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| Greg's diary |
| July 2024 |
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| Monday, 1 July 2024 | Dereel | Images for 1 July 2024 |
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Cold weather
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Topic: general | Link here |
We're going through an unusually cool period of weather at the moment:
mysql> select year(date), min(outside_temp), avg(outside_temp), max(outside_temp)
from observations
where month(date) = 6
group by year(date);
+------------+-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+
| year(date) | min(outside_temp) | avg(outside_temp) | max(outside_temp) |
+------------+-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+
| 2017 | 0.1 | 8.583251664357402 | 17.2 |
| 2018 | -0.2 | 8.587153978918375 | 18.9 |
| 2019 | -0.9 | 9.446074306448931 | 17.6 |
| 2020 | -0.7 | 8.782459793250906 | 16.6 |
| 2021 | 0.8 | 9.77173985397815 | 18.2 |
| 2022 | 0.6 | 8.86966862322499 | 19.6 |
| 2023 | -0.4 | 10.222608372489137 | 20.5 |
| 2024 | -2.4 | 8.394851808112373 | 16.5 |
+------------+-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+
And of course we had to discover that our new Mitsubishi Electric MSZ-AP60VG(D) air conditioner isn't really up to the task. It takes hours in the morning to bring the lounge room up to temperature:
I turned it on shortly after 5:00, and it took until 10:00 to come up to temperature (top line). I'm going to have to leave it running overnight.
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Lies, damn lies and statistics
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Last month was cold? How about this month?
mysql> select year(date), min(outside_temp), avg(outside_temp), max(outside_temp)
from observations
where month(date) = 7
group by year(date);
+------------+-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+
| year(date) | min(outside_temp) | avg(outside_temp) | max(outside_temp) |
+------------+-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+
| 2017 | -1.8 | 8.386610996751084 | 17.2 |
| 2018 | -0.5 | 8.84761882739429 | 19.7 |
| 2019 | 1 | 9.319298495442224 | 18.5 |
| 2020 | -0.8 | 8.394708139534231 | 16.7 |
| 2021 | -0.6 | 8.415084340357575 | 17.2 |
| 2022 | -2.6 | 8.445030549610115 | 20.4 |
| 2023 | -0.5 | 9.574544398292241 | 17.9 |
| 2024 | 0.9 | 2.9052224463604865 | 6.8 |
+------------+-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+
The maximum temperature is much lower than the average of any previous year! Of course, that's what you get with 10 hours of overnight data.
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Constructive translations
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Topic: language, technology, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Google Translate is quite useful for reading labels on East Asian food, but it has its limits. Here's a particularly amusing one:
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Somehow Google Translate is just too eager to please.
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More garden work
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Topic: gardening, animals | Link here |
Jesse Walsh along to do some more garden work today, notably the “island” in the driveway:
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The Leucospermum had been so covered in Carpobrotus that there's a big bald patch:
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At the other end also planted some small Carpobrotus and some nameless plants that Yvonne got from Kelly-ann Nyari:
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And while tidying up, he found a particularly bloated frog:
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Also planted a long-suffering Buddleja_×_weyeriana in front of the “shade area”:
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X configuration: RTFM!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
More searching for answers to the .Xdefaults issue today. What does the xterm(1) man page say? Much more than it did 30 years ago. Now there are 7,758 lines, about 130 pages. When I learnt X it was 253 lines, less than 5 pages. And much of this new version describes exactly what I'm looking for: a line like xterm-r*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono refers to a name xterm-r, which is described in X(1):
-nameThis option specifies the name under which resources for the application should be found. This option is useful in shell aliases to distinguish between invocations of an application, without resorting to creating links to alter the executable file name.
And it's used like this:
/usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm-r" -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display :0.3 -geometry 90x50-53+0 -e /usr/local/bin/bash
And faceName is a resource described in the man page.
