “smartphones have moved a bunch of internet-based tasks from something you set aside time for when sitting down at your PC, to something you can do to fill the gaps while you're waiting in a queue at a shop or something”. But my recent experience moving files from Android makes it an emergency measure at best. Andy thinks it's the easiest way. Who's wrong?
The first thing he said is significant: “your way is actually a PITA if you just want to send a quick, low quality snapshot”. This implies—probably correctly—that people are prepared to lower their standards to send things easily. But is it really easier? My work flow matches what I want to do, but I can upload images from my camera to an external web server in (almost) a single command:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 266 -> mount /camera/
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 267 ->
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/37) ~/public_html 40 -> scp /camera/dcim/106___09/img_9214.jpg www:www.lemis.com/grog/Day/20161206
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/37) ~/public_html 41 ->
The mount command is only necessary because I don't normally do things this way. If I wanted, I could automate it with devd. So how do I do it with a tablet? Instagram, says Andy. I know that: it's a system that deliberately limits uploads so that you must use a mobile device, anathema to a Unix approach. Still, it was worth comparing. OK, admittedly, I'm new to this, but the concepts are so bizarre, complicated and badly implemented that it took me from 13:26 to 14:50.
Much of this time was spent trying to log in. I discovered I have an Instagram login, though I was apparently too ashamed to mention it in this diary at the time, and I didn't write down the password. OK, “reset password”, and got the opportunity to reset it. “Create a new password that isn't your current password.”. OK, try just logging in with the old password. “The username you entered doesn't belong to an account. Please check your username and try again.”.
Huh? But it gets worse. I reset my password on my real computer and tried logging in with it from the tablet. It failed. I suspect that the first time round blind typing the password on this emetic glass surface enabled me to mistype the password the same way twice, despite the snail's pace.
After a couple of attempts and another reset, I got a different message: “This email is taken by another account”. Can you only be logged in from one place at a time? Finally—it seemed more like trial and error than anything—I got logged in. Probably the issues were a combination of inaccuracy due to the touch screen typing and wildly incorrect error messages from Instagram.
Trying to download the app was fun too. It wanted access to my Facebook account and promised to steal my list of friends and to bombard me with advertisements. But of course I had a real login. And once I got there, I couldn't work out how to use it. It didn't match Andy's description in the slightest. About the only thing that I discovered is that some screens refuse to recognize the orientation of the tablet and appeared in portrait orientation, not what seems to be normal for tablets. Bad Instagram! That's substandard even by mobile phone standards.
But it seems I hadn't followed Andy's instructions to the letter: don't use the app, just the native Android “Photos” app. And how about that, I could upload the images I took, after first going through a couple of screens where I was offered some unspecified way to crop them. Finally done!
And what beautiful photos!
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The first is from the tablet, a screen shot from Instagram, since I can't find a way to access the original image any more. The second is from my camera.
OK, I'm not expecting wonders from a tablet camera, especially not from a $90 tablet, and the quality of the real camera image isn't spectacular either, but why should I compromise? And how do I get them on my computer? Instagram doesn't offer me an option, or if it does, I don't understand it:
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What does “Save page to Pocket” mean? In any case, there's no menu item for saving the image. If I want the photo elsewhere, I can download it directly from my tablet.
Can I? That's what I was ranting about the other day. But that's what Peter Jeremy says. I just need to use the industry standard Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP). Why? Because it's a standard (I can hear Andy Tanenbaum laughing in the wings). What's good about it? Not clear. It destroys file system structures, so it must be good. Peter tells me that it's necessary because you can't mount a file system from two different machines at the same time, something that even Microsoft has been doing for decades. It doesn't do anything that a file system view can't do (not surprisingly, since images are universally stored in FAT-32 format), and even the Wikipedia page has a “Drawbacks” section but not an “Advantages” section. But, Peter says, that's the way Android does it.
By this time I was past asking “why?”. I tried it. On Yvonne's old Canon IXUS 130 (5 years old and thus disowned by Canon), I don't get a choice of connection, only PTP. And how about that, with gphoto2 I was able to list all files, stripped of their directories. It's not clear what it would do if it found the same file name in two different directories, but next time I feel like a rant I'll think about it. So how about with the tablet?
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 255 -> gphoto2 --list-files
“USB Developer” reminds me of other incorrectly or incompletely implemented software from ALDI. I'll have to try again with the smart phone once the battery arrives. But at least for this tablet, it doesn't work. Peter thought I might get a popup asking whether to enable it, but I didn't.
The issues I'm looking at here are really not complicated. They've just been “solved” in a way that makes you wonder what is going on inside people's heads. To publish a photo, you need at least two of these steps:
And what do we have now? Web sites that deliberately impose restrictions on this functionality. With Android I no longer have general access to the network and file system hierarchies. Once I put the photo up on the net, I can't find a way to get it back again. If I take a photo on my tablet and want to process it on my PC, I have to jump through hoops just to move the image. Once I'm done with the processing, I need to move it back to the tablet, because Instagram won't give me access from a computer. And once it's on Instagram, it's cast in concrete. No further access.
Admittedly, I might be wrong about getting my images back from Instagram. But at the very least they have created a new, unneccessary interface that, far from offering new functionality, limits existing functionality. It's comparable with going to a new supermarket in town and discovering that you need to learn a new, synthetic language with components from Esperanto, Swahili and Suomi.
People might say “Yes, but you're a computer (ex) professional. You know what you're doing”. There are two issues here: first, I don't know what I'm doing any more, and beginners can't find out how to do things because they've been blocked. This is a serious retrograde step.
Almost the saddest thing, though, is that the people on IRC all disagree with me. They, of all people, should know better. But the concepts have crept up on them over the years, and they no longer realise what has happened. All these devices run a derivative of Unix (Microsoft is is blameless in this arena). Why have they broken things so badly?
| Wednesday, 7 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 7 December 2016 |
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Instagram kills Android tablet
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Overnight I had a problem with my new Android tablet: it wouldn't charge. In the evening it was at 39% charge, and after being powered off and charged overnight, it was up to 44%. It claimed to be charging, but the lightning flash symbol near the battery display was absent.
What caused that? My guess is a combination of poor design and poor quality. The charger connection is on the right-hand side, and I've already had an ALDI tablet die because of poor contact from not one, but two connectors.
But this tablet is 2 weeks old. Why did it happen now? I think it's because I was forced to position it in portrait mode, the only mode that some pages on the Instagram app will use. I didn't disconnect the cable, and the result appears to be damage to the (microUSB) connector.
ALDI tablets may have issues, but their one overwhelming advantage is that you can return the device within 60 days if you don't like it. So that's what I did. Any further ranting about Android will have to be theoretical, at least for the time being.
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Android rant, day 2
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Not surprisingly, people on IRC disagreed with yesterday's second rant.
Firstly, people claimed that PTP does show directory structure. So I tried. It worked yesterday, but today I got:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/5) ~/Photos/20161206 364 -> gphoto2 --list-files
After a couple of other attempts, tried that and got lots of output, ending in:
Nothing obvious there. It took me quite a while to guess that this was a permissions issue. The file for the connection was /dev/ugen1.11, and the permissions were:
That's my fault, of course: I should have set the default permissions. But where are the error messages? This seems to be an issue with the USB implementation, but there should be some way to return an EPERM.
So I ran it as root, and confirmed that they're right: PTP does maintain the directory structure, sort of. Here's a partial listing of the SD card in my camera:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/5) ~/Photos/20161206 362 -> mdir -s a: | less
And here's what gphoto2 makes of it:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 271 -> gphoto2 --list-files
There are a number of things to note here:
It has invented a mount point store_00010001'. OK, so mdir has invented A:, but in the Microsoft space that's instantly recognizable.
It doesn't know what a directory is.
Instead of listing file size clearly, it shows the number of kB (misspelt as KB).
It invents a MIME type, something that the underlying file system does not store. For the fun of it, I made a copy of PB275054.ORF as PB275054.JPG. The result:
As the size shows, this is the same file. So the MIME type is meaningless and misleading. file(1) is cleverer:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/5) ~/Photos/20161127/orig 377 -> file PB275054*
On the other hand, this view doesn't give me the modification timestamp for the files. This would make any scripting like my syp script, which optimizes downloads, incomparably more complicated.
Potentially all of these problems are the fault of gphoto2, and maybe it even has many long options to make it behave the way it should by default. In addition, it seems that you can mount PTP file systems directly on Linux, but not on FreeBSD. That would make life easier, but it doesn't explain the raison d`être of PTP in the first place.
And my other objections? Peter Jeremy pointed out that it's not as simple as copying from camera to web server, apparently missing my mention of automount. In particular, it's a question of establishing connections. After discussion, we came up with three scenarios:
The first two are Peter's scenarios, unchanged. The third is mine. And promptly Daniel O'Connor came up with the claim that his phone is always connected to the network, a claim he couldn't substantiate: in exactly those situations where smart phones are useful, in public transport or waiting rooms for example, you can't be sure of having a network at all. Even Daniel discounted using the mobile telephone network for these functions. In many cases you can get network coverage, but then you need to connect to it.
On the other hand, both Peter and Daniel automatically back up to the “cloud”. OK, good idea, if you have the bandwidth. So far this month Yvonne and I have taken just shy of 10 GB of photos. Even if I can afford to upload them to the cloud, what will that do to my network response times? And once they're there, how do I manipulate them? I need to investigate this, but I'm prepared to find that there will be many restrictions as to where I can move the data. It seems that we already have this with the automatic backup: can I back up to my real computer? With Android, no, just to Google. I'm prepared to bet that Apple has some similar restriction.
And looking at Peter's first alternative. All he has in addition to the copying is connecting a cable. You shouldn't even need that: if you can automatically back up to Big Brother, you should be able to automatically back up to your real computer. The functionality is the same. And in the case of all cameras I've seen, alternative 3 does not exist.
Do people really not recognize that they're voluntarily accepting restrictive “solutions” when the problems have been solved for decades? I wouldn't really care, but so many people think that this is state of the art that it excludes more general solutions that we already have.
This article has been much longer than intended. It's time to move the whole thing to its own page, but not today.
| Thursday, 8 December 2016 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 8 December 2016 |
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Eye examination
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Topic: health | Link here |
Off to Ballarat today to see Trent Roydhouse of the Ballarat Eye Clinic to have my eyes examined. A one hour appointment, 50 minutes of which were spent waiting for eye drops to make my vision go funny. The examination itself took less than 10 minutes, with equipment that looked no better than what the opticians use, but presumably a trained head behind it that saw more. The verdict: no sign of macular degeneration, no retinal detachment, just a vitreous detachment that would heal by itself. I had never heard of that; it seems that, at least in America, it's called a posterior vitreous detachment. It seems that nothing needs to be done, and it will go away by itself, but I should refrain from vigorous exertion (“no bungee jumping”).
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Android pain, day 3
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The good thing about my Android pain of the last couple of days is that the Android tablet failed and got returned to ALDI. End of pain.
Well, no. Today the replacement battery arrived for Chris Bahlo's Samsung GT-I9100T mobile phone, also known (but not on the phone itself) as Galaxy S2. It wasn't quite clear what to do with it, since I needed to be authorized to open the package, and I needed to take unspecified static electricity precautions:
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Unlike the claim on the eBay page, it wasn't an aftermarket battery after all, or if so, it was a very good copy of the original:
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But when I put it into the phone, it rattled. Further investigation showed that it was smaller than the original, and that it had one contact less:
Put it in anyway and jammed in with some cardboard:
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Surprisingly, it worked. It's an Android 4.1.x, something that I understand better than Android 6, and it soon came up with an offer to download 60 MB of firmware updates. Chris can't have used the phone in years, so that sounded like a good idea. But there wasn't enough space on the phone (only 16 GB, all full of Chris' stuff that I didn't want to delete quite yet). So I pulled the 8 GB microSD card out of my old, dead tablet and put it on the desk while I searched for the SD card slot (it's above the battery, next to the SIM card slot):
OK, insert the μSD card. Gone! Where did it go? It was on the desk, I hadn't got up from the desk in the intervening two or three minutes, but it was no longer there. Did it fall on the floor, or onto my lap? Possible, but I didn't find it. Potentially it has fallen under something, but it would take a lot of moving things around to search for it. I found another card in a drawer, carefully placed in a plastic bag with other small cards (this isn't the first time I've lost a μSD card) and used that instead. Moral: Never put a naked μSD card anywhere except inside something bigger.
That worked fine, so loaded the update. Reboot. Reboot. Reboot. The thing wouldn't start. How do you debug a boot failure on a mobile phone? The obvious thing was to call technical support, where I spoke to a Sam (sung?), who spent half an hour going through the usual tech support stuff. It seems that they do have me on file (presumably for issues related to washing machine recalls), with the old address. I confirmed that, but she didn't want to update the address, even when I suggested it to her. She took me through a few incantations, none of which worked, and then said they would get the phone picked up and taken for service.
Who pays? It seems clear that it was the firmware update that bricked the device, but that's from Android, not from Samsung. And she confirmed that the warranty expired about 3 years ago. But so far there's no question of payment, so it might make sense to send it in.
First, though, I went looking on line, and found this page, which includes lots of incantations to get the thing into debug mode. What finally worked was the combination Vol+/Menu/Power, which brings up these screens:
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In passing, I rather like the images.
The instructions were to first “wipe” the cache partition and then, if it didn't work, do a factory reset. I tried both, with no success.
