Spent a large part of the afternoon trying to assemble the kitchen trolley that Yvonne brought back from ALDI on Wednesday. Do-it-yourself assemblies are always a pain, but I think this one drives
it to extremes. It starts off with some warnings (I think):
This is typically European: since there are so many languages, people find it easier to show
diagrams than descriptions. IKEA does exactly
the same thing. But in this case, I'm left wondering what the second diagram means. After
some consideration, it seems that it's saying "leave the cams in the open position”. But
that doesn't explain the duplication.
Carried on anyway, noting that some of the components were marked with letters, and others
weren't. And then I had to mount the sliders on the drawer (good news: there are
sliders):
Two sets of sliders! But I could only find one. And then it dawned on me: the sliders are
assembled. And to put the thing together, they need to be taken apart. How? Oh, that's so
obvious that we don't need to insult you by giving details.
In fact, it wasn't that difficult: pull down the catch in the middle and it will come apart.
It's the little tongue in the middle of the top view:
But the result was that I didn't get any further today. By evening the place looked like a
bomb had gone off:
Yvonne back from riding today with the statement “I've just
wasted $50”.
She meant the cost of a unused carbon dioxide cylinder for her inflatable riding vest. It
seems that Carlotta had got as far as Progress Road, looked up the road towards Wendy
McClelland's house, and paniced. She spun around 180°, causing Yvonne to lose her balance
and fall off.
The vest inflated as advertised, but she still managed to knock her back, fortunately in an
area that wasn't particularly dangerous. We considered taking her to the hospital emergency
department anyway, but it wasn't clear that they could find anything. If she had a cracked
rib—a possibility—the only treatment is to wait. And by chance I had had cause yesterday to
refer to my falling through the ceiling 13 years ago. On
that occasion we went to the hospital, waited for hours while they attended to more urgent
cases, and then left again. Probably not what we would want to do today. If it's still
painful tomorrow, she can go and see the doctor.
Another frost overnight, though unlike last time the weather station didn't report
temperatures below 0°: the overnight low was 0.3°. Still, we ended up with more ice in the
bird bath than last time, this time about 8 mm:
I've run out of masa harina,
something that is hard to find in Australia. The last time I got some old stock from a shop
in Belmont, but I'm not due
down that way for a couple of weeks.
Lorraine Carranza mentioned that the Indian restaurant in Dana
St, Ballarat, had a shop in the back, so
last Wednesday Yvonne went there and picked up some Makki
Atta:
That's maize meal, of course, but is it the same as masa harina? It looked similar enough,
but my main concern was whether I could make
a tortilla dough out of it. Today was
the attempt.
Normally I make two tortillas with 60 g of masa and 100 ml of water (3:5, or 60% as much
flour as water). This corresponds to more like 3:2 for wheat flour. Tried that combination
and ended up with a runny mess. I had to add another 25 g of meal to get a reasonable
consistency (roughly 5:6). But at least it made a dough that I could handle.
Cooking the tortillas was faster, of course, because there was less water. But the taste!
It tasted nothing like maize, and was far too tough. The dogs got it.
I don't suppose this is a real criticism of the atta. After all, it wasn't intended for
tortillas. But it does seem that it's intended
for roti, so I wonder why the taste is so
boring.
Somehow we're out of hay, and we'll need another 100 bales to tide us over the winter. Off
to a place east of Rokewood to
see somebody who had some for sale.
Nobody home? We tried to arouse people in the house, but were unsuccessful. That's at
least because Australians are too polite to use doorbells, and the fly screens were locked.
But it proved that there was really nobody at home: there had been some emergency, and he
didn't make it back on time. Still, the hay looked OK:
Yvonne was still not feeling very good this morning, though
she was able to drive to Ballarat to see
a doctor (Paul Smith is once again not here this week). She told her that nothing was
broken, just bruising. Good to hear.
Question on Quora today: How many cups is
100 grams of uncooked rice?
Why, oh why, do people still measure things in cups? Real-world cups range in size (in
my world experience) between 65 ml and 220 ml. “Standard” cups (I can
hear Andy Tanenbaumechoing in the background) range
mainly between 220 g and 285 g, with the USA offering three distinct sizes.
To prove my point, I took some photos. This mug is the size of a British measuring cup:
My best guess is that 100 g of rice
(here Arborio) take up about 140 ml.
But none of the other responses mentioned one crucial fact: as I have discovered, at least some rice cookers
use a “standard” rice cup of 180 ml. So 100 g would be about 0.78 cup. Other answers to
the question, presumably US-based, said ”half a cup”.
Noisy night: it was very windy, with wind gusts up to 40 km/h, though I suspect the weather
station is too polite to tell the truth. In the morning, the evidence was clear:
But on closer examination it's not clear that that was the wind. The rubbish was in the
recycling bin (the one with the yellow lid on the left), and there had been much more
inside. So it looks like the rubbish people were sloppy, didn't empty it properly, and then
knocked it over.
Two news sets of toys arrived in the post today: a set of “baby pins” for mounting studio
flash units, from B & H in New York City, ordered on 29
June, and the Saramonic
UWMIC9 microphones that I ordered in Sydney two days earlier.
Both arrived at the same time, though I had chosen the slowest postage from the USA. Why?
One reason, of course, is that Digital Camera Warehouse took two days to send the order. And though the postage
from the USA was fast, it was also very expensive, the main reason I so seldom buy
anything from B & H. The items cost (USD) $53.75, but the shipping amounted to a
whopping $36.91.
The baby pins were as described, though bigger than I expected. I had bought 6" ones
in case the 3" ones weren't long enough, but there doesn't seem to be any danger there:
They're also solid enough (look at the thickness of the base) that I don't necessarily need
to screw them to anything: in that position, they'll hold the flash by themselves. Of
course, the pins are made in China. Why couldn't I find them elsewhere?
The microphones are interesting. Dozens of bits and pieces, requiring me to read the manual
to understand. The batteries are inserted into the devices (two transmitters and one
receiver) in a little frame, which would make sense if you could get additional frames to
have in reserve. But on unpacking I discovered that the first one I looked at had a damaged
spring:
How serious is that? Put some batteries in and tried turning the transmitter on. Nothing.
OK, RTFM time. Mentions of batteries are
mainly related to level, but on page 6 I have (no image):
The very first thing you want to do when you get the device is put in the batteries.
And you have to work three-quarters of the way through the manual (page 24 of 32; there
are two unnumbered pages at the start) to find out how.
This is the only mention of battery polarity. I had assumed that the batteries
were in parallel, since there's a spring at the end of each section. But a more careful
look shows that there's no connection from the plate with the springs on it, so clearly
one should be in each direction.
The contacts for the batteries are misleading. The “broken” spring was intended to be
that way, and it's a contact for the positive terminal of the battery. That's a
complete violation of POLA.
OK, where's the polarity indicator? I checked the housings of the individual devices.
Nothing. On the back maybe?
This was after a lot of messing around with a macro lens, which normally makes
it much easier to see this sort of thing. In fact, it was on the very first image
above, but you really have to know where to look and how to interpret the poorly moulded, 1
cm long, disproportionate, inverted image.
Congratulations, Saramonic. This really takes the cake for the worst documented detail I
have seen in a long time. There are no images at all of the battery holder, and not a
single photo in the instructions. But that seems to be typical for modern instructions.