So now I have the background to actually do something. Looking through the configuration file, I find that most of these names simply refer to colours. They're relatively arbitrary, but they also describe the location of the icons. Here a “before” and “after” converting to Color
Style "xterm-r" Icon xterm.xpm,Color yellow/black,IconBox -40 300 -1 -140
Style "xterm-r" Icon xterm.xpm,Colorset 21,IconBox -40 300 -1 -140
So now I need to create entries for each of these names. Currently I have xterm-lx xterm-rx, xterm-r, xterm-rsxa and xterm-rsxd. Do I need all of them? Probably not.
And then there are the options passed to the xterm:
/usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm-r" -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display :0.3 -geometry 90x50-53+0 -e /usr/local/bin/bash
So after all that, my invocation reduces to:
/usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm-r" -display :0.3 -e /usr/local/bin/bash
Do I need to specify the display? Probably not. But there's no resource to specify the shell; the best choice there is the SHELL environment variable. If that works, I can reduce things to
/usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm-r"
So do I need to generate individual files? Yes, unfortunately. I still have different invocations for local and remote machines, which could potentially reduce to something like this on hydra:
+ "eureka" Exec ssh -A eureka /usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm-r" &
+ "hydra" Exec /usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm-r" &
And on eureka it would be the other way round. Still, things look a lot simpler like that. The next step is to decide what names to use, and how to allocate them.
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20 years of wrong directions
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Topic: history, technology | Link here |
Twenty years ago today I started this idea of saving all my RCS files in a separate hierarchy. Bad idea, and it's still biting me.
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bhyve: out
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've already had my concerns about using bhyve instead of VirtualBox, but another thing that concerned me was how to save a running instance. Once again Google Gemini to my aid. You don't:
Unfortunately, as of July 1, 2024, bhyve itself doesn't offer a built-in feature to save the state of a running virtual machine. This functionality is under development, but there's no official release yet.
| Tuesday, 2 July 2024 | Dereel | Images for 2 July 2024 |
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The end of US democracy?
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Topic: history, politics, opinion | Link here |
The Supreme Court of the USA has made an amazing decision: the President is above the law.
I needed to catch my breath. This special treatment of the ruler was one of the differences between the USA and Great Britain. It seems that the concept of equality under the law is not stated as clearly in US law as it is elsewhere, but the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution implies it, and it also states:
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
And, it seems, this decision reverses exactly the issue of the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. How can that happen? My understanding is that the only way to reverse this decision is for the Supreme Court to change its mind.
The consequences are staggering. The Shovel put it into perspective. Biden Responds to Supreme Court Ruling by Immediately Assassinating Donald Trump. Part of the article is worth reading:
The Biden team used an unconventional method to carry out the assassination – an actor posing as Vladimir Putin was hired to tell Trump that he doesn’t like him. Trump immediately died of sadness.
But somehow that's the death knell of US democracy. The 2020s have not been a good decade so far. I see even worse times ahead.
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Fixing the gate
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Our front gate does not shut very accurately, and lately it has been overshooting the “closed” position. A minor adjustment, maybe?
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It doesn't look like much, but I think it should be enough. I didn't want to overdo it and risk breaking off the hook.
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ANZ: You typed the wrong password
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Time for my monthly check on my bank accounts today. But no, my ANZ web page told me that my password was wrong.
What? It's stored in the web browser. I also have it written down, so I tried that. No, wrong. Please reset.
How did that happen? It's definitely not my doing. Called up and finally, after nearly a minute of announcements, I was asked the reason for my call. “I think my password has been breached”.
WRONG. Another two minutes explaining to me how to use the ANZ App to reset my password. And then I was disconnected. Nearly 3 minutes for nothing.
Tried again, this time telling the non-recognition that I had a security breach. OK, 5 to 10 minute wait, which proved to be closer to 15. Connected to Gracia, who told me that no special characters were allowed in the password, and then helped me reset it after a third time also failed and locked me out of my account.
When was my password last changed? 2 May, she said. OK, I've logged in since then, so if their site didn't let me log in, there must be something seriously wrong. Please inform your security team. ”I am the security team”. No escalation needed: I typed my password with an special character or some other error.
