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| Greg's diary |
| December 2019 |
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| Sunday, 1 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 1 December 2019 |
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Garage sales, day 2
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Topic: general | Link here |
After yesterday's fun with garage sales, we had had enough. But one was still of interest, at 111 Stones Road, almost our next-door neighbour (only 800 m away). Up early to take a look, but ultimately didn't find much of interest. It seems that things were hopping yesterday morning, though.
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Recovering lagoon, day 2
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
On with the recovery of lagoon today. In principle, it's simple. Change /boot/loader.conf on the first bootable partition:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 36 -> rcsdiff -wu /destdir/boot/loader.conf
--- /destdir/boot/loader.conf 2017/10/04 22:51:33 1.1
+++ /destdir/boot/loader.conf 2019/12/01 01:06:44
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
-currdev=disk0p1
-rootdev=disk0p1
+currdev=disk0p4
+rootdev=disk0p4
Copy or merge the important files in /etc/ to the new root partition, and we're away.
Oh. The loader can't find the root partition. Somehow I had messed up my file systems, and the new /etc/fstab still reflected the old Vultr system:
# Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass#
/dev/ufs/rootfs / ufs rw 1 1
Yes, that didn't work. Quite a few files in /etc/ still needed updating, including files not under revision control. Morale: save all config files in RCS, even if they're not changed. That way I at least have an indication of what else I needed to do.
And apart from that? Email continues to be a pain, and I got messages that I didn't expect:
Dec 1 13:12:52 lagoon sm-mta[1144]: alias database /etc/mail/aliases.db out of date
And strangely it stayed that way after running newaliases:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 42 -> l /etc/mail
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1,698 1 Dec 10:22 aliases
-rw-r----- 1 root wheel 131,072 8 Nov 15:22 aliases.db
But clearly I need to spend more time going through the postfix configuration with a fine tooth comb. /usr/local/etc/postfix/main.cf is currently at revision 1.18
revision 1.18
date: 2007/03/08 04:43:19; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +6 -5
Adapt to local environment.
...
revision 1.1
date: 2001/02/06 01:31:46; author: grog; state: Exp;
Initial revision
Interestingly, it really seems that it hasn't changed in nearly 13 years, since before we moved to Dereel.
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Google: don't obfuscate
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Juha Kupiainen came up with some interesting information today: Google Slammed Over Chrome Change That Strips 'www' From Domain URLs . But it seems that Google doesn't care:
When asked about this change in a long discussion thread on a mailing list, a Google staffer wrote: "www is now considered a 'trivial' subdomain, and hiding trivial subdomains can be disabled in flags (will also disable hiding the URL scheme)..."
They may consider that to be the case. They clearly haven't considered the DNS implications of using the domain name as the web server name. And it still violates POLA. Fortunately, somebody has come up with instructions on how to stop it doing this stuff. Hopefully it will still work if I ever find myself forced to use Chrome.
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Rusty Wrench again
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Mail from Linux Australia today, soliciting nominations for next year's “Rusty Wrench Award”:
The Rusty Wrench Award is Australia's highest honour for community contributions to the Open Source movement in the country. It was eponymously named after luminary Rusty Russell, one of Australia's most prominent contributors and community members, founder of linux.conf.au (as CALU, in 1999), and the inaugural recipient of the award.
And how about that, I was there at the first presentation, nearly 15 years ago at the conference dinner for linux.conf.au. And though I didn't mention it in my diary at the time, I did take a photo:
Not a very good photo; this was 2005, after all, and my camera (Nikon “Coolpix” 880, with only 3 megapixels, and already a few years old) was not the best. But that's not the original image; I have enhanced it (if that's the correct word) with DxO PhotoLab. Originally it looked like the left-side image (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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Things would be even better if Ashampoo optimizer would still work, but in this specific case the new “green background” bug makes it unusable.
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Flowering Solanum?
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Topic: gardening, photography, opinion | Link here |
Nine months ago I noticed some particularly active Solanum laciniatum bushes. But today they're flowering even more:
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Where? Walking past, the flowers reach out and grab you. Why is there nothing to be seen in a photo? Yes, they're there, but somehow the photo (any photo) hides them.
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First tomato of summer
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
It's only been a couple of weeks since I planted this tomato plant, a „Riesentraube“:
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I wonder how long before it will bear usable fruit.
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Food poisoning from raw fish?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
When I answered questions on Quora, one of the recurring questions related to food poisoning. Eat food that hasn't been cooked to at least 145° and you run the risk of food poisoning.
One thing is common to all these questions, and the temperature itself shows it: clearly 145° is not a normal temperature for anything you eat. It uses the old Fahrenheit scale (and corresponds to about 63° C). It seems that this phobia is a very US American thing, and the idea of eating undercooked or even uncooked food (like the sashimi that we ate yesterday) probably sets off people's reactions without them actually having to eat anything.
But this morning I got up and discovered that Yvonne had forgotten to put the leftover sashimi into the fridge. Had it? Took a sniff. No, seemed perfectly normal. So I put it in the fridge and we ate it in the evening. Admittedly I had a few misgivings, but again, it tasted normal. And we had no ill effects.
How dangerous are raw animal foodstuffs really? Under what circumstances could you get sick from food that tastes normal?
| Monday, 2 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 2 December 2019 |
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Understanding postfix
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So lagoon is up and running, and so far Yvonne hasn't found anything wrong. But there's still the mail configuration to worry about, and it occurs to me that I haven't really ever understood postfix. That's why I still use a configuration that I cobbled together 18 years ago, and which I have been hacking ever since.
Today I had two main problems. Firstly, I don't really understand postfix's main.cf configuration file. I've told it to use a virtual map for delivery outside the local system:
# $Id: transport,v 1.5 2012/07/10 02:44:24 grog Exp $
# While they're blocking 25
* smtp:eureka.lemis.com
postmap then converts this to a database format. That works, but postfix ignores it! Configuration issue? I have:
transport_maps = hash:/usr/local/etc/postfix/transport
And that's also what's in my other configuration files. But on lagoon what I get is:
Dec 2 12:09:36 lagoon sm-mta[4995]: xB219aVd004995: from=<grog@lagoon.lemis.com>, size=377, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<201912020109.xB219Z8P004994@lagoon.lemis.com>, proto=ESMTPS, daemon=Daemon0, relay=localhost [127.0.0.1]
Dec 2 12:09:36 lagoon sendmail[4994]: xB219Z8P004994: to=grog@freebsd.org, ctladdr=grog (1004/1000), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=30045, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (xB219aVd004995 Message accepted for delivery)
Dec 2 12:09:48 lagoon sm-mta[4997]: STARTTLS=client, relay=mx1.freebsd.org., version=TLSv1.3, verify=FAIL, cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384, bits=256/256
Dec 2 12:09:51 lagoon sm-mta[4997]: xB219aVd004995: to=<grog@freebsd.org>, ctladdr=<grog@lagoon.lemis.com> (1004/1000), delay=00:00:15, xdelay=00:00:15, mailer=esmtp, pri=30377, relay=mx1.freebsd.org. [96.47.72.80], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (Ok: queued as 47R6Tn5KDjz4Slv)
Oh. Not what I intended, but what I wanted. Looking at the message when it came back confirmed:
Received: from lagoon.lemis.com (167-179-139-35.a7b38b.mel.nbn.aussiebb.net [167.179.139.35])
(using TLSv1.3 with cipher TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (256/256 bits)
server-signature RSA-PSS (4096 bits)
client-signature RSA-PSS (2048 bits) client-digest SHA256)
(Client CN "guest.localhost", Issuer "guest.localhost" (not verified))
by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 47R6Tn5KDjz4Slv
for <grog@freebsd.org>; Mon, 2 Dec 2019 01:09:48 +0000 (UTC)
(envelope-from grog@lagoon.lemis.com)
In other words, my network link no longer blocks SMTP. That's excellent news—if it lasts. It means that I no longer have to use this kludge mail tunnel to www.lemis.com. But it doesn't help in the slightest in understanding what postfix is doing.
By comparison, the other problem hasn't gone away. newaliases, once the part of sendmail responsible for creating /etc/mail/aliases.db, is now a new alias for postfix, and though it complains about the content of aliases, it doesn't change that file. This is not related to the upgrade of lagoon; it happens exactly the same way on eureka:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 116 -> newaliases
postalias: warning: /etc/aliases.db: duplicate entry: "mailer-daemon"
postalias: warning: /etc/aliases.db: duplicate entry: "postmaster"
...=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 117 -> l /etc/mail
...
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 13,350 3 Dec 11:26 aliases
-rw-r----- 1 root wheel 131,072 30 Dec 2013 aliases.db
This doesn't matter for postfix, but there are other programs, like mail(1), that look at /etc/aliases.db and complain:
Dec 2 12:09:03 lagoon sm-mta[4988]: alias database /etc/mail/aliases.db out of date
That's really a problem, since I can't find a way to rebuild the file, and messages that should end up with me go to root instead. More head-scratching.
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Microwave oven usability
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Since we got our first “inverter” microwave oven over 12 years ago, we've found one of the best features to be the fact that you can soften butter with them. As a result, we've ensured that the two successor machines are also “inverter” machines.
But the newest, the Sharp R350EW, bought in August, doesn't seem to do it as well as its Panasonic predecessors:
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That was done at 100 W, the same rating as the Panasonics, for 90 seconds. It seems that the power distribution of the Sharp is not as uniform. Presumably the hole is in the exact centre of the turntable, where rotation doesn't help. And so it seems that putting the butter to one side would work around the problem. So would doing it in the newer Panasonic oven, which is still in service.
| Tuesday, 3 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 3 December 2019 |
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lagoon again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Basically things are working on lagoon now. Email continues to be a problem, but I have workarounds for the time being, and I'll need to spend more time to consider all the issues.
Apart from that, there are things like the nightly backups. They're run from a cron job in /etc/crontab:
0 21 * * * root /home/local/bin/cleanup
But for some reason it doesn't get started, and there's no obvious reason why not.
As expected, there were problems running my photo software. The strangest one was:
=== yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/1) ~/Photos/20191203 26 -> for i in `ls *.jpeg *.gif *.png 2>/dev/null`; do echo $i; done | by 2 /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php /Photos/Tools `pwd` tiny 67500; MYDIR=`pwd`; IMAGELINKS=`pwd`/Imagelinks; if [ -f $IMAGELINKS ]; then (cd ~/public_html/Photos/`basename $MYDIR`/tiny && checkimagelinks $IMAGELINKS tiny); fi
sh: /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php: not found
sh: /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php: not found
sh: /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php: not found
sh: /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php: not found
Huh? That file is there. Isn't it? Yes:
=== yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/1) ~/Photos/20191203 27 -> l /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php
-r-xr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 1,927 16 Feb 2013 /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php
So what's the problem? Pull it out of the loop and try again:
=== yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/1) ~/Photos/20191203 25 -> /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php
bash: /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php: /usr/local/bin/php: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
Aaah! Missing port. Now wasn't the message from sh helpful? OK, off to install.
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) ~ 110 -> pkg install php
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
FreeBSD repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
pkg: No packages available to install matching 'php' have been found in the repositories=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) ~ 112 -> pkg search php | wc -l
2843
Which of the 2,843 php ports should I install? How I wish that there were a canonical port name for these things! They seem to have managed it for Emacs. Why not for PHP?. Finally found php74 and installed it, and despite my concerns (much newer version) it worked as expected. But it shouldn't be such a pain.
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Email requirements
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Email proves to be a bigger problem than I had expected. I need to take a step back and think what I really need, and then how I achieve it. There are at least three separate configurations:
Firstly, the main email configuration at eureka, externally better known as mx0.lemis.com. This is the final destination for all mail to lemis.com. What do I need?
Send mail to the outside world with a uniform domain name @lemis.com. This is not the standard, which leaves the complete hostname (for example @lagoon.lemis.com). This is not just cosmetic: lagoon.lemis.com is not accessible from the outside world.
Accept all valid mail. I'm pretty sure that this is a standard configuration, but it needs to be understood, since it's not the case for higher-level MX systems.
Reject spam. The tools that postfix provides are pretty minimal, but they're there. There are three basic approaches: check the recipient, check the sender and check the client MTA. I have these in place for incoming mail, though many are out of date. For example, my access file is at least 13 years old and refuses domain names like 123bizweb.com, 1-GLOBAL.COM and 1STFAMILY.COM, all of which have probably been there for the best part of 20 years. Do they still send spam? 123bizweb.com doesn't: it no longer exists. Who knows about the others? So at the very list I need to go through these files, and they're not short:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/11) /usr/local/etc/postfix 504 -> wc -l access accept-to client-access
Probably the best approach is to start again.
Another tool is checking consistency. There are plenty of issues there, like SPF compliance (broken by many mailing lists), reverse lookup (does anybody not provide that any more?) and MTA name checking, of which I have fallen foul myself. But that's for later.
Then there are the higher-order MX servers. This currently “works”, though I'm not convinced that everything works well. They require
Finally, other machines, both local (lagoon) and remote (ffm.lemis.com for example). It's not clear that I even need an MTA on lagoon, but the principle is the same, and I should have an MTA on ffm and possibly other external servers that I may create. In principle, they only need to send. That should be an out-of-the-box configuration, but I need to reconsider after I have done the other two.
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YouTube reviews: fake news?
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I've already taken Tony Northrup to task for his misinterpretation of “ISO” and his claims of the demise of the Micro Four Thirds system. In the latter case, in particular, I suspected that he was paid to spread rumours, as he did two weeks ago again about Olympus closing their camera business.
But it seems that he doesn't just have it in for Olympus. He also has a clip Nikon is DYING “(but it's not too late)”, and most intriguingly, Are DSLR Cameas DEAD?!.
That seemed worth watching. It seems that Ricoh (the only serious camera maker without a mirrorless offering) has claimed Ricoh Thinks Mirrorless Shooters Will Switch Back to DSLRs in 1-2 Years. They're not alone: yes, Tony says, DSLRs will make a comeback.
His argumentation is amazing. He compares mirrorless cameras (a clear technological advance) with DVD Audio and Super Audio CD (attempts at marketing fragmentation). He looks at numbers based on Amazon's top 100 list, noting in passing that CIPA has other figures.
I didn't know about Amazon's top 100 list, so I went looking. Yes, it's interesting, and it's based on Amazon's recent sales. But there are separate lists for DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, and the lists are updated every hour, clearly reflecting recent sales (though it's clear that that doesn't need to mean exactly the sales in the previous 60 minutes). But there are so many reasons not to use it as reflective of real sales.
From this dubious base he makes projections and claims that lens makers will be reluctant to bring out new lenses for mirrorless cameras, ignoring the large number that have been introduced: DSLR lenses fit mirrorless too, mirrorless don't fit DSLRs.
What's completely missing from his argumentation (and from Ricoh's claims, for that matter) are hard technical facts. How will any DSLR maker be able to bring out lenses like Nikon's 58 mm f/0.95 Noct? Or any number of other lenses too difficult to make with DSLRs? How do you do macro work, where a DSLR viewfinder is too dim? How do you do video? (Answer to that one: simulate a mirrorless camera, because that's all you have when you flip the mirror to take video with a DSLR).
The bottom line, though, is that many people listen to people like Northrup. He's a marketing factor, and he's clearly available for hire. I don't think it's worth listening to anything he has to say any more.
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New wildflowers
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
I would have thought that by now I had seen most of the wildflowers that there are around here. But I don't think that I've seen these ones (in Westons Road) before:
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| Wednesday, 4 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 4 December 2019 |
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lagoon continued
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
OK, lagoon is up and running, but I had had some strange problems installing the userland after the last buildworld, probably as a result of moving file systems around. OK, update and build the latest FreeBSD 12-STABLE.
It crashed on me! And in a way I know:
Dec 4 09:05:05 lagoon kernel: pid 4073 (c++), jid 0, uid 0, was killed: out of swap space
Dec 4 09:05:07 lagoon kernel: pid 4082 (c++), jid 0, uid 0, was killed: out of swap space
Huh? I have 20 GB of swap! Don't I?
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 140 -> pstat -s
Device 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity
/dev/ada0p3 0 0 0 98%
Huh? Oh: /etc/fstab contains:
# Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass#
/dev/ada0p1 /destdir ufs rw 1 1
/dev/ada0p3 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/ada0p4 / ufs rw 1 2
That makes sense. All my system disks have the same partitioning: partition 1 is the first root file system, partition 2 is the boot partition, partition 3 is swap, partition 4 is the second (alternative) root file system, the one I'm using now, and partition 5 is the (big) remainder file system. But gpart sees a different view:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 145 -> gpart show
=> 40 3907029088 ada0 GPT (1.8T)
40 83886080 1 freebsd-ufs (40G)
83886120 41943040 2 freebsd-swap (20G)
125829160 1024 3 freebsd-boot (512K)
125830184 83885048 4 freebsd-ufs (40G)
209715232 3697313895 5 freebsd-ufs (1.7T)
It seems that I partitioned lagoon before I settled on this scheme, and here swap is partition 2. But for convenience I copied the fstab from teevee. And it seems that swapon was clever enough not to use the partition.