What would have happened if I had inserted the batteries the wrong way round? In the good
old days, it would have fried the electronics. Do people put protection in modern devices?
I don't want to try to find out.
That wasn't the only difficulty. How do I mount the receiver on a tripod? There's an
adapter for flash shoe or tripod, but no obvious way to connect it to the receiver. OK,
RTFM again:
But it just slides on top of the clip. It took me quite some time to realize that the
adapter fits between the clip and the body. How much easier it would have been if
they had written:
4. Slide the shoe mount adapter upwards between the clip and the receiver until the belt
clip fits into the groove on the adapter.
On the positive side, the devices themselves look good and seem to work. Now I need to find
an opportunity to use them. Ten
days ago that was clear: Chris and Yvonne riding, and
the visit of Arto
Fama this weekend. But now Yvonne is out of action after her fall from Carlotta, and it's not
clear that there will be anything interesting to record this weekend, so it could be a
while.
I took a number of the macro photos of the Saramonic battery compartment with
the Olympus STF-8 macro flash. In the past it has worked well, but not so today:
exposure was underexposed by up to 2 EV, and I got the feeling that the unit wasn't strong
enough to give me properly exposed images at f/11. Oh for a good flash unit!
The instructions for the ALDI kitchen trolley
have really turned me off assembling it. I did a couple of steps a day during the week and
gave up out of annoyance. But gradually it came together, and today I finally finished it.
The instructions continued to be as bad as ever. Here the section for mounting the top
(marble plate):
Apart from the weight, it's just plain easier to access if you do it upside down, where you
can see the mounting holes. But which way round does the top go? Not a word in the
instructions. Fortunately the frame under the plate is perfectly symmetrical, and it went
on with no trouble. The reinforcement for the cupboard (screws!) were less fun: somehow it
didn't fit as well as I had expected. But it runs well on the wheels—much better than the
old one—and mounting the drawer on its slides was easier than I thought, though it didn't
slide as well as I would have hoped.
Wheeled it into the place of the old one It doesn't look bad. The marble top certainly
makes a difference:
Dammit, it's good enough. But what's that cutout above the drawer? It's for the back!
Despite my attempts to outsmart the instructions, I managed to put the top plate on the
wrong way round! Bloody ALDI!
What can I do about it? It's not that difficult to remove, only 6 mounting screws and 3
where the back was mounted. But those last 3 holes would then show above the drawer. Is it
worth it?
As I thought several times when assembling it, I would much rather pay more money for a
better quality trolley that had already been assembled. But they're not available.
Even now, terrestrial broadcast TV only accounts for about 18% of TV viewing in the USA.
The rest is delivered mainly by some kind of network connection, either Internet or cable.
Radio and TV broadcasts will gradually cease. They are costly: they use a lot of power,
and that transmission and reception equipment are also expensive. Even now it is
possible to receive TV via the Internet:
a recent
report found that in Western countries, 90% of Internet users watched online video.
Significant investment in net backbones will be required to deliver the content, but it
will still be cheaper than maintaining current transmission equipment. This change in
the distribution method will also
allow video on
demand to take the place of fixed broadcasts.
I didn't know about Netflix then, and I'm
surprised how quickly it has taken the lead. But how long will it be before cable and
terrestrial broadcast cease altogether? The difference in the usage of the 18-34 age group
(then to be 34-50) suggests that it won't take long. I think I'm in good shape for my
prediction to come true.
Filthy weather today, but somehow I managed to take my house photos. The new way of processing is
getting better, but I still run into problems. The big one at the moment is
that pto_gen (part of Hugin) does more than advertised and changes the colour balance of the images. Here an
example:
Those are descriptions for three images. Er is the red balance, and Eb is the
blue balance. Both should be 1 for all images unless I ask it to change. Eev is
the EV value, which is unchanged here, though
the number itself is strange: according to
the Exif data for the images, the exposure
was EV 12.6.
How do I get rid of this? pto_gen has very few options, and there's no indication in
the man page that it performs this kind of manipulation at all. I could write a sed
script, of course, but there should be a better way.
One item of equipment that I could use is a good ball head for taking video. Somehow I
haven't had much luck with ball heads. I never used to like them, but I found a use for
them for panoramas. The first one I had literally buckled under the weight of my equipment,
and I replaced it with the current Manfrotto 3416 leveling base 7 years ago,
but from the beginning I wasn't happy with it, and I still am not.
As a result, on 22 March 2014 I bought a new ball head to replace the Manfrotto, but it proved to be difficult to
adjust. Still, I kept it for other purposes, but despite being one of the largest diameter
balls there are, it has become so stiff that I can't really use it for video.
OK, how expensive can they be? Went looking and found them starting at a little below $40.
But one thing (apart from the stiffness) that annoys me about the present base is that it
has two knobs to tighten it. That's fiddly. How about a lever?
It's a leveling base, a genuine replacement for the Manfrotto. Those things used to be
prohibitively expensive, but this one was only $55, so I bought that too. It has a 15°
adjustment range, three times the adjustment of the Manfrotto, and hopefully it'll be easier
to use.
Buying the ball head and leveling base was interesting. Of course I had cause to grumble
once again about the fact that the price indicated did not
include GST, which was put on at the very
last second, long after I had committed to buy. So I ended up paying 10% more than
eBay claimed. Hopefully they'll get their act
together before people have to complain about it.
Then on to the ball head. No GST! This item is in Australia, so the GST was included in
the price.
I can see where they're coming from, but this is ridiculous, yet another instance of how
incapable eBay is. Now I need to look very carefully at the item location before I can find
out its price.
Writing yesterday's article
on mounting hardware required looking back at old entries. And inevitably I found things
that needed changing. Link rot, photos that didn't look as good as they could... It kept
me going all day.
One thing that I didn't understand was that something crashed when stitching this image
(here the old version):
Hugin has the irritating “feature”
of displaying progress in a popup window and then deleting it and the log when it's
finished. In this case it seems that enblend died, but I didn't get a chance to see
what went wrong. OK, I can run nona and enblend manually and see what's going
on.
But that's another idea: do that anyway. That way I can run Hugin just to do the
adjustments, save the project file and leave the rest to be done without my intervention (or
waiting). So that's my next project.
I'm rather irritated that Aussie
Broadband wants to use SMS to verify my
credit card change. Dammit, it's a toy! And I don't use it. But then I found this article about hijacking SMS. Not directly applicable, but maybe enough to
present as an argument.
Chris Bahlo was playing mediaeval combat all weekend. I was supposed to go and take videos,
but for various reasons decided that my technique was not up to it. So I found a valid
excuse: I had to bake bread, which takes all day.
One consequence was that we put off our Saturday dinner
(fake Tournedos Rossini, since
we have so much truffle) until today. We were wondering whether Chris would make it out
unscathed, and when she finally showed up (15 minutes late), she had a scrape across her
forehead:
As planned, spent some time today trying to automate Hugin stitching. There are two steps after
masking and cropping: run nona on each image individually to create reprojected and
cropped images, then run enblend to blend them together to a panorama.
But how do I find the parameters with which to invoke the programs? The Preferences
tab in Hugin gives some parameters for enblend, but there's no mention
of nona, probably because there's a choice of blender, but none for the reprojector.
OK, create a fake script called nona closer to the beginning of PATH. No
go. We don't need no steenking environment variables: the program
is /usr/local/bin/nona, and that's the way it stays.