Please take a complaint. After three attempts and a threat to involve the regulatory bodies, she agreed to do so. Give me the complaint number, please. Can't do that yet, will send a “text message”, presumably an SMS. No, I'd like to have an email, please. Sorry, we can't send email. Wait on the line.
Finally she came back with the number. And where do we go from here? She seemed to think that that was the last I would hear of it, and maybe she's right. And after all, she said, I just typed my password in wrong.
I exploded, being rather rude and calling her an idiot. I regret that, but I've seldom had such a frustrating and stupid interaction.
And after it was all over and done, I got an email with the complaint number.
Somehow this is so like the interaction with Aussie Broadband a few months ago. We're being held to ransom by the “help desk” people.
| Wednesday, 3 July 2024 | Dereel | Images for 3 July 2024 |
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Repairing the bore pump
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Topic: Stones Road house, gardening, general | Link here |
Steven from UPI along today with an apprentice (Riley?) to look at the wiring of the bore pump. Irritatingly, it worked for him, sort of. At least the pump ran. But it seems that these junction boxes are really pressure switches, one for the pump, one for the pressure cell. And both of them were badly corroded by the bore water:
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So he had to replace both of them, along with the pressure gauge:
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Why are they not made of a material that doesn't corrode? They're very expensive—the parts alone came to a total of $450.
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Preserved lemons, status
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
It's been a little over a week since I started on my preserved lemons:
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Now they look like this:
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One of the big differences between the recipes was whether to add lemon juice or not. The rationale is that the lemons will go mouldy if they're not covered. No recipe specifically wants them uncovered, so my guess is that the ones that don't add juice expect there to be enough juice in the lemons themselves. Clearly that's not the case here, so today I added what proved to be 100 ml of lemon juice:
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So far there's not much evidence of softening.
| Thursday, 4 July 2024 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 4 July 2024 |
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Shopping again
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Topic: general, food and drink, health | Link here |
Somehow a number of things have cropped up that required me to go shopping: Mona has learnt how to open doors, so we need knobs instead of levers. As often, I needed a visit to the Fruit Shack, and my glasses still needed adjustment. In addition, ALDI had an air compressor on offer, and it was too heavy for Yvonne to pick up yesterday, so did that too.
And somehow the day was done. The good news is that everything went smoothly, not a foregone conclusion.
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ANZ password: Groggy's fault
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Checking my local web pages, discovered this:
-r--r--r-- 1 grog lemis 6462 2 May 14:32 bank.php
That's the page I use to access financial web sites. And it had a new password, one that I hadn't transferred to my password list. So the issues that I had on Tuesday were my fault after all.
Did Gracia do the right thing then? No. she couldn't have known that, and her utter conviction that I had typed a special character in the password shows a lack of will to investigate the real issues. But I do feel silly.
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Problems with NBN scheduled outages
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
It seems that I'm not the only person to get annoyed by National Broadband Network scheduled outages.
| Friday, 5 July 2024 | Dereel | Images for 5 July 2024 |
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두부부침양념장
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
The (Korean) title 두부부침양념장 transliterates as dububuchim-yangnyeomjang, a tongue-twister that even reflects in the Korean spelling. It translates as “Pan fried tofu with spicy sauce”, but it seems easier to distinguish it by calling it Korean fried dofu.
The photo looked good:
So yesterday I bought some dofu, not quite the same as used in the recipe:
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In particular, the pieces are smaller.
After a bit of recipe translation, came up with this:
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The rice is mentioned in the original recipe, but not illustrated.
Per serving
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 150 g | firm dofu | 1 | ||
| 12 g | soya sauce | 2 | ||
| 5 g | gochugaru (Korean chili flakes, 고춧가루) | 2 | ||
| 15 g | garlic | 2 | ||
| 30 g | onion, chopped finely | 2 | ||
| 12 ml | sesame oil | 2 | ||
| sesame seeds | 2 | |||
| 15 g (1) | spring onion | 3 | ||
Cut the dofu into slices about 6-7 mm thick:
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Fry until crispy:
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Mix the ingredients together:
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Cut spring onion and add to the sauce:
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Serve with rice:
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Britain votes and gets on with it
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
A number of national elections are creating interest at the moment: the USA, Iran, France and now the United Kingdom. The USA elections have been number one topic for months, and there are another 4 months to go (until Melbourne Cup day). France started its election campaign at the beginning of last month and had elections on Sunday, only the results were a tie, so they need a second round come Sunday. In Iran it was similar: they called elections at the beginning of last month, they were held last Friday, and they, too, need a run-off that will take place today.