Or was it? The summary at the end of the aborted kernel build showed 6 page swaps. Why the 0 in the output of pstat? Because BLOCKSIZE was 1048576 (1 MB), and the partition was only 512 kB in size.
So: did I swap to the boot code or not? Copied the partition to a file and compared with the boot partitions on teevee and subsequently on eureka:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /var/tmp 149 -> cmp bootpartition.eureka bootpartition.teevee
bootpartition.eureka bootpartition.teevee differ: char 28, line 2=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /var/tmp 150 -> cmp bootpartition.eureka bootpartition.lagoon
bootpartition.eureka bootpartition.lagoon differ: char 1815, line 18=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /var/tmp 151 -> cmp bootpartition.teevee bootpartition.lagoon
bootpartition.teevee bootpartition.lagoon differ: char 28, line 2
That doesn't help much. OK, reinstall the boot code and try again:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 16 -> gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot -i 3 ada0=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 17 -> dd if=/dev/ada0p3 of=/eureka/home/var/tmp/bootpartition-2.lagoon
...=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /var/tmp 152 -> cmp bootpartition*lagoon
bootpartition-2.lagoon bootpartition.lagoon differ: char 28, line 2
So at the very least the bootcode that I just installed is different from what was there before. Was the old code still OK? Hard to say, but it's so easy to reinstall, and so hard to recover if you have a machine with no boot code.
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More mail forwarding insights
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I worked around my problems with /etc/mail/aliases on lagoon by creating a file /root/.forward that forwarded all email to groggyhimself@eureka.lemis.com. And that works, and I'm getting root mail for lagoon again. And then on a hunch I did:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 6 -> diff /destdir/root/.forward ~/.forward=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 7 ->
That's exactly what I did last time! So it's quite possible that mail on lagoon hasn't been working properly for a long time.
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/etc/crontab problems: solved?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Why isn't cron on lagoon honouring the contents of /etc/crontab? Spent some time RTFMing, without any obvious insights. And then I checked the log files:
Dec 2 09:43:00 lagoon /usr/sbin/cron[900]: (*system*) RELOAD (/etc/crontab)
OK, clearly it's looking at /etc/crontab, and presumably it's doing it automatically. But that was 2 days ago, and it was the only time. When does it reload? When the file is updated, in other words when the modification time stamp increases?
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /etc/X11 20 -> l /etc/crontab
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 768 30 Jun 2018 /etc/crontab
That makes sense. I had copied it from the old partition with cp -p, so the modification timestamp was unchanged. And when?
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /etc/X11 21 -> l -c /etc/crontab
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 768 2 Dec 22:14 /etc/crontab
Problem solved, indirectly, on rebooting the new system.
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X problems
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the puzzling things I had with lagoon was still outstanding when I started the upgrade: Two years ago I put in the current display card, which identifies as:
[ 1606.734] (II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA GPU GeForce GT 710 (GK208) at PCI:1:0:0 (GPU-0)
That's very convenient, because on teevee I had:
[ 18.506] (II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA GPU GeForce GT 710 (GK208) at PCI:1:0:0 (GPU-0)
In other words, exactly the same hardware. The fact that it worked so well in teevee was the main reason I put one in lagoon. But it didn't work! At the time I just gave up and installed the standard nv driver.
Clearly a cop-out. So today I tried again, again ending in failure. In the process I saw a message in /var/log/Xorg.0.log that I have never seen before:
[ 1605.758] (WW) Hotplugging is on, devices using drivers 'kbd', 'mouse' or 'vmmouse' will be disabled.
[ 1605.758] (WW) Disabling Keyboard0
[ 1605.758] (WW) Disabling Mouse0
And sure enough, keyboard and mouse were dead in the water.
The remaining content of the log file is similar to what I had 2 years ago, but different enough to be hard to interpret. But it seems that the big difference is here:
[ 1606.735] (II) NVIDIA(0): Validated MetaModes:
[ 1606.735] (II) NVIDIA(0): "NULL"
That contrasts with the contents of the file on teevee:
[ 33.442] (--) NVIDIA(0): Valid display device(s) on GPU-0 at PCI:1:0:0
[ 33.442] (--) NVIDIA(0): CRT-0
[ 33.442] (--) NVIDIA(0): CRT-1
[ 33.442] (--) NVIDIA(0): DFP-0
[ 33.442] (--) NVIDIA(0): DFP-1 (boot)
...
[ 33.443] (II) NVIDIA(0): Detected PCI Express Link width: 16X
[ 33.463] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): CRT-0: disconnected
[ 33.463] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): CRT-0: 400.0 MHz maximum pixel clock
[ 33.463] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0):
[ 33.464] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): CRT-1: disconnected
[ 33.464] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): CRT-1: 400.0 MHz maximum pixel clock
[ 33.464] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0):
[ 33.467] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): DFP-0: disconnected
[ 33.467] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): DFP-0: Internal TMDS
[ 33.467] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): DFP-0: 330.0 MHz maximum pixel clock
[ 33.467] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0):
[ 33.482] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): XXX TV (DFP-1): connected
[ 33.482] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): XXX TV (DFP-1): Internal TMDS
[ 33.482] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): XXX TV (DFP-1): 230.0 MHz maximum pixel clock
[ 33.482] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0):
[ 33.485] (II) NVIDIA(0): Validated MetaModes:
[ 33.485] (II) NVIDIA(0): "DFP-1:1920x1080"
[ 33.485] (II) NVIDIA(0): "DFP-1:1280x720"
In other words, no mention of any devices attached to the card. Why? At first I thought that it might be that the monitor wasn't providing any EDID data, but that wouldn't explain the reference to non-existent devices like CRT-0 on teevee. I still have the old card from teevee, so I should try that out.
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Revenge through spam
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I can't be the only person who is receiving torrents of spam from RAY-BAN and UGG BOOTS. Time to update my ~/.procmailrc file. Why do renowned companies resort to such tactics?
Why, do renowned companies resort to such tactics? While looking at things to filter on, noticed that the headers appear to have nothing to do with the companies:
From: "RAY-BAN[2019]" <obama@dgpcm.com>
From: "RAY-BAN" <lucy@roses18.com>
From: "RAY-BAN[2019]" <coupons@dgpcm.com>
From: "UGG BOOTS" <lucy@shqmcg.com>
And so on. Interestingly, the domain part of the email address is correct, and they're presumably expecting people to use toy MUAs that are too polite to show the originator's email address. So whoever is sending these messages appears to have nothing to do with the companies they claim to represent. Are they trying to get them to pay to stop?
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Leonid does a runner
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
For a couple of months now we've been letting Leonid run free when we walk the dogs. We only want one to go free so that they won't feel obliged go head off together into the Wild Blue Yonder. Originally we had decided to let Nikolai run free, but on that occasion he got bitten by an electric fence, and I had to save him. Since then he feels insecure if he's not on a lead.
So it's Leonid. But today he misbehaved: for no obvious reason, he ran down the driveway of Fay (neighbour in Grassy Gully Road, whose surname I have forgotten). Wouldn't come back, and I had to go and get him. Fortunately there was a gate at the other end, so I was able to catch him. But that's really disappointing. Should we keep him on a lead from now on?
| Thursday, 5 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 5 December 2019 |
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Peace!
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Topic: general | Link here |
It's been a busy week, but finally the activity is subsiding. All I really did today was to write my diary. And it's so relaxing.
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Harrisons Road house
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Topic: general, Stones Road house | Link here |
We're observing the progress of the new house by JG King in Harrisons Road. It started construction about 2 weeks earlier than our house five years ago. Now they've started bricking:
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Is the time gap between the houses widening? No, on checking it seems that they started bricking our house on 16 December 2014. I still think they'll move in round Anzac Day or a couple of days earlier.
| Friday, 6 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 6 December 2019 |
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TIO complaint
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne in round 10:00 this morning with the sad news “We're off the net!”. And so it was. NBN planned outage? Presumably. It would be difficult to recognize an unplanned outage, since just about the whole day, every day, is slated for a “planned outage”.
Fortunately it was relatively short, barely half an hour, but it reminded me that I had set a deadline of last week for some kind of action to be taken. Of course none was. So: off to http://www.tio.com.au/ to enter a complaint.
That in itself was a problem. They wanted all sorts of information that made little sense in context, but then there was a box to enter the details of the complaint. OK, wrote that out and stored it where people can find it. Then tried to paste it in to the box. Sorry, only 1200 characters (about 40%) allowed. OK, paste the first two paragraphs and point to the online version.
Finally “SEND”. Sorry, we don't support this browser. Please upgrade to a supported browser:
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Now isn't that fun? Why didn't they say before? And what are their supported browsers? There was a link, but I didn't follow it, and I closed the window.
Finally found a browser that met TIO's approval and sent the complaint off. Got an automated reply assigning number 2019/12/02636. I hope that the 02636 don't refer to the number of complaints received so far this month. It reinterpreted “when did you become aware of the complaint?” (March 2015, and in itself the question is strange) as “Complaint date”, which potentially could be a problem: at https://www.tio.com.au/complaints-we-can-and-cant-take I read:
We deal with complaints about things that happened, or that you became aware of, within the last two years. We may still be able to help with complaints that are up to six years old, depending on the reason for the delay. Contact us if you’re unsure if we can help.
I think there's a valid case here: I was told that it would stop, and it didn't.
And then there was this question:
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But what arrived on the copy was:
Your preferred outcome The RSP can't do anything. This is a problem with the NBN.
They also mangled my carefully written text by removing all white space except single spaces, making it almost illegible. But I suppose they're used to reading the vomit that such systems produce.
Here's the content of the complaint:
This complaint relates to the NBN fixed wireless “service” in Dereel, which I have been using since December 2013. It is the only Internet service available, and the reliability is the worst I have experienced in 30 years using the Internet. I first noticed this problem in June 2014 (/grog/diary-jun2014.php#D-20140607-015618).
Most of the unreliability comes from NBN “scheduled maintenance”, which they have been performing on a regular basis for several years now, causing regular outages of up to 8 hours during the daytime, effectively taking the service offline for a whole day (for example, from 17 October 2019 08:38:34 to 17 October 2019 16:29:26). Since August 2016 I have received a total of 81 outage notifications from my RSP, and there have been some for which I have not been informed, such as on 23 April 2018 (/grog/diary-apr2018.php#D-20180424-001301). I have a complete list of outages at /grog/nbnstats.php which currently shows a total of 418 outages amounting to 11 days, 6½ hours.
The first time I complained was on 13 April 2018 (/grog/diary-apr2018.php#D-20180414-015333), when I was told that these outages were necessary to improve service in the future. But they have been continuing for over 2 years now, and there are always new outages on the horizon. Both the frequency and duration of the outages are on the increase. For the months of July 2019 to October 2019 there were a total of nearly 39 hours of outages, an availability of only 98.52%, or an average of 26 minutes of downtime every day. Currently (6 December 2019) there are three outages scheduled for the next 2 weeks, covering a time frame of 12 days, and with potential outage durations of up to 12 hours. I can't recall a time when there has not been at least one outage scheduled.
I lodged a formal complaint with Aussie Broadband on 3 July 2019 (/grog/diary-jul2019.php#D-20190704-050320), when I was told to expect a call back from the NBN within 1 to 2 weeks, with the fault number #6275739. I didn't hear back.
On 14 November 2019 I checked the progress of the fault number, and couldn't find it. I contacted Aussie Broadband repeatedly, but did not get an explanation for the disappearance of the fault. Instead they raised a new complaint with the NBN, #11411861. I asked for a response by CoB 29 November. So far I have had no contact.
I find this level of service completely unacceptable. While I appreciate that it's not possible to maintain 100% reliability, I find that the current situation is not even close to reliable. If I had an alternative, I would probably take it. As a state-sponsored monopolist, I consider that the NBN has a responsibility to improve its services. There is a Telstra mobile phone tower next to the NBN tower. It uses very similar technology, and I haven't heard of any outages with it.
I fear I won't get much satisfaction.
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Prima Taste Prawn Mee
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Last time I was in Geelong I bought a couple of spice mixes to try out, along many established ones. Two were from Prima Taste. Today I tried their Prawn Mee:
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The most obvious thing that occurred to me was the price. $8 for 3, maybe 4 portions! Add to that meat and prawns and it's really quite expensive.
On the positive side, they go to a lot of trouble. Most of these things are a single sachet; this one had four, including chili powder, fried shallots and garlic powder (!). OK, make it up, three portions. The results: boring! Also not enough. Somehow they have completely missed the mark.
I also have a laksa from them. I wonder what that will be like.
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Sick curry tree
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Since I've had my curry tree (Murraya koenigii), I've had problems with it. It's particularly prone to mites, and I have been spraying it with pyrethrum at regular intervals. But it didn't help much, and a few months back a salesman at Formosa gardens suggested a very expensive product which proved to be soap water.
Repeated applications. To no avail:
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OK, time to clean it out completely and repot it. I don't think it's going to die, but it's certainly not doing well. Does it still have mites?
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It's difficult to decide if there's anything alive in that mess. It could just be soap film. Too much, maybe?
Mick Solly, the gardener, was also here today, and spent 5 hours weeding, notably removing the yellow-flowering “ground cover” that he had so carefully planted: it had grown to 40 cm high and completely smothered other things, notably (to his pain; he doesn't use gloves) the cacti.
| Saturday, 7 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 7 December 2019 |
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More grid power failures
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Another two grid power failures today between 11:36:44 and 11:49:50, each a couple of seconds long, but proof that they were real failures and not brownouts. The PV system has made itself paid for the peace of mind it brings, though today might also be the first day where we had a net credit with Red Energy, our grid power supplier: we consumed 5.3 kWh from the grid (so early in the morning, before the break of day), and fed back 24.5 kWh, corresponding to the price of about 10 kWh from the grid.
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More signs of summer
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Gradually it's getting warmer, and about time too. While Sydney burns, we have been subject to cool and moist weather. But the garden is showing that things are improving. The outside clone of the “Uncle Max” Hibiscus rosa-sinensis is gradually producing buds:
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One of the Strelitzia reginae (Strelitziis reginarum?) is flowering, and the Strelitzia nicolai apprear so be progressing in that direction:
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And the chili plant that got burnt by fertilizer seems to be shaking it off:
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Further afield, we've found two more flowering bushes at the end of Bliss Road:
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The first appears to be a Carpobrotus species, and the second an Alyogyne. But I've never seen either in white before. I took a couple of stems of the first, which should grow; I'll have to find a supplier for the Alyogyne.
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Exposure compensation
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I took the photos of the garden flowers with the OM-D E-M1 Mark I, and somehow the viewfinder image didn't look right. Neither did the results. Then I realized: the camera was set to manual exposure, and the photos were overexposed by up to 3 EV.
OK, I can compensate in post-processing. But 3 EV? Tried, and they didn't look too bad, but there was no reason not to Do It Right, so out and took the photos again. Here a comparison of the results:
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The first pair were really 3 EV apart, and it shows. My attempts at compensation could have been better, but the first is almost acceptable. The second pair were only 1.4 EV apart.
But a lot depends on what I'm aiming for. On a second attempt, I got:
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That looks better, but the background of the chili shows a non-recoverable problem: the label is burnt out. There's nothing you can do about that.
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ALDI “Salmon Wellington”
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
A couple of weeks ago Yvonne bought a deep-frozen “Salmon Wellington” at ALDI, and today we ate it.
I should have been warned by the description: “with cheese & dill sauce”. What an idea! It was intended to be put in the oven and baked (50 minutes, 185° in a fan oven). Presentation wasn't good. The pastry was cracked and broken, and the fish fillet itself was offset by about 3 cm from the middle:
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The cooking time proved not to be enough: the pastry was still pale. So I grilled it for a while, and after another 10 minutes it looked the kind of colour we wanted.
Cheese & dill sauce? What I found was a completely inappropriate béchamel with little to no taste to it:
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Without the slime it didn't taste too bad, but it would have been cheaper and more flexible to buy some salmon and bake it, probably with a different sauce.
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Baking peanuts
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
At the end of last month I noted that air fryers aren't ideal for roasting peanuts. But I've never had really good results in the oven, either. Since we needed it on anyway for the salmon, I heated it up half an hour before and tried baking peanuts in it. 160°? 10 minutes? Not nearly enough. Another 10 minutes? Still not enough. Out of time: I had to put in the salmon, which wanted 185°, so I moved them down a notch. And after another 10 minutes they were almost overcooked.