OK, rename nona and put the script there. Something went wrong, and it crashed:
“Error 2!” is the polite way of saying ENOENT (No such file or directory),
as /usr/include/sys/errno.h clarifies. What went wrong there? Who cares? We have
the parameters:
/tmp/huginpto_QolCZS is the name of the project file, which Hugin thoughtfully
deleted before I could check. But that's OK: I had saved it, and it's in the current
directory as verandah-panorama.pto. Run that, and all was well.
Oh. Most of that stuff is clear. But where's the project file? It seems
that enblend doesn't use it. Instead I have the
parameter -f4357x2640+503+671, clearly the geometry of the finished image. This
must be an idea in the mind of Hugin.
On the positive side, I found out what the problem was:
enblend -f4357x2640+503+671 --compression=LZW ...
enblend: info: loading next image: verandah-panorama0000.tif 1/1
enblend: info: loading next image: verandah-panorama0001.tif 1/1
enblend: excessive overlap detected; remove one of the images
enblend: info: remove invalid output image "verandah-panorama.tif"
I've seen this message numerous times before, but normally it doesn't cause the window to
close prematurely. At the time (September 2010) I was taking bracketed images, one with
flash, and I forget how I merged them. But there are ways round that once I know the
details.
Last week Yvonne bought some fresh rice noodles that I wanted
to use for Penang laksa. There were two 220 g
portions, somewhat more than the 180 g I normally eat for breakfast, but they were OK.
But I had three portions of laksa and only two portions of noodles, so for the third I
cooked some dried noodles—90 g of them, assuming that they would increase in weight by about
100%. But no, the result was a whopping 350 g, effectively a 300% increase. Who would have
thought that?
Reading more panorama scripting in a nutshell today. It's horribly out of date. I'd like
to fix it, but I don't know all the details yet. I'm left wondering how to write draft
updates to a wiki. One of the really serious issues with an “easy” toy markup language
like MediaWiki. Almost the easiest way
would be to convert it to a real web page (simple enough with the “view source” function of
any browser), and then tidy it up and edit it. But how do I then convert the result back
again?
In any case, apart from mentioning various obsolete tools, it also pointed me at hugin_executor, a wrapper that
runs both nona and enblend, effectively replicating the Stitch!
function in the GUI—exactly what I wanted to do. And a first attempt shows that yes, it
does just that. So now I really just need to tidy up my scripts to only do work that still
needs to be done, in other words not to build project files if they're already there, and
not to stitch panoramas if they're already present. I can't be bothered now; I'll try again
on Saturday when I have real panoramas to work on.
Somehow I haven't been doing very much lately, and things slowed down almost to a standstill
today. Spent some time watching TV, a little bit of time looking at my Hugin scripts, and somehow the day was gone.
Is this what getting old is all about?
Into Ballarat this morning for a
six-monthly blood test. I had intended to do a number of other things, but the list I made
didn't have much on it, and so I was back by midday.
In Kleins Road we had a tree that bore small pink
fruit that looked and tasted like pepper. It had drooping leaves, somewhat like
a Salix babylonica (weeping
willow). It's fairly clear now that our Salix didn't survive a brief spell of dryness in
the summer, and Yvonne wanted to replace it with a pepper
tree. But what's the correct term? I recalled “Californian pepper tree”, and I went to
Formosa Gardens today and
asked for that. Blank look. “Do they grow here?”. I described it, and gradually he
understood: “Do you mean a peppercorn tree?”. Took me into the nursery, found one, pointed
through the shade cloth to the outlines of a fully grown one in a neighbouring property
about 50 m away. It's a Schinus
molle, but it's known by both names (and many more). In fact, it doesn't seem to have
much to do with California: it's not the first plant in the garden that comes
from Peru: we also have
the Mirabilis jalapa, despite
the name, and we had
a Zephyranthes candida in
the past, though I'm not sure if we still have one now.
But why did it take so long for the name to sink in? It wasn't that different from the name
he knows.
It's interesting to watch this clip, because it shows various inaccuracies in the reports I
have seen. Starting at 3:20 into the clip, he says “Germany imports 60-70% of its energy
from Russia”, at 4:10 ”Ultimately Germany will have almost 70% of their country controlled
by Russia with natural gas ... Germany is totally controlled by Russia, because
they <mumble> getting 60 to 70% of their energy from Russia”, and at 6:15
“Germany is a captive of Russia”.
How much truth is there in these claims? Clearly they're nonsense, but what's the truth?
This report shows that in
fact about 20% of Germany's energy comes from Russia. But he was referring specifically to
Nord
Stream 2, about which there has been much criticism elsewhere as well,
as Jens Stoltenberg replied.
What remains in people's minds? Many just see him as the liar he is, and even my reference above misquotes him to
make it sound worse than what he really said: “The claim: Germany imports 60% to 70% of its
energy from Russia”. No, he claimed that they <mumble> getting 60 to 70% of
their energy from Russia”. My best guess is that <mumble> was meant to be
“will be”, presumably referring to the time after Nord Stream 2 is completed. And nobody
seems to have commented on what the situation will be then. And his comments about Germany
not pulling its weight in NATO are probably correct: it's a rich country, but their
contributions to the NATO budget are relatively low compared to other countries.
On the other hand, this exchange shows at least three things:
Trump seems to go out of his way to be insulting.
He doesn't care about alliances, or he doesn't think that it will damage the alliance.
I'm quite sure that he's wrong there.
His continual lying is convincing a lot of people who don't worry about checking the
veracity of the statements. To quote Lewis Carroll: “What I tell
you three times is true”. Isn't it time for people to require Trump to tell the truth,
or at least admit it when shown to be incorrect?
Contradiction? That depends. As usual, the OED is
good for multiple definitions. The oldest definition is also the only one in Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755:
Mick the gardener along this morning to mainly plant and transplant. He got
the Schinus molle in surprisingly
soon after we bought it, though it's still dwarfed by
the Carpobrotus:
Much of the Carpobrotus went, some of it to Petra Gietz, who was here today. It seems that
she gave it to us in summer 2016/2017. It has certainly grown since then, and it's possible
that she took more back with her than she gave us then. Some of the Carpobrotus ended up
round the water tanks, where hopefully they'll keep the weeds down:
That required a chain reaction of transplantations. First, some of
the Cannas'Yellow King Humbert'
had to come out. Here they are in January and then today:
That's what was left over after Petra and Mick had taken their pick. Then Chris Bahlo and
Margaret Swan will get some, and I'm sure we'll still have some left over.
Then he was able to transplant
the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis
that had been in the place where the Euphorbia had to go:
It's in the gap on the right of the first photo, and that's all we have of it after two
years, admittedly hindered by Mick's whipper-snipper.
In passing it's interesting to note that
the Syringa vulgaris (lilac)
that he planted a couple of months
ago seem to be coming on OK, that our tomato plant still isn't completely dead, and
that our Grevillea bronwenae
is flowering better than it did any time last year:
I've had a computer at home since 1977. At the time people were amazed. Nowadays, of
course, just about everybody does. But the times are changing, as this statistic from
Statista shows:
I'm assuming that this statistic includes other desktop and laptop-style computers, such as
Apple Mac. Why are the shipments dropping? The real question is maybe: why do
non-technical people use PCs? Because there's nothing else, I suspect. Now they have
something even worse, smart phones, and they don't need computers any more. It's difficult
to understand how people can put up with mobile phones, but it probably makes a great
difference if you can't type.