Send it in? One thing is clear: these “fix it” pages include help for numerous problems, but failed firmware update isn't one of them. So what could be the cause? I can think of multiple reasons: The one case where firmware update does fail, coincidence, or possibly an indication of what the fourth battery contact does. Would it be possible, for example, that it maintains cache contents or some such when the phone is powered down? Then a reset of cache would result in it becoming non-functional, which could result in the symptoms I have seen.
But to test that hypothesis, I need a real battery. Why was I sent the wrong battery anyway? Looking at the order, it's clear why: it's just what I asked for, but not what I want. The seller had two batteries on offer for the same price. I confirmed that one of them was the correct battery, without checking the other, and then went looking at other sellers. When I came back, it seems that I chose a battery without reconfirming the specs, and got the wrong one. Bad Groggy.
In general, though, after a third day of messing around with this stuff, and the second defective device, I've come to the conclusion: I may hate Android, but clearly the feeling is mutual.
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DxO can't read PNG
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I recently upgraded to DxO ViewPoint release 3, which works together with DxO Optics “Pro”, and promises automatic perspective correction and cropping. As a gesture of good will, I got the upgrade for free, along with a free copy of FilmPack, which I find very generous of them. But ViewPoint 3 is not without its problems. Firstly, there's no manual! All I can find is a series of hard-to-navigate web pages that only describe use as a standalone program.
So on Monday last week I raised a ticket asking for the location of the documentation. I'd include the number here, but it seems that DxO doesn't publish their tickets, so only I can see it. Here the content:
I've installed a trial version of ViewPoint 3 on my Optics "Pro" system, running Microsoft 7. I have multiple problems:
It took them over a week to respond, at “Tuesday at 04:11”. How I hate these silly date representations! By that time I had, by trial and error found the automatic perspective correction function, but nothing else. And the reply didn't address any of my problems, nor indeed did I get the feeling that he had read the report. But he wanted a screen shot of the startup splash screen (showing what I had already stated in the ticket that only version 3 was installed), so I sent it, along with an indication of what DxO displays. I'm omitting the splash screen, because it contains the activation keys for the software, but here's the rest:
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These images show the splash screen, the perspective correction screen before and after correction, and the crop screen showing no auto crop. I think these are the files that I uploaded. It seems that DxO, a leader in image processing, can't display PNG images! Any web browser can do that! So they deleted them from the ticket, and asked me to send them in “another format”, without specifying what they can read. Instead I was given the following URLs to answer my questions about documentation:
This is a link to the Optics “Pro” web pages. I already have a manual, so this is unnecessary.
This is the online user manual that I was complaining about.
This contains tutorials for all DxO products, not only ViewPoint (which seems not to deserve a URL of its own). The ViewPoint tutorials all (currently) refer to version 2 only, so this is useless.
Why is it so difficult to get even simple issues resolved. I can't even blame Sam (clearly a popular name for support personnel): this seems to happen everywhere.
| Friday, 9 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 9 December 2016 |
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More Trump horrors
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Donald Trump continues to cause anxiety. A few days ago I started a page about my concerns. He's ensuring that it gets updated.
Who's the new head of the EPA? A climate change sceptic! Now everybody, myself included, is concerned that the USA will reverse what little progress has been made towards addressing the issue. A Google search for “Trump EPA” brings headlines with almost universal criticism. Only Forbes wrote “Trump's EPA Pick Is Just What This Country Needs: A sensible, law-based approach to the energy business will be a welcome change if Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt is confirmed to ...” I think that says more about Forbes than about the issue, but I can't follow up because they want me to log in.
That makes it clear, though, that there are a sizeable number of climate change deniers in the USA. But other actions are more likely to make him unpopular in his own country. He campaigned on decreasing unemployment and increasing income. So he appointed Andy Puzder, a CEO of a fast-food chain and “a vocal critic of substantially increasing the minimum wage and an opponent of rules that would make more workers eligible for overtime pay” to the head of the US Labor Department. That must set a sign for the voters who believed his promises.
And then there's the question of the lies about the job savings at Carrier, which has the additional spice of ad hominem attacks on union officials on Twitter. Whatever the background, that's a completely unstatesmanlike action.
Where is this going to lead?
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Australia Post: No information overload
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Mail message from AusPost today:
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What does that tell me? Nothing. Yes, there's a tracking number there too, but I don't recognize it. Where does the package come from? Who sent it? Where is it? All too complicated. For that, you need to be intelligent enough to select “Show detailed tracking”, which gives (upside down, and thus in reverse sequence from the first display) marginally more information:
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I still don't know what it is. I'd guess that it's something I bought on eBay, but there's no way of knowing.
Bravo, AusPost.
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New crockery and glasses
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Forty-one years ago I got married, and we received our first real set of crockery as a wedding present, in nice 1970s pop:
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That fashion didn't last long, and when my sister got married in September 1983, we bought her a set of the same series, but now in a more neutral colour. We liked that enough that a couple of years later we bought a set for ourselves:
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That was over 30 years ago, but we still have the same crockery, now looking less impressive. The photos above are of soup plates, which we hardly use and which thus look pretty much as they did 30 or 40 years ago. The ones we use look like this side plate:
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Why do we still use them? I tried a few years back and bought alternative crockery, but Yvonne (who wasn't present at the time) didn't like it, so we're still using the same old crockery.
Finally, on Wednesday, Yvonne found something that she liked:
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Not our ideal, but not as fancy or trendy as most of the stuff we have seen. At least we have something not quite so worn-out for everyday use, and we can still look for something better. That's made all the easier because a set of four (small and large plate, soup bowl and mug) cost $10, reduced from $30.
I've already established that we don't use soup bowls much. But the mugs are amazing, a typical Australian bucket:
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It contains 350 ml, a new record for my measures page. And the lack of a saucer is more of a nuisance than I thought. Where do you put your spoon when you're done with it? I suppose that “in the mug” is the canonical answer, but that's not for me. But while shopping in Ballarat today, Yvonne found some better looking cups, along with some wine glasses. Also reduced. Why do they reduce things in the middle of Advent (and thus the Christmas shopping season).
She came back with two different kinds of cups, volumes 200 ml and 230 ml. They cost $3 a piece, and thus more than a set of four from Big W. But at least they have saucers and look relatively normal (here compared with the 200 ml old cup on the left):
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She brought two new sets of glasses as well, not cheap at $9.95 each. But nasty. Once again uneven thickness, heavy, uninteresting shape. In fact, not so different from the ones that we bought for $0.95 a while back. It's difficult to get a photo that shows the issues, so there is none, but they'll go back.
But that price got me thinking. Yvonne bought the first sets of crockery at Big W, and the cups and glasses at Spotlight. There she saw what appeared to be the same crockery that she bought at Big W. 50% reduced: from $120 (maybe $139.95) to $59.95! That still makes it 6 times the price of Big W. Caveat emptor.
| Saturday, 10 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 10 December 2016 |
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Learning about flash
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Topic: photography | Link here |
I've always had problems with flash, particularly on-camera flash, so when Paul Shire chose flash photography as the topic for today's meeting of the Dereel Camera Crew, I was quite enthusiastic, and this time took a lot of equipment with me.
It seems that Paul and I complement each other well. I know the theory, he knows the practice. And the one thing that I brought back was that you can alter the relations of ambient and flash illumination. That's no secret: both flashes and cameras have ways to increase or decrease flash illumination. But somehow it never sank in until today.
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Google is watching you
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Mail from Google today:
Your Google Account groggyhimself@gmail.com was just used to sign in from Firefox on Windows.Windows
Saturday, December 10, 2016 9:06 AM (Australian Eastern Daylight Time)
Ballarat VIC, Australia*
Firefox*Don't recognize this activity?*
Review your recently used devices
<URL>Why are we sending this? We take security very seriously and we want to keep you in the loop on important actions in your account. We were unable to determine whether you have used this browser or device with your account before. This can happen when you sign in for the first time on a new computer, phone or browser, when you use your browser's incognito or private browsing mode or clear your cookies, or when somebody else is accessing your account.
What's wrong with this picture? Lack of information. A login from “Windows”. What Windows? What's the IP address? How did it determine the location?
In fact, this was me, from dischord, trying to work round some browser issue. Why does it say Ballarat? Because it's not prepared to let me tell its location services where I really am. But the lack of an IP address is unforgivable.
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Mobile phones: small choice in rotten apples
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
At the Camera Crew meeting people started talking about mobile phones. It occurred to me that maybe somebody had an old one to get rid of, so I asked. Yes, indeed, Carol Moyse had a iPhone 5S that she no longer needed, and offered it to me for $200. Almost before I could answer, Helen Miller said “I'll take it”. But I had first choice, and it seemed all the better because Helen would take it if I didn't like it.
So up to Carol's place a little later, in the process recognizing the house: I was there three years ago helping her diagnose a failed ADSL2 “modem”. Watched her spend at least 10 minutes clearing the phone of all her personal stuff, requiring three reboots, and then home with my new treasure.
The next hour was at least as painful as anything I've had with Android.
First thing, of course, was configuration. How about that, it lets me enter a static IP address (hopefully per network). It only took me 4 minutes to type in IP, net mask, router and DNS IP, with only 20 typos. That's the fault of this appalling touch screen, made no better by the fact that the display doesn't rotate with the orientation of the screen: it's fixed in portrait mode, with total keyboard width being 4.7 cm, slightly less than double the width of my thumb. But what then? Where's the NEXT button? It seems I had to go BACK, which I suppose any modern person would understand.
Every time I turn the thing on, I need to enter a 6 digit security code. With Android it was only 4, and I could turn it off. So far I haven't found a way to do that here. What a pain!
Next, I thought it would be fun to download OI.Share, the app to communicate with my camera, conveniently (as was forcibly brought home) requiring multiple shift keys to enter. That is done via App Store, a well-hidden URL that redirects anyway. And of course for that I need an “Apple ID”. So I clicked “Sign up” and selected the country suggestion “Australia”. Nothing happened. It was dead in the water: can't go forward, can't go back. Tried in a couple of other places, finally under “Settings”, where I was subjected to the sum of everything I find wrong in modern graphical interfaces: in particular, I needed to enter my birth date! What business is that of Apple's when I was born? And in best “don't show all your cards at once” tradition, it asked me first for the day, suggesting 1, 2, many... (just scroll down). OK, 1 is good enough. Month: January, ... (just scroll down). OK, January it is. Year? By this time I was thoroughly fed up and entered 11 (which would make me 2005 years old). But not according to Apple: “You Cannot Create An Apple ID Because You Do Not Meet The Minimum Age Requirement”. GRRRR! And I had to type everything in again on the abysmal keyboard. This time I entered 55. “You Cannot Create An Apple ID Because You Do Not Meet The Minimum Age Requirement”. So I entered 1948, my real year of birth. “You Cannot Create An Apple ID Because You Do Not Meet The Minimum Age Requirement”.
Andy Snow, one of the many people on IRC eating peanuts and watching the fun, came up with
the explanation: get it wrong once, and you have to wait 24 hours before you can try
again. Isn't it nice of Big Brotherthem to tell me so?
That was all I had time for today; 45 minutes and almost no progress. Certainly Apple has shown itself from its worst side (at least, I hope so).
| Sunday, 11 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 11 December 2016 |
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iPhone pain, day 2 of 2
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday my attempts to set up my iPhone 5S created a maximum amount of pain in less than an hour. But I learnt from that and followed the explanation, signing up for the App Store via a normal web session.
That was easier, but not much. The signup seemed to be a collection of (from my perspective) worst practice for web forms:
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So I chose ones that showed what I thought of the people who created this system.
Then there was a Captcha:
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OK, I can fix that with “New Code”. Then I got:
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How do you extract a sequence from that? I chose 2GL2, but what did I know? Wrong! Another twirling ring, and on the fourth attempt I found a Captcha that displayed and that we could agree on.
Then it wanted my credit card number!
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Damn you, Apple, I don't trust you further than I can throw you. I certainly don't want you storing my credit card number. So I entered an incorrect one:
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I find this highly offensive. But what can I do? So I entered the details of my debit card, which I never use, so that if anything goes wrong I can cancel it immediately.
After all that, I still couldn't log in on the phone: the AppStore app was still hanging from yesterday. After a while I found what presumably every user knows: double click on the button at the bottom (which is apparently called Home), which gives a list of apps. Scroll until the one you're looking for is in the middle, partially obscured by others, and swipe upwards.
Finally I could log in. Could I? Well, sort of. First I had to enter this emetic password, which took me about 60 seconds. People comforted me and told me I'd get faster in the course of time. I'm sure they're right: it would probably get much faster, even 4 or 6 times as fast. But that's still 15 or 10 seconds, when I could do it on a real keyboard in 1 or 2. And I had to keep entering it; there is apparently no way to stop this requirement. I suppose that makes sense when you consider that your credit card details are behind it. But that's the wrong solution: Apple shouldn't store the credit card number, and should prompt for that when necessary.
In general I'm left with the feeling that the thing is after my money. Yes, of course they are, but they show it so aggressively. And yes, like with the Toy Shop, there are free apps. But there are continual suggestions about how to spend money. Maybe my view was influenced by having to enter a credit card number.
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OI.Share revisited
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
So, finally I had the phone vaguely functional. Download a couple of apps, first OI.Share. Getting it to work was the usual pain, mainly not the fault of Apple. To get it to run you first need to disconnect from the network, and OI.Share doesn't do this automatically. Neither do the instructions help. You need to go to the Settings menu and select the camera as network. After that, OI.Share worked as well as it has ever done—not very.