My guess is that they're particularly temperature-sensitive. Next time I'll think of going for 170° and maybe 20 minutes.
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Packaged excrement
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
In the evening, Leonid wanted to go out the front of the house rather urgently. On the way to the door I found this on the ground:
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It's almost certainly from Leonid. But how did he end up with passing that? Yvonne thought that it might be weed mat, but it's nothing that obvious. It almost looks like some kind of root, but he would have chewed it at least partially.
| Sunday, 8 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 8 December 2019 |
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Rejecting mail
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been over a month since I did my last mail server changes, something that should long have been finished. Things seem to be working, but I have something like 200 messages in the mail queue on oldwww.lemis.com. Most look like this:
3D6B41B728BA 1886 Fri Dec 6 01:31:43 nicola@servmonk.live
(host mx0.lemis.com[167.179.139.35] said: 450 4.1.1 <groggyhimself@lemis.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table (in reply to RCPT TO command))
groggyhimself@lemis.com
This time that's really groggyhimself@lemis.com, a fake address that I use in this diary to protect against people like nicola@servmonk.live. And of course it should bounce immediately, but the soft_bounce parameter in the server configuration stops it.
OK, reset soft_bounce to no. That will fix it. But it looks like it will take 5 days; the ones that are waiting in the queue continue to wait.
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More garden stuff
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Once upon a time I did a lot of work in the garden. But that was years ago. Today was an ideal day for weed spraying, and the sprayer is full and ready to go. And that's the way it stayed.
About the only thing I did was to plant the Pandorea pandorana (Wonga Wonga Vine) that we bought in October:
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That's in the shade area, and while I was there I saw that the Fuchsia triphylla, bought last year and already considered dead, was still showing signs of life. Cleared around it and spread fertilizer carefully, but clearly not carefully enough, as this photo shows:
Somehow I managed to burn the new leaves anyway.
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Also spread some fertilizer, of which numerous plants appear to be in need, like this Pelargonium:
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On the other hand, we have the first water lilies, and the reborn Clematis “General Sikorski” is making up for lost time with multiple flowers:
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It's still much smaller than the Clematis “Edomurasaki”, but it's flowering more profusely. Hopefully we have that problem behind us.
There's now little doubt that the growths on the Strelitzia nicolai are flowers. Here's today's status:
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Waiting for mail? Or Godot?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Seen while walking the dogs today:
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I wonder what the chair is there for.
| Monday, 9 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 9 December 2019 |
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Strelitziae!
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Our second Strelitzia reginae is flowering, once again with an atypical flower. Here the new one, then the still-flowering other one (there's a third that doesn't seem to want to flower):
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And it's becoming clear that the Strelitzia nicolai is also preparing to flower. The bud has changed angle and now looks more like the proportions of the Strelitzia reginae, though it's more than double the size. Here yesterday, then today:
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It seems that the flowers can be recognized early by the shape of the leaf at the end of the top spike:
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Preparing for Christmas
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Topic: photography, animals, opinion | Link here |
We're working on this year's Christmas letter, which includes a photo of Yvonne, myself and as many animals as we can fit in. We tried the photo today.
Arranging the animals has always been “fun”, as has the choice of location. Today, somehow, we had more fun with the animals than normal. Here are some of the photos that didn't make it:
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Maybe it's time for photos with the horses this year.
| Tuesday, 10 December 2019 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 10 December 2019 |
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Strelitzia watch
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
I'm keeping my eye on the buds of the Strelitzia nicolai, which are gradually opening. Here's the more accessible one two days ago, yesterday and today:
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TIO: NBN can do what it wants
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Call from Yash from the TIO today referring to yesterday's complaint, and wanting to know what it was all about and what to do going forward. Yesterday? I didn't put in a complaint yesterday. It was on Friday. And I had given more detail than they expected, so much that I couldn't paste it in their form. Oh, they're not allowed to follow URLs. So could I please explain going forward?
What? They make judgements on disputes without being able to use the tools of their trade? OK, I explained it to him briefly. Sorry, they can't complain about the NBN choosing their maintenance schedule, only missed appointments and property damage. I'll have to contact my ISP [sic] going forward.
OK, nothing that he can do about it going forward. I asked him for an email confirming his statement, and got one with the interesting information (reformatted for legibility):
The TIO is a dispute resolution service for small business and residential consumers with complaints about telecommunications services supplied or offered in Australia.
We handle complaints where the consumer is an end-user of the telecommunications service or is directly affected by the telecommunications service.
The types of complaints we handle include complaints about supply of services, faults with services, billing and debt recovery, and breach of privacy.
OK, sounds right. That's why I contacted them. He goes on:
Your correspondence is about NBN scheduled maintenance which has been causing your internet to be disrupted over the past several months.
Exactly.
Because your complaint is about this issue, we cannot continue handling your complaint and we will not be taking this matter further.
Huh?
The TIO does can't compel NBN to stop having scheduled maintenance due to the matter falling out of the jurisdiction of the TIO.
Does that add up? Not for me. In any case, it ties up absolutely with what Rob of Aussie Broadband told me early last year. Next step: complain to my local federal Member of Parliament. That might potentially have some effect, since at least part of the complaint is that the NBN hasn't even responded to my complaint.
Is there any significance to the fact that today is the 6th anniversary of the NBN's arrival in Dereel?
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A new pussy?
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Topic: animals, food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
A few days ago, Petra Gietz, who is into animal rescue, came across a blue-point Siamese cat in Sebastopol whose owner had been transferred to an aged care facility, so the cat was thus looking for a new home (alternative: put her down). Yvonne got in contact with Sharon, the daughter of the owner, who had left her in her father's house. Clearly high time to get her out of there, but Sharon hadn't had time until today.
Off as planned to Ballarat, first to look for a new Chinese grocery store that Daniele Teo had mentioned. On the way Yvonne listened to her voice mail: Sharon couldn't make it today! Damn. At the very least we need to do something about voice mail on mobile phones. She called Sharon up to make a new appointment, and Sharon asked if our dogs were allowed inside. Yes. “Oh, in that case I can't give you the cat”.
It's been a long time since I've stopped marvelling about people with strange prejudices, but I felt sorry for the cat. But Yvonne thought, possibly correctly, that that was just an excuse, and for some reason she had found somebody else to take it. I hope she's right, and that the new owner will look after her.
To add injury to insult, we couldn't find the Chinese grocery. It's possibly that the local relationship (Yvonne first said “Big W”, but then “Woolworths”) is incorrect, and the shop is kilometres away. Frustrating experience.
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New tripod? Newer? Neewer?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
We need another tripod. Why? I already have three, but I'm using each for purposes that require a certain amount of work to configure. On occasion, for example, I have missed my analemma shot because the tripod had the wrong equipment on it.
What I have now is:
The oldest, bought over 10 years ago, a FANCIER FT-6662A according to the text on one of the legs. It's pretty poor quality, but it's bigger than most (why are tripods generally so small?), and it's still sufficient for my analemma photos.
Also over 10 years ago I bought a much more stable and big tripod:
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It's quite heavy, but it's just what I need for my panorama shots, and it almost always has the panorama equipment on it. It's also available for those few cases where I really need a height of 2.15 m.
That kept me going for a while, but 2 years ago I bought a Vanguard ALTA PRO 263AT, now far too old for them to have it on their web site. It's just what I need for macros, and it's generally in a surprisingly convoluted form:
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But now we have the PIXIO “Robot Cameraman”, and it needs to be mounted on a tripod. Which one? They're all in use, sort of. So last week I went looking for yet another tripod. It didn't really need to be special: the FANCIER would have done. But how do you find them? The eBay sellers seem to concentrate on table-top devices, and when they do describe features, they're features that don't interest me.
I need a tripod at least 1.70 m high. Where do you find that? Went looking through the catalogue that B&H thoughtfully sent me, but such details don't seem to interest them either.
Finally I bit the bullet and found a few that looked as if they might fit, in particular two tripods from Neewer (how do you pronounce that?) Both are interesting in that they have a tiltable middle column, like the Vanguard:
Why do they make two tripods that are so similar? What are the pros and cons? The first one (they appear to be too polite for model numbers) seems the older, and on careful examination it proves to have only fixed angles (or is that angels?) for the centre column. It's also not quite as high, though 1.83 m (compared to 1.91 m) is still more than enough. For the PIXIO either is overkill, but there don't seem to be any others that go over 1.6 m in height, and potentially it could be useful for macros or other situations requiring convolution. So in the end I ordered the higher one. Should be here next week.
In passing, it's amusing to see that they advertise this tripod as “for Panoramic Shooting”. I don't understand why. Do they think that the horizontal column means that you can position the entrance pupil over the axis of rotation? Yes, but except for extremely long focal lengths and distant entrance pupils, you're going to get the rest of the column in the picture, and even then you can only shoot absolutely horizontal panoramas.
| Wednesday, 11 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 11 December 2019 |
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More email fun
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Another mail bounce message today, reminding me that the status quo is insufficient: the current external mail server (oldwww.lemis.com) claims to be www.lemis.com, but that's a different address, causing a number of sites, notably FreeBSD, to reject mail. I need to change something for my outgoing mail. But since they removed the block on my outgoing SMTP, there's no reason to use any external server as a relay any more. So how about just updating the transport database to deliver directly?
No go:
Dec 11 11:34:02 eureka postfix/cleanup[8344]: BDB72263592: message-id=<20191211003402.BDB72263592@eureka.lemis.com>
Dec 11 11:34:02 eureka postfix/qmgr[8264]: BDB72263592: from=<groggyhimself@lemis.com>, size=308, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Dec 11 11:34:02 eureka postfix/smtp[8346]: BDB72263592: to=<groggyhimself@freebsd.org>, relay=none, delay=0.22, delays=0.02/0.01/0.2/0, dsn=4.4.4, status=SOFTBOUNCE (Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=mail type=A: Host not found)
Dec 11 11:34:41 eureka postfix/pickup[8263]: DB1DE263594: uid=1004 from=<groggyhimself>
Huh? Of course there's a name. In fact, there are at least two, depending on which IP address, a detail that the message politely omitted. But it works from lagoon. Doesn't it? Sent a message, and it worked fine:
Dec 11 11:36:08 lagoon sm-mta[82461]: xBB0a8Zi082461: from=<groggyhimself@lagoon.lemis.com>, size=372, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<201912110036.xBB0a7Xl082460@lagoon.lemis.com>, proto=ESMTPS, daemon=Daemon0, relay=localhost [127.0.0.1]
Dec 11 11:36:08 lagoon sendmail[82460]: xBB0a7Xl082460: to=groggyhimself@freebsd.org, ctladdr=groggyhimself (1004/1000), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=30038, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (xBB0a8Zi082461 Message accepted for delivery)
Dec 11 11:36:18 lagoon sm-mta[82463]: STARTTLS=client, relay=mx1.freebsd.org., version=TLSv1.3, verify=FAIL, cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384, bits=256/256
Dec 11 11:36:22 lagoon sm-mta[82463]: xBB0a8Zi082461: to=<groggyhimself@freebsd.org>, ctladdr=<groggyhimself@lagoon.lemis.com> (1004/1000), delay=00:00:14, xdelay=00:00:14, mailer=esmtp, pri=30372, relay=mx1.freebsd.org. [96.47.72.80], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (Ok: queued as 47XdK36RSFz4TmG)
Well, there were some strange messages in there. What's this STARTTLS? The important thing, though, was that the message got through.
OK, I need to read up, but the obvious thing to do is to use lagoon as the relay. Update transport again on eureka, and modify the config on lagoon to relay from the local network. That wasn't helped by a complete change in the main.cf file, with nearly 1000 lines of diffs between my current file and the sample configuration file. At one point I got:
Dec 11 11:45:03 lagoon postfix/smtpd[82503]: fatal: in parameter smtpd_relay_restrictions or smtpd_recipient_restrictions, specify at least one working instance of: reject_unauth_destination, defer_unauth_destination, reject, defer, defer_if_permit or check_relay_domains
OK, look for smtpd_relay_restrictions in main.cf. Not there! I had to add it. But why the message in the first place?
Even after fixing that, it didn't work:
Dec 11 12:29:08 lagoon postfix/smtpd[82727]: 1185CD7BD4: client=eureka.lemis.com[192.109.197.137]
Dec 11 12:29:08 lagoon postfix/cleanup[82732]: 1185CD7BD4: message-id=<20191211004156.B4BA6263594@eureka.lemis.com>
Dec 11 12:29:08 lagoon postfix/qmgr[82726]: 1185CD7BD4: from=<groggyhimself@lemis.com>, size=502, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Dec 11 12:29:12 lagoon postfix/smtp[82741]: 1185CD7BD4: host mx1.freebsd.org[96.47.72.80] said: 451-4.7.1 Try again later 451 4.7.1 in case of permanent delivery errors (e.g. 5XX SMTP errors) please send your problem report from a non-blocked location (e.g. gmail/yahoo) to postmaster@FreeBSD.org and include the following information: time (Dec 11 01:29:15) and client (167.179.139.35). (in reply to end of DATA command)
Dec 11 12:29:13 lagoon postfix/smtp[82741]: 1185CD7BD4: to=<groggyhimself@freebsd.org>, relay=mx66.freebsd.org[96.47.72.85]:25, delay=5.8, delays=0.06/0.02/4.8/0.9, dsn=4.7.1, status=deferred (host mx66.freebsd.org[96.47.72.85] said: 451-4.7.1 Try again later 451 4.7.1 in case of permanent delivery errors (e.g. 5XX SMTP errors) please send your problem report from a non-blocked location (e.g. gmail/yahoo) to postmaster@FreeBSD.org and include the following information: time (Dec 11 01:29:17) and client (167.179.139.35). (in reply to end of DATA command))
What went wrong there? At least the second message is different, but what does “try again later” mean?
It seems that this time it wasn't my fault. While I was scratching my head, the other shoe dropped:
Dec 11 12:39:00 lagoon postfix/qmgr[82726]: 1185CD7BD4: from=<groggyhimself@lemis.com>, size=502, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Dec 11 12:39:03 lagoon postfix/smtp[82773]: 1185CD7BD4: to=<groggyhimself@freebsd.org>, relay=mx1.freebsd.org[96.47.72.80]:25, delay=596, delays=592/0.01/2.5/1.3, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 47XfjQ1ZJ5z4Wxd)
Dec 11 12:39:03 lagoon postfix/qmgr[82726]: 1185CD7BD4: removed
So it looks as if it was a problem at the other end, and on the second try the mail went through, along with a lot of other stuff.
This is getting more and more confusing. I knew this stuff well 20 years ago, but it looks like I should start from scratch and revisit everything
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NBN outages: Telstra to the rescue?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The situation with NBN reliability remains unacceptable. But today on IRC, Peter Jeremy pointed me to a search path to find that Telstra apparently offers a “modem” for NBN that features 4G wireless backup—for no extra cost, if I read the documentation correctly. Yes, only 6 MB/s downlink, but not so long ago that was a luxury:
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Is it worth going through the pain with Telstra to get that feature? The pain started with “check your address”, with this tastefully formatted message:
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Why no FW signup online? The last thing I need is to talk with a “consultant” who would fail the Turing test, to potentially discover that this “modem” offer doesn't apply to fixed wireless.
Now wouldn't it be nice if Aussie Broadband would come up with something like that?
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Repotting curry tree
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Our Curry tree lost its remaining leaves in the wind, but it's not dead:
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Are those still mite webs on the second image? Or does this damage indicate an infection?
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Maybe I should cut it back from those points.
Repotted it as planned today, in the process planting a number of suckers in individual pots:
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| Thursday, 12 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 12 December 2019 |
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Christmas photo, take 2
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Topic: photography, general, opinion | Link here |
Somehow Monday's attempts at Christmas photos weren't quite what we wanted. It occurred to me that we have more animals than just cats and dogs, and they're better trained. How about a different view this year? From left to right Valeta (with a single t), Yvonne, myself and Carlotta:
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That sounded easier than it was. Yes, the horses are well-behaved, but it was cold outside (after all, it is December), and they wanted a warm-up first:
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Finally we had them together, and we positioned them:
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Press the button on the remote control. Don't hear anything. And only one photo. Did the shutter go off? Checked the remote control and found the LED blinking. Battery empty? Off back to the house to get new batteries, and then discovered that the remote control was set incorrectly to something that the camera doesn't understand. Reset, replace batteries anyway, and back.
Press the button on the remote control. Don't hear anything. Check. Yes, firing normally. Just a very quiet shutter.
So: is it now worth adding some ducks to the photo? We had them there until the horses started running around:
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But I don't think it would add much.
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More mail fun
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So now mail is working, if not quite the way I expected. Still, until I read up on the subject it'll do the job.