Should I care? Yes, I think so. Up to a couple of years ago, people were putting great
efforts into improving PCs. Now the money is elsewhere. I see this, for example, when I
want to buy a mouse. No more el-cheapo mice, and the Logitech offerings don't seem to have
changed in years (and still cause my X display to
vomit when I move from one display to another). It can only go downhill from here.
House photos again today, and another
chance to work on my panorama stitching workflow. It went pretty well. I forgot to save
the intermediate images as TIFF, giving
myself the opportunity to refine (and simplify) my mkpto script to handle this case. All went relatively well with the exception
of one panorama, where mkpto managed to get it inverted by 180°. Why? I was able to
work around that, of course, and the fact that I could leave the stitching until later
really speeds things up.
Not everybody has a web site, of course, but I'm getting the feel that the threshold is
getting higher. More people are creating Facebook pages instead, like Formosa Gardens nursery. Is this a good way to go? If it means that they can keep
things up to date better, then probably yes.
Only a little over 52 years ago I read an article in
Punch about what could
have happened if William the
Conqueror had been William the Conquered at
the Battle of Hastings. Today
I got a message from a Paul, presumably not the
author Paul
Jennings (he died decades ago) pointing me to this page with the online locations of the three articles: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. I haven't read it all yet, but in light of my experience of the past 52
years it's bound to be even more interesting. I notice that he also used my preferred
title William the Bastard,
which I'm sure I didn't understand in those days.
Nicely packaged parcel from Andy Farkas today, containing a Asahi Pentax KM with 55
mm f/1.8 SMC Pentax lens. It came
from Bundaberg, and included a reminder
of what the weather is like in that part of the world:
That was once a black leather case, but it seems that
the Queensland moisture took its toll.
The camera was in good condition, however.
From a historical point of view, it was introduced in 1975, 11 years after
the Pentax Spotmatic, but it
looks amazingly like the Spotmatic and very different from the Z-1 that was introduced 16
years later. And the lens is a warmed-over version of the 55 mm f/1.8 Super Takumar that I got with my Asahi
Pentax SV in July 1965. The SV was introduced in
1963, so presumably the lens design is at least that old.
In fact, the SV was introduced in 1962, and the lens was introduced with its
predecessor, the Pentax S3, in 1961.
In general, it's amazing how little difference there is between the S3 and the KM, despite
the 14 years' “progress”.
I now have 5 old SLRs, 4 Pentax and
an Edixa Reflex. I'll take some
photos of them Real Soon Now.
Cooked a slightly faked scaloppine alla Modenese today, derived from a recipe for costolette de maile alla
Modenese. Very nice, and something we should eat more often. Yvonne tried a new experiment today: “poires gourmandes”, pears baked on puff pastry
with chocolate:
The fun there is that there are only four people in the image. But while looking at the
details, like these ones, it occurred to me that the images aren't very sharp.
That's a crop from one of the component images, so it hasn't been affected by any stitching
issues. It's really not as sharp as it should be. Why? It was taken with my Zuiko Digital
ED 9-18 mm f/4.0-5.6, which I used again today, with much better results. So it can't
be the lens. Camera? Software? More head-scratching needed.
Finding and planting the Schinus
molle (peppercorn tree) over the past couple of days went remarkably smoothly, modulo
communication issues. So something had to go wrong: Yvonne found it too small. Just one reason to go shopping for plants: it's also the middle of
winter, time to plan for spring. We decided to go to town and take a look at what was to be
had, including some things that I had looked at on Thursday, and while we were there to
visit the Golden
Crown Chinese restaurant, who offer
yum cha on Sundays.
As it happened, we went to Avalon
Nursery in Haddon first.
Yvonne found another Schinus more to her liking:
Also a couple of jasmine
(Jasminum polyanthum
and Trachelospermum
jasminoides) for the garden arch for which we still haven't decided on a location. Also
some herbs: chives and sage, and
another Salvia, which I thought
was Salvia microphylla, but
which is too polite to mention a species, and simply calls itself Huntington's red. Also
a Lamium maculatum “Stormy
frost” that caught Yvonne's eye, and which she things will fit somewhere. But I doubt that
she notes that it's not suited for full sun.
Then Yvonne wanted to go to the Sunday market, so off there, where she bought various odds
and ends from the Dutch stall there. I went looking for the people from whom I bought the
bulbs last year, but once
again they weren't there. On the way out we found somebody selling flowers for $1 each, so
bought a whole lot of pansies:
A bit of a let down. Yum cha is one of those things that thrives on lots of people, with
trolleys going around and offering things that look interesting. Here it seems we were the
only people eating, and we were given a sheet of paper with a list of what they had: only
dumplings, at surprisingly high prices. And instead of tea, we were given a wine list, and
the table setting included spoon and fork but no chopsticks. No Chinese people there, but
then there were only 3 or 4 other people there at all. In addition, it was very cold. I
can't say that the food was bad, but everything pointed to a let-down, so before anybody
came along to serve us, we had time to reconsider, and we decided to leave. On the way out
I saw a waitress bringing some deep-fried spring rolls. Were they intended as part of the
Yum cha?
On to Formosa Gardens nursery,
where we bought the Quercus rubra
(“red” oak, an American species that promises particularly red leaves in autumn) that I had
been looking at, and five bare-rooted roses:
The varieties are shown left to right, back (top) to front (bottom). They went in quickly,
of course. The rest will have to wait until at least tomorrow, and I think the Salvia
microphylla should stay in its pot (or a new, larger one) until the weather is a little milder.
While planting the roses, I heard noise from the front of the house. More mediaeval visits,
this time with Amber Fitzpatrick, who had bought herself a fur coat to match her horse:
The photo of the Schinus molle in
the car was a challenge: dark inside the car, full sun at the back. So apart from the
normal photo, I also took a 3 shot bracket and processed with Photomatix. I needn't have bothered: DxO PhotoLab did it
for me with the single shot. Here the first photo as shot, then the result after processing
and the HDR bracket:
Middle of the month, and also middle of winter, time for the monthly flower photos. It's been a surprisingly mild
(but dry) winter, and the garden shows it.
We only have one Anigozanthos
(kangaroo paw) left, the one that Sasha tried to eat years ago. It
has recovered with a venegeance:
For some reason, probably inappropriate soil, the ones that Petra Gietz gave us have
apparently died. We'll see for sure in spring.
The Grevilleas are doing well, both the
grafted Grevillea bronwenae
that we bought last year and the remaining ground cover Grevillea that we bought two years ago—the other one was
drowned.
The Tropaeolum are confirming my
opinion of the quality of the soil south of the house (first photo). Those have been there
for three years, and they have hardly grown. The ones in the second image were planted last
year, and despite the exposure to frost recently are looking much better:
Also started planting the pansies in the boxes in the north garden, but it was almost
completely full of bulbs that hadn't started to sprout, and I had to give up half way. I'll
have to find somewhere else to plant the rest, probably in front of the house.
Flashes in my eyes again this evening, like I had last summer. Posterior vitreous
detachment? I'll be seeing Paul Smith on Thursday, so we can discuss it then, but based
on the last time (where the symptoms were worse), it's not overly dangerous, and there's not
much to do about it except wait.
But why did it happen? Last time I thought it was because of exertion, and today I did my
first digging for a long time. But it was hardly exertion. To be discussed.