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A keyboard for an iPhone
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
By far the worst thing about this iPhone is the appalling touch-screen keyboard. Yes, Android phones have something similar, but for some reason many (most) Apple apps are stuck in portrait mode, giving me a keyboard rather less than double the width of my thumb. At least on Android, most apps will let you turn the thing on its side, at least doubling the width.
In addition, the keyboard is a typical toy with separate shift keys for numerics and capitals. On Android I used the Hackers Keyboard, which made things marginally less painful. Is it available for Apple? It was, but it seems to no longer be supported. What I did find in the App Store was typical Apple: candy-coloured keyboards and a “Geek Keyboard” where the key caps were modified to represent chemical elements. Aren't we clever?
So I borrowed a Bluetooth keyboard from Chris Bahlo. I didn't get it to work. In fact, I couldn't get the phone to recognize any Bluetooth device except my desk phone. No debugging help, just dead in the water. That's very different from my previous experience with Bluetooth and Android. Potentially there's something wrong with the keyboard, or I'm using it incorrectly, but it didn't recognize my headset either.
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TeamViewer for iOS
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Topic: technology | Link here |
And then I thought of another option for less painful keyboard access: TeamViewer is available for the iPhone. I've used it in the past for access to other systems. It seems a little silly to send all the traffic between keyboard and display round the world and back, but hey, we're modern.
So I installed TeamViewer. The good news: it works. The bad news: it's upside-down. It reduces my 2510×1390 dischord window to the 800×480 or whatever of the iPhone, requiring many gestures to scroll the screen. What an amazing idea. The gesture I chose is not for publication.
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Do I need an iPhone?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Today's playing around with the iPhone made me step back and think: why do I need an iPhone? Why, do I need an iPhone? Apart from all the pain it causes, the display is so minuscule that it's not worth using for many purposes. Tried reading a Wikipedia page on it, which conveniently folded and hid data to make things not too painful. But I wouldn't use that format except in an emergency. I've already grumbled at length about the “keyboard”. And another size-related issue is that I have to hold it much closer. The monitors on my desk top are between 70 and 80 cm away. To read the phone, I need to hold it 25 to 30 cm from my face. That's a focus difference of about 2.5 dioptres, more than my old eyes can accommodate. So I need to change glasses. Yet another pain.
So, I've decided: the best thing about this phone is that Helen Miller will buy it from me at the price I paid. It's hers.
And what do I do? I started this business because Chris Bahlo had a phone to give away. It cost me $11 odd for a new battery, and if the firmware update hadn't killed it, it would have been worthwhile. But how many of my complaints about the iPhone would apply to Android? Most of them.
Went looking and found this page comparing iPhone and Android. It came out in favour of Android, though I don't really identify with the criteria. I suppose the next thing is to try to reinstate the firmware for the phone via one of the recovery functions.
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Next Trump horror
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
So now the USA intelligence agencies have discovered Russian activity prior to the election was designed to get Trump elected. What does Donald Trump do? Denies it and accuses the CIA of incompetence:
These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again,’
Well, no, Donald, that was 15 years. People at the CIA have gone and come since then. And maybe the agency has learnt caution since then. But what does that kind of claim do for relationships between the president and the agency? According to this article, they're not amused:
“Given his proclivity for revenge combined with his notorious thin skin, this threatens to result in a lasting relationship of distrust and ill will between the president and the intelligence community,” said Paul Pillar, former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.
It seems that, at least theoretically, the choice of president has not yet been made. That happens when the Electoral College meets on on 19 December, and they have been known to go against the numbers. Wouldn't it be funny if Trump were not elected? Sadly, I don't see that happening.
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Strelitzia
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
We've had a Strelitzia reginae for over 8 years, and when we moved to Stones Road we split it into 3. One is still looking unhappy, but the others are flowering better than they ever did in Kleins Road:
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Now we need to wait for the newly planted (from a pot) Strelitzia nicolai to flower. I doubt it'll be this year.
| Monday, 12 December 2016 | Dereel → Geelong → Dereel | Images for 12 December 2016 |
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Duck eggs
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Last week Petra brought us some fresh duck eggs. Yvonne wanted to eat them for breakfast, but I had some prejudice from my childhood that duck eggs were dangerous and needed to be cooked thoroughly before eating. But looking on the web showed no such warnings, and maybe this is an old, worn-out magic word. So today we had some of them for breakfast:
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And they tasted good, though not as different from hen eggs as I had expected.
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Flash experiments
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Saturday's Camera Crew meeting got me thinking about flash lighting. Yesterday, for the first time, we had 6 flowers on the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis bush, so took a few photos with varying flash, starting yesterday.
The results were not spectacular. Yesterday I took a total of 4 sets. Each set consisted of exposures without flash, with flash +0 EV, -1 EV, -2 EV and -3 EV. I managed to get things wrong the first: I had the camera set to automatic ISO and aperture priority metering (f/8), with the interesting effect that it changed the ISO depending on the flash intensity:
| Flash | Shutter speed | ISO | ||
| 0 EV | 1/60 | 30°/800 | ||
| -1 EV | 1/60 | 29°/640 | ||
| -2 EV | 1/60 | 25°/250 | ||
| -3 EV | 1/60 | 24°/200 | ||
| none | 1/60 | 32°/1250 |
This doesn't make much sense to me. The less flash I use, the lower the ISO rating? But with no flash at all, it's at its highest. It's also interesting to note that the camera always seems to set the shutter speed at 1/60 s, something I've noted before.
For the next set I set the ISO to 24°/200 and used the camera to set the flash intensity. Finally I did it setting the flash intensity from the flash unit. The camera and flash record individual settings, but don't show the settings from the other device.
The results? I was amazed by the consistent exposure detail, until I realized that that was thanks to DxO Optics “Pro”. Without it (as below), things didn't look nearly as good, and very much in keeping with my previous experience with flash. But in addition, in every case with flash I got significant shadows. Here the last set with no flash, -3 EV and 0 EV compensation:
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It seems that once you use flash, the camera sets itself to 1/60 s and gives up on automatic exposure. It calls the mode “fill-in” (the EXIF data are directly from the camera), but in principle it seems to be relying on the flash to do the exposure rather than to fill in. I've seen this before, and gradually I'm coming to the conclusion that Olympus flash exposure is either terminally broken or so badly documented that it's impossible to get good results.
But independently of that, it's clear that flash didn't work there. But there are more options: how about bounce flash? I already have studio flash units in the room, and I can bounce the camera flash. How does that look?
The room flash exposures were useless, though the (manual) exposure was correct. The light came from behind:
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That's not surprising: the units are aligned to illuminate the area to the left of the plants. I tried again with only one of the flashes, but unsurprisingly it was worse:
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But somehow today things weren't as good as yesterday. A direct flash with +0 EV looked nothing like yesterday (first image):
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Why? I still don't know. The flash intensity was the same, and the ambient light made almost no difference, since it was 2 EV underexposed, as the (better) exposure with no flash at all shows:
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But at the same exposure, the shutter speed was 1/13 s instead of 1/60 s, fully 2 EV more exposure. The difference must really be that the ambient lighting was different today, and the lack of automatic exposure did the rest.
Finally, though, bounce flash seems to have done the job, sort of:
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It could still have done with more exposure. But all this flash exposure stuff, at least with Olympus, seems more trouble than it's worth.
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Repairing mobile phones
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Topic: technology | Link here |
In the last few days I've tried various things to repair the Samsung GT-I9100T using the recovery functions I found the other day:
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So far I have tried the wipe functions, without success. But there are two “Apply update” functions there, either from ADB (what's that? Obsolete debugger?) or external storage, whatever that may mean. Went looking on the web and found little reliable information, just pages like this, but it seems that the ADB is an Android Debug Bridge. It seems not to be a piece of hardware, but so far I haven't found any description detailed enough to be able to use it. The same goes for external storage, which seems to be a SD Card. So far everything I have found doesn't give details of where to find the image, nor how to prepare the medium so that the phone can understand it.
Since I was planning to go to Geelong, called up Buzztech, who confirmed that they could install an image on the phone, and if there were no complications it would cost $55. Considered that and decided that I could probably save $55 and gain experience if I tried to do it myself. If not, a repairer in Ballarat would make more sense. Now to look for reliable info on sources of firmware.
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Geelong again
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Topic: health, food and drink | Link here |
Off to Geelong in the afternoon for my 6-monthly periodontics checkup. Nothing unusual there; just the confirmation that nothing has changed, and cleaner teeth at the end, and a lot of money to pay.
Then off to Belmont for shopping. Got some masa harina at Indo-Asian groceries, which proved to be expiring in 2 months, and various curry and laksa pastes at Gourmet Asian Grocery.. Hopefully the laksa will be good enough.
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Your System has been blocked
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
When I got home, Yvonne called me to a problem on her machine:
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What's that? The browser displayed the URL http://get.infinityitservices.net Called up the number (which was an Australian free call) and was connected to somebody who, as usual, didn't understand what was going on. He was fully locked in to the Microsoft mentality, asked me to press the “Broken windows” key and R (I think) and was surprised when nothing happened. Then he wanted me to download a Microsoft executable and run it, but this screen wouldn't take no (or Cancel) for an answer: it kept opening a new tab with the same URL and the same messages, and my browser was effectively dead. He asked me to try Chrome, which at least functioned normally, but nothing like the way he thought. He did go to the trouble to look up X, and was mightily impressed by the fact that it was a server, so much that he no longer insisted that I reboot the machine.
After about 20 minutes it was clear that we weren't coming any closer, and I gave up. What I really wanted to find out was what the site was for, and why it was blocking some unspecified IP. http://www.infinityitservices.net/ appears to be some marketing system, and probably Yvonne clicked on it by accident. God protect us from such sites!
| Tuesday, 13 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 13 December 2016 |
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Nobody wants an iPhone
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Helen Miller along this morning to pick up the iPhone. Looked at it and said “It's an iPhone 5S”. Yes, as advertised. But not what she had expected: she thought it was a iPhone 6S. She already has a 5S, so she doesn't need it.
Damn! I only bought the thing with the safety net of being able to sell it to her if I didn't want it. What do I do now? Take it back to Carol? Sell it on eBay? For the moment I'll give it another try.
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Tortillas again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
It's been over 7 years since I started making tortillas from masa harina. It took me a long while, but finally I got to the stage where I could make them fairly reliably.
But the masa I bought yesterday was a different brand, Minsa, which I've used before, and have notes for. So I made it according to the notes, but things didn't work as well. The pressed tortillas were very fragile, and I wasn't able to keep them together:
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What's causing that? My notes say to use more water (5:3) than for the Casa Iberica masa (3:2). Are they incorrect? To be tried again with 3:2. And probably I should accept that the roti maker may be good for chapatis, but the tortillas come out too dry.
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Hot weather for cats
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Topic: animals | Link here |
The temperature hit 32° today, and it seems that Rani felt like a shower:
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Reinstalling Android firmware
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
A little more investigation of how to recover the Samsung GT-I9100T today. It seems that they have a maintenance tool, Kies that runs on Microsoft and communicates with the phone via 802.11 or USB. So I installed that and tried it out. Not the most convincing program I've seen: it didn't detect the phone set to recovery mode, and offered a “Troubleshoot connection error” function which required the phone to be disconnected! It ran and found no error (nor, for that matter, anything else). I had at least expected it to want the phone to be reconnected at some point, but no, that won't be necessary, thank you. Neither, from my point of view, is Kies. Choose something else.
The other one is the ADB that I've already mentioned. It turns out to be a program in Android Studio. I suppose I should install that, but first I need to find a source of the firmware.
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The daily Trump horror
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
A few days ago Donald Trump committed a diplomatic blunder—we think—by establishing contact with the President of Taiwan, a country that the USA does not recognize, in breach of its One China Policy. China has so far reacted the way I expected, calling Trump “naive”, probably a gentle term. So what do you do when you're in a hole? Dig, says Trump. This commentary confirms my concerns of last week: “Wars have been started by smaller things”.
Now it may not be a bad idea to show China that they can't do anything they like, but it requires the skills of a seasoned diplomat, not a ruthless businessman. Hopefully the USA will get a good Secretary of State, and Trump will let him do his job without too much interference.
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Malaysian food pastes
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
In Geelong yesterday I bought a number of pre-prepared food pastes, including one for Ikan kukus (steamed fish), made by Suntraco in Klang. The images look good, but what we got was a reddish paste, and the results (which I forgot to photograph) look nothing like the ones I found on the web.
The results were acceptable but boring. I wonder if any of these pastes will be worth using.
| Wednesday, 14 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 14 December 2016 |
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Phone pain: Android
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So it seems that it is possible to download a firmware image to the Samsung GT-I9100T. I just need to find an image. OK, off for a search, which came up with a lot of useless information, but also some promising ones. http://www.sammobile.com/firmwares/ looked promising, and found the apparently correct firmware after an amazing amount of suppressed advertising and a Captcha to end all Captchas:
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It requires not one, but two steps, and the first time round I got it wrong. And then I had to put up with one of these silly download screens: free download at 15 kB/s, or fast download for 10 €. More waiting for a badly presented video, and finally error 404. Tried many different combinations, browsers and operating systems and finally gave up.
But there was more than one site. The next was http://www.android.gs/, which led me to the XXSLR firmware, whatever that may be. Also 404.