Meanwhile, in the UK, they also called elections at the beginning of last month. They took place yesterday. No run-off: polling ended at 22:00 BST (7:00 this morning here), and by the evening the King had invited Sir Keir Starmer to form a government. No messing around like in the USA, where the incumbent has 2½ months to subvert the election before the president-elect actually takes office.
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New doorknobs
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Topic: Stones Road house, animals, general, opinion | Link here |
I really don't like the idea of round doorknobs: they're significantly more difficult to handle than the lever type. But Mona agrees, so I have to do something.
Then Yvonne came up with the obvious answer: reposition the levers so that they're pointing down. Now why didn't I come up with that idea? But it turned out that the maker of the levers had found an asnwer: you can't. So I had to mount the knobs after all:
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Mona was not amused. In the evening we heard her trying to get into my office and failing. She didn't exactly growl, but her tail was twice the normal thickness. Somehow I feel that I have let her down: here she had the great success of finding a new way through doors, and already it stops working.
| Saturday, 6 July 2024 | Dereel | Images for 6 July 2024 |
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Breakfast experiment fail
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I have a surprising amount of dofu and almost no recipes for it. How about using some in my Pad Thai recipe? Fried the slices a little hotter (7 on the induction cooker), which resulted in much faster browning, but despite all attempts they still stuck a little.
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And while I was at it, I used a different ALDI paste (first image) instead of their “Pad Thai” paste:
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The result?
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Boring! And the “stirfry” sauce tasted of almost nothing.
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A mouse!
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Topic: technology, history, opinion | Link here |
I'm still planning to put in the new teevee.lemis.com in the lounge room Real Soon Now. The intention is to run it in parallel with tiwi until I'm happy. Until then, all the videos will be on tiwi. Things that are missing are: keyboard, mouse, display card (maybe).
Surely I have lots of keyboards and mice? Yes, I do, but for some reason they “don't work”, at least partially because all the dongles are unmarked, and none of my experiments in pairing them have worked. So when I was in town on Thursday, I picked up an el-cheapo wireless keyboard and mouse from Officeworks, total price $33.
They had others on offer, including things aimed at Apple for round 10 times the price, so I wasn't expecting very much. But what I found was much better than I dared to hope.
Backspace 35 years to my first graphics environments. Mice had three buttons and nothing else, and of course they were wired. Since then a number of things have happened: wireless mice appeared (very good; I had to use cable mice again recently, and they're a real pain), scroll wheels appeared (also useful), and the second button went away (bad). To make up for it, some high-end mice ended up with additional buttons for the (right) thumb, and I was able to remap them to button 2. But the cheap mice didn't.
But this one does! In fact, the button layout is the same as my Logitech M705: two main buttons, scroll wheel in between, which can also be pressed for a button press, and two buttons for the thumb. xev tells me:
| left | right | scroll | scroll | scroll | thumb | thumb | ||||||
| forward | back | press | forward | back | ||||||||
| 1 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 2 | 9 | 8 | ||||||
That's the same for the Logitech mouse, except that the thumb buttons have been remapped.
The probe messages are:
ugen0.3: <Telink 2.4G Mouse> at usbus0
ums1 on uhub4
ums1: <Telink 2.4G Mouse, class 0/0, rev 1.10/1.00, addr 34> on usbus0
ums1: 5 buttons and [XYZ] coordinates ID=1
That's much more than I had hoped for. And to make things even better, the mouse has a storage place for the dongle, so if I do take it out of service, at least I won't have to look for the dongle.
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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