But then Yvonne came and told me that Danielle Teo wasn't getting the email that she sent. Danielle's on Gmail, and it's easy enough to check:
Dec 11 16:46:15 lagoon sm-mta[83327]: xBB5kFGK083327: from=<yxlehey@lagoon.lemis.com>, size=1312, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<20191211054615.GC73821@lagoon.lemis.com>, proto=ESMTPS, daemon=Daemon0, relay=localhost [127.0.0.1]
Dec 11 16:46:15 lagoon sendmail[83324]: xBB5kFXI083324: to=daniteo@gmail.com, ctladdr=yxlehey (1005/1001), delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=31129, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (xBB5kFGK083327 Message accepted for delivery)
Dec 11 16:46:20 lagoon sm-mta[83329]: xBB5kFGK083327: to=<daniteo@gmail.com>, ctladdr=<yxlehey@lagoon.lemis.com> (1005/1001), delay=00:00:05, xdelay=00:00:05, mailer=esmtp, pri=31312, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. [74.125.24.27], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (OK 1576043183 i33si750514pgl.485 - gsmtp)
So what's the issue? It accepted the mail, no complaints. Could Google be performing obscenities? Got Yvonne to send a test email to Danielle and my Gmail account. Look at that!
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“Why is this message in spam? It is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past.” What does that mean? Follow the question mark? That way stupidity lies. I have no indication why Google silently marks my email as spam.
That may sound trivial, but it's really unfair discrimination. Yvonne has done nothing wrong, but she can't send mail to the world's largest mail provider, and they won't say why. Arguably that's abuse of their market power. One more black mark against Google.
How do I proceed? It seems reasonable to assume that it's related to the MTA configuration, but FreeBSD accepts it where it didn't accept others. At the very least the Google MTA should have rejected it. As it is I have to guess, and if Danielle hadn't reported the problem, we would never have found out.
| Friday, 13 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 13 December 2019 |
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Next step with lagoon
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
In principle lagoon is now up and running, and even serving mail for our domain, something that I had never planned. But Yvonne still had issues: F11 didn't work.
OK, that's clearly in the context of editing emails with Emacs, where I had bound it to a function called tidy-up-reply. And of course it said what was worrying it:
Undefined dictionary: british
In other words, I hadn't installed aspell. OK, switch to VTY 2 to install it. Then switch back to X server 0. Not there! For some reason it had crashed!
OK, start again. Comes up in 640x480 mode. Somehow X couldn't find the nv driver. Dammit, where did it go? And how do you install that?
Rather than think too long about that, considered the alternative that I really wanted, the proprietary nvidia driver. Tried that, and, as last week, got no useful results.
OK, what next? Last week I had considered the possibility that the monitor was not supplying the correct EDID information. OK, it's easy enough to test that: put in another monitor. Did that, and sure enough, things worked! So despite the annoyance, it was worth the trouble.
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The eternal mail configuration
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
OK, why is Gmail silently swallowing my emails? Did some testing, in which it appears that it's too polite to make any complaint, even when sending mail to nonexistent destinations (or is there really a groggyhimslef@gmail.com?). OK, let's guess that it's my MTA behind NAT, and let's finally configure the server on www as it should be.
First, modify main.cf on lagoon to relay to www. Try it out. No change: it continued to send messages directly:
Dec 13 12:19:10 lagoon sm-mta[90492]: xBD1J9PU090492: from=<groggyhimself@lagoon.lemis.com>, size=386, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<201912130119.xBD1J9Mk090491@lagoon.lemis.com>, proto=ESMTPS, daemon=Daemon0, relay=localhost [127.0.0.1]
Dec 13 12:19:10 lagoon sendmail[90491]: xBD1J9Mk090491: to=groggyhimself@freebsd.org, ctladdr=groggyhimself (1004/1000), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=relay, pri=30052, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (xBD1J9PU090492 Message accepted for delivery)
Dec 13 12:19:21 lagoon sm-mta[90494]: STARTTLS=client, relay=mx1.freebsd.org., version=TLSv1.3, verify=FAIL, cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384, bits=256/256
Dec 13 12:19:25 lagoon sm-mta[90494]: xBD1J9PU090492: to=<groggyhimself@freebsd.org>, ctladdr=<groggyhimself@lagoon.lemis.com> (1004/1000), delay=00:00:16, xdelay=00:00:15, mailer=esmtp, pri=30386, relay=mx1.freebsd.org. [96.47.72.80], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (Ok: queued as 47Yt9l2hmLz4LDW)
Gradually a suspicion came to me. Why is postfix on lagoon calling itself sendmail? I've always found that to be irritating, but at least in the past the log messages said postfix. Now what I see is:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/postfix 51 -> ps aux | grep mail
root 872 0.0 0.0 16980 1496 - Ss 4Dec19 0:05.88 sendmail: accepting connections (sendmail)
smmsp 875 0.0 0.0 16800 1048 - Is 4Dec19 0:00.08 sendmail: Queue runner@00:30:00 for /var/spool/clientmqueue (sendmail)
root 86493 0.0 0.1 11436 2092 0 S+ 12:38 0:00.00 grep mail
grog 82753 0.0 0.0 10776 1180 2 I+ Wed12 0:00.00 tail -f /var/log/maillog=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/postfix 52 -> wh sendmail
93508 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 36304 15 Nov 10:14 /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
5057980 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 11 4 Dec 11:14 /usr/sbin/sendmail -> mailwrapper=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/postfix 53 -> wh mailwrapper
4736986 -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 15416 4 Dec 11:14 /usr/sbin/mailwrapper
Is that really postfix? The path names look strange. postfix should be in /usr/local, and sendmail should be in /usr/sbin and friends. Here I seem to have a mixture. OK,
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/postfix 54 -> postfix start
postfix/postfix-script: fatal: the Postfix mail system is already running=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/postfix 55 -> postfix stop
postfix/postfix-script: stopping the Postfix mail system
postfix/postfix-script: waiting for the Postfix mail system to terminate
That looks like I was running postfix. What's left? As before. Try again:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/postfix 57 -> postfix start
postfix/postfix-script: starting the Postfix mail system=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/postfix 58 -> ps aux | grep mail
root 872 0.0 0.0 16980 1496 - Ss 4Dec19 0:05.88 sendmail: accepting connections (sendmail)
smmsp 875 0.0 0.0 16800 1048 - Is 4Dec19 0:00.08 sendmail: Queue runner@00:30:00 for /var/spool/clientmqueue (sendmail)
root 86605 0.0 0.1 11436 2176 0 S+ 12:40 0:00.00 grep mail
grog 82753 0.0 0.0 10776 1180 2 I+ Wed12 0:00.00 tail -f /var/log/maillog=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/postfix 59 -> ps aux | grep postfix
root 86601 0.0 0.2 22776 8276 - Ss 12:40 0:00.00 /usr/local/libexec/postfix/master -w
postfix 86602 0.0 0.2 22768 8296 - S 12:40 0:00.00 pickup -l -t unix -u
postfix 86603 0.0 0.2 22816 8384 - S 12:40 0:00.00 qmgr -l -t unix -u
root 86607 0.0 0.1 11388 2172 0 S+ 12:40 0:00.00 grep postfix
So it seems that yes, indeed, I've somehow managed to run both sendmail and postfix at the same time—and it worked! OK, stop sendmail and run only with postfix, which worked as expected and produced somewhat more intelligible and less ambiguous messages:
Dec 13 12:20:33 lagoon postfix/qmgr[90594]: AFE44D7BD4: from=<groggyhimself@lagoon.lemis.com>, size=580, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Dec 13 12:20:33 lagoon postfix/smtpd[90597]: disconnect from localhost[127.0.0.1] ehlo=1 mail=1 rcpt=1 data=1 quit=1 commands=5
Dec 13 12:20:34 lagoon postfix/smtp[90601]: AFE44D7BD4: to=<groggyhimself@freebsd.org>, relay=www.lemis.com[45.32.70.18]:25, delay=1.2, delays=0.11/0.01/0.6/0.43, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 9133F27FF6)
But how did that happen? I know that you have to disable sendmail when you install postfix.
After some time, came up with these changes:
And that almost worked. Mail came in and was relayed. But then I saw a message:
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of yvonne@lagoon.lemis.com designates 45.32.70.18 as permitted sender) client-ip=45.32.70.18;
What's that? The SPF record should be there. And it is. DNS delays, maybe?
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Talking to Apples
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
DxO PhotoLab version 3 is out, and normally I'd try it out. But DxO doesn't like dischord, my Microsoft box: it runs “Windows” 7, too old for something modern like PhotoLab. So that's yet another upgrade on my path.
But recently Chris Bahlo gave me an old MacBook Pro, and DxO runs on Apple as well. Now to find out how to access it from a sane system. VNC, wasn't it? Checked. Yes, I have a program called vncviewer on eureka. What do I need on silberapfel (the Apple)? Nothing, it turns out. Newer versions of Mac OS include a VNC server. Just click, click, click, click, click and you're done!
OK, try it out:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) ~ 79 -> vncviewer -autopass silberapfel
Connected to RFB server, using protocol version 3.8
Performing standard VNC authentication
(Password)
Authentication successful
Desktop name "silver (2)"
VNC server default format:
32 bits per pixel.
Least significant byte first in each pixel.
True colour: max red 255 green 255 blue 255, shift red 16 green 8 blue 0
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" to type FontStruct
Using default colormap which is TrueColor. Pixel format:
32 bits per pixel.
Least significant byte first in each pixel.
True colour: max red 255 green 255 blue 255, shift red 16 green 8 blue 0
Login screen appears, I log in, then...
Rect too large: 1282x1026 at (0, 0)
A Google search showed that I wasn't alone. Old version of vncviewer? Checked, and it seems that the real name is tightvnc. OK, install on teevee, and try again. Same thing. What's that?
After a lot of discussion, found an alternative, tigervnc. That also installed a program called vncviewer, requiring the removal of tightvnc. It looks more polished, and it worked. Got round to installing DxO when the connection froze. So did the computer. Chris gave me this box because it had a display problem—that's one of the reasons for VNC. In the past I suspected that there was more to the problem than the display, and today it seems to have proven it: the display scrambled, and the machine was dead in the water.
I wonder if it's worth repairing. Chris had enquired and decided “no”, which is probably correct.
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Another grid power outage
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Another grid power failure today at 12:05:25. It was one of these really short ones, but interesting because it made the office UPS beep, so I noticed it at the time.
| Saturday, 14 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 14 December 2019 |
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Mail config, the daily pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So my mail configuration is finally working. Or is it? lagoon is still sending all mail to www. Is that a good idea?
No, for at least two reasons. The mail about the nightly backup, which should end up in my inbox on eureka, gets sent to www too, not exactly efficient. But from there it can't get back!
Dec 13 22:18:10 w4 postfix/qmgr[29383]: 787C727FF9: from=<root@lagoon.lemis.com>, size=59648, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Dec 13 22:18:40 w4 postfix/smtp[36173]: 787C727FF9: to=<groggyhimself@eureka.lemis.com>, relay=none, delay=43572, delays=43542/0/30/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (connect to eureka.lemis.com[192.109.197.137]:25: Operation timed out)
It should, of course, send to mx0.lemis.com, the external address for eureka. But there was some issue with the transport.db table. .lemis.com instead of lemis.com? I had hoped to get by without transport, which seems to be particularly poorly documented. Read the man page and some “helpful” web tutorial that helped even less, and finally created a table:
.lemis.com :smtp:mx0.lemis.com:25
* smtp:
But that didn't work. Instead I got:
Dec 14 03:03:38 w4 postfix/qmgr[37725]: 787C727FF9: from=<root@lagoon.lemis.com>, size=59648, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Dec 14 03:03:39 w4 postfix/error[38579]: 787C727FF9: to=<groggyhimself@eureka.lemis.com>, relay=none, delay=60671, delays=60670/1/0/0, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (unknown mail transport error)
If it doesn't know, what chance do I have?
In addition, I had a really bizarre message:
Dec 14 01:41:41 w4 postfix/qmgr[37555]: AB7942819D: from=<groggyhimself@lemis.com>, size=710, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Dec 14 01:42:12 w4 postfix/smtp[37563]: AB7942819D: to=<groggyhimself@freebsd.org>, relay=none, delay=31, delays=0.2/0.01/30/0, dsn=4.4.3, status=deferred (Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=mx66.freebsd.org type=A: Host not found, try again)
But while I was scratching my head about other things, it retried, and the message went through. mx66.freebsd.org does exist, so maybe the FreeBSD people are having fun with email or DNS as well.
And then there was another issue: I'm using www as a higher-level MX for lemis.com, but I also accept mail for Chris Bahlo's domain, narrawin.com. And I completely forgot about that!
Dec 14 00:03:11 w4 postfix/smtpd[36819]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from au-smtp-delivery-103.mimecast.com[180.189.28.103]: 454 4.7.1 <christiane@narrawin.com>: Relay access denied; from=<alumni@federation.edu.au> to=<christiane@narrawin.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<au-smtp-delivery-103.mimecast.com>
OK, declare it for local delivery. Add to mydestination:
--- main.cf 2019/11/04 04:46:34 1.2
+++ main.cf 2019/12/14 01:53:21
@@ -161,8 +161,7 @@
-mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost
+mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost, narrawin.com
But that didn't work either!
Dec 14 23:43:40 w4 postfix/error[45713]: AF9FE28182: to=<christiane@narrawin.com>, relay=none, delay=78478, delays=78478/0.06/0/0.01, dsn=4.0.0, status=deferred (delivery temporarily suspended: mail for narrawin.com loops back to myself)
While messing around with this, the shell input froze. Network problems? www down? We proved to be off the net. But that's another story. And after that I was so frustrated that I didn't continue.
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More bloody network problems!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
While trying to fix my mail config, my network link failed in mid-command. I got as far as typing le of less, and that was all.
What caused that? The usual tools showed that nothing was going across the link:
Looked at the NTD, but it looked normal, and usually the NBN people are too polite to work at weekends. Was Aussie Broadband doing some reconfiguration work that went wrong? It wouldn't be the first time.
Finally decided to brave the mobile phone app. No go:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /usr/local/bin 196 -> tcpdump -n -i xl0
12:58:11.932614 ARP, Request who-has 167.179.136.1 tell 167.179.139.35, length 28
12:58:12.928504 ARP, Request who-has 167.179.136.1 tell 167.179.139.35, length 28
12:58:14.302346 ARP, Request who-has 167.179.136.1 tell 167.179.139.35, length 28
...
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Should I call the number? It usually takes for ever. But given the error message, it's possible that something serious had really gone wrong, and that I might get an informative recorded message. So I called and had to fight my way through multiple menus (1: “residential”, 3 “support”) to be told that, quite frankly, the waiting times were longer than they would like, and that they would call me back if I want.
Finally! That's just what I was complaining about earlier in the year. So I pressed that, and sure enough Frank called back relatively quickly. No, no outages known. What brand of router? Oh. How old is the computer? That depends on which part. Finally I explained that I was sniffing the connection to the NTD, and that nothing was coming back, though the status was normal.
Bit of discussion, along with the information that somebody could come and take a look on coming Wednesday. Wednesday! Four days without a net? In any case, while we were talking, I power cycled the NTD. Restart dhcpd. And it worked.
Fool Groggy! I always power cycle before calling; I only didn't this time because of the misleading error message on the app. But it does rather look like there's an issue with the NTD. If it happens again, it might be worth having it replaced. It wouldn't be the first time.
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Girding down
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Topic: general, language, opinion | Link here |
What term do you use for putting on armour? I know “gird up”, but strictly speaking that's the application of a girth. Still, it's something that Chris Bahlo does relatively frequently, and usually Yvonne helps her.
And then there's the opposite: removing the armour. Yvonne helps there, too, and until I find a better term, I'll call it “girding down”.
That's what Yvonne had to do today; Chris came by after dinner, giving me the opportunity for some photos and to admire her new chain mail shirt:
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| Sunday, 15 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 15 December 2019 |
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Delivering hay
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Topic: general | Link here |
It's hay harvest time again, and despite all our fears, particularly with regard to the droughts in Queensland and New South Wales, we got a relatively reasonable price. But no delivery! So Chris Bahlo and Yvonne had to go and pick it up themselves.
For health reasons I can't participate, but I was able to get a few photos, showing that, in fact, there were really enough helpers already:
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Taking the hay photos
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Clearly the photo of unloading hay needed some preparation. Where do you position the camera? How much dynamic range do you need? Did some testing before they arrived with the hay and discovered that there was a 6 EV difference in brightness between the hay shed and outside. OK, we can do that with HDR imaging. But my first attempt looked like this:
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That's still pretty dark in the shed. A bit of playing around brought this:
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To get that, I loaded the left-hand image twice and masked the dark portion of one of them and the light portion of the other. Then I raised the brightness of the dark one and stitched. That works here because the boundaries are relatively clear, but there must be a better way. HDR stitching with Hugin?