Clearly there's a pattern here. This page promised me official firmware, but brought me back to sammobile with yet another 404. Somewhere I saw a reference to Cyanogenmod, of which I had heard. They offer alternative firmware along with documentation that seemed just too painful. In addition, as long as I don't know the status of the phone, it doesn't seem to be a good idea to use alternative firmware.
Finally I found this page, which offered me the XXMS7 official firmware, whatever that means. More 15 kB/s downloads—why do they do that? And why doesn't Samsung offer their own download page? Started downloading my 550 MB of files, and that was all I could do for the day.
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Phone pain: iOS
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So I'm stuck with the iPhone 5S, at least for the moment. I might as well try it out in more detail. I had already reset everything, so I set it up again, which was not quite as painful as last time. This time I read some of the stuff that I skipped last time, including touch ID. And how about that, with my fingerprint I can bypass all this emetic password entry! It took me a while to realize that I needed to hold the finger over the Home button (the unmarked button at the bottom), and that I really needed a thumbprint and not the print of my index finger). That seems to work, and it saves a lot of pain. How reliable is it? What happens if somebody else presents a photocopy of my thumb?
It also signed me up for all sorts of things I don't (currently) want, including iCloud, whatever that may be. And I got another stupid mail message:
No, that doesn't look familiar at all. I wasn't aware of having signed in to iCloud, certainly not in an incorrect time zone. But the device is correct, and the time (once converted) seems to make sense, so probably it was I. But once again there is no location or IP address information. Blessed are the the poor in spirit, for they shall prop up Apple's bottom line.
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ALDI SIM registration
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I went out and spent big on a new SIM card for the iPhone 5S: $5 for ALDI's best. And once again I had fun trying to access their appalling web site. I have had an account with them for several years (how long? They don't keep track of the years, so it's hard to tell from there, but it seems that I've had fun in the past in June 2014 and a few months back). On the second occasion I had to reset my password, because they had changed the rules and my current password no longer worked, and they would not tell me the rules they required to limit the difficulty of a brute-force attack.
Today the password still worked, but that seemed to confuse the system:
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I didn't need to update the password, but the fact that I had two SIM cards already didn't impress it very much: I had to re-enter all information, including my Medicare number. It still wasn't impressed:
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So I had to do a dummy debit from my credit card and report the sum that they debited. It appeared to succeed, but my bank wasn't impressed: no indication of a debit. Another thing that will have to wait until tomorrow.
How I hate ALDI Mobile!
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The daily Trump
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Only yesterday I wrote:
... it requires the skills of a seasoned diplomat, not a ruthless businessman. Hopefully the USA will get a good Secretary of State, and Trump will let him do his job without too much interference.
So whom did he appoint? Rex Tillerson, the CEO of one of the USA's largest corporations, and the first nominee for the position with no diplomatic experience. God help us. Hopefully the US Senate will reject the appointment.
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Goodbye Kito
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Sad news today: Chris Bahlo's Bengal cat Kito has been run over. She was one of two of which we had the choice in April:
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At the time we chose Rani, but it wasn't an easy choice. In particular, she was even less Felis catus than Rani. In particular, she didn't meow: the sound she made was very different. But for reasons I don't understand, Chris doesn't let her cats into the house, which particularly annoyed Kito. A pity: if she had been let in more often, she would probably still be alive.
| Thursday, 15 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 15 December 2016 |
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Trying out the new driveway
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Topic: Stones Road house, animals | Link here |
Chris Bahlo along this morning to bring a few horses to eat down the grass round the dam, including “Little Al”:
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This was also the first time we had a trailer go round the new driveway. It needs to be taken wide:
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World travelers return
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Topic: general | Link here |
Garry Mariott is back from the second stage of his multiyear trip round Australia. Diane wasn't with him: her mother (94 years old) is dying, and she was visiting her. After that they'll be off again, but they're planning to return home in October next year.
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More wildflowers
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Despite the advent of summer, there are a number of flowers around:
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Moving the goldfish
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Topic: gardening, animals | Link here |
We've had our goldfish in a bathtub in front of the house for over a year, and the crystal clear water then has changed somewhat, particularly in the last few weeks. Here then and now:
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And yes, those goldfish are dead. No wonder with that water.
We had intended to transplant them into the trough round the “verandah” to be once we had finished it, but after over a year we still can't make up our minds what to do with the area. So we decided it was time to put the fish in the trough anyway, and we can move them out temporarily when (if?) the work starts. It was a fair amount of work, mainly dividing the enormous clumps of vegetation:
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We don't have pots for most of them, so they're lying at all angles. But things seem on the way to improvement, and if goldfish have emotions, I'm sure they're happy about the change. Here's before and after. Run the cursor over either image to compare with the partner:
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Android: next firmware attempt
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The firmware download for my Samsung GT-I9100T finally completed, but I still wasn't really happy. What is it? It's not the official release for Australia. More searching, and I found something that looked more plausible. The link took me to another file on rapidgator.net, along with the silly Captchas and slow download, but at least it looked more convincing. Another day of waiting, made easier by all the other things I had to do.
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The daily Trump
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
So it seems that China has decided to install missiles on its artificial islands in the South China Sea. Why? Yes, the islands are not only disputed, they have been declared illegal by the Permanant Court of Arbitration. China has refuted the authority of the court, but until now had done nothing further. Now Donald Trump has annoyed them, and I've mentioned a couple of times that wars can be started inadvertently by stupid actions of people like Trump. I don't see that coming immediately; I think this is just sabre-rattling. But it seems that every day his actions cause new problems.
| Friday, 16 December 2016 | Dereel → Ballarat → Enfield → Dereel | |
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Visiting Eureka
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Off this morning with Nikolai (and Yvonne and Sasha) to Eureka Village Hostel. It's becoming routine now, and there wasn't much to report.
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More Anigozanthos
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Topic: gardening, general | Link here |
On the way home, dropped in in Enfield to pick up some Anigozanthos plants from Petra Gietz. By coincidence she lives in Inglewood Drive, exactly across the road from the property we nearly bought in March 2013. I even took a photo of her house at the time:
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The daily Trump disaster
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
One of the few positive things I had hoped for from the Donald Trump disaster was that he appears to be less interested in supporting conflicts outside the USA. In particular, it would be good for the USA to stop propping up Israël's illegal occupation of Palestine. Today he dashed even that hope: he appointed David M. Friedman (a name so well-known that I had to add it to Wikipedia), as ambassador to Israel. In this case, nomen non est omen: to quote the New York Times, he is “a bankruptcy lawyer aligned with the Israeli far right”, and he has already signaled confrontation with an intention to move the US Embassy to “Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem”.
And of course, if that were not already obvious, he has no diplomatic experience. Even the Israeli newspaper Haaretz stated “He makes Benjamin Netanyahu seem like a left-wing defeatist.”
Electoral College, are you listening?
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iPhone: success!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Two days ago I went through a bizarre method of authentication to register the SIM card for my iPhone: they were to deduct a small sum from my credit card, and I was to use this sum as evidence that I exist (or at least that I am an entity having access to my bank statements). That went ahead, and the system acknowledged that it had debited something from my credit card.
But my bank didn't want to know. Plenty of other transactions, but nothing from ALDI. After two days, finally called them up and spoke to a human, who was able to complete the transaction. About the only issue we had was the phone number: yes, I can transfer the phone number, but then I lose the $5 credit I had on the new SIM. And I can't transfer back again: I would need to buy yet another SIM (and lose another $5). So it made more sense to use up the credit on the new card, and then decide if I wanted to transfer the number (to another new SIM).
As it happened, the number I was assigned actually looks better than the one I had. The old one is 0401 265 606, which I remember as interleaved 250 and 666. But the new one is 0490 494 038, much easier to remember: UNIVAC 490 UNIVAC 494 (coincidentally one of my favourite computers) and the interrupt vector address for the 0xff instruction on the Intel 8080, 0x38.
Can I make a call with it. Yes! After finding my way through the menu system (it offered me “Favorites”, of which I had none), found the number pad. It only took me 6 days.
In the evening, used the thing to display the recipe I was cooking. It wasn't easy typing in the URL; even when I had got as far
as lemis.com, it kept suggesting different domain names. And when I had my home
page (/grog/), I couldn't find a way to get from there to /grog/recipes/ayam-lemak.php. There's probably a way, but it's
not obvious intuitive. And the fact remains: the tiny screen is almost useless.
Good in an emergency, but you'd have to be masochistic to want to use it.
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Rendang paste: no thanks
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Today cooked another of the paste mixtures I bought on Monday, a rendang, also from Suntraco. Boring. And like the other one, not enough salt. But it's too pedas for Yvonne, so I don't see myself buying anything further.
| Saturday, 17 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 17 December 2016 |
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More garden beds
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Mick the gardener along today to do more work, including planting plants on the mound in the middle of the new driveway. We're planning to cover the whole mound in Carpobrotus, which grow fast, suppress weeds, and are easily removed when needed. He also planted yesterday's Anigozanthos and a Leucospermum cordifolium that has been waiting for a spot for months.
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Unfortunately, Mick misunderstood the purpose of the Carpobrotus, and now it's interleaved with the Anigozanthos:
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Still, the place looks very different already:
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And if the Carpobrotus take off the way I hope, it'll look different again by the autumn.
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Garden flowers in early summer
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
It's well past the middle of the month, time for the monthly garden flower photos. One disappointment were the roses, which look considerably worse than last month:
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I suspect that they need more water, something that we need to look at soon.
The Cannas are doing well. In particular, they're coming much more strongly than last year:
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The Hebes are also starting to flower:
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And as previously mentioned, the Strelitziae reginae are doing better than ever before:
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Other flowers are doing well, though some have issues with the wind:
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And the lilies I planted in the winter are flowering, some of them nearly finished:
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The Senna aciphylla that we transplanted a month ago looks rather the way I expected. The first photo was taken last month:
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But it is developing new shoots, so it may survive:
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Android? iOS?
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Peter Jeremy has bought one of the ALDI Android tablets that I bought last month. He's actually less happy with it than I was, for completely unrelated reasons: it seems it's really slow, and the battery has a very limited life. Maybe there is an issue with the batteries: after all, I returned mine because it wouldn't charge at all, though at the time I blamed it on Instagram. But speed? Somehow not a thing that I have noticed one way or another with portable devices. And it's not as if he's playing games or similar: just launching an app, it seems, is too slow.
The other thing that Peter didn't like was the image quality. Image quality? Ah, right, these things have a camera in them. What about the iPhone? Found out how to take photos with it. That was straightforward enough. Now how do I get them to my computer? After not trying too hard, found the modern way: send them to myself as an email attachment. To groggyhimself@lemis.com? No, that was too much trouble. But I could send to Gmail. Isn't that the modern way to do things? And of course I was asked if I really wanted to send the images, or just thumbnails. Still, it got through.
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Your mail ID has been used!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Using Gmail for sending my photos (why did I need to log in? Why, did I need to log in?) brought another of these silly messages from Google:
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What earthly use is that? Last week I ranted about the lack of useful information in a warning about this kind of login. Now, at any rate, they haven't included useless information: they have included no information whatsoever, just a bit of advertising. What use is that? Why do they bother?
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iPhone image quality
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Once I got the images, I put them through my normal work flow, using DxO Optics “Pro”, which knew all about the “camera”, and did image correction, showing it to be one of the few lenses I know with pincushion distortion. Here the original and as processed. Run the cursor over either image to compare with the partner:
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In fact, the images are surprisingly good. The lighting of the scene is quite complicated, and I suspect that Apple is doing quite a bit of processing internally. I should do some more comparisons.
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Dinner with Pene
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Topic: general, food and drink | Link here |
Pene Kirk over for dinner tonight, tournedos Rossini Henri IV (we couldn't find a substitute
for foie gras). Food was excellent,
and we had lots of fun. Pene was in a talkative mood and told us some interesting stories.
| Sunday, 18 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 18 December 2016 |
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Copying: a non-word
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Copying files from my iPhone to my computer was suboptimal at best: send them round the world and back again. But Edwin Groothuis and Daniel O'Connor gave me another suggestion: it seems that if you plug the USB cable into a Microsoft or Apple computer, it just shows up as a file system.
OK, but let's try FreeBSD first.
That's not exactly an out-of-box success, though I'm surprised that the system doesn't recognize the device. So try with dischord. Sure enough, it showed up:
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But that's not a file system, and when I clicked on the image, I got an empty screen—not even an error message. Time to Google. This page, from Apple, explains the error of my ways: you don't copy files any more, you import them, and they're not files, they're photos and videos. Ugh.
It led me to this page, also using this stupid terminology. It seems that I have to power on the device and specifically allow access:
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Then I was offered limited access to the file system. This “mobile device” access is something like a second-rate citizen: the file system is there, but it's not anchored into the Microsoft hierarchy, so tools like COMMAND.EXE can't find them, especially since I haven't found a way to select multiple images: clicking on them opens them. Instead you need to drag, which is a real drag if there are lots of them. I must find out what is behind the connection. One of these silly Picture Transfer Protocol things? It seems inappropriate for what appears to be a complete view of the file system, but then maybe it isn't. After all, showing the user what he has is not modern. One of the many things I need to understand.