The protrusions in the panel mean that it can't seal properly. More head-scratching, but
one obvious “solution” is simply to accept it. It's the laundry, after all, and not heated.
Today was my 6-monthly periodontics checkup
in Geelong, at 14:00. Early in the
morning I heard that there was a bus strike there, from 9:00 to 13:00. Should be over by
the time I got there? Yes, but what about the people who normally go to work by bus, but
had taken their cars today? Car parking chaos?
Called up the surgery and tried to postpone my appointment, but the next one would have been
in October. But they had a solution for me: they have a patient parking place behind the
building, and I could use that. Accordingly off and found only a single parking place,
conveniently blocked by a car which had parked fully 2 m from the end of its parking place:
That's my car at the back of the first photo, so somehow I managed it, but I was proud
enough of myself that I took these photos. In to ask the reception to find the owner of the
Audi that had blocked my way. That was easy: that was the receptionist, and she would move
it. A good thing that I didn't express my opinion of such parking more forcibly.
In the waiting room, received confirmation of my concerns about parking: another patient was
complaining about the difficulty of finding a parking place.
Later I was called in for my examination, but it proved to be a different nurse, the owner
of the white car in the middle. She suspected me of having scraped it and pointed to a
small scrape on the bumper bar. Could I have been it? No, for a number of reasons.
Firstly there was no mark on my car, secondly the scratch was at a height corresponding to
an indentation in my car, and finally I could hardly have hit it the way the Audi was parked
(by the time we examined it it had been moved forward).
The appointment itself was routine: teeth OK, come back in 6 months, $250 please.
After my appointment I spoke to the receptionist again, and she explained that where I had
parked wasn't intended for parking. Why? Looks OK to me. But it seems that the trees on
the left leave spots on the cars, which is why they park so far back, and I should have
parked in front of the cars on the right of where I parked, since the owners weren't going
anywhere. At least the nurse (with whom she checked) had accepted the fact that it probably
wasn't my car that did the damage.
But then he was off to Helsinki to meet
with Vladimir Putin. Given his
treatment of his friends, how would he treat his foes? Two hours behind closed doors, and
the only thing worth mentioning was that Trump reported that Putin had reported that Russia
had not meddled in the 2006 US Elections, and that he believed him! And this
despite CIA intelligence that showed clear
meddling, and after arrest warrants had been issued for 12 Russian spies, and just before
another was issued. As The Shovel put
it,
Winner Of US Election Meets With Donald Trump In Helsinki. This spectacle has caused
even his own party to label his behaviour “treasonous”.
In that connection, it's interesting to note this statistic from Statista, showing that most of the world distrusts both Trump and
Putin, but Trump more than Putin. Only countries that have something to gain from Trump,
here Israel
and South Korea, find him more
trustworthy than Putin.
Where do we go from here? Treason is a ground for impeachment. Will the opinion find a
majority?
Mail from Paul Robbins today, the bloke who sent me the information about 1066 And All
Saxon. It seems that he's reading my entire diary of the 1960s! I had typed it in
mainly for my own use, and, indeed, I use it frequently. But for other people? He even wrote
This would make a great television series, It would run for years.
While in Geelong, and arrived at the
Indo-Asian Grocery Store in
heavy rain—there must have been over 10 mm in 20 minutes—to find them mopping the floors.
Finding Masa harina is becoming more
difficult all the time. They had Minsa harina, but only blue, which I don't really like,
and something called P.A.N. “Maíz precocida”.
What's that? The owner assured me that it was just like the masa I knew, but that's “Harina
de maíz nixtamalizada”,
and there's no mention of
making tortillas on the package. Still,
there's small choice, and so I bought a package. If I had seen the price in advance, I may
not have. The flour that Yvonne bought
in Ballarattwo weeks ago cost $3 for 1 kg. This
cost $7. And to add to my annoyance, I discovered that it was “white maize”. That's my
fault: they had both white and yellow maize, and I grabbed the wrong one. What do I do with
lots of (potentially) useless maize flour?
Then on to the Gourmet Asian Grocery, where I bought my normal supplies and also a lot
of Yum cha style dumplings. Back home
and steamed some of them:
The Andoer DY-60A leveling base that I ordered the weekend before last arrived today
from Guangdong (and
not Singapore as claimed), but still
before the ball head that I had ordered
from Sydney last week, and which had been
sent last Monday. Bloody Australia Post!
It's not clear that this was Auspost's fault. See the following day.
The head looks pretty much like what it promises to be. Here it is (on the right) compared
with the Manfrotto 3416 that I have at the moment:
What's the advantage? It's a lot easier to adjust than the Manfrotto, which has stiff
screws oriented at 120° from each other. It also has a considerably larger range:
I noted that it cost 770 IRR, and that it was very expensive. When I typed in the diary entry in February 2011, I
also noted that 770 Rials are now worth USD 0.40, which for three serves of caviar would
really be the world's cheapest.
Today I heard from Paul Robbins, who has apparently fought his way through my diary to this
point. There's a site fxtop.com that
specializes in historical exchange rates. The interface is rather hard to use, but I was
able to establish that 770 Rials were worth £3/6/0 on this date. I would convert that to
$150 AUD nowadays, which does indeed sound very expensive.
Pam Hay arrived to spend a couple of nights. I had thought that it had been some time since
we last saw her, but in fact it was less than three years
ago. I must be more careful in noting things in my diary.
Into Ballarat early this morning (the
only appointment I could get) to discuss the results of last week's blood test. Nothing
unexpected, but there are still a couple of anomalies that puzzle Paul: MCV remains above the
80-96 fl at 101 fl, like it has been
for years. And both neutrophils and
general white blood cell counts
are low.
Taking the photos of my leveling bases for yesterday started with the Olympus STF-8. Not good. First I accidentally had the camera set to f/22, just too small an aperture
for the poor, anaemic flash at 1 m distance:
Sometimes I wonder what use the thing is. If only there were a sane ring flash for the
system. But the mecablitz ring flash looks like it has a number of disadvantages as well.
A bit more investigation about what happened to the ball head that I bought nearly two weeks ago. Now I have a
tracking number, indicating that Auspost has received the shipping details earlier this week. And no more! Let's see what happens
tomorrow.
Pam Hay left this morning and headed north. But first she wanted to see Lucy, the
28-year-old Paso peruano mare that
Lorraine Carranza now has. Pam has known Lucy since she was a foal, and she has a colt who
is a grandson of hers. So over to say hello:
Yvonne and I have our differences about eating fish. She
loves eating fish of any kind, while I find so much of it really boring: fish and
chips, for example.
Today, being Friday, Yvonne wanted to eat fish again. What kind? After some discussion we
agreed on what I call Tenggiri,
but which has other names in English-speaking areas,
including Wahoo
and Spanish mackerel. It's a
nice fish, but how do you cook it? I had this recollection from my youth of fish in a
vaguely soya-like sauce with strips of onions. Took a look in “Singapore Food”, by
Wendy Hutton, and to my surprise found exactly what I was looking for, titled “Fish in
taucheo sauce”.
What's taucheo? A kind of soya bean
preparation. What's in the fridge? Taucu, clearly the same thing. Or is it? Wikipedia
has a separate page about it. I suspect
that this is a regional misunderstanding, probably helped by the langauges, though the
Taucheo page refers to it as 黄豆酱 and the Tauchu page refers to it as 豆醬. OK, tried it
out, and how about that, exactly what I was looking for. I've seldom been so lucky. Here's
my recipe.