And the final photo? It wasn't the only one. I took four different viewpoints with the Summilux 15 mm f/1.7 ASPH. and a total of 36 HDR images, of which I only used 8. And it was still not easy, at least partially because, I suspect, I didn't guess the entrance pupil right.
The angle of view wasn't very wide, only 102° horizontally. How about using the M.Zuiko DIGITAL ED 7-14 mm f/2.8 PRO, which, by sheer coincidence, has a horizontal angle of view of 102(.04)°?
Tried a few photos like that from a different viewpoint:
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They were hand-held, so I can't stitch them, but it's a possibility for next time.
In passing, these images were taken hand-held and merged with Photomatix, which didn't always get things right, and I had to discard a number of blurred merges.
But they were also taken with the P (“program”) autoexposure setting; normally I set it on M (“manual”). With manual, it changes the shutter speed (for example f/5.6 at 1/200, 1/25, 1/1600 s), but with P it changes both shutter speed and aperture, for example 1/100 s at f/3.6, 1/60 s at f/2.8 and 1/250 s at f/5.6. Clearly that's a better choice in this specific case, since otherwise the +3 EV exposure would have been 1/15 s at f/5.6.
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Daily mail fun
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
After the annoyance with the net failure yesterday, I gave up on what I was doing with mail. But looking at that transport table again made things clear:
.lemis.com :smtp:mx0.lemis.com:25
* smtp:
Syntax error! It should have been this, without the colon in the predicate:
.lemis.com smtp:mx0.lemis.com:25
OK, try that. Success!
Next, what do we do with narrawin.com? Chris forwards her email to Gmail, so all we need to do is send it on. And the MTA on oldwww.lemis.com, now rather lonely, can do that. So just add another line to the transport table:
narrawin.com smtp:mx2.lemis.com:25
Reload postfix, and what do I see?
Dec 15 00:03:23 lax postfix/smtp[45937]: EB63528165: to=<christiane@narrawin.com>, relay=mx2.lemis.com[192.109.197.81]:25, delay=73765, delays=73764/0/0.2/0.2, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as A59691B72837)
Dec 15 00:03:23 lax postfix/smtp[45960]: 0E515281B8: to=<christiane@narrawin.com>, relay=mx2.lemis.com[192.109.197.81]:25, delay=77732, delays=77731/0.03/0.22/0.15, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as B9E061B7283D)
Dec 15 00:03:23 lax postfix/smtp[45957]: EFAF2281EC: to=<christiane@narrawin.com>, relay=mx2.lemis.com[192.109.197.81]:25, delay=78894, delays=78893/0.01/0.21/0.34, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as ADA0C1B7283C)
In passing, the lax there is the name I've given the server. Migrating functions like www makes it difficult to keep track of which system is which, so it seems to make more sense to name them by their location, like ffm and tyo before them.
So: success? Up to a point, yes. But the devil's in the detail: the messages were delivered 3 minutes too early! How could that happen? Simple: now that transport works, postfix looks at where to send the messages. And that's:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/29) ~ 1696 -> host -t mx narrawin.com
narrawin.com mail is handled by 20 mx2.lemis.com.
So the mail had been forwarded even before I put in the special rule. Now to work out how to get Gmail to accept mail directly for narrawin.com.
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lemis.cn?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Unexpected mail today, from chinaregistry.org.cn, the Chinese domain registrar:
A company called Kanghong Ltd requested “lemis” as their internet keyword and China (CN) domain names (lemis.cn, lemis.com.cn, lemis.net.cn, lemis.org.cn)
They wanted to know if it had anything to do with me. Nice of them to contact me, but what should I do? Years ago lemis.de, once my domain, was taken over by somebody else, though currently it's registered to parkingcrew.net, clearly a cowboy. It would be nice if Kanghong Ltd. would pay me some money for the name, but that chance seems extremely unlikely.
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Where did aspell go?
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Topic: technology | Link here |
While testing Friday's aspell problems, I renamed /usr/local/bin/aspell to test the results. And I forgot to rename it back again! What did I call it? On one system I called it foo (a safe name), but not on lagoon.
OK, pkg update. No, it's up to date, who cares if it's complete? OK, remove it and reinstall it. No problem. No aspell. Why didn't it install it? That doesn't make sense to me.
Of course, there are easier ways to find the old aspell binary. List the directory by time and look for other programs that are installed:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 150,712 14 Nov 12:20 apsel
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 2,050 14 Nov 12:20 aspell-import
...
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 68 14 Nov 12:20 run-with-aspell
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 15,224 14 Nov 12:20 word-list-compress
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Lost heron
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Topic: animals, photography | Link here |
In the evening heard a noise outside. An aggressive magpie trying to chase off another bird. Other bird looked unimpressed: it was a heron, apparently a young one. Off to get my camera, which was still set to HDR. Got one photo, but while I was resetting the camera it flew away:
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It's surprising how well it merges into the background.
| Monday, 16 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 16 December 2019 |
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Shame on Australia!
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Topic: politics, language, opinion | Link here |
The effects of Climate Change are becoming ever clearer. The 2019–20 Australian bushfire season looks like being the worst on record, with bushfires starting in New South Wales in early September, months earlier than normal. Sydney has been covered in smoke:
What is our government doing about it? This month was the occasion of
the COP25 conference
in Madrid. It was
a failuredisappointment. Three countries were singled out for holding up progress: up: USA (think
Donald Trump), Brazil
(think Jair Bolsonaro)
and... Australia, where it seems
that Scott Morrison sees the
others as role models and is trying to emulate them.
Our supreme leader has managed to completely ignore the catastrophes of the last few months. You'd think that he has misunderstood the name of his government: “Coalition” does not derive from “Coal” and “ition” (an old word meaning “the action of going”).
What will it take for these people to see beyond the next election? Would it help if all their houses burnt down?
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PIXIO: current status
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Topic: photography, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has used the PIXIO “Robot Cameraman” a couple of times now. The last time she placed it in the middle of the long side of the arena. We placed beacon 1 on the other side at the right corner, beacon 2 on the other side at the left corner, and beacon 3 on the left corner of the same side as the camera.
Things worked OK. Time to think about the advantages and disadvantages of the device. The advantage is clear: it does what it sets out to do, most of the time. But there are a number of irritating issues, and that might be the reason that she didn't even try today:
The camera mount is just plain silly: a little flap with a screw that is hard to get to and hard to tighten:
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The screw has a slit for a screwdriver, but I can't access it because it doesn't open up enough. I've had to resort to using pliers.
It also can't be held in place. Only gravity and a silly adjusting screw prevent the camera from falling forward:
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The specs say that it can hold cameras of up to 2.5 kg, but it's so flimsy that Yvonne's camera (860 g with big lens) wobbles on it.
The beacons come with “mini-tripods” with a screw thread made out of plastic so soft that I'm scared that I'll damage the thread when I try to mount them, as seems to already be the case:
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I went looking for alternatives on eBay and found these ones too, the very cheapest on offer at $1.53 each. I don't know what I'll replace them with, but maybe I can just mount some lengths of ¼" threads on the corner posts.
Charging the batteries is an issue too, since there are five devices to charge, and they really need to be charged every time. But somehow the details make it even more difficult: firstly, the cables are much longer than necessary (1 m), and they get tangled easily.
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And for non-obvious reasons they have used a model of micro USB connector that is particularly difficult to connect:
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The beacons are even worse: they have a flap that has to be kept open with one finger, thus making it even more difficult to insert the plug:
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It seems that the rough edges of the connector are a big part of the problem. Here by contrast my phone:
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Wouldn't it have been easier and cheaper for them to use cables about 30 cm long?
I haven't mentioned zoom. That's not really PIXIO's fault. Like just about all cameras that evolved from still cameras, our cameras don't support remote zoom control. PIXIO does support a very few video cameras with this feature, but there again there are issues: choosing a video camera, getting used to using it, and finding usable software to process the streams. And even when all that's done, there's the question of what you want in the image. Today Yvonne was training two horses, and they didn't stay together. How do you automate that? For the time being I consider it to be an unsolved problem.
So: the first step to make life with PIXIO easier is for better mounts. Today I ordered a number of Arca-Swiss plates and clamps, one of which will go on to the top of the PIXIO. That way at least mounting won't be such a pain. Then to consider shorter charging cables.
| Tuesday, 17 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 17 December 2019 |
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I want lemis!
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Mail from Gareth Jing today, presumably associated with Kanghong Ltd:
To whom it concerns,
We will register the China domain names "lemis.cn" "lemis.com.cn" "lemis.net.cn" "lemis.org.cn" and internet keyword "lemis" and have submitted our application. We are waiting for Mr. Kevin Liu's approval and think these CN domains and internet keyword are very important for our business. Even though Mr. Kevin Liu advised us to change another name, we will persist in this name.
OK, it's interesting to see it from the other side. I've already had lemis.de taken over by somebody with only minimal connection with the name, though I see that it has now landed with a domain squatter. It doesn't seem to be a good idea to duplicate a name used in other domains, but what can I do about it? Suggest that he pay me something?
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New tripod, loss of face?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
When will the tripod arrive that I bought last week? I was just considering contacting the seller to ask about tracking numbers when a courier walked down the drive with the tripod in a far-too-large box. That's not bad service for “free postage”. I wonder if it's a sign of things to come: the wine sellers also always send a courier to the door.
Unpack and take a look. Yes, quite nice, and sturdier than the FANCIER, though not as sturdy as the Vanguard. And it doesn't look bad:
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Two ball heads? Why that? The upper one looks good and works better than the ones I already have. But the lower one doesn't rotate.
RTFM? It doesn't mention the ball heads at all. Time for some head-scratching.
Just as I was finishing my investigation, Yvonne came in with a little plate with the word “FANCIER” on it. It seems to have fallen off the old tripod, and I couldn't get it back on. Loss of face?
| Wednesday, 18 December 2019 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 18 December 2019 |
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Food shopping in Ballarat
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne off shopping in Ballarat this morning, and I decided to do the same, though independently. First to the Curry Star Restaurant, which has an Indian food section at one end, for... kidney beans, no longer the staple they once were.
Then on again looking for the new Chinese grocery that we looked for in vain last week. Since then Danielle Teo had sent us a map, which proved to be pointing to a Chinese noodle restaurant. In and discovered that the grocery shop was about 100 m further west at 33 Little Bridge St:
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Sadly, it's quite small and very Chinese: in other words, no Malaysian/Singaporean Chinese food. I found some fish balls that I might be able to use if I run out, but not the Daun pandan or even fried dofu that I had been looking for.
Disappointed, on to Cellar Savers in the off chance that they might have some good cheese for fondue de fromage, but I couldn't find a parking place, and the chances didn't look that good. On to ALDI in Sebastopol to look for Christmas roasts, bumping into Yvonne in the process.
We've been calling the place “Cellar Savers” for a long time, but it's really called Campana's Stockade Cellars.
ALDI Sebastopol has recently been renovated. It seems only a year or so ago that it first opened, but in fact it's been 12 years. They haven't increased the floor area, but it seems to have much more space:
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Much of that is because the shelves are higher. I had to help a rather short woman access some food on the top shelf. Does it look better? Yvonne says yes, but I'm not so sure.
And the roasts? Nothing. What a frustrating search. At least I got my kidney beans.
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Understanding the Neewer tripod
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Topic: photography | Link here |
What do I do with the tripod I got yesterday? Back to look at the illustrations on the eBay offer. They didn't help much, but I did check the relatively voluminous negative feedback about the seller, emilyandlilly. Items not as described, poor communication. And even the seller name appears misleading: far from being a small operation of a couple of women in Sydney, it's international (a surprising amount of negative feedback was written in French and Italian).
Oh well, let's try anyway. Sent a message:
The tripod I received does not look like the illustrations. In particular, there is no second centre column component between the two ball heads. The lower ball head (with the red ball) also does not rotate. The instructions don't mention any of this. Please clarify.
To my surprise, got an answer within 2 hours: after loosening the screw on the lower “ball head”, first lift the inner part of the central column out of the outer part, and then turn:
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So the only problem was the appalling documentation. But that's modern. Sent them back a reply saying that the issue had been resolved, and even got a confirmatory reply from them.
Negative feedback? No, definitely positive. Could it be that the “seller” is really a franchise, and that the service you get depends on where you order it from?
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You, too, can register lemis.cn
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
More mail from Kevin Liu of chinaregistry.org.cn today:
We have already suggested that they should choose another name to avoid this conflict according as your company have no relationship with them, but they persist in this name as China domain names (lemis.cn, lemis.com.cn, lemis.net.cn, lemis.org.cn) and internet keyword. In our opinion, maybe they do the similar business as your company then register it to promote his company.
As is known to all, the domain name registration based on the international principle is opened to company and individual. Any company or individual have the right to register any domain name and internet keyword which are unregistered. Your company haven't registered this name as China domains and internet keyword, so any company is able to obtain them by registration. But in order to avoid this conflict, the trademark or original name owner have priority right to register China domain name and internet keyword during our dispute period. If your company is the original owner of this name and want to register these China domain names (lemis.cn, lemis.com.cn, lemis.net.cn, lemis.org.cn) and internet keyword to prevent anybody from using them, please inform us. We can send you an application form with price list to help your company register these China domains and internet keyword during our dispute period.
Somehow that rings alarm bells. Nothing wrong in what Kevin says, but what if they're just trying to sell domain names? It would certainly be a lot of effort for little gain.
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Preparing vols-au-vent
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Vols-au-vent for dinner today. Should they be baked before filling? According to the instructions on the package, they should be baked after filling, but that way madness lies.
Decided to try them in the smaller air fryer (the “coffee machine”), giving them 4 minutes at 140°. Not enough. What do I do next time? Longer or hotter? Maybe both: 6 minutes at 160°?
| Thursday, 19 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 19 December 2019 |
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More domain registration insights
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Discussing my domain name issues on IRC with Peter Jeremy today. He came up with some interesting details, including this explanation of “internet keyword” from chinaregistry.org.cn:
Internet Keyword, a newly emerged technique for visiting network names, is a convenient way to realize the visitation of the browser by establishing a corresponding relationship between Internet Keyword and URL. You only need to use the language you are familiar with to tell the browser the address of the Internet Keyword you want to go.
But other links were more interesting, like this one. It's over 6 years old, but the exchange is almost identical with mine, with some names changed. Here a quote from that page:
We are Huajing company based in China. We will register the “abc” as internet keyword and China domain names .cn, .com.cn, .net.cn, .org.cn. We have submitted our application and are waiting for Mr. Peter Cheng’s approval. We think these CN domains and internet keyword are very important for our business. Even though Mr. Peter Cheng advises us to change another name, we will persist in this name.Best regards Gareth Liao
And here's what I received two days ago:
We will register the China domain names "lemis.cn" "lemis.com.cn" "lemis.net.cn" "lemis.org.cn" and internet keyword "lemis" and have submitted our application. We are waiting for Mr. Kevin Liu's approval and think these CN domains and internet keyword are very important for our business. Even though Mr. Kevin Liu advised us to change another name, we will persist in this name.Kind regards
Gareth Jing
They didn't even change the name “Gareth”.
There's also another, more detailed description at Chinese Domain Name Registration Scams, though the texts don't match as well. But they show that the pricing can be worthwhile for the scammer. I wasn't very interested initially, but should I play along? I discovered that I couldn't get any pricing from chinaregistry.org.cn, so maybe I should answer yesterday's offer and at least find out how much money they want.
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Another grid power outage
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Another grid power failure today at 9:33:42, about 2 seconds.
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Communicating with Telstra customers
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Voice mail from my cousin Robert Herbert today. It seems that he doesn't have our real phone number. He had sent me an SMS a couple of days ago, but I hadn't seen it—it was probably announced by one of those strange beep sequences that Android loves to send.
Called Robert up on the phone (now isn't that an old-fashioned way to communicate? I suspect that it's so complicated on “smart” phones that people choose other methods) and discovered that he and Brendan will be down this way on Monday. Time for a dinner party? He'll discuss with Brendan. In the meantime I have to send them an email, and that doesn't work well with Telstra. Sent a message off and followed up by sending from a different domain.
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Mutt problems
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Topic: technology, history, opinion | Link here |
I chose to send the duplicate emails from freefall.freebsd.org. Things weren't quite as I expected:
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/45) ~ 1 -> mutt
ELF interpreter /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1 not found, error 8
Abort trap
Huh? OK, contact the admins, and Li-Wen Hsu replied pretty quickly asking an obvious question:
Which mutt are you running?
I should have thought of that, but what could I be using?