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Updating iPhone firmware, again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I only upgraded the firmware on my iPhone last week, not surprising in view of the fact that I had just got it. And today I was asked again. Is this a coincidence, or do they bring out weekly updates? As before, the update was successful, but I had to enter my password again! Why? No idea. At first I thought it had deleted the fingerprints, but they're still there. And once again I had to go through far too many setup functions again before I could use it. And once again indications of access restrictions:
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So they have deliberately restricted access. What about devices that can't be upgraded? Somehow this is all more pain than it is worth.
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Updating Android firmware, yet again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So now I have the firmware for my Samsung GT-I9100T. All I need to do is transfer it to the phone, and I have the instructions for that. But that includes downloading a USB driver and an upgrade program. The instructions refer to an Odin3_v3.07 Flasher tool and a Samsung Galaxy S2 USB driver, both ultimately leading to rapidgator.net, which I am leaning to hate with a passion. Downloading the driver gave me continual advertising popups that obscured what I was trying to do, and at one point it claimed that my Captcha had expired, and I had to wait 60 minutes. Later, with no further activity, it was increased to 120 minutes. Finally I got the bloody thing, and with some misgivings attempted to install it. Already there! Grrr!
On with Odin. That, too, was difficult to install, and finally I gave up and found this page, which didn't do silly things. But the size was wrong! Rapidgator had offered a file of some 7 MB, and this one was only 460 kB. But it was correct. Who knows what malware Rapidgator has put in their version?
So finally I had what I needed: driver, firmware and utility. What's missing? The documentation, of course; this is a modern program. But it looks like it's going to work.
So why didn't I try it? Based on everything that has happened so far, it's not going to be straightforward, so I put it off until I have at least 2 hours of uninterrupted time.
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Updating MythTV
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yet another pain is MythTV, which has been so painful that I haven't done anything about it in months. But one issue is that it currently saves the recordings as MPEG transport streams, which don't have correct elapsed time information. My attempts to run it manually failed with some obscure error hidden deep in some disinterested library.
So today I ran mythtv-setup to try to get it to run automatically after recording. I'm not convinced I was successful, but after that the backend was catatonic. How to stop? There's a program called mythshutdown, so I ran that. It shut down the computer into a catatonic state, and I had to press the Big Red Button. And then, of course, I booted the wrong image. I must find out how to set the default boot partition on the current incarnation of GRUB (hint: currently it's /dev/hda8).
| Monday, 19 December 2016 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 19 December 2016 |
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Power failure
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Topic: general | Link here |
Another power failure this morning at 10:27, one of those rare failures that is neither instantaneous nor prolonged. I had time to get the generator started and roll out the power cable when the power came back.
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GPS on iPhone
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Today I had to go to Ballarat for yet another doctor's appointment. Time to try out GPS apps on the iPhone.
I found one last week before I reset it to factory defaults, but I've forgotten what it was called. How do I find it again? Impossible. In fact, finding anything on this tiny screen is impossible. How can I access the App Store from a real computer? You'd think Apple would have a method, since they sell real computers too. But they seem to have identity issues between the App Store and iTunes, and the best I could find was this page. At least it has categories, like Navigation. But that only presents an unsorted list of apps with no further information. At top right there's a link “View Navigation in iTunes”, which leads you to an install page
And when I did, I got an unexpected message:
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That is about 150 km away. Surely location services can do better than that. Is that maybe where one of the gateway machines is located?
Installing iTunes didn't help. How about that? It only offers music and videos. OK, back to the original link View Navigation in iTunes. Nope, it still offers to install it for me, though it's installed. Dead End.
Then somehow I found this page, which at least shows some details. But how did I get there? No idea. It's really amazingly difficult to find things. So I moved to the iPhone and tried downloading some of them. It wanted my password again! But it seems only once, and because I had upgraded the firmware. Others confirmed that this only happened about every other month, so it's (barely) bearable.
Ended up installing Sygic, Waze and Google Maps (shouldn't that be there automatically?) Waze is completely confusing, and of course none of these apps offer anything like help (they may have it, but they don't offer it). So this display is neither what I expected nor what I understand:
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The two I ended up starting (which? without a window title it's difficult to tell). I think they might have been Sygic and Google Maps. As it happened, I needed to find my way to 4 Vine St in Ballarat, where I had never been before. Both guided me there, one with a female voice, one with a male voice. But neither are easy to use: I really needed to enter the name exactly via the horrible keyboard. When I entered “Vine Rd” instead of “Vine St”, it didn't complain—it just took me to a random place in Doveton St. And one (Sygic?) took something like 30 seconds to locate the address, and if I didn't wait for it, it just reverted to the previous address. Neither of these would have happened with my dedicated navigator: after entering “Vin” it automatically shows all matches (Vincent Ct, Vincent Dr, Vine Pl, Vine St).
Once again I'm left amazed at how bad mobile phone GPS apps are. I've used Sygic before, and I was relatively happy with it then. But the price was astronomical. What's it like now? I ended up with this anonymous claim:
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What does that relate to? It doesn't seem to come from Apple Maps or Google Maps. Waze maybe, whatever that is? I suppose I'll find out. Something kept displaying “7 days to go” at the top of the screen, conveniently on various screens. But my el-cheapo standalone navigator may be clunky, but address entry is vastly simpler: select town, street and number in separate steps, with name completion at all stages. Why are the smart phone apps so hard to use?
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Doctor visit
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Topic: health | Link here |
The visit with the doctor (Paul Smith) was routine, to discuss the results of my eye examination. Paul was at least interested in the cause of the problem, but we decided it was probably the result of over-exertion. That's a good excuse next time somebody asks me to do some work that I don't want to do.
Also had another vaccination, this time for Diptheria and Pertussis, and possibly something else. It seems strange to do that at my time of life, but Paul says that it can happen to older people too, and I could end up being a carrier.
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Repairing mobile phones
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
On Saturday Chris Bahlo brought me another mobile phone, her last Samsung. It failed on her watch: it seems that the charging circuitry failed. It's a considerably better one than the GT-I9100T that I'm trying to re-flash, but clearly replacing parts is beyond my ability. So I looked up repair places, and came up with no less than two of them, iAdrenalin and Ballarat iPhones. Despite the name, both of them also do Samsung, and they're both located at 4 Vine Street, which is a residential address and the reason for my search described above. Along to take a look. As expected, one man (David), two companies, though the card he gave me was for Ballarat iPhones. He thinks a repair will be worthwhile, and will check.
I also asked him about re-flashing the I9100. Yes, Odin3_v3.07 Flasher is the way to go. He's not interested in doing it himself—he can't be sure it will work, and he doesn't want dissatisfied customers. Only partially encouraging.
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More Trump
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Donald Trump has been relatively quiet in the last couple of days, maybe to avoid fanning the flames of people trying to convince the Electoral College to disendorse him. But he did manage to voice his opinion that China should keep the underwater drone that they captured a couple of days ago. Some claim that this will further antagonize them; somehow I don't see that. Still, he'll find something else.
More cartoons, of course. Someone on Quora asked what the Irish think of him. Pretty much what everybody outside the USA thinks of him. I particularly liked this one:
| Tuesday, 20 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 20 December 2016 |
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Reviving Galaxy S2
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Finally found time to re-flash the Samsung GT-I9100T. I've been planning it for a week, but finally I had all the pieces together and the time for something to go wrong. I followed this page, which could do with some improvement, but basically is correct. Here's the procedure:
Download Odin3 and maybe the Samsung Galaxy S2 USB driver. The latter URL points to rapidgator.net, which I strongly recommend avoiding, but I haven't found (or needed to find) an alternative site.
Download the firmware. Here again, sadly, I was taken to rapdigator, but finally managed the download.
The firmware file will be in zip format, for some reason, since the only useful content is a tar file. Unzip it and you should end up with something like the following files:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/32) /src/Firmware 45 -> unzip -l I9100-XSA-LSH-20130226.zip
Making sure that the phone is not connected to the computer, start Odin3:
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Select options “Auto Reboot” and “F. Reset Time” on middle left (the instructions claim they're on the right), and ensure that the rest are not set:
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Select PDA on the right and find a way to enter the file name (here moved to dischord):
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Odin3 then checks the firmware file and confirms (hopefully) the consistency:
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Select “Start” at bottom centre.
Set the phone to download mode: press keys Volume Down, OK (button at bottom) and Power On. Here the image from the instructions (now succumbed to bit rot):
The phone then displays this screen:
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Press Volume Up and connect the USB cable to the computer. The display changes to:
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The cyan bar at the bottom is a progress indicator; at the beginning it's empty.
After about 10 minutes, including pauses for photos, it was done, and the Telstra emblem was gone: the update had gone without a hitch. The fun started when I tried to set up the phone. It refused my email ID! So I tried online from a real computer:
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It didn't want to know that I wasn't in the USA. Found a site relating to Australia, but I still wasn't out of the woods. Another site that wants to tell me what characters to use:
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Apart from the abject stupidity and incorrect grammar (of course passwords can contain repeated or consecutive characters; they'll just be rejected), what does this mean?
The only special characters that can be used are those available by default on the keyboard.
In any case, thought out a password that fitted those criteria: “Easy to crack”. Rejected. Are spaces maybe not available by default on the keyboard? No, “Easytocrack” also fails. Finally Samsung1diots was accepted. So it seems that it requires at least one digit in the password, not what the page says.
But I still wasn't there. It rejected my email address! Time to call Samsung on 1300 362 603, where of course they couldn't help beyond (after confirming name and address) that they already had an email address for me, my canonical one. Of course: they sent me an email the other day for returning the phone. So I signed in under that and it worked. She gave me a reference number for the talk, 8210007884. As I said, “That's not a valid password!”. At least I got a laugh out of her.
How long did it take? I didn't keep notes, but my cameras and images did:
| Time | Action | |
| 08:34:52 | Start Odin3 | |
| 08:36:54 | Start flashing | |
| 08:45:08 | Flash complete, upgrading | |
| 08:47:03 | Start setup | |
| 08:58:21 | Give up account creation attempt, try computer | |
| 09:08:35 | Call Samsung | |
| 09:25:15 | End call Samsung | |
In summary, then, the re-flashing took about 10 minutes, and the setup took 40 minutes to the point where I could start loading apps from the toyshop. Aren't modern devices fun?
So: time to tell Samsung I don't need to return the phone for service. How do I do that? The email was from a no-reply email address (why do they do that?), and there was no information in the message about how to contact them by email. Oh well: they'll find out somehow.
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DxO ViewPoint 3 understood
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
My ticket about DxO ViewPoint release 3 is now over three weeks old. For once, the ball is in my court: it seems that the functionality that I missed (specifically, automatic cropping) is present, but only if you use the default “presets” (collections of configuration parameters). I have my own, and they don't want to know. I can't even find a way of updating them. And clearly annoying myself with DxO support is not going to help much.
But these “presets” are stored in XML format. Time to compare them and see what I need to tweak. How hard can it be?
Well, this is on dischord, a Microsoft box, so most of the tools are missing. I have Cygwin, but it distorts my view of the Microsoft hierarchy to a point where I can't find my way about. Emacs doesn't, but it doesn't make comparison that easy. In particular, the saved “presets” don't have the same indentation as the original. OK, let's make a copy of C:\Users\Grog\AppData\Local\ on eureka.
It took a surprisingly long time. But that's only surprising because I wasn't expecting the hierarchy to contain nearly 50 GB of data, including cache files up to 2½ years old from two older versions of DxO Optics “Pro”. Time to clean up this mess. Is that what Microsoft means by removing old Internet files? It seems unlikely, but what do I understand?
In any case, took another look at the configuration files. They've really gone to great lengths to make it impossible to discern what needs tweaking. This one goes on my impressively large tuit queue.
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Merry Christmas to all!
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Topic: general | Link here |
It's Christmas time, and we've created our annual Christmas message. Merry Christmas to all. If you know me and didn't get an email, send me mail and I'll add you to the list next year.
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Photos for Christmas letter
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Our annual Christmas message includes a photo of Yvonne and myself at the top, along with as many animals as we can keep still. This year we decided to do it inside, which ultimately worked out acceptably:
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But that was photo 28 of a total of 29 attempts. The photos were taken with the studio flash in the dining room, which isn't really aimed at the area we were sitting in, and despite claims from the light meter, everything was significantly underexposed. Postprocessing helped, but this is what the original looked like:
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That's a pity, because when I went to improve the lighting, Piccola escaped, so we ended up with only the dogs.
And one of the photos looks very much like I got the wrong shutter speed:
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How did that happen? It looks for all the world like a shutter malfunction.
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Reviving plants
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Over the winter a number of our plants suffered. Our miniature lime tree lost most of its leaves, at least partially because of parasites. We planted it outside mainly in a last-ditch attempt to save it. But how about that, it's getting new leaves:
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And the curry tree that I've been coddling for years also suffered badly in the winter, losing nearly all its leaves. I didn't dare show photos of it for fear of condemnation by Peter Jeremy, who gave it to me nearly 7 years ago. But in the last few weeks it has recovered greatly. Here the first timid shoots last month, and what has grown out of them by today:
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And finally there's the Senna aciphylla, which I showed last week. Gradually the shoots are taking the shape of leaves:
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Trumped!
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
So the Electoral College have spoken—the bastards. It seems that only two electors voted against what was expected of him. So for better or (probably) worse, we're lumbered with an idiot in one of the most powerful positions in the world. God help us.
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Block Pirate Bay
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
The Australian Federal Court has ruled that Australian ISPs must block access to The Pirate Bay.