How does it compare to the Manfrotto 3416? My main concern was that it would have
sufficient adjustment to remove the need to change the tripod legs. Things were a little
different from what I thought. In particular, the ball is stiffer than I expected, and it
grates a little when moving. On the other hand, it means that I don't need to tighten the
ball when I have positioned it, so the issue is really cosmetic. It's much easier to
use than the Manfrotto, and yes, it adapted to my uneven ground with adjustment to spare.
Definitely an advantage over the Manfrotto.
Five years later the leveling base is no longer stiff, which means it needs tightening
to keep it in place. But that's normal.
Why? There are plenty of similarities, and I was able to add control points manually.
But cpfind decided that they were 200 pixels apart, and there was nothing I could do
about it. The result was correspondingly useless:
OK, add the control points before running cpfind. No, sorry don't like those control
points: I'll remove them. I tried a number of things, including the panomatic
control point detector, but it just didn't want to know. In the end I took the photos
again, this time ensuring that each wall was completely in one image. That worked, but only
just: cpfind found only two control points between the wall and the next image to the
right, compared to 21 between the two walls:
What's causing this? My best guess is that the control point detectors are looking for
different kinds of features than I am, and there are none shared between these images.
I was going to report this to the Hugin development list, so I converted the
(TIFF) images to lower
quality JPEG images. But then the problem
didn't show up! It did find some control points. Still more head-scratching to do.
One new thing I've done is to compensate for pto_gen's insistence on changing the
colour balance for individual images: a simple script discolour that resets the colour factors to 1 again. Yes, it's a kludge, but
it showed its worth: it proved that pto_gen wasn't the only program to reset the
colour balance.
You have to say one thing for Donald Trump: he has even Yvonne interested in
politics, in particular anything that can denigrate him. Today she came up with this one:
Find, record, download and convert music, movies, series, videos, TV and radio broadcasts
OK, that sounds interesting, even if the price didn't. Where's the demo version? None.
Ah, I missed “(Ashampoo Partner Shop)”. OK, go looking on the web and find (surprise)
http://www.audials.com/. Downloaded the demo version and started
installing. It hung!
After some investigation discovered that it was downloading another
package, Audials_Radiotracker-Setup.exe, over 100 MB in size. It failed, but it
didn't seem to notice. Finally it was done and came up with this:
Where are the TV channels? It seems to be very much oriented towards radio (as indeed the
name suggests). Select “Save Video” under “Streaming” and find get offered "Record
streaming video from video on demand services, TV websites and viedo portals”. A few more
clicks and I had:
Nothing very interesting there, and places like Netflix aren't free. Where are the TV web sites? The only one I can see is
NBC. OK, select that and get:
If I can view this in my browser, what do I need a $$ application for? I can use YouTube Download instead, which both free and a lot easier
to use. I had hoped that the package would at least include a list of TV web sites, but it
doesn't seem to include that.
And while I was investigating, I got another popup:
That suggests that it is trying to intercept a stream being delivered to a web browser.
Ugh. I wonder (idly, and not enough to want to check) what happens if the stream times out.
Thank God for demo versions!
But for whatever reason, Leonid didn't want to
use it, though he's higher in rank. Yvonne has been trying
for some time to get him to lie on the couch, and finally today she was successful:
Yesterday's photos of the dogs brought reminded me once again of the problems of
representing wide angles on flat images. Which of these is more extreme?
That's one of the reasons why I'm not tempted to buy a really wide angle lens like the
M.ZUIKO Digital ED 7-14 mm f/2.8 PRO. To do it right, I should try a
cylindrical projection, but I suspect that that won't work well with the perspective I
chose.
Last year we bought a dog
bath, somewhat against my will: do we need one? What can it do that a garden hose can't do?
But Yvonne was convinced that we would save a lot of money
compared to having them washed in town.
We have used it twice, to my recollection. And the pump needs to be run from time to time
(the pump shop recommended every three months) or it could seize up. Today I remembered,
and yes, indeed, it was somewhat reluctant to start, but once it started it ran happily.
Discussed the matter with Yvonne. Yes, maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all. So she
offered it for sale on the local buy, swap and sell Facebook group. Bang! Several people wanted it, one of
whom (not the first, however) wanted to come and pick it up immediately. I have the feeling
that we had asked too little for it. As it is, it
looks like it will be picked up on Friday.
Into Ballarat for various things. First
to Dorevitch for a blood test. I didn't
even have time to take a number before I was called, and once again I was out within 5
minutes. Then to the Police to find
a Justice of the
Peace to confirm that I, whom he had never seen before, was alive (my doctor isn't
allowed to confirm this; German rule books). He was sitting there looking bored, offered to
pinch me to confirm whether I was alive, and had the document witnessed and ready in about 2
minutes.
Then on to Napoleons to the
post office to pick up the ball head that I had ordered 2½ weeks ago. And there I hit the
first snag: the bar code reader didn't like the bar code, and she had to type it in.
Three things to be done, all with no waiting. How I love living in sparsely populated
areas!
My recent eye problems have
had me concerned, particularly since it seemed to happen while gardening. But it some
exertion must have been involved, so simply planting will (hopefully) not trigger it. Today
I planted the remainder of the pansies, the sage and the chives.
It will be interesting to see how the remaining fruit survive on what appears to be a dead
vine. But my estimate of still having fresh tomatoes in August looks like coming true.
So Donald Trump's trade war
has already come home to bite him, as this report indicates: he's putting up a fund of $12,000 million to compensate US
farmers for losses incurred by the trade war.
Isn't that about half the value of the tariffs that he has put on imports? Only for one
affected sector? What about the metal importers, who now have to pay more for their raw
materials, and their overseas customers, who have to pay two sets of tariffs? And even
amongst the agriculturists, it doesn't make sense. To quote the article:
“The trade war is cutting the legs out from under farmers and White House’s ‘plan’ is to
spend $12 billion on gold crutches"
This is all clearly intended to help with the mid-term elections in November. What happens
then?
I was going to say "those who don't understand history are condemned to repeat it”, and
there, I did it. But I also checked: the original
quote, by Jorge Santayana,
was “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
Who uses phones any more? They're all smartphones nowadays. But we have two “landlines”
(really VoIP over NBN). I access them via cordless phones, but as I age
and become generally less tolerant, and my eyes are not what they were. Even when they were
new, it was difficult to read the phone displays. First, the fonts are very distorted (high
and narrow), and even with illumination called numbers are difficult to read, especially at
an angle and at a distance (pick up the handset and it disappears):
In addition, the newer one (bought three years ago) doesn't really fulfill its promise. It
has Bluetooth connectivity, the main
reason I chose it (for a Bluetooth headset, since I couldn't find anything with connections
for conventional headsets), but somehow there's no way to control the headset volume, and
the sound quality is very poor. Surely there must be something better.
Went looking for best
cordless phone and found, of course, a number of relevant hits. This one was typical. It came with a list of features to look for, like:
Some of the most popular cordless phone features include:
Speakerphone.
Caller ID.
Mailbox.
LCD screen on handsets and/or bases to display your phone directory, caller ID, battery
life, and other information.
Headset jack. A headset jack with a belt clip allows you to chat while you move about
the room or look through paperwork for a hands-free conversation.