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/45) ~ 5 -> which mutt
./mutt=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/45) ~ 6 -> l mutt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 grog grog 1191851 Dec 6 2000 mutt
Look at that date! What's that doing there? My best bet is that I put it there, nearly 20 years ago, because freefall didn't have mutt installed at the time. Apart from the egg on my face, isn't it amazing how much time has gone by? That's by no means the oldest file in my home directory on freefall; that honour falls to a file called mbox, unmodified for nearly 24 years::
-rw------- 1 grog grog 5744 Feb 8 1996 mbox
And some things never change. One of the messages in it was:
Received: from cls.net (freeside.cls.de [192.129.50.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id BAA15841 for <jkh@time.cdrom.com>; Fri, 12 Jan 1996 01:46:02 -0800
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 96 09:45 GMT
To: jkh@time.cdrom.com
Cc: postmaster@cls.net
Subject: mail failed, returning to sender
|------------------------- Failed addresses follow: ---------------------|
<grog@lemis.de> ... transport smtp: MX record for allegro.lemis.de points to local host
|------------------------- Message text follows: ------------------------|
Time to start tidying up? But then I'd miss such historical gems.
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NBN Christmas Joke
|
Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the eternal NBN planned outage messages today, making 4 upcoming outages in total over the next 6 weeks. But this one was clearly a joke:
NBNCo has let us know that they are planning network maintenance in your area, and that
your service at <strong>29 STONES RD, DEREEL VIC</strong> will be affected.<br>
The details are:
- Start date and time: Fri 31st January 2020 00:00 AEDT
- End date and time: Fri 31st January 2020 06:00 AEDT
You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance
- 1 min
One minute? They can do (much) more than that, and that in the middle of the day. Now if only all outages were so short.
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Magda and Nele for lunch
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Topic: food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
Magda Delva is in the country again, so we wanted to invite her for dinner. To my surprise, it's been ten years since we met her. Now her daughter Nele has two children, and she also lives considerably further away, so we can no longer entertain them in the evenings. Big, heavy lunch:
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Then a quick walk in the paddocks to see the horses, and they were gone again for another year.
Somehow these heavy meals in the middle of the day completely disrupt things; we didn't eat anything for the rest of the day.
| Friday, 20 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 20 December 2019 |
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Sumer is icumen in
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Summer's clearly come. Today was threatened to be very hot, and it was: the highest temperature was 44.5°, a new December record. Over the last 10 years since I wrote my weather station software and until yesterday, the highest December temperature that I recorded was 42.2°. That's not only a new record, but a significantly higher one.
It wasn't just here. Horsham recorded 47.9°, beating the previous December record of 46.6° and setting an all-time record.
What lies ahead? We've had it good in Victoria, but bushfires have been burning out of control in New South Wales for over 3 months, and the main bushfire season hasn't even started yet. What does our Supreme Leader do? Goes to Hawaii to cool off.
There should be some way to bring the government to account. But the current Trump Impeachment furore shows how difficult that is.
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Bushfire! Where? What?
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
On a day like today we keep an eye on the emergency services web site. I've been grumbling about this site and its predecessors for over 10 years, but it has only marginally improved. Today Yvonne noticed what could be smoke to the east. Check http://emergency.vic.gov.au/. Yes, many fires:
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What is all that stuff? Looking in more detail made it clear that you can't believe what you see. Yes, doubtless there's at least one fire, but:
Which is the most dangerous? They don't have any sane method of describing the relative danger, but my guess is that the darker the red, the greater the danger. So in this case it's this one:
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This one offers “MORE INFO”, not a foregone conclusion. And the info tells me that there's a bushfire in Mount Mercer, to the north-west of the group of fires, and that it's out of control. It refers to Grahams Road and Gundies Road. Grahams Road is to the north-west of the yellow fires to the north, where the westmost fire emblem is located, and Gundies Road is slightly above the middle of that fire.
So: the real danger is the fire (or fires) to the north. Why are they yellow and the one below (where, it seems, there is no fire) red? Arguably it could be that, though the fire is to the north, the area is almost uninhabited, and the danger is round the populated areas.
The two fires to the south of Mount Mercer are shown as being 1 km apart, and one of them (which one?) is presumably described more accurately by the grey outline. So why are they talking about two fires? On the face of it, the one at the north (“14 km West of Meredith”) is more directly involved, but according to the information it's only 500 ha (or, as they put it, Ha), and at the time I took the screen shots they were too polite to state the number of vehicles involved:
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At other times they showed up to 5 vehicles responding.
On the other hand, the fire at the end of Grahams Road has 61 vehicles responding. There were up to 77 at various times. That's clearly a serious fire, and the only one I really believe:
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This one's “medium”, while the other one is “500.00 ha”. Which is bigger?
So why are there two? My guess is that they're two different groups of firefighters, and while they may be cooperating on the ground, they're not cooperating with their reporting.
Then there's a small “fire” to the north of the others:
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You know something, people? Most people aren't interested in structure fires. Why can't there be an easy way to see just bushfires?
Finally there's a big yellow area round Meredith and to the south. I didn't get any screen shots of the details, but my recollection was that that, too, wasn't a bushfire.
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Your tripod is on its way!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
A couple of days ago I was musing about the lack of tracking number for my new tripod. But they've made up for it:
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“19 Dec 2019 3:58 pm”. That's two days after I received it! Am I going to get another one? Off to follow the tracking number, helped by eBay's polite refusal to provide a link, and ultimately found this:
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That's the presumably roughly correct information, modulo missing timestamps. How does eBay manage to make such a mess?
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Modern-day resource hogs
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Once upon a time Emacs was considered a resource hog, in the long-gone days of the 20th century: “Eight Megabytes And Continually Swapping” gives the lie. And then came web browsers with a memory hunger than blows my mind.
Move over, firefox. The real hog is Java, or at least applications that use it. Today I started MediathekView, a java application, on teevee, and had to wait for it to start up and read in its programme list:
PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND
9543 grog 22 21 0 1780M 409M CPU2 2 6:38 11.04% firefox
16996 grog 24 52 0 2505M 1173M uwait 1 13:00 1.16% java
1112 grog 1 20 0 6260M 35M select 3 770:35 0.95% Xorg
84521 grog 4 20 0 155M 28M select 3 6:12 0.01% emacs-26.2
13 minutes of CPU time and well over a gigabyte of real memory just to start up! How often did a CDC 7600 manage to stay up that long, taking into account the relative performance? Clearly it couldn't come close to using that much memory.
| Saturday, 21 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 21 December 2019 |
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Steak and kidney pie insights
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Steak and kidney pie for the main course this evening. I've been working on the recipe for some time, and last time I established that “air fryers” were not the appropriate way to bake them. So back to the real oven, where I had written “30 minutes at 210°”. But that's not optimal. After 20 minutes we had:
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That's brown enough in general, but the smaller pie shows distinct areas that are underbaked. So: next time cooler.
In addition, there wasn't enough salt in the mixture, and it was far too dry. More adjustments to the recipe.
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Still more flash pain
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I thought I had gradually sorted things out with flash exposure, but today I was reminded that we're not there yet. Yesterday I had managed to try to add some meat to cucumber sliced with a mandolin, and I had had a bandage on the end of my thumb, not a good place to keep it in place. While turning off a light, I discovered it gone:
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Nothing special, right? But that's after postprocessing. I took it with the mecablitz 15 MS-1, and the original looked like this:
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Why so underexposed? That's a TTL flash unit. My best bet is that it's not strong enough, though it should be. I had the camera set to aperture priority, f/10. The unit should have a guide number of 21 at 200/24° ISO, which would be enough for a distance of up to 2 m.
A related issue is my planned flash lighting of the kitchen. If we can ever get an electrician to do the work, I'm planning to put a studio flash between kitchen space and living space, roughly where the stand to the left of this view is:
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I thought that this might be enough by itself, but it's clearly lop-sided:
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But with the existing flash on top of the fridge on the right it doesn't look too bad:
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Only at the back, near the oven and the stove, it gets a little dark:
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Would TTL flash help there? I don't seem to have had good results.
| Sunday, 22 December 2019 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 22 December 2019 |
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Air conditioner failure
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Topic: Stones Road house, opinion | Link here |
Went to check the room temperatures shortly after noon and found the air conditioner turned off. Strange. Turned it back on again, and after a few seconds it turned itself off again.
What's causing that? Circuit breaker tripped? Out to take a look at the switchboard. No breakers tripped. Turned the air conditioner breaker off and on again, just in case. No change. Toggle outside switch? No change. But I thought that there was usually a brief mechanical noise when I powered it on, and this time there was nothing.
Anything inside of interest? When the unit was installed I took some photos, notably this one:
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OK, that shows a set of contact breakers at top right. Had one tripped? Took the cover off and took a look. No, circuit breakers OK. On the board on the left there was also a fuse, also OK:
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There was also some convenient documentation on the inside of the cover, including status codes:
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And for reference here's the manufacturer's identification on the outside:
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Checked the power supplies. Yes, power was getting to the circuit breakers and the board at the bottom left, which they call a CPU. Yes, interestingly 230 V AC. But nothing in the display.
And then I read this:
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No display on boot. That can't be mechanical failure. The board itself must have failed. OK, nothing I can do.
Off to check on how to contact Waldron. Not at all until 6 January! They've taken two weeks off, and the air conditioner chose the worst possible time to fail. Checked the Actron web site, where I was able to fill out a form:
Outdoor unit does not start. Indoor controller works but powers down immediately,
Checked power to outdoor unit and circuit breakers and fuse on CPU board. All are functional. Power comes to the CPU board, but the display does not work. According to the information in the unit, it should display "boot" for 30 seconds after powering up. I therefore assume that there is a problem with the CPU board. The LED on the small board above the CPU board lights green.
What's the chance of that getting done before Christmas? A bat's chance in hell, I would have thought. We've been here before with the dish washer: buy another one to tide us over.
In the case of air conditioners, that means a portable air conditioner. Where do you get them? Somehow The Good Guys are about the only game in town. And their web site is suffering again today, producing even worse results than usual.
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Still more grid power failures
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Coincidentally, discovered that round the time the air conditioner failed, there had been five grid power failures, all only one second long. They happened between 13:15:14 and 13:52:53. I took my photos of the external unit starting at 13:41, so it's unlikely that the unit failed any later than 13:30, after only the first one. Alternatively, could the report be related to power cycling the air conditioner? No, I don't think so. One occurred at 13:41:57, between these two photos:
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They were on the cover at the end of the external unit, and I can't imagine that I power cycled the unit between the two. And the PV inverter stats show that the mains voltage was between 250 V and 245 V, lower than usual, though still above the nominal mains voltage of 230 V.
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The pleasure of animals
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Topic: animals, health | Link here |
Walking the dogs today, a car passed us with a barking dog. Leonid wanted none of that, and wanted to chase them. Yvonne tried to hold him back, and he danced around on her feet:
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Yes, bruises are nothing unusual. But it swelled up like that after only a few seconds! Coincidentally this happened in almost exactly the same place that Nikolai and Leo pulled me over and dislocated my little finger three years ago, maybe 3 m away, on the other side of the road. Curtailed the dog walk and took Yvonne and Leo back, after which I took Nikolai for a short walk.
Is it serious? Bruises swell up, and then the swelling goes away. But this time it happened so fast that I was concerned, especially since Yvonne is no longer the youngest. She discussed it with Chris Bahlo, who agreed that it would be good to get it looked at.
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Off to Ballarat
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Topic: health, Stones Road house, general | Link here |
So off to the Ballarat Base Hospital, where I left Yvonne and went on to The Good Guys to look for an air conditioner. To my surprise, the place was almost empty. Found a singularly clueless sales “assistant” who couldn't tell me anything useful about the units, even to the point of claiming that they have no reverse cycle ones, until she ran into one. But reverse cycle doesn't seem to be the best choice here: the one item produced 3 kW cooling power for $699, and we found a 5.5 kW unit, a Levante LEV18 for (ultimately) $949. You can buy a lot of electrical blower heaters for that price difference.
I hadn't even loaded the thing into the car when Yvonne called to say that she had had a clean bill of health, and that nothing needed to be done. Picked her up and off home again, a total time away, including an hour's drive and filling up the petrol tank, of 100 minutes. From the IRC log:
* groggyhimself heads off to the emergency department with Yvonne. [15:48]
* groggyhimself returns with checked-out Yvonne and new aircon. [17:34]
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Levante LEV18 air conditioner
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Unpacked the air conditioner and put it in place. Where are the instructions? Spent some time growling before I finally found them, stuck inside the exhaust air duct.
How do you connect the exhaust air? I had problems with this 3 years ago, when we bought one for Chris Bahlo. The mounting equipment is just plain bizarre:
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That's too short for a sliding door, and completely wrong for typical Australian wind-out windows:
A bit of reading the instructions made things clear. This unit (and all others on the market, it seems) is not designed for Australian conditions. They expect sliding windows, not wind-out windows. Why? Wind-out windows are the Australian standard, and though we had some sliding windows in the old part of Wantadilla, I haven't seen any new houses with them in the last 20 years. So now I need to find a way to seal off the gap in the window, something that the maker should have provided.
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And apart from that? It works, and it cools. For a device that claims “lower noise” you have to wonder what it was comparing to. Sure, I wasn't expecting anything as silent as a ducted system, but this one is really noisy. And it doesn't stop blowing when it reaches the set temperature. Under those circumstances it's a good thing that it has a remote control (requiring a screwdriver to insert the batteries).
| Monday, 23 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 23 December 2019 |
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Repairing the air conditioner
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
What chance do we have to get the air conditioner repaired quickly? Not much, but not impossible. Called up Waldron on 5336 0000 and got the expected “we're closed for the next two weeks” message, but I was able to leave a message. Not much hope, but why not?
Then called Actron on 1800 119 229 and spoke to somebody who didn't give me her name. She would send the local agent around as soon as possible. Waldron? Let me check... there seem to be a couple of others around who are open over Christmas. With a lot of luck they might contact me on Friday. Reference number—hold on—8046819. That's about as much as I had expected.
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More equipment failure?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Hot on the failure of our air conditioner yesterday, I looked at the “Dashboard” of my photovoltaic system this morning. No solar power at all, despite bright sunshine outside. Damn! Has the thing failed?
No, just gone off to do its own thing and “calibrate” the batteries. From 0:45 to 17:00. OK, it started in the middle of the night, but if this is really necessary, can't they start it immediately after sundown? As it was, instead of the 50-odd kWh that I've been getting in the current weather, I only got 10 kWh. That's effectively $12 lost.
As if that wasn't enough, in the afternoon I heard a whining from our new fridge, possibly from a fan. Hopefully it's not going to fail on us over the Christmas period as well. It went away after about half an hour, but it sounds like I'm going to need to call service after the Christmas break.
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The birds is coming
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Looking out the lounge room window this morning, saw a surprising number of birds of different feathers in close proximity:
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That's unusual. In particular, there aren't many galahs around here. My guess is that the seeding grass attracted them. And the poor image quality is because I chose not to open the glass door in case it scared them off.
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Garden flowers at the summer solstice
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Yesterday was the summer solstice, time for the monthly garden photos, but the sun was too bright and glaring, so I decided to take the photos early this morning. I think it has paid off.
The trees in the front of the house seem to be looking better. The Schinus molle that we replanted at the end of last month seems to be improving. At first sight the comparison between last month and now doesn't seem very different:
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But the leaves are growing:
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So I'm relatively confident that it's on the way to recovery.
Another plant that gives cause for concern is the Curry tree, which lost all of its leaves after a treatment with soap recommended by our local gardening supplier:
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I repotted it, and it seems to be gradually recovering:
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And for once my Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” is not looking at all happy:
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It dropped leaves on the shade side some time ago. My guess is that I hadn't watered it enough, and that was its reaction. The other side is looking normal enough:
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So in case of doubt “it needed pruning anyway”.
And the first Hibiscus syriacus of the season is also flowering:
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The Grevillea robusta that wasn't looking so robust last month is now looking better, though it's surprisingly difficult to demonstrate on a photo:
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Again, I have few concerns.
And then there's the Paulownia kawakamii, which should have grown much more. But at least now it's as tall as its star pickets:
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A first is a flower on our Strelitzia nicolai, which became apparent at the end of last month:
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It has been developing since then, but it's still not open. Current status is:
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The second view is from above, and shows a total of four components of the flower.
And the Strelitziae reginae are also flowering for the first time in a couple of years:
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The Clematis “General Sikorski” was just coming into flower last month. Now it has almost finished flowering, but in between it was surprisingly active for such a small plant. Here a photo from 8 December:
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The succulent bed to the north-east of the house continues to grow well:
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Other dry climate flowers are the Kniphofia and Leucospermum cordifolium. The latter has recovered from what I suspect was under-watering:
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Maybe we should plant more of that kind of plant.