On the face of it, that makes sense. The Pirate Bay assists copyright infringement. And the Federal Court rules that the copyright owners should come up with the funding for blocking it.
But does it really makes sense? A number of things suggest that it doesn't:
What is copyright? Is it still a valid concept in its 20th century invocation? At the moment I have a choice when watching films for: free-to-air TV or download the video. I'm omitting things like Netflix and pay TV, because they're not free. But in the case of free TV, the same programs are being broadcast. Sure, the TV channels (or their advertisers) are paying royalties, but that doesn't affect me, especially if I have technology to skip over the commercials. This is a similar issue to the one of access to copyrighted books: the Oxford English Dictionary is very expensive even for private users, but in may parts of the world (including Australia) it's available for free from the local public library.
Is The Pirate Bay the correct target? They just publish information on where to get the material. If they go away, the same information will be distributed by other channels. To do it correctly, you need to block the myriads of individual sites that distribute the files themselves.
How do you block them? Replacements can spring up like flowers after rain in the desert. It seems that the Federal Court has left that to the ISPs. From the reference above:
It could be DNS blocking, blocking IP addresses, URL blocking or any other technical methods which are mutually agreed to by ISPs and rights holders.
Let's consider the alternatives.
DNS blocking. That requires access to the DNS servers. Yes, most people use the DNS servers allocated by their ISPs. But how quickly will people realize that there are alternatives? The ISPs can block port 53 (DNS), but that would just mean running DNS over a different port. That makes things more difficult, but not difficult.
IP blocking. Simple: change your IP or use a tunnel. Again, the ISPs can block the secondary IPs used as the target of a tunnel, but how much work will that be?
URL blocking is similar. It seems to assume that the ISP has some influence over web access (a proxy server, for example). It would seem bypassing that is as simple as not using the ISP proxy server.
For many, the ruling might be interesting for this statement:
The Federal Court handed down its judgement yesterday afternoon, also ordering that ISPs block similar bittorrent websites Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt and streaming service SolarMovie.
I have heard of The Pirate Bay. I hadn't heard of the others. So now they're getting free advertising.
In any case, the first ISPs have reacted. Here's what Telstra has to say:
The message you are receiving around Content Denied where you have tried to access a website is not in relation to any Telstra issue or fault. Access to this website has been disabled by an order of the Federal Court of Australia because it infringes or facilitates the infringement of Copyright.
The first question I ask here is whether this text passes the Turing Test.
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More mobile phone GPS apps
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
On several occasions I have compared the navigation apps available for mobile phones with the software on my el-cheapo GPS navigator, almost invariably unfavourably. But the same software, iGO, is available for Samsung phones (only). Tried downloading it today. It's really difficult to use it outside a car: in the house there's no GPS coverage, and outside it's too bright. But it seems to work quite similarly to the way it does on the dedicated navigator. It's free, but the maps cost—about $27 for Australia. That might even be worth it, but the question is whether the phone version offers anything that the standalone version doesn't. Display size is definitely in favour of the standalone version.
| Wednesday, 21 December 2016 | Dereel | |
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Planning Christmas
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Topic: food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
What's Christmas? According to The Shovel, it's Santa's birthday. According to Tom Lehrer, it's a commercial festival. According to most Christians, it's the birthday of Jesus Christ. And of course for children around the world, even if they know nothing of Christianity, they know that Christmas means presents.
And for me? I'm not Christian, and my interests in presents on a specific day (“Relations sparing no expense'll buy some useless old utensil”) have long waned. But I was brought up in the British Christian tradition, and I enjoyed the ceremony and music, and even the food.
And there's the problem. Somehow going carol singing with outside temperatures in the mid-20s doesn't seem appropriate, as shown by last weekend's gathering in Ballarat. And the idea of midnight mass or carol festivals no longer attracts. Most people in Australia seem to think the same way. Many don't even know when Christmastide is: ABC Classic FM recently sent out mail messages for the 12 days of Christmas, starting on 5 December, the Monday after the second Sunday in Advent. What confusion caused them to do that? Is it an off-by-one confusion of Christmas and Saint Nicholas Day?
So what remains is the music and the food. British Christmas carols can be fun, though there's better music, like Bach's Christmas Oratorio. But I still like a British-style Christmas dinner—after all, it's only once a year. In our family we have always followed the German tradition in one thing: Christmas dinner is in the evening of the 24th, not lunch on the 25th. That way you can just fall into bed and digest.
Yvonne was not brought up in that tradition, and she can't find anything useful in it. We've come to a compromise: no Christmas pudding, maybe a Stollen or Bûche instead. And no ham—the last few times we had ham for Christmas, it was boring. Goose? Very hard to find, and quite difficult to cook correctly. So turkey it is, at least for me. I have to convince Yvonne every year, but in fact in the last ten years we've only cooked turkey twice according to my voluminous records (24 December 2006 and 24 December 2013).
So Yvonne brought back a turkey with her from Ballarat. Just shy of 4 kg, once the magic weight below which the turkeys were too young to taste any good. But she couldn't find anything between 4 kg and 6.5 kg, while there were birds as small as 3.2 kg, barely more than what passes for a chicken nowadays. It's “self basting”, which hopefully doesn't mean too many inappropriate additives. We'll see.
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Trump encourages the lawbreakers
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
So now the disaster is complete: Donald Trump will become the next President of the United States of America. And my hopes have been dashed that he would put Israel in its place and convince them to abide by international law. Instead, as the Jerusalem Post reports, Benyamin Netanyahu said:
We will continue to strengthen and develop settlements, and I want to make clear: There is not, nor will there be, a government that gives more support to settling and cares more about settling than this government we in the Likud lead, This will continue.
Netanyahu, this is a breach of international law! And if people complain about the Russians vetoing decisions about Syria in the UN Security Council, they should be equally concerned about the US abuse of its veto power regarding Israel. Then not even a Trump could help them continue in their violations. But under the current circumstances, they're clearly encouraged by him.
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Finally! Display smart phone on external monitor
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
While trawling through web pages on Android, I came across this one (their bold text):
The Screen Mirroring feature lets you wirelessly beam your photos, videos, presentations, or even your video games to your big screen.
Sounds excellent. Butt then you read on and discover:
You can connect to any HDTV using the AllShare Cast Wireless Hub for TV models earlier than 2013 (F Series), or you can connect directly to a supported Samsung Smart TV (newer models).
SCREAM! Why do they have to invent something different and restrictive instead of using conventional, more flexible technology? I think the answer is clear: sell the AllShare Cast Wireless Hub or Samsung Smart TVs. They don't seem to realize that offering flexible connectivity would sell far more Samsung mobile phones, something they definitely need to do after the Galaxy Note 7 disaster.
| Thursday, 22 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 22 December 2016 |
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Colic!
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Yvonne in early this morning with the news that Gabriella was looking sick, potentially colic. Indeed she didn't look good, so Yvonne called Pene Kirk, who wasn't available, so we called up the Golden Plains Vet Practice, who sent out Sigrid (apparently from somewhere in The Netherlands) to take a look at her:
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Yes, colic. She gave her some treatment and instructions to contact her again in the afternoon if things weren't looking better. They were, but not good enough, and we called and were given new criteria to call them up. It wasn't until about 20:30 that she started looking uncomfortable again, and she still hadn't passed anything, so we called Chris Bahlo, who came along with her float (trailer). We were just about to load her when we discovered that she had passed some droppings, maybe enough. So we postponed that to tomorrow morning.
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Getting to the vet
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The vet hospital is in Lethbridge, not a place I was even able to place accurately (it's between Ballarat and Bannockburn on the Midland Highway). How do we get there? With the aid of a GPS navigator, of course. I've been fighting navigation software for years, but in this case I just set up a route with my trusty el-cheapo navigator. Looking at Google Maps was instructive, though. Many of my friends on IRC think that it's good enough. Even Google puts in a disclaimer that the system is in beta, and well they may.
It seems that the best way there is really via Mount Mercer and Shelford. But there are alternatives, and Google Maps picked them at random. Here's the first attempt on a computer:
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What's missing here? The normal route from Dereel, via Rokewood. From where we live, in the north of Dereel, there are arguments for the route via Mount Mercer. But the Rokewood alternative isn't so bad that it should be omitted. It's certainly a better route than those via Ballarat or via Meredith, both of which were on the recommendation: Ballarat is nearly 20 km longer, and the road to Meredith includes a very twisty, poorly surfaced area which a good navigator should eliminate based on preferences.
Never mind, it reconsidered and added that route—sort of. But it clearly didn't like the road (admittedly, it's quite a boring drive), so it took me off the road on two sides of a triangle via Barunah Park, a place that neither I nor Wikipedia have ever heard of:
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This was clearly a momentary indiscretion that it didn't repeat (instead it dropped the route entirely), and I wasn't able to save the entire route, but the complete window shows the start and end locations.
What about the smart phones? It would be boring for them to show the same way, wouldn't it? The Android version showed the same paths as the computer version, but the iOS version showed only the Rokewood route and the Ballarat route, neither of the ones through the middle:
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This is the same program! But you'd have to know it; the appearance is completely different.
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Retailing for dummies
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Posted on IRC:
http://fraghome.com/ircstuff/dummies.jpg
This was an image that has since gone to the big garbage collector in the cloud. Sadly I no longer have any idea what it was, and I didn't keep a copy.
| Friday, 23 December 2016 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 23 December 2016 |
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Gabriella still sick
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Yvonne out first thing this morning to find Gabriella still looking unwell, so she arranged to (finally) take her to Lethbridge. Transport in Chris Bahlo's enormous float (trailer) posed its problems:
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To GCC
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Topic: general | Link here |
Taking Gabriella to Lethbridge meant that Yvonne couldn't go to her weekly visit to the Geoffrey Cutter Centre, so I had to stand in. I've been there before, but that was a while back. Compared to the Eureka Village Hostel some of the residents are in much worse condition, and it was difficult to see the pleasure that Sasha apparently caused to some of them; only the nurse confirmed (correctly, I hope) that they were happy to see him. I still can't imagine being in their place.
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Navigation and Android repairs
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Going to town gave me another opportunity of testing some navigation apps, made necessary because Chris had taken my navigator to Lethbridge with her. For various reasons, it was not a success:
iGO was a dead loss: it hung displaying the lie “Starting...”. That was funny, because it worked normally the last time I tried it. Some time later it occurred to me that I had moved it from device memory to the SD card. That shouldn't make any difference, but it may have anyway.
Getting Sygic to behave was almost impossible. I tried three times to enter the (complete, unabbreviated, exact) address of the animal hospital in Lethbridge. Each time, inside in my office, a sudden resumption of GPS reception caused Sygic to interrupt the entry, erase the partial text, and go back the home display. And while entering, I was offered alternative addresses:
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E.Leclerc is somewhere in France, and My Brother's Bar is in New York City. What use is that?
That was the good news: on other occasions, when I lost GPS signal, the app hung and I had to restart it—again with loss of all input. And on the one occasion where I was able to enter a name it recognized, it took 20 seconds to find the place. Other apps are “instantaneous”.
I also tried installing Navigon, which downloaded immense quantities of data:
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I didn't have time to set it up before leaving. Next time.
I finally ended up using Google Maps. I've already ranted about that before, but there were more issues. After collecting the other Samsung phone from Ballarat iPhones (not repairable, probably defective logic board), I wanted to go to the Jaycar representatives on the corner of Sturt St. and Ring Road. How do I enter that? On iGo, I select one of the roads, then “junction with” the other one. But I don't know of a way to do that with Google Maps, and I suspect there is none.
Never mind, Google Maps is good at finding businesses. So I searched for “Jaycar Ballarat”, and sure enough, it found a route for me. Not where I thought it was; maybe they had moved. In any case, it was pretty much in the middle of town, so I headed there. No Jaycar. For some reason Google Maps didn't recognize “Jaycar”, so it ignored it, but was too polite to tell me of the error of my ways. Instead it just took me to the middle of town. It's not clear why it didn't find it; the real computer version does find it.
In passing, it's interesting to note an issue with the Samsung GT-I9100T: the battery life is ridiculously short. When the GPS receiver is enabled, it's less than an hour. And recharging takes forever. That's one area where the iPhone is greatly superior. After coming out of the GCC, the Samsung (which I accidentally left on in the car) was down to 13% battery, and dropped further while I drove round town, despite being on charge. The iPhone (which I deliberately left on in my shirt pocket) was down to 79%, which sounds more normal.
Is this normal? Or the fact that I'm using a cheap aftermarket battery? Or the fact that I'm using the wrong cheap aftermarket battery? I'm not overly worried, but it's a significant difference.
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Trump: Build settlements and nukes!
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
I've already expressed my concern about Donald Trump's policy towards Israel. But things are getting worse. It seems that there was a draft resolution before the UN Security Council to condemn Israel's building of settlements. But Egypt, who presented the resolution, withdrew it again—according to this report as a result of pressure by Israel and Trump. Others are prepared to carry the torch, but from my perspective the real issue is that Trump is once again aiding international law-breaking.
As if that wasn't enough, the Putin/Trump mutual admiration society (clearly Putin is the senior partner) have both come out in favour of more nuclear weapons. To quote a Trump tweet (as the Germans would say, „Bei ihm piept's“):
The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclean capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.
This sounds like “The bombings will continue until morale improves”. What is this idiot (the latter of the two) going to do right?