Two-line support. This feature allows you to receive calls for two phone numbers on the
same phone. Some phones give two distinct ringers to let you know which line is
ringing. This feature is very handy if you’re conferencing with two callers in a
three-way conversation.
Auto talk. This feature means your call connects as soon as you lift the handset from
the base.
Battery backup. This feature means your phone can keep working if you lose power.
Multiple handsets. This option allows you to have an intercom mode or answer calls
throughout the house.
Most of those, I would have thought, are normal. Certainly all phones that I have had in
this millennium had most of them. No idea what a "mailbox" is, possibly a modern name for
an answering machine, which is otherwise not mentioned. The only two features that stand
out, both of which I want, are a headset jack and two line support. And last time I went
looking, I couldn't find any with either feature. No mention of display quality, probably
because the testers are young enough to be my grandchildren. And no mention of Bluetooth in
that list! OK, let's see their “Editor's Pick”, the Panasonic KX-TG9541B:
If you are looking for the best cordless phone then make sure to get the Panasonic
Link2Cell Cordless Phone as this is their best phone to date.
From noise reduction to bluetooth support, this phone boats [sic] a number of
features including digital answering system.
Now isn't that informative? Not even a link to the specs, just to Amazon to buy one. After some investigation, it seems
that it only handles one line, and there's no indication that it has a headphone jack. In
fact, only one of their recommendations (the Vtech CS6719-2, for “under $30”) has two line
support, and only one model (the Gigaset-E630A) has a headset jack. Neither is available
in Australia, and as usual the postage
from the USA rivals the purchase price.
OK, on to the other links. Choice has
reviews, of course, but no indication that they're any good, and they want money for them.
I wish Google would put them further down the list, or otherwise indicate that I can't get
any information from them without paying money.
OK, further searching. What's on the Australian eBay? Not very much, and surprisingly most of them are manufacturer refurbished.
There's the Panasonic KX-TG8793AZS and the Uniden 9135, both at reasonable prices and with
Bluetooth. Specs? This one is typical (for the Panasonic):
Handset (Quantity) 3
Frequency 1.9 GHz
Frequency Range 1.88 GHz - 1.90 GHz
Number of Channels 120 Channels
System DECT 6.0
Number of Phone Lines 1
Multiple Handsets Capability Up to 6 Handsets
LCD Language English
Talk time: upto 10 hours
Standby time: upto 8 days
Charge time: about 7 hours
Link-to-cell
Noise reduction
Advanced TAM
Key finder included
Power back-up operation
What's Link-to-cell? Advanced TAM? Key finder? All SMOB (Silly Marketeer Obfuscatory
Bullshit), I assert. Link-to-cell proves to be a Bluetooth connection to (an unspecified
number of) mobile phones, which sounds useful.
With a bit of trouble, found the instructions for the Panasonic and the Uniden.
The Panasonic was sobering: for many functions, including important ones (like setting the
date, for example), there are no menus, just numeric codes for what you want to do. What
use is that?
The Uniden looked better, and indeed it has a headphone jack on each handset. OK, what
about reviews? I've decided that Productreview are useful up to a point: if I see several reports of the same issue,
it's probably valid. And the Uniden only got an
average of 2.0 out of 5 points from 14 reviews (9 of which were ”terrible”), which is really
not good. Poor sound quality. Echoing. Noise, interference. Exactly the things that I
want to avoid.
So where are we? Nowhere, I fear. Only one thing has become more understandable (well, I
have a better guess): what does “NBN compatible” mean? I had noted this (then called “NBN
ready”) a year ago. I think
it means that the radio frequency is not in the same range as
traditional 802.11 (2.4 GHz). What does
that have to do with the NBN? Nothing. Probably people using the NBN were the majority of
the people that ran into problems with 802.11, so it stuck.
It's gradually getting milder, though we have another 5 weeks of winter to do, and we did a
bit of consideration what to do with the garden when Mick comes next week. One thing is the
garden arch that we bought years ago and for which we couldn't decide a location. We're
down to these two now:
For some time there has been a rodent hiding behind junk in the garage, and Piccola has been very interested, going in there for
extended periods. Finally she caught one, but clearly it wasn't to her taste. She left
this on the doormat:
Donald Trump has had some
newsworthy meetings recently, notably
with Kim Jong-un
and Vladimir Putin. And in each
case he met with them one-on-one, arousing further interest and, particularly in the case of
Putin, criticism.
But why? He does this with other people too. Gradually I'm coming to the conclusion that
he is incapable of following a multilateral meeting. To be observed.
Facebook presented disappointing earnings for
the last quarter, as this Statistachart shows:
The commentary relates to the “stalling” growth. But in Europe, it has dropped, and in the
USA it's essentially stagnant.
Why? One obvious reason is that everybody already has a Facebook account, even I. But
potentially it relates to an open question in my Internet in 2034 paper:
How important will social networks be? Will they reach a plateau or even decline? Or will
they continue to grow and form a significant part of social life?
There's nothing in this individual statistic that points either way, but it's worth
watching. My own impression (“observation” is too strong a word) is that activity on the
local Facebook groups has declined.
One group of people who are definitely watching are the stockholders. They were impressed: Facebook stock dropped by 19%, or $120,000 million, apparently the largest
one-day drop of market value ever suffered (the New
York Times, from which I got this information, states “among the largest one-day
destruction [sic] of market value“).
That seems excessive, but I suppose it's indicative of the lack of understanding of the
average shareholder.
Yvonne has a new bedside lamp, but she doesn't like the
switch. OK, put an inline switch on the cable. Ordered one from China for the princely sum
of $1. It arrived today. Opening it was a revelation:
It's only a single pole switch, and the whole construction doesn't have a single screw!
That's just plain dangerous, and how do you ensure a contact? Isn't this intended for
mains? The rear of the case says yes:
What does 2/250V~ mean? Clearly it's rated for 250 VAC, but the 2? I'd guess two pole. So
basically this just doesn't match its own claims. I've seen some bad stuff on eBay before, but this one is just plain dangerous.
In Geelonglast week I bought some Chu Hou sauce
in a jar, claimed to be good for slow-cooked Chinese stews. On the web I found a number of
dubious authenticity, but this one looked
reasonable. Today I tried it and came up with my interpretation.
And how was it? I have a recollection of North Chinese stews with a powerful flavour
of Star Anise. This was much weaker
in flavour. Next time I'll put much more in.
Clearly spam, and to a non-existent user, but why am I getting error messages about it? It
took a while to note this particular line:
Out: 452 4.3.1 Insufficient system storage
That's interesting for two reasons: first, the system has run out of disk space, and
secondly the return error code was 452, indicating an unrecoverable error. Why? Typically
people react to this situation by reclaiming space, so a retry would be worthwhile.
But the real issue is: yes, I'm out of space on the machine. I've been thinking about
alternatives for some time, but the idea of block storage is distasteful to me. But I'm
going to have to do something, even if it's only increasing the space.
House photo day again today, and
gradually I'm getting my routine adjusted. But there are still some strangenesses. For
reasons I don't understand, I got this image layout:
Yvonne was in town today and bought a new inline switch for
her bedside light at Bunnings. Only $6,
compared to $1 for two of the cheap ones, but it had no less than 8 screws: dual pole
switch, and, rather unnecessarily, four screws to keep the housing together.