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Visitors from Bendigo
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Topic: general | Link here |
My cousins Brendan and Robert Herbert came down from Bendigo today, bearing an incredible amount of old photos.
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I had asked them to find some of my personal effects, including a photo album, but it has taken them over 9 months to sift through the amazing amount of stuff that she had, and these are just the photos (including my photo album, which shows my development up to about 1960).
There's some interesting stuff in there: photos that must be over 100 years old, a locket that my father gave to my mother-to-be on her 16th birthday (12 April 1940), two medals from the RAAF in honour of his service in the Second World War, and other things that I had never seen before, including these photos, taken on 24 February 1972:
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Those are my parents in the middle of the photos. It will take me months, if not years, to sift through all the stuff.
This is only the second time that I have seen Brendan and Robert since December 1977, when they were 15 and 11 years old, and the last time was at my mother's funeral. Unfortunately they couldn't stay. A cup of coffee, once round the property and looking at the horses, and they were off.
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I suspect that they wanted to drop us a Christmas present. But we had a good time, and I hope we'll see them again when they have dug out more of the old stuff.
| Tuesday, 24 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 24 December 2019 |
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Setting up the air conditioner
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday was relatively cool, and we didn't need the new air conditioner, but today, though still mild, it was warm enough to want cooling, with a maximum temperature of 28.1°. First we needed to seal off the window:
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The makers should really be ashamed of themselves that they don't provide appropriate fittings. I wonder if this is not a breach of the conditions of the Trade Practices Act.
Turning the machine on was straightforward, and it worked, creating much more noise than cool air. And then the “ADD WATER” LED went on. OK, how do you do that? Go to the page labeled “WATER DRAINAGE” [sic] and read the last paragraph, which, without any illustration, states:
Water is required in the reservoir for the unit to run in Engergy Saving Mode. If water is required, the Add Water LED on the control panel will illuminate, adn you must addwater [sic] to the water reservoir (10).
What's (10)? It the page number, but that doesn't make sense. It's not a figure number. After some searching it proves to be an otherwise unidentified point in Fig. 2 on page 3. Here's what it looks like, hidden below the exhaust air hose:
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It's the upper of those two protrusions. That's the carpet underneath: it's almost at floor level. But how do you pour water into that? It doesn't say. You have to try and discover that it can be pulled out, leaving a slot about 1.5 cm across, where you can't even properly fit a funnel:
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The instructions continue:
In order to avoid the water flooding from the under pan, you should add no more than 1800 ml (three cups).
Yet another implicit definition of cup: 600 ml! So far the definitions I have found range from 65 ml to 300 ml, so this is quite a step.
Filled in 1.8 l of water, painfully. The light didn't go out. After 2.5 l it still didn't. I'll continue trying, but it's a real pain to fill. Couldn't they have put a tube up to the top of the thing?
In passing, the rest of page 10 is really about WATER DRAINAGE. The instructions include the gem of wisdom:
Uncap the lid, remove the rubber plug on [sic] the drainage port, then let the water flow out into a suitable container.
OK, I'll bite. The bottom of the drain port is 4 mm from the ground. How much does the reservoir hold? I don't know. Is it even the same reservoir as for the water to be filled in? They use different terminology for each, but it's not conflicting, and it seems reasonable that there's only one. In that case, it demonstrably holds 2.5 l. A “suitable container” 4 mm high would thus have to be at least 0.625 m² in size (a side of about 80 cm), and then it would be filled to overflowing.
Not mentioned in the instructions anywhere is a short length of plastic tubing that came with the unit, apparently intended to work around this issue. But how do you connect it? Once you open the port, water starts flowing. I'd love to see the designer of this monstrosity perform the drainage operation.
And how does it cool? Not well. If we sit in the lounge room with the thing blasting at us, it works fine, but we can't hear the TV. And when you consider that this is supposed to be a 5.5 kW unit, and our house air conditioner is only 14.4 kW for the whole house, you'd expect something better.
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Ashampoo photo optimizer: finally a use
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Amongst my mother's photos I found photos of the Royal visit of 24 February 1972. They were mainly black and white, but a couple were in faded colour:
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How do you recover that? I tried playing around with DxO PhotoLab, but didn't get any useful results. Still, better than nothing.
But then it occurred to me to try Ashampoo photo optimizer. I've almost given up using it, since recently it has started to create a greenish cast that I can't remove. But for this kind of photo it seems to be quite usable (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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And here's my mother:
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Fresh wildflowers
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Topic: gardening, photography, opinion | Link here |
I would have thought it too late in the year for new wildflowers, but today we found large numbers of two new kinds while walking the dogs:
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Took a couple home and tried to take close-up photos, once again thwarted by the difficult operation of Olympus' focus stacking. Put off the processing until tomorrow, though the accidental individual images suggest that I should be looking for better specimens:
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Cheating oysters
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Oysters as entrée today. But somehow they didn't look right:
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Where are the oysters at bottom left and the one next to it? The shells were empty. Clearly this was before we opened them, thus the photos. But when I opened them, I found that they had somehow escaped from their shells, and all were present.
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Fondue revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
We eat fondue de fromage about every 6 weeks, but a while back we ran out of cheese, which we buy at The Corner Larder in the Victoria Market in Melbourne. All the way to Melbourne for some cheese? No, we have plenty of other stuff we need too, but the idea of fighting our way through Melbourne traffic just before Christmas isn't good for our health.
So Yvonne went to Campana's Stockade Cellars, which we've been calling “Cellar Savers”. Their choice of cheese isn't great—it's not even mentioned on their home page—but she was able to find some real Gruyère. So we made a fondue with only Gruyère, and it didn't even taste bad. But for some reason it was thinner than usual. Is that because of the other missing cheeses, or just a property of this particular cheese?
The other issue was the size of the bread cubes. I thought that they were too small, though at least that meant that we finished the pot: the smaller the cubes, the more cheese they take per unit weight. So I weighed these ones: they weighed between 1.6 and 3 g. I think the 3 g were about right, so maybe we should aim for 3.5 to 4 g average next time.
| Wednesday, 25 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 25 December 2019 |
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Bloody air conditioner!
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
This new Levante LEV18 air conditioner really doesn't live up to its claims. Today it got warmer (32.6° maximum), and the thing barely made any difference to the inside temperature. It's in the lounge room, while my office (normally 1° warmer because of the electronics) was at effectively the same temperature. Yes, I wasn't expecting the thing to be as effective as the house air conditioner, but it is still rated at 5.5 kW, 38% of the house air conditioner, and it can't even make a dent on the temperature of one room. And the claim that it's “lower noise” is just plain incorrect. I've never heard such a loud machine.
And this “add water” light goes on despite my having added 3.5 l of water (instead of their confused maximum of 1.8 l or 3 cups). I suspect that the water might help with the cooling, but it's not clear how much more I will have to add.
It goes back. There's no way that it matches its specs.
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More focus-stacked wildflowers
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Topic: photography, gardening, opinion | Link here |
I picked two wildflowers to photograph yesterday, but only managed the yellow one: the pink ones had closed. Put them in water outside in the sun, and sure enough, they opened again, and I was able to get some focus-stacked photos:
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But they're still not all in focus! The focus stacking settings on the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II are really difficult to adjust; it's far too easy to think that you've changed something, and then you haven't. In this case, I had intended to change the “focus step“ parameter from 2 to 8, but it appears that I hadn't. More to the point, though, despite my careful choice of flower, the tips of the petals are still slightly shriveled. Discouraged, I didn't try to process the focus stacked photos that I took yesterday.
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Merry Christmas!
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Somehow the combination of the heat and general lethargy didn't make for a good Christmas Day. We actually ate leftovers! I had thought that I had never done that before, but it proves that we did on 25 December 1965, and possibly on other occasions. At least we ate some Moreton Bay bugs, which proved even more difficult to prepare than last time.
Piccola must have sensed the situation. In the evening she walks between our armchairs over the side table with drinks on it. I've often marveled at how carefully she works her way between the glasses.
Not so today:
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Atypically, the cheap pressed wine glass broke, but the more expensive crystal glass survived.
| Thursday, 26 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 26 December 2019 |
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High Commissions: Cutting through red tape
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Topic: history, general, opinion | Link here |
In April to June 1967 my father and I drove from Singapore to London, which we referred to as the Asia Trip. One of the more unusual things that happened during the trip was that my father's passport became full, requiring a new passport.
Problem: this happened in Tehran, and at the time Australia did not have any diplomatic relations with Iran. The closest Australian Embassy was probably in Baghdad.
So we contacted the British Embassy, and they helped. As I commented some time after the event,
He had received a British passport, attached to his Australian passport with genuine red tape and sealing wax. On the title page, the standard text “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies” had been amended to read “Citizen of the British Commonwealth”.
And how about that, I found the passports in the collection of stuff that Brendan and Robert had brought on Monday. They were no longer joined together, but the holes were clear:
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It seems that they had been separated so that each High Commission could cancel the respective passport. Cutting through the red tape!
Except that it wasn't red tape at all. It was blue tape:
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But wait, there's more! I found a third passport, clearly of a newer variety:
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It was unused, and he had had it with him when his first passport ran out. Why didn't he just use it? The devil's in the detail:
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There's nothing else obvious, but I had also had one of these passports. The time in question was just before the war where Israel annexed what then was West Jordan. Relationships between Israel and its neighbours were already frosty, and the Arab countries would not accept a passport with an Israeli stamp in them. So we were issued separate passports specifically for the Israeli stamps. I had recalled that the passport was endorsed “Valid for Israel only”, but that seems not to have been the case. My father could have continued the journey on that passport, but at that point we had planned to continue the journey to Israel (arriving roughly at the beginning of the war). Patrick Wogan of the British Embassy talked us out of that, but only after preparing the new passport.
And my second passport? I lost it shortly later. I suspected that it had been stolen, but who wants a passport endorsed “Valid for Israel only”? Only now has it become clear that it was more valuable.
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VE Day in 1967
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Topic: history, opinion | Link here |
One of the strangest things of the passport story was a complimentary slip that I received with the cancelled UK passport:
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Huh? It took me a while to realize that this was really the name of the person returning the passport. I wonder if he/she was born on VE Day. That would have made him/her only 22 at the time, probably a little young for experience “in the colonies”.
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Quail eggs
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Topic: food and drink, general | Link here |
Our neighbour Helen from the end of Westons Road along today with eggs, dozens of them. Most are quail's eggs:
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By chance, these 5 weigh almost exactly as much as the single hen's egg that I used for comparison.
What do we do with them? Helen eats them boiled (and warns me that they're much more filling than hen's eggs), but I'm sure there are more interesting ways of preparing them.
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Ceramic knives: no sharpening?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
15 months ago we bought some ceramic knives (“never need sharpening”). They're quite good, but the statement really should be “can't be sharpened”. Here's what one of them looks like now:
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It still works, but clearly it's not what it used to be.
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Yana comes for Christmas
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Topic: general | Link here |
Our daughter Yana along for a few days this evening, having braved a 10 hour bus journey from Adelaide.
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Cabillaud à la sauce jaune
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Cabillaud à la sauce jaune for dinner tonight. I've only made it once before, but I've written down the recipe. It's straightforward enough, but it's a good thing that I did, because otherwise I would have used different quantities (more saffron, less salt).
But today it looked completely different. Left the last time (over 3 years ago), right today:
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In addition, it tasted too salty—just the problems I would have guessed. What went wrong there? At least I can update the recipe (and have done so).
| Friday, 27 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 27 December 2019 |
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Academia: serious or scam?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
I'm subscribed to a service called Academia, which claims “Academia is the easiest way to share papers with millions of people across the world for free”. By “papers” they mean “academic papers”, of course, and I've found some interesting stuff in there, mainly related to linguistics, though Old Norse -yn and Proto-Germanic *-u-njō-, a Residual Suffix Class: Re-Analysis and Spread of Derivational Morphology through Semantic Association ("Dérivation nominale et innovations dans les langues indo-européennes anciennes", Rouen 11-12/10/2018) may be a little too specific for my casual interest.
But how serious is the matter? Almost every time I sign in, and several times a week by email, I'm told things like “The name "Greg Lehey" is mentioned by an Archaeology researcher in a paper uploaded to Academia”.
Archaeology? I have nothing to do with that. And coincidentally my name has no Doppelgänger. Find a reference on the web to “Greg Lehey”, and it'll be referring to me. OK, I'll bite. Please show me the reference. Ah, for that you'll have to sign up for the pay version. It's not exorbitant, but I don't really believe the claim in the first place, so so far I've resisted any temptation.
But then there are other “papers”: “The Cambridge Dictionary of Linguistics by Keith Brown and Jim Miller”, uploaded by Mansoor Ahmed Khan. What's that? It's a complete book, 434 pages in length. What does that have to do with Mansoor Ahmed Khan? Somehow nobody talks about copyright here.
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Christmas dinner, the third
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yana off into town today to pick up a friend, Sol Santana, who also stayed for dinner:
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Quail's eggs
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
What do we do with the quail's eggs? Yvonne went searching and came up with Räucherlachs-Crostini mit Dillfrischkäse, Kapern und Wachtelei:
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They didn't taste bad, though I'm sure there's room for tuning.
| Saturday, 28 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 28 December 2019 |
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Boop—Boop—Boop
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
It's another hot weekend, not that unusual at this time of year: my weather data doesn't point at a smoking gun with “climate change” written on it. But the flies love it, and I've taken to taking the dogs for a walk with a veil:
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What a joy when the air conditioner is on the blink. In the evening the temperature gradually dropped to below what the toy air conditioner could produce, so we flung open the windows and... no change. There was almost no wind. Now wouldn't a fan help?
Another place where I thought that a fan might have been of use was in my office. Went in there in the afternoon to find room temperature round 30° and a faint “boop—boop—boop” noise, which I identified as coming from somewhere in eureka. Where? Nothing in the log files. Measured temperatures inside the box with an infrared thermometer, and the most obvious high temperature was round 57° on one of the display cards. But nvidia-settings showed a slightly lower temperature just on the green side of yellow, so presumably not the problem.
Then I saw a light flashing. On silberapfel, the Apple MacBook or similar that Chris Bahlo had given me. The timing matched the “boop—boop—boop”. Not eureka after all? And, as was to be expected, the display was scrambled, so there was nothing to stop me turning it off. I don't know if I'll ever turn it on again.
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Christmas dinner, the fourth
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Topic: food and drink, general | Link here |
Another Christmas dinner this evening, this time with Chris Bahlo and Yana:
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This time it was a glazed smoked ham from ALDI, chosen out of few alternatives by Yvonne because of the pineapple glaze.
BORING! No evidence of pineapple. On the good side, it might make Yvonne more amenable to turkey next year. And we'll have plenty of sliced ham for the next few months.
Thank God that's over! Yana will return to Adelaide tomorrow morning, after a breakfast orgy also involving Kelly Yeoh, and after that we won't have this kind of sight in the kitchen any more, nor the twice-daily dishwasher runs:
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Beep—Beep—Beep
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
In the middle of the night I was woken by a penetrating ”Beep—beep—beep”. Apple again? No, the machine is powered down, and this was orders of magnitude louder. Photovoltaic system failing because of heat? No, nothing from that area. Gradually it occurred to me that it must be the fire alarm. But why? There's no smoke. It stopped after waking the entire household, but what do I do if it happens again? From my recollection there's not much you can do about the things except remove them.
| Sunday, 29 December 2019 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 29 December 2019 |
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No breakfast orgy
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Up early this morning to hear from Yana that Kelly Yeoh wouldn't be coming for breakfast: Alyssa was sick, and both had been up most of the night. So after some consideration, took Yana to the Dalys in Delacombe for transport back to Adelaide. A pity about the breakfast, but it's been a tiring week: today was the fourth day in a row when we ran the dishwasher twice.
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Cool that house!
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Life is not made any easier by the lack of cooling in the house: today the outside temperature reached 38.5°, and the thermometer in my office reached 32.0°. While in Ballarat went on to The Good Guys, arriving 3 minutes before opening time, and looked at some fans. There are a surprising number:
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One for $22.95, another for $219, nearly 10 times the price. What's the difference? That's what I asked an assistant who had come along. Ah, the bigger one has more air flow. How much? How many l/s? No, there's no water in there, so you don't need litres. After I explained to her that l/s is the standard method of measuring air flow, she looked everywhere. No indication, neither for this item nor for any of the other ones. Happily I got rid of the “assistant”.
It seems that the big difference is that the $219 job is that it has a continuously adjustable fan speed and fan tilt in four directions. I can't see much of an advantage in the former, and only a minor advantage in the latter. Certainly not enough to warrant that price difference.