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More relay board fun
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Topic: technology, gardening, opinion | Link here |
The weather is getting hotter—today we had a maximum temperature of 34°, and the toy sprinkler controller is not working correctly. It's high time I got my new Ethernet-connected relay board working. I've located a program called RelayNet.exe, but the name is the only thing I recognize. It's in Chinese, and the display is only partially intelligible:
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Clearly the values on the left are IP address and (TCP) port number. But what does the rest mean? Can I decipher it anyway? Where do I find a competent Chinese-speaking programmer?
| Saturday, 24 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 24 December 2016 |
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Garden sprinklers
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Topic: gardening, technology, opinion | Link here |
I still don't have my relay board working correctly, but I can't wait: today the temperature hit 35°, and there's more of same forecast. The garden needs watering. So I hacked something together to run the relays manually:
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That showed a number of unexpected problems. Apart from the hoses, which are still blowing apart at the joints, there were a number of badly mounted drippers, like this one:
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And a couple of the drippers themselves had blown apart, with spectacular results:
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And it seems that circuit 1 really has a wiring problem. Too hot today; I'll wait for a cool change and water manually in the meantime.
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Christmas turkey again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
As planned, the main course for dinner this evening was turkey. 3.97 kg or so, so according to my cooking times page, it should take about 160 minutes. Or maybe 135. It depends on the temperature I want in the breast. Based on previous attempts, I had decided to go for 76° this time. But after further thought I decided to go even lower, only 74°.
It went into the oven (175°) at 15:38, and 75 minutes later the exposed parts looked pretty well cooked:
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After another 40 minutes, the breast temperature had been reached. Problem: I hadn't removed the foil from the breast, with consequent results:
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So I left it to stand, during which the breast temperature increased to 78° and stayed there. A bit of work with the grill did the rest. And for once the breast was tender but not flaky nor overdone, and the legs were cooked through. I think it might have been the best yet.
So what does this say for next time? Cooking time for 4 kg at 175° to reach a breast temperature of 74° is 120 minutes. Next time I'll remove the foil from the breast after 80 minutes and keep an eye on it to avoid getting it too brown.
Apart from that, we also modified the stuffing by adding chicken livers. How many? I forgot to weigh them, but there were three. 120 g maybe? Next time I'll weigh them. The result was a definite improvement.
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Navigation and location
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Talking with Chris Bahlo after dinner. She came up with other issues about the way to Lethbridge. It seems that the road between Dereel and Mount Mercer is a roller coaster, and the road from Mount Mercer to Shelford is a gradual incline. Neither is of interest when going by car (which is why I had to think about the first stretch), but when towing a horse float (trailer), it makes a big difference. So she prefers the somewhat longer way via Rokewood, which has one climb on the way back to Dereel, but is otherwise relatively horizontal.
And Google Maps? I still don't know why it gives me different information on different devices, but Chris notes that it will remember addresses input on a real computer and suggest them when searching on the mobile device. But for some reason it doesn't do that for me. I do have the same ID on all devices, with the result that I get a flood of Gmail on the phone, about 2 messages at a time out of several hundred a day. If this is the future of email, it's no wonder that people don't use it. To be investigated.
Apart from that, though, it has become clear that there are two separate functions that a navigator performs: one is the location of addresses, which most do relatively well, though Google Maps puts our driveway 60 m from the correct position. Given that the house numbers are an encoding of the distance from the start of the road, there's no excuse for that: our house number 29 means that we're between 280 and 300 m from the beginning of the road, and the odd number means we're on the left side.
The other issue is what navigators are named after: navigation. And that's where my issues are.
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Finally! A resolution about Israeli settlements
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Only yesterday I commented (again) about the US support of Israel despite its illegal settlement policy, and how it wouldn't survive without that support. But in his final days in office, Barack Obama has done something that he couldn't have done earlier if he had wanted a political future. Now that he hasn't anyway, he can allow what should have happened decades ago: abstain from a resolution condemning Israel's settlements. So now it has been passed—unanimously except for an abstention by the USA.
The Israeli response was as expected: “shameful”. But how can Donald Trump reverse that? I don't think he can. If he tries, it will become more evident than ever that he is on his own.
| Sunday, 25 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 25 December 2016 |
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More sprinkler fun
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Yesterday's attempts at getting the sprinklers working were only partially successful. Today I spent a bit more frustrating time trying to fix some of the problems, including a union that I had repaired yesterday and which had blown apart again. Clearly I really need to do something about the pump pressure, but in the meantime turned down the solenoids, which seems to have helped a little.
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GPS coordinates in photos?
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Juha Kupiainen posted a photo today of a landscape somewhat obscured by a motorbike:
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He had taken it with his iPhone, and he wondered where it was. I thought that's one of the reasons why these phones had GPS receivers. But no, after lots of poring through the EXIF data, we couldn't find any. Maybe the receiver was turned off?
Out to play with my iPhone, something I've been meaning to do for a while. With the GPS receiver turned on, I got this display:
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So clearly it stores location data somewhere. I'll leave it until tomorrow to investigate.
In passing, it's interesting to note that the camera has an HDR function (or at least a menu system relating to it). My images could have done with that, but I didn't see much difference on the screen. To be investigated tomorrow.
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Cats love the garage
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Today the temperature rose to 35.9°, one of the hottest Christmases I can recall. And the hottest “room“ in the house must have been the garage. But that's where the cats just love to go:
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Why? How can you understand cats? Chris Bahlo sent this suggestion.
| Monday, 26 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 26 December 2016 |
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Tortilla problems
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I haven't had much luck with the new Minsa masa harina that I bought a couple of weeks ago. The first attempt was too moist, the next one too dry. Today I tried something in between, but it still didn't come out well:
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Masa harina doesn't stick together well at the best of times, but this particular variety seems more complicated than most. The stuff from Casa Iberica is cheaper and better, so that's what I'll get when this is finished.
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Replacing damaged drippers
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
How did this happen?
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The drippers are screwed together, and surely they won't unscrew that easily. But while replacing them, found this one, which for some reason Mick didn't throw away:
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It seems that they're not very robust.
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Potential panorama viewer software?
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
While trawling the web came across this page, which promises interesting functionality. I haven't looked at it in detail yet.
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Another Echidna
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Topic: animals | Link here |
While walking the dogs in the house forest, Leonid came across an Echidna:
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Before we could stop him, he prodded at it with his nose, not a thing he'll do again soon.
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GPS position info from phone cameras
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
After yesterday's playing around, it seemed reasonable to look for EXIF data related to GPS position. Out to take some photos with the iPhone, and after remembering how to download the images, discovered a plethora of EXIF data relating to position:
That's much more than I expected, and also much more than needed: none of the entries shown in italics above add any information, but they account for 6 of 17 entries. In any case, that's something that I can parse, so I updated my image display functions to include GPS information where necessary, and also to offer a link to Google Maps. Currently the link doesn't drop a pin where the photo was taken; I'll have to learn how to do that.
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Smart phone image quality
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
The photos I took with the iPhone last week were not at all bad. Now I have a second phone with a camera, the Samsung GT-I9100T. Time for some comparison photos with them and with a real camera.
First, a low-light scene. I used the Zuiko Digital ED 14-35mm f/2.0 SWD so that I could set the same aperture as the iPhone (f/2.2). Here the results: E-M1, iPhone and Samsung, in that order:
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Things didn't work out quite the way I wanted to: I had forgotten to set manual ISO and aperture priority on the camera, so it set the ISO to 34°/2000, giving a shutter speed of 1/60 s. The iPhone also raised the ISO setting to 26°/320, presumably its maxiumum, which gave a shutter speed of only 1/17 s. The Samsung did pretty much the same: 27°/400 ISO, 1/17 s and f/2.6.
And the results? The pooor quality of the Samsung, in particular the uneven colour, was visible in the viewfinder. What's not so obvious is that all 3 images I took with the iPhone had significant camera shake, while the Samsung didn't to the same extent. The first image is the best of three from the iPhone. The E-M1 didn't have any camera shake of course, because of the much faster shutter speed, but I'd expect it to be good at 1/17 s too. Here in the same sequence:
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These selections are from the darkest part of the image. Postprocessing would get more shadow detail, particularly with the (12 bit) E-M1, but I wanted to see the original images. What's less obvious is the extreme noise in the smart phone images.
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The E-M1 doesn't do very well here either, but after all the images were taken at 34°/2000 ISO.
The next series were taken outside the house, and they look a lot better:
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But here again the Samsung looks washed out. The other thing that I need to look at is the focal length: according to the EXIF data, the iPhone has a 35 mm equivalent focal length of 29 mm. But the E-M1 is set at 16 mm (32 mm equivalent). Why?
There are many “whys”. I'm not done yet; I'll take another look tomorrow. And of course these comparisons are not definitive: the Samsung is an old and potentially defective phone, and the iPhone isn't the newest either.
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Reading [MP]TP file systems
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Transferring images from a smart phone to a computer is a pain! FreeBSD doesn't seem to recognize the iPhone, and I can't use toys like gphoto2 to read them in. So off to the web to see what people have done in the past. This thread and this one describe pain trying to use sysutils/fusefs-ifuse, but this one talks about using usbmuxd, apparently from the same site. That sounded like a good idea, so I tried:
=== root@stable (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src 4 -> mailme pkg install usbmuxd
Remove 168 ports! And not the least important! Nothing I'll try in eureka, so set to upgrading the physical machine stable.lemis.com. I also have a virtual stable-10.lemis.com, but the last thing I want to throw into the equation at this stage is running USB in a virtual machine.
| Tuesday, 27 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 27 December 2016 |
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More smart phone and GPS stuff
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday's camera comparisons had a number of issues that I could improve on, as well as many that I can't, for example the choice of phones. There are plenty of sites that address the latter, such as DxOMark, which ranks mobile phone cameras. Currently the top of the line is the Google Pixel, with 86 points. The worst is the Apple iPhone 4, with 50 points. Second last, with 57 points, is my Samsung, and my iPhone 5S comes in with 76 points (at the time of the review, it seems, in second place). That's consistent with my experience. In particular, of the Samsung they say “the product was also plagued by strong color shading.”
Still, there are things I can do to improve my own measurements. Firstly, why are the photos taken with the Samsung GT-I9100T so fuzzy? Dirty “lens”? Could be:
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That line just above the lens opening was some kind of smudge. OK, a while back I received a free SmartKlear cleaner for smart phones.
CMS alert: this link appears to have been generated by a Content Management System, so it's ephemeral.
Unpacked it. Not quite what I was expecting:
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Clearly it's not designed for lens, but for the touch screen, something that is easy enough to clean with more conventional means.
Still, I tried with conventional means, a cotton swab. No, nothing to be done. It must be a scratch, as a later examination of the photo confirms:
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This photo shows things not visible to this naked eye, at any rate. But it also suggests that the scratch barely extends to the lens area itself.
Back to yesterday's photos. The interior photos were made easier by another dog lying in the same position (yesterday it was Nikolai, today Leonid). The big difference this time was that I set the Olympus OM-D E-M1 to comparable settings. Here again Apple, Samsung and Olympus:
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This time the Olympus was set at ISO 24°/200 and f/2.2 (to match the iPhone), and it chose a shutter speed of 1/6 s. And yes, if you enlarge the image to full size, there's barely a hint of camera shake. But it's nothing in comparison to the Apple, which seems to really have problems in this area. This time I've shown the worst image, but in each case I went to some trouble to avoid camera shake, and the Samsung doesn't do as badly.
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The other issue is the noise. As to be expected, the Olympus now does much better:
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Outside there wasn't much to check. I took exactly the same view of the house, and the Apple claimed a 29 mm equivalent focal length, while the E-M1 claimed 32 mm:
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The Samsung doesn't count here, because it doesn't make any claims about 35 mm equivalent focal lengths.
The other issue was GPS location. I made sure that the Samsung's GPS receiver was running, but it still didn't save any location. Later I discovered that there may be a setting to turn it on, something that might have been Juha's problem the other day. So there's still more playing around to do, including trying GPS location with the E-M1, which promises to be so fiddly that I don't really want to do it.
Apart from that, more playing around with my PHP functions to display image location and link to the correct Google Maps page. For some reason, it seems, Google maps encodes the location twice, once as DMS and once as fractions. For example, this image:
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It generates this: link
https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/37°48'0.90"S+143°45'4.78"E/@-37.8002500,143.7513278,20z
Strangely, though, the second link doesn't show the same map as the one in the image menu. Still more head-scratching to do.
| Wednesday, 28 December 2016 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 28 December 2016 |
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Another new camera?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Sometimes I think I need a third camera. Often enough I find myself using Yvonne's camera, but she is using that more and more herself. So I have been thinking that when the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II comes out, I might keep my existing E-M1 Mark I as a backup. But that's still an expensive camera, and I've decided not to buy the new one until DxO Optics “Pro” has support for it, or Olympus comes out with a new special offer.
But yesterday I saw an offer on an Olympus Facebook page: an E-PM1 body for $65, including a relatively good looking carrying case. That's so little that the postage added 25% to the price.