Opened it and... a contact fell out. There seems to be nothing keeping them in. Put it
back in and connected the cables. And it didn't work. Oh yes, it did. No, it didn't.
What's wrong with the bloody thing? I didn't take any photos, but if it continues to work
intermittently, I'll have to take it back, and then there will most certainly be photos.
What's wrong there? For some time I've had the impression that I haven't been applying
enough fertilizer, so I made up for it today, at least for some beds. Others need
replanting first.
Into Ballarat again today to hear the
results of last week's blood
test. Almost as expected, there was nothing unusual. MCV was still above the
80-96 fl, this time 102 fl. Contrary
to expectations, Vitamin B12 was in
the normal range, 51 pmol/l, above the limit 37. That was still notably lower than the 77
of 2 and 3 years ago, probably because of the injections I had 3½ years ago. White blood cells were
in the normal range, so his concern
about neutropaenia seemed unfounded.
So were the reticulocytes and
the thyroid hormones. So why the
elevated MCV? I wonder how accurate the limits are; maybe this is normal for me. It's
interesting to note that
the Wikipedia article
mentions a range of 77 to 93 fl.
About the only interesting thing was that Paul had a student there, the second time; clearly
he's popular with the medical schools. This one showed a great propensity for learning: he
copied Paul's gestures and gesticulations (something that you normally wouldn't notice)
perfectly. It would have been fun to have a video of the whole thing.
While I was there, discussed my weight. I have been very hungry lately, but eating hasn't
increased my weight. I guessed that I would be not over 90 kg. Weighed myself there,
clothed, and came in at 89.7 kg. That's less than I would expect. Back home tried again
and came in at 89.9 kg, naked.
When we bought the current
modern digital scales (precise to 100 g), it showed 2 kg more than my ancient LED device,
precise to 500 g. We had assumed that the old one was wrong, but it's beginning to look
like we should have kept the old one.
Health First, my medical
clinic, is almost exactly in the centre
of Ballarat, about 100 m from the
junction of Sturt St and Doveton St. Fortunately there's a free car park across the road
in Central Square.
Problem: it's a multi-storey car park, and from the time I enter it until I get across the
road to the clinic it takes between 8 and 10 minutes, a significant chunk of the 30 minutes
that I need to get there from home. Much of this it taken by traffic driving at a snail's
pace round 3 or 4 sets of floors, and then taking the escalator downstairs again.
Once upon a time the lower storeys were reserved for paying customers, and we had to pull a
ticket on the outside deck on about the 4th floor. But now they have replaced the human
checking with computers: they read the number plate when you come in. You take a ticket,
and if you stay for more than 2 hours, you have to pay. Otherwise the exit gate opens
automatically. Clearly a sensible development, but the lack of human checking (currently)
means that you can park just about anywhere. OK, why not park further down? Tried it today
and discovered why:
No stairs! I hate lifts at the best of times, but the lifts in park houses are particularly
unpleasant, and this one didn't even give me an indication of the direction I wanted to go
in. On the other side of the building I found a fire escape, so I noted the floor and went
out there, coming out on the street just across the road from Health First. After the
appointment, back via Target and went
looking for my car. The lift gave me no indication of whether floor D (or any other floor,
for that matter) was up or down. Pressed "up" and "down", and when the lift arrived, looked
at the buttons. No D! Guessed down one floor (L4), and turned out that I was right. Of
course, after arriving there, you see what you no longer need:
I suppose if you come up the ramp instead of down it, you would see that earlier. But faced
with going up or down to a lift, most people would go down.
After my doctor's appointment, along to Bunnings to buy things for the garden: a couple of trellises like the ones I bought
last year, and stuff to
mount it. And there was nothing there! Maybe I've chosen the wrong time of year. Also
looked for fertilizer—none found—and herbs, but found few: a couple of particularly
vigorous-looking thyme bushes (lemon thyme
and “pizza” thyme) and some rather
sad-looking Persicaria
odorata, or Vietnamese mint, which Wikipedia calls “Vietnamese coriander” for reasons
that baffle me:
Real coriander tastes very different, and it's very much in use
in Việt Nam. What kind of confusion can
lead to such a name?
On to Formosa Gardens nursery to look for what I didn't find at Bunnings. No further herbs; in fact, the whole place
looked vaguely deserted and surprisingly run-down, and there were few herbs, some in very
poor condition. Strangely, they did
have hops, though only some rather strange
varieties: British, American, and Saaz.
Left without buying anything, and only later remembered that I should have looked for
fertilizer.
An article today
about cord-cutting. What's that?
Replacing wired Ethernet
with 802.11? No, it seems that it's
replacing cable TV with Internet offerings. Not quite what I envisaged in my Internet of the Future paper, but close.
How-To Geek isn't always very perspicacious,
but this observation makes sense:
Find a kid who has always had access to Netflix and try to explain to them that their
favorite shows are only on at a particular time, once a day. They will think it’s just the
dumbest thing, because it is. We have a better system now.
What doesn't make sense to me, and the reason why I haven't signed up for Netflix, is that they want to control how you access the
content, effectively limiting high quality images to streaming services. That's (still) too
unreliable for my liking.
Sadly, this graph has gone away, and I forgot to save a copy. The original URL was
https://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_10460_twitter_user_growth_n.jpg
One day after Facebook lost the greatest
market capitalization in US history, Twitter also seems to be suffering. People might see a connection with Donald Trump's abuse of the platform,
but I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't a trend here.
Away from social media? Maybe people are getting fed up with the novelty of smart phones?
Yes, their sales have also reached a plateau, but I think that that's only because the
market is saturated. Despite my personal lack of understanding for the medium, I don't see
it going out of fashion.
I've established that the Panasonic cordless
phones available in Australia have a particularly emetic menu structure. But they're
the world's biggest maker of cordless phones. Surely something must be going for them. So
I went looking on the Panasonic
US site (at great difficulty: it tried to divert me to the German site, and wouldn't
take no for an answer). A maze of twisty little images, all the same, 36 models in all.
Where are the specs? We don't need no steenking specs. Manuals? A circular set of pages
telling me to look for “support" in the source page. Finally I found two different kinds of
page, but in each case searching for “PDF” brought me to the download link.
I wasn't done yet. It seemed that the detail pages had a different model number from the
overview page, and the download links had a different number again. Here a summary for the
phones that came into consideration:
And without exception, they all have numeric menus! Why? Is it an acknowledgement that
menu structures are so complicated that just numbering them is easier? Why is this all so
complicated?
Rose of Sharon is one of those
plant names that I know from my childhood. What do they look like? No idea. I wasn't
interested in flowers in those days.
Today Yvonne told me that a Rose of Sharon is
a Hibiscus. Nonsense! I knew what a
Hibiscus was, and so did my mother. She would have told me if the Rose of Sharon was
anything like a Hibiscus. But Yvonne didn't let up, and she sent me this link. How
about that, Hibiscus syriacus.
Why didn't my mother ever tell me that? Following the Wikipedia link
for Rose of Sharon showed that the
name is also applied to Hypericum
calycinum:
That page states that that is what is called Rose of Sharon in the UK and Australia, so
presumably that's the plant my mother knew.
More to the point, though, I have two Hibiscus syriacus! Here the image from the link
above, and then my own, taken in mid-May:
I had assumed that it was one of the many cultivars
of Hibiscus rosa-sinensis,
but clearly it's Hibiscus syriacus.
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