Shortly later another assistant, Megan, came along, clearly better informed. Yes, it's a crying shame that they don't specify air flow. I explained what I was looking for, and that the Levante LEV18 air conditioner just didn't work properly. We went to look at the display model, which she had turned on a few minutes earlier. Ah, you can't compare a portable air conditioner with a “split system”: the split system cools the coil with outside air, while the portable devices use air from inside the room, sucking in warm air from outside in the process. Ultimately its the air in the immediate vicinity of the device that is used for cooling, instead of cooling the room.
Yes, she's right. Why didn't that occur to me? More importantly, why did the manufacturer do it like that? If you need a hose for the exhaust air, you can suck air in from the outside as well. Yes, it makes it even more unwieldy, but it should be possible. Even a 5 m hose from elsewhere in the house would do it. It seems that I can't blame Levante alone for that: all portable air conditioners seem to have that problem, along with fittings that don't match modern Australian houses. And as I had predicted, a few minutes later the display device displayed its “add water” LED.
In the end, bought two of the GVΛ fans. Back home, left the Levante running all day. By evening it was warmer in the lounge room (where I placed the device) than in my office, the main heat generator of the house. You can't explain that with the design flaws alone. Assuming, say, only 40% of the efficiency of a real air conditioner, I'd still expect about 5° difference in temperature. And there's no way that the design flaws can explain that it's warmer near the air conditioner than in the rest of the house.
On the other hand, the fans did do their job, once I had worked out how to put the things together: the screw cap holding the fan blades in place has a left-hand thread, something that the instructions did not emphasize. I hadn't expected them to work that well, but clearly the comparison with the air conditioner had lowered my expectations.
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Strelitzia nicolai blooms
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Our (first) Strelitzia nicolai flower has opened:
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Now the structural similarity with the Strelitzia reginae is more obvious. It's interesting how it escaped to one side. I wonder if the others will do that.
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A new camera for Yvonne?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne was not overly impressed when I bought her her current Olympus E-PM2. Far too big! Gradually, though, she has come to terms with it, and even leaves the VF-2 viewfinder on it all the time. That makes its bounding box bigger than that of Chris Bahlo's E-M10 Mark II.
One day her camera is going to fail again. It did so once after only 22 months, conveniently still under warranty. Now it's nearly 6 years old, and the E-PM range has been out of production almost the entire time.
When the camera failed I did some comparisons of size and weight. They're out of date now, so let's look at the table including newer models. In the process I discover that my volume calculation was incorrect, and also that the dimensions vary depending on whom you ask. These should be close enough:
| Model | Width | Height | Depth | Volume | Weight | |||||
| (mm) | (mm) | (mm) | (cm³) | (g) | ||||||
| E-M1X | 144 | 147 | 75 | 1588 | 997 | |||||
| E-M1 | 130 | 93 | 63 | 762 | 769 | |||||
| E-M1 mk2 | 134 | 91 | 67 | 817 | 574 | |||||
| E-M10 | 119 | 82 | 45 | 439 | 449 | |||||
| E-M10 mk2 | 120 | 83 | 47 | 468 | 390 | |||||
| E-M10 mk3 | 122 | 84 | 50 | 512 | 410 | |||||
| E-M5 | 121 | 89 | 41 | 442 | 454 | |||||
| E-M5 mk2 | 123 | 85 | 44 | 460 | 467 | |||||
| E-M5 mk3 | 125 | 85 | 50 | 512 | 414 | |||||
| E-P3 | 122 | 69 | 34 | 286 | 289 | |||||
| E-P5 | 122 | 68 | 37 | 307 | 313 | |||||
| E-PL5 | 110 | 63 | 38 | 263 | 268 | |||||
| E-PL7 | 114 | 67 | 38 | 290 | 295 | |||||
| E-PM2 | 110 | 64 | 34 | 239 | 269 | |||||
| Pen F | 124 | 72 | 37 | 330 | 335 | |||||
Somehow I have had great difficulty with these dimensions, probably because I have taken them from multiple places. I think the important ones are correct now, but don't rely on them.
OK, borrow Chris' E-M10 Mark II and compare them. Yes, indeed, the VF-2 makes the E-PM2 higher (101 mm compared to 83 mm) and deeper (50 mm compared to 46 mm), so the bounding box is 550 cm² compared to the E-M10's 468 cm² or the E-M5 Mark III's 531 cm³. Arguably the volume doesn't make much sense, since the big difference (depth) is mainly the grip on the right.
But will Yvonne buy it? To my surprise, yes, especially when she found out how much easier it is to use. But so far it's just an experiment. The E-M10 isn't really a good choice, since we need a camera with a microphone input, and that would have to be an E-M5 or E-M1.
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What price electricity?
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
I've grumbled about the fact that electricity costs round 30¢ per kWh, but the Victorian feed-in tariff for photovoltaic power are only 13.5¢ per kWh. But that's still too much for Red Energy, who only give me 12¢. OK, based on a feedin of 20 kWh per day, that's $0.30 per day, $10 per month. Not good, but bearable.
But now they're putting up their rates by about 0.4¢ per kWh (specifically, to 31.405¢ for the first 16.438 (!) kW/day and 31.108¢ for the rest). And the feedin tariff? Unchanged.
OK, Red Energy, I've been with you for 12½ years, and I thought you were a good, ecologically fair company. But now's time to compare.
What a mess these comparison sites are! But after a lot of messing around found Victorian Energy Compare, run by the Victorian government. And based on my actual usage they came up with some surprising offers, the most expensive of which was from Red Energy. From memory they ranged from $2,880 to $3,480 per year, suggesting possible savings of 17%.
The cheapest is from Elysian Energy, but it's really difficult to understand:
Customers can choose from one of the following plans; Minimalist - $72.50 per month; A New Chapter - $111.50 per month (includes first 400 kWh); The Good Life $188.50 per month (includes first 800 kWh); The Full Life $265.50 per month (includes first 1,200 kWh) all prices are GST inclusive. Plan sizes are assessed regularly and maybe adjusted, based on actual usage. For more information go to www.elysianenergy.com.au.
OK, is that all? elsewhere it says “supply charges 114.59 ¢/day”, “all consumption 19.25¢/kWh”. How does that relate to those “plans”?
Went off looking on their site, where I found no way of entering the quote number I had been given, but two other different pricings for the same “plans”, both lower. To find out what I can really get I needed to enter all sorts of stupid information, including a mandatory mobile telephone number (it accepted 0400000000) and expiry date for my pension card (it expires on my expiry, not yet determined), along with an insistence of entering dates by hunting and pecking on the screen. And at the end they wanted a digital signature. Now isn't that modern? But I couldn't find a way to enter my key. What they meant was “scratch with your mouse until something appears on the screen”.
And then they wanted my credit card number. No faking there: if I enter the correct one, they'll take over my power delivery. I'm not ready for that yet, and there's no way to save the details that I have painfully entered. In particular, so far I don't know if the changeover will cost me anything or not: the sites provide conflicting information.
Still, the pricing looks good. If this “Full Life” for $265.50 gives me 1,200 kWh per month, that's 22.125¢ per kWh. My last bill from Red Energy was $1,073.63 for 3,328 kWh, including $5.54 credit for feedin (this was just for a few days in winter). That corresponds to 32.43¢ per kWh. The discrepancy is due to their service charge (round $1.18 per day, similar to the charges that VEC mentions in its “now you see me, now you don't” document). So a change should save me over 30% in the bill—if there are no hidden charges. That's considerably more than the web site promised.
What a pain this is!
| Monday, 30 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 30 December 2019 |
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NFS fail race condition
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
While opening or closing a window in the office yesterday evening, it seems that I wobbled a connection to the external /videobackup disk drive:
Dec 29 21:49:19 eureka kernel: ugen0.9: <Seagate> at usbus0 (disconnected)
...
Dec 29 21:49:21 eureka kernel: ugen0.9: <Seagate> at usbus0
Dec 29 21:49:21 eureka kernel: umass1: <Seagate Expansion Desk, class 0/0, rev 3.00/1.00, addr 22> on usbus0
So the disk was still there, but the mount was invalidated. It was NFS exported, and teevee uses it. This morning at 4:00 it ran into trouble:
Mon 30 Dec 2019 04:00:00 AEDT
[tcp] eureka:/videobackup: Permission denied
...
OK, nothing for it: force umount /videobackup on eureka, run fsck, remount, umount and mount on teevee, and restart the backup.
That worked. Problem over? No, not quite. The first backup had still been running:
[tcp] eureka:/videobackup: Permission denied
Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
eureka:/videobackup 81,228,984 44,416,464 30,314,208 59% 561,467 4,735,427 11% /videobackup
rsync /tmp/rsyncerrs -LHav --partial --delete-after /spool/Air-crash-investigation ...
building file list ... done
created directory /videobackup/spool
rsyncerrs
Air-crash-investigation/
Air-crash-investigation/10/
...
Already/Series/Phoenixsee/
Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
eureka:/videobackup 15,626,431,768 14,664,736,704 805,430,752 95% 312,498 768,076 29% /videobackup
Mon 30 Dec 2019 08:54:42 AEDT Video backup started
Mon 30 Dec 2019 09:05:25 AEDT Video backup ended
rsync: write failed on "/videobackup/spool/Air-crash-investigation/Broadcast/Air_Crash_Investigations-2016-03-16-2239": Device not configured (6)
rsync: stat "/videobackup/spool/Air-crash-investigation/Broadcast/.Air_Crash_Investigations-2016-03-16-2239.viF1bP" failed: Stale NFS file handle (70)
rsync: rename "/videobackup/spool/Air-crash-investigation/Broadcast/.Air_Crash_Investigations-2016-03-16-2239.viF1bP" -> "Air-crash-investigation/Broadcast/Air_Crash_Investigations-2016-03-16-2239": Stale NFS file handle (70)
rsync: recv_generator: mkdir "/videobackup/spool/Already/Series/Blue-Heelers/03" failed: Not a directory (20)
*** Skipping any contents from this failed directory ***
What happened there? A race condition. The backup kept retrying on “Permission denied”. And when I force umounted the disk, /videobackup became an accessible path on the root file system, as the reported size (81,228,984 512-blocks) indicates. And it happily backed up there until I remounted the disk (15,626,431,768 512-blocks). Then it could no longer access the files it was looking at, because the NFS identification had changed, so it aborted that part of the backup. And then it couldn't find its carefully constructed directory tree, because it was hidden by the new disk.
OK, no harm done? Well, not much. There's still data under that mount point. umounted again and found:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 213 -> umount /videobackup=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 214 -> l /videobackup
total 1
drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 512 30 Dec 08:54 spool=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 215 -> du -s /videobackup
1321 /videobackup=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 216 ->
That's still 1.3 GB of data to tidy up. After that, remounted /videobackup and all will be well to the next time I trip over the cables. But somehow this dual function of directories as mount points is tacky.
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Still more cooking!
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Christmas entertaining is over, but cooking is not. As a result of the Christmas visits I had put off making two staples: ayam lemak and baked beans, and spent much of the day doing that. At least I didn't quite get two dishwashers full this time.
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Beating the heat
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Another hot day today without a functional air conditioner: 42.3° maximum, and 3½ hours over 40°. What a time for our air conditioner to have failed!
And the Levante LEV18? I've complained that it reduces temperatures by 2° at best, but where are the exact figures?
They're below. I measured the temperature in varying parts of the house over a 2½ hour period. This photo shows the view from the air conditioner (bottom).
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The most obvious point for measurement is the back of the sofa, 2.7 m away. I also measured the temperature at the kitchen island behind the sofa and the clock on the wall to the left.
Then I measured the temperature of the two armchairs to the right of the air conditioner: Yvonne's (left) and mine (right). The air conditioner was on “swing”, meaning that the air was deflected to the left and right, but it wasn't to be expected than any direct air flow would hit my armchair.
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Finally I measured the temperature in my office, usually the hottest place in the house and not affected in any way by the air conditioner, and also outside. I took an initial measurement at 14:54 with the air conditioner off. Then I turned it on and continued measuring. The results:
| Location | 14:54 | 15:08 | 15:21 | 15:45 | 16:30 | 17:00 | 17:35 | |||||||
| Status | off | on | on | on | on | on | off | |||||||
| Sofa | 31.8 | 28.9 | 29.2 | 29.7 | 28.8 | 29.7 | 29.0 | |||||||
| Under island | 28.7 | 28.6 | 29.2 | 29.7 | 29.0 | 29.6 | 29.2 | |||||||
| Under clock | 30.0 | 29.9 | 30.4 | 30.9 | 30.0 | 31.4 | 31.2 | |||||||
| Yvonne armchair | 32.1 | 31.6 | 31.9 | 32.2 | 31.5 | 32.0 | 31.5 | |||||||
| Greg armchair | 32.2 | 32.1 | 32.6 | 33.2 | 31.8 | 30.8 | 32.4 | |||||||
| Office | 32.6 | 32.7 | 32.8 | 32.9 | 33.0 | 33.2 | 33.1 | |||||||
| Outside | 39.8 | 41.1 | 40.8 | 40.6 | 40.2 | 40.3 | 36.8 |
Yes, there's a difference. At one point the temperature at the sofa dropped by nearly 3°. Arguably there's a slight drop (0.5°) at Yvonne's armchair. And that's all! By contrast, the 5.8 kW air conditioner head in the kitchen in Kleins Road, a similar volume, managed to keep things comfortably cool under all circumstances. That can't be explained by the broken-by-design Levante alone: there's no way that this thing can generate anything like 5.5 kW of cooling. Maybe the fact that the “add water” light won't go out is indicative. It's interesting to note that the coolest it managed was 10 minutes after starting. It also seems that the temperature of the air coming out of the unit gradually increased: at the beginning it was round 12°, and towards the end it was closer to 18°. I didn't record it because it was almost impossible to get a consistent reading.
Round 17:00 the weather changed, and the outside temperature dropped rapidly. But despite the fans and open windows, the inside temperature stayed high. By midnight the outside temperature was 15.4°, but in the office it was still 26.3°. Yes, not much wind, but it's surprising how difficult it is to cool this house.
| Tuesday, 31 December 2019 | Dereel | Images for 31 December 2019 |
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Bushfires and Android
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Somehow, try as I might, I can't make friends with Android. Things are so bad that I can't understand how anybody can live with them, so maybe part of it is my specific phone. What I see is:
Today at 14:34 I got a “beep beep beep beep” from the Victorian Emergency Services. OK, check it out. After something like 5 minutes messing around with a non-responsive phone, finally discovered a small bushfire in Mount Mercer! Is that a repeat or restart of last week's fire? The map showed it at the east end of the Dereel—Mount Mercer Road, about 11 km away to the east, just to the north of last week's fire.
More details? Everything was so glacially slow that I tried rebooting the system, producing more strange signal noises but little if any performance improvement. But then “beep beep beep beep” again. Update. Now the bushfire had moved to the other end of the Dereel—Mount Mercer Road, only 1.6 km away, still to the east (we're at the junction of Stones Road and Grassy Gully Road, on the left of the map):
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Smoke to be seen? No, clear blue skies, mild wind from the west. Clearly no danger, despite the proximity. But how could the bushfire have moved?
And then more beeping. The bushfire has moved to the south-east (from observation I have discovered that the black diamond at bottom right represents the location of a fire):
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But wait, there's more, tastefully hidden by the Advice window:
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One is halfway down the Mount Mercer Road, and the other is at the east end of Ferrers Road. Or is it? It seems not to have liked it there, so it has moved to the north-west, just east of Dereel (the lagoon is visible at the bottom left of the second map), or, as the information claims, 2.7 km to the west of Dereel:
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So what really happened? Were there really two bushfires? Where? In the course of an hour there were no less than 5 different locations, twice two concurrently, with different specifications. This reminds me very much of last time, and confirms my suspicion that there are two different groups doing the reporting.
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Happy New Year!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
For the past 7 years we've been sending out a Christmas letter instead of Christmas cards. And I started again this year, until it occurred to me: why Christmas? It's a letter telling people what we have done in the past (calendar) year, so the very end of the year seems more appropriate. So from this year on it's a New Year's letter, and today I got it out, just on time: here.
45 minutes later Warren Toomey wrote:
Hmm, for me it's empty under both Firefox and Chromium.
Huh? Did I do something wrong putting it up on the external web site? Checked. No, “It Works For Me”. So I asked on IRC. Andrew Perry: “sorry, doesn't work for me”.
OK, let's see what the W3C Markup Validator says. No, it didn't like it either, came up with all sorts of strange claims. It wasn't until I looked at the source that I discovered that the document was 5 lines long! And then I saw in the source, after those 5 lines:
if (! $islocal) exit ();
That's a test that I put in just in case people started sniffing drafts: the document was just truncated at that point unless the request came from our subnet. Remove that and all was well.
Moral: check the document with the validator before publishing.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
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