The E-PM1 isn't exactly Olympus' best camera: it's the predecessor to Yvonne's E-PM2, so old that Olympus can't afford the web space for the description, and it lacks a few features of the E-PM2. But it's eminently suitable as a second camera—I think, and I bought it. Of course I had to go and compare. A couple of things might make it interesting for Yvonne: it doesn't have a touch screen (something that she continually seems to hit inadvertently), and it's marginally smaller. But I came across a couple of interesting pages: this one compares the E-PM1 and the E-PM2, and this review includes standard images. So I downloaded them and compared them to the ones in the review for the E-PM2. Here they are. Run the cursor over either image to compare with the partner, preferably enlarged:
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Not surprisingly (the photos were taken 18 months apart) things don't look quite the same, and the resolution has been adjusted to that of the E-PM2 (16 MP compared to 12 MP). On the face of it, the images from the E-PM2 look better than those from the E-PM1. But I'm wondering to what extent the differences in gradation relate to the cameras and to what extent they relate to factors relating to the exposure. It's interesting to note that the exposure in the second image was 0.6 EV more than in the first, suggesting different illumination levels. The reflections on the bottle also show that the light came from a different direction.
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Another car problem
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Topic: general, photography | Link here |
Call from Yvonne in Ballarat today at 13:20 telling me that the overheating warning light had come on in her car. Did a bit of phone diagnosis and then set off with a watering can full of water. I arrived at 14:05, where I saw a familiar sight:
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Burst hose? Until we get it looked at, it's hard to say. But it looks very much like what happened to us last year, right down to the location. Could it be the same place? It would be interesting to know why. But the parallels didn't end there: once again we had a free towing service voucher, and this time the tower showed up quickly. At 14:27 he had it on the truck, and at 14:39 it was at the garage:
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Only 80 minutes, including 30 minutes for me to get into town. You can't complain about that.
Unfortunately, that's where the speed ends. The Sperbers have taken Christmas off, and the garage is closed until 9 January. On the way home dropped in at Brad Witham's (phone 0421 693 507) to see if he could do the work. Yes, but we'd have to get it there, another 14 km. Is it worth it? We have another car, and the only real issue we have is how to get Leonid and Nikolai to the aged care homes on Friday. He gave me the phone number of Gary Young, a tower (phone 0417 036 854), but he wouldn't have the car finished by then, so it doesn't seem to be worthwhile. Next week Yvonne goes alone, so we don't have an issue then.
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Olympus geotagging: almost useless
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
My camera has a “feature”: “Wireless shooting”, just add smart phone. And with that I can add geotagging. I've already commented about how much of a pain it is to use OI.Share, but now I have the added interest of geotagging, so out into the garden to take a photo.
The good news: it works. The bad news: it is such a pain that it's hardly worth it:
Ultimately it seemed that the photos remained on the camera, and I could download them the good old way. No idea what the “import” function did, if anything. The GPS tags look the same as on other images, with the exception of the altitude, which was set to 0 m. Possibly that's an issue with the phone (the Samsung GT-I9100T).
But I wasn't done yet. Next, I needed to process the (raw) images with DxO Optics “Pro”. The results upset my downstream software:
What was that? Indeed, it looked strange. There were a couple of boxes at the bottom:
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Was that due to the geotagging? A second photo without geotagging was normal.
I've had issues with DxO and EXIF data in the past: they clearly have very poor processing of EXIF data, and even minor modifications can break it, as I discovered years ago:
DxO Optics Pro must always be the first program to edit your images. It is important to remember that EXIF data should not be modified or altered in any way, as this data is essential to insure the selection of the correct optical correction module and, therefore, the proper automatic optical corrections.
There's clearly no valid excuse for this restriction. So had the geotagging (“editing”) EXIF data broken it? Another issue could be the author data that I include in the raw files when I copy them in. So I tried copying the files with the GPS info and without my author data. It worked.
What does this say about DxO? There are very clear rules about how to access EXIF data—even the makernotes, which aren't otherwise clearly defined. Are they kludging, like assuming that the offset or size of the EXIF data is a constant? It almost looks like it.
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Google Maps accuracy
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Topic: technology | Link here |
The trip to Ballarat also gave me the first real test of my GPS location web page code, as the photos above show. Interestingly it seems that just about all the photos show me further east than I really was, though the latitude is variable. Here today's photos with the strange routes (by foot) that Google Maps makes from the actual location to the claimed location (the latter with the red pin):
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But then, the accuracy is closer than the difference between “satellite” and map views.
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Yet another mobile phone comparison
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Chris Bahlo here in the evening with her Samsung Galaxy S7, which the EXIF data calls a SM-G930F. DxOMark doesn't seem to have tested it, but the presumably similar Galaxy S7 edge gets 88 points, only one point shy of the top mark, and it seems to have the same camera. So of course I had to get her try the camera with my test shots. The comparison wasn't as good as it could have been because of the different lighting situation. The indoor photo is much better, but then there was about three times as much light. Here Apple, Samsung Galaxy 7 and Olympus; the Samsung I9100 isn't close to the same league:
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Outside it didn't do badly either, in a particularly bad backlighting situation. Like the iPhone, it has an HDR setting. Unlike the iPhone, it works, sort of. Here first the iPhone, then the Samsung, then the Olympus OM-D E-M1. In each case the first image is without HDR, the second with:
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I think that the iPhone photos are without and then with “HDR”. I can see no difference, and the EXIF data doesn't mention the fact. But clearly Apple HDR is useless, while the Samsung at least tries. On the other hand, the Samsung “HDR” is only barely better than the E-M1 out of camera photo.
The other thing worth noting is how much better mobile phone cameras have got in the last 5 or so years. What will stop them being better than cameras like the Olympus OM-D E-M1? There are many issues, but they have already dealt with some of them.
| Thursday, 29 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 29 December 2016 |
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Sumer is icumen in
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Topic: general | Link here |
Summer seems to have arrived in a big way. The last few days have been really warm, and last night the overnight low temperature was 24°. That's even hot by tropical standards. I've seldom experienced such a high minimum temperature. It looks like we're in for a hot summer.
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More garden work
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Mick the gardener along today, now mainly weeding, though he also managed to pot most of the aquatic plants that we moved to the trough two weeks ago:
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In the process we poured out the blue water drum (barely visible on the left of the photo above) in which we had kept the waterlily. In the process, a dead fish (non-golden goldfish) fell out. But Mick discovered it wasn't dead, just (presumably) pining for the fjords. Back into the trough, and it should be OK. But it must have been in that drum for months with nothing to eat. I wonder how it survived.
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Prime lenses for internal photography
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has long made clear her primary criterion for a good camera: small size. Her Olympus E-PM2 is really too big for her, and she uses the M.Zuiko 14-42 EZ nearly all the time, even indoors in riding arenas where the light levels are low, because it's the smallest lens she has. I had hoped that she would find favour with the M.Zuiko 45 mm f/1.8, and later the Leica Summilux 25 mm f/1.4, but they're too big for her.
But today things were different. She specifically asked me for one of them, and in the end took both with her. Yes, she misses zooming (in itself progress), but it seems that the improvement in image quality is sufficient for her to put up with that difficulty. She ended up using the 45 mm lens for most of the photos, though it was too long for some shots. I can see her taking the E-PM1 with her as well, with one of the lenses on each camera.
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Cat on a hot tin roof
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Topic: animals | Link here |
For some reason Rani got up on the roof today, despite the high temperatures, which caused her to pant:
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I kept an eye on her for a while, expecting her to jump down onto the fire water tank, but she walked straight past to the back of the house. I still don't know how she got down.
| Friday, 30 December 2016 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 30 December 2016 |
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Eureka again
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Topic: general | Link here |
Off to Eureka Village Hostel with Nikolai, Leonid and Yvonne today, made somewhat more complicated by the fact that we had to go in my car, which is much smaller. Somehow we got the dogs in there anyway, though they weren't happy. There weren't many people at Eureka: the Christmas season and the good weather meant that many were away.
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Australia supports international crime!
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
It's no secret that I was greatly heartened by the Resolution 2334 calling for an end to Israel's illegal settlements in Palestine. It was telling that nobody voted against the resolution.
But that, it seems, is because our own freedom-loving government was not represented in the Security Council. Julie Bishop, Australia's foreign minister, distanced herself from the resolution, and stated that Australia would probably have voted against the resolution. So far, it seems that that puts Australia at odds with the rest of the civilized world, with the obvious exception of Israel.
I am disgusted. Yes, I didn't vote for her party, and I've expressed my dissatisfaction in the past. But this is the sort of thing that makes me ashamed to admit I'm Australian. Certainly a good example of the difference between the government and people of a representative democracy.
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Gratuitous GUI changes
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've grumbled so frequently about the way commercial GUI software keeps changing its interface on every release. Sometimes I think that the GUI change is the only real difference. And once again xkcd has said it for me:
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UK company search
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
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Once again I'm reminded of xkcd:
| Saturday, 31 December 2016 | Dereel | Images for 31 December 2016 |
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Adjective food
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I read xkcd only from time to time, but lately they've come up with a couple of good cartoons. Here's another one that matches various rants over the decades about ridiculous food labelling:
The thing is, as I have seen, that it's not even too far from the truth.
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Tidying up the garden
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
We (particularly Mick) have been working on the garden for weeks, and it was only gradually showing signs of improvement. But today, somehow, all the pieces fell into place. It's still bare, and it still needs a lot of work, but at least it's looking a little bit tidy now.
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Still no relay documentation
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I still don't have any documentation for the relay board I bought over a month ago, and the seller only responds when I prod him. The last exchange was particularly useless. He pointed me to a web page, which rendered:
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It's not only Western web sites that forget their character encoding. Set for Simplified Chinese, it came out as
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OK, clearly they're trying to send me a file called SKU367002.rar. Click on it, and what do I get?
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It took me a while to think of Google translate, which really did help:
Temporarily unable to extract the files you need Please try to refresh this page to resolve this issue.
No, that didn't resolve anything. The seller clearly didn't check, and wasn't able to send me the file. Now I'm negotiating to refund 60% of the price and I'll try it myself. That makes sense for the seller: he has to pay for the return postage otherwise.
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More sprinkler work
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Topic: gardening, technology | Link here |
Spent some time looking at the garden sprinklers today, not helped by the lack of a sprinkler controller—maybe. After much messing around, discovered the problem with circuit 1: the solenoid on the solenoid valve was open circuit. How can that come? Of all the unreliable parts in the system, you'd think that it was the most reliable. Hopefully I can get a replacement that doesn't require me to replace the entire valve.
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Apple spam
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Message today:
Dear Customer,Your Apple ID (groggyhimeself@lemis.com) was used to sign in to iMessage
If you have not recently set up an iPhone with your Apple ID, then you should change your Apple ID password. Learn More.
Yes, I've seen and grumbled about this sort of thing in the past, in particular the lack of detail. This one was worse than most. But for some reason gmail had classified it as spam. Why?
Because it was spam, but you have to look carefully to see it:
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I wonder how many people are fooled by these messages.
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Happy New Year, horses
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Topic: animals, food and drink, general | Link here |
Dinner with Chris Bahlo today, as on almost every Saturday, but today was New Year's Eve. So, for some reason, we went out to talk to Big Al and Esperanza, the horses which Chris has had here for the last few weeks to graze the excess grass. Here Yvonne's choice of the photos I took:
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Christmas or New Year?
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Topic: general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
After that, the eternal question: how do we hold it out until midnight? We no longer stay up late, and for some reason I was feeling more than usually tired today. The New Year sweeps here from the east, and in past years we have cracked the bottle when it reaches New Zealand. Today we decided to start with Kiritimati instead, an hour earlier at 21:00, helped by the widow of Monsigny. Monsigny himself, a maker of champagne, presumably died of shame, but his widow was clearly made of sterner stuff. Yvonne faded round New Zealand, but Chris and I managed until 23:15, which doesn't relate to any time zone I know of.
Isn't getting old fun?
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Mobile phone cameras and timekeeping
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
I've had timepieces for as long as I can remember. Some time in mid-1957 my parents gave me a new watch with a sweep second hand. My previous watch had a separate small dial for the second hand.
But that's nearly 60 years ago. Today my digital watch was going about 10 seconds fast at the first of the all-important midnights, as Chris confirmed from her Samsung Galaxy S7. That's presumably network synchronized. OK, let's use it to set my watch. But it only showed hours and minutes.
Twenty minutes of searching later we came to the conclusion that the standard clocks on both Android and iPhone don't have the ability to display seconds. A little later I found one that displayed them twice, offset by about 2 seconds: it seemed to be doing NTP in the background, and it really wanted to root the phone.
What's wrong here? Since when do clocks no longer display seconds? Chris thinks it's an indication that nobody wants the functionality. I think it's because the designers decided that that nobody wants the functionality, and the users are too disinterested to be worried about it.
But that's like so many aspects of smart phones. Yvonne's (dumb) phone is straightforward: fold it open, type in the phone number (or select a pre-stored number) and press the green phone emblem. On a smart phone, I need to first authenticate myself, then find the phone app, ensure I'm on the right screen, look at the thing, because it doesn't have tactile feedback, and then I can do the same as with the el-cheapo phone. This is progress?
While playing with phones, also took a few photos. It's clear that there's an enormous difference between Chris' new phone and the old Samsung GT-I9100T:
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And I wish I could find a way to get the iPhone to click when I take a photo. I end up taking many more than I expect. The Samsung does, but does the iPhone? For some reason settings are very hard to find on mobile phones. Maybe that's why nobody bothers.
In passing, it's interesting to note that the last two photos contain GPS location information. The one from the iPhone clearly relates to the last time it had a signal (outside the front of the house), but the one from the Samsung is somewhere to the east of Ballarat, about 40 km away, and where I haven't been for years. Where does it get that location from? And why does either save GPS information when there's no signal?
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