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| Greg's diary |
| May 2018 |
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| Tuesday, 1 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 1 May 2018 |
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Cherries? Tomatoes?
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Topic: food and drink, gardening, opinion | Link here |
Callum Gibson asked me if there was a typo in yesterday's article about the tomatoes. Clearly I meant to write “cherry tomato”, but only wrote “cherry”.
No, I meant to write “cherry”. I had really thought that they were cherries. I have never seen tomatoes that small before. Here they are in comparison with Roma tomatoes from ALDI and our own cherry tomatoes from the garden:
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They're much smaller than cherry tomatoes, and the colour doesn't match either.
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Compressing backups
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
How efficient is the compression on my EaseUS Todo backups? For the fun of it, I ran bzip2 on the old backup. It ran for about 5 hours, maxing out a core. Here the results:
That's about 10% savings. Is it worth it? It represents about the total storage capacity of all computers I used in my first 15 years of computing, but nowadays it's peanuts.
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New induction cooker
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Topic: general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Testing my new induction cooker has been hampered by lack of cable to connect it to a power point. Once upon a time I had lots of this sort of stuff lying around, but it seems that I threw most of it away when we moved to Stones Road nearly 3 years ago.
Finally I jury-rigged something together and tried it out. How do you turn it on? Secret key:
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Pixellation courtesy of the PDF version of the instruction manual. The areas marked 1 are controls for the individual heating zones, 2 are up and down controls (no individual fields like my el-cheapo device). And the rest? 3 must be the on/off, no idea what 4 is, and 5 is the timer that these manufacturers can never resist adding.
Well, no. 3 did nothing. Power connection problems? No, it's 4 with the obvious symbol.
And how does it work? When you turn on a zone, it automatically comes up with level 5 out of 9, forgetting whatever was there before. If you want a low heat, you need to quickly turn it down before it starts burning things.
I tried it on level 1 for a while. Almost no heat at all, probably just what I wanted. But I really can't test it until I have something to cook. At any rate the first impression is that it isn't as rabid as the portable device.
| Wednesday, 2 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 2 May 2018 |
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Sabre-rattling and neutral reporting
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Why is Russia so aggressive? Why have they invaded Ukraine? Why are they supporting Bashar al-Assad? Why did they flagrantly kill an ex-spy in the United Kingdom?
I get answers, of course, but they're all from Western news sources. And my Russian friends are all convinced that it's a smear campaign.
The same applies to other countries. Iran is the sole remaining country (hub?) of the axis of evil. But even the Western media have difficulty finding them actually doing anything in contravention of international law. Supplying arms to the Houthis? All Western countries supply weapons to some belligerent group. On the other hand, both Saudi Arabia and Israel are on record for violating the territorial integrity of their neighbours. Depending on how you count, Israel has been doing it for 50 or 70 years and shows no sign of living up to its claims of wanting peace. It shoots dead unarmed protesters in their own country and nobody stops them.
Even Iran's involvement in Syria is in accordance with international law: they were invited. Yes, the legitimacy of the Syrian regime is dubious, but what would happen if Assad were toppled? It would probably be a success story similar to the liberations of Iraq and Libya. Maybe that's what Russia and Iran are trying to avoid.
But Donald Trump doesn't like the Iran nuclear deal. Why? Who hasn't complied with the terms? That's simple: the USA. The Iranians were supposed to stop uranium enrichment, which they did, and the US Americans were supposed to lift sanctions, which they didn't. Who's in violation there?
But now, with US backing, Benyamin Netanyahu has got up on his hind legs and shown what he claims are documents stolen from the Iranians by the Israelis (clearly in accordance with international law). Years old, but apparently an indication that Iran still can't be trusted. The International Atomic Energy Agency wasn't impressed. Nothing of interest there. But the whole presentation appeared to be designed to give Trump an excuse to go back on the remainder of the deal. I can't help wondering which countries can't be trusted.
Of course, nobody believes that Russia and Iran are innocent. But clearly the USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia are also not exactly shining examples of international peace. The real issue is that the reports in the media are clearly one-sided. Why can't I get reliable information from the other side? I've been watching Al Jazeera news, but they're pretty much in line with Western news sources. I've read IRNA from time to time, but somehow there's not very helpful. Oh for a neutral viewpoint!
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Saffron crocus
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
As I feared, my Crocus sativus were planted at about the worst possible time. I only covered the bulbs 6 days ago, and already one of them is trying to flower:
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I wonder how many will survive.
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Microsoft camera capture, next attempt
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Topic: multimedia, technology | Link here |
I still haven't managed to get a clean image from Chris Bahlo's dongle on Microsoft. Doesn't the system come with a multimedia program? Ah, right, “Windows” Media Viewer. Can I use that? Off to Google to find many references to windows media player camera. Millions of hits, of course, many pointing to “Media Encoder”, free but not included. Spent a lot of time before checking Wikipedia. “Media Encoder” is an old, worn-out magic word (“discontinued”), now 15 years old. It seems that I should be using Microsoft Expression Encoder.
OK, look at that page. Status: Discontinued. Replacement? Not mentioned.
Sigh Why is this so complicated? Certainly my revulsion to the stuff doesn't help. Put off until my stomach settles.
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How much chili?
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Yvonne bought some pok choi a while back, so I had to find a way to incorporate it in a dish. In the end tried a sachet of “Mi udang” (prawn noodles) from Tean's Gourmet:
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Is it authentic? Probably. The instructions are in Malay first, then Chinese and only then English. But what a result!
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It doesn't look bad, but the stuff is so full of chili that Yvonne couldn't eat it. Was Malaysian food always this pedas?
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New induction cooktop
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Topic: food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
Finally got round to trying out the new induction cooktop this evening. The good news: it works better than the old one. In particular, it's not nearly as aggressive in its heating patterns, and the lower heating levels are relatively gentle, though I still need to get used to that. It's also much quieter.
In the process, though, I'm left wondering just what I need in any cooktop. Here are some first thoughts.
How far apart should the heating zones be? The zones on this cooker are arranged in a square, so they're all the same distance apart, 29.5 cm. This strange distance is all the more surprising because it's exactly the same as the lateral distance on the gas cooker. But the rear flames on the gas cooker are only 20 cm behind the front flames.
That makes a big difference. I can now put my 32 cm pan next to the 28 cm pan:
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The old gas cooker doesn't stand a chance there. The best I can do is on a diagonal, and even then the big pan doesn't fit because the cooktop is too close to the wall:
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It doesn't harm that the induction cooktop is 52 cm deep instead of 50.5 cm for the gas cooktop, so even with this position it would still work.
I can also fit another pot (or two) on the cooktop, though then only an 18 cm pot:
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That wouldn't work on the gas cooktop in any arrangement.
In passing, it's interesting to note that all these sizes are nominal. In fact, the pans are all at least 5 mm smaller in top diameter, and the “18 cm” pot is in fact 17 cm. But that should just make things easier.
What else? The modern electronic controls are clearly inferior to the old analogue ones. With the gas cooktop, I can turn the flame on and adjust it with one button. To turn the flame on I need to press it, but that's relatively quick, and adjustment is almost instantaneous. With the electronic control, I must first press on the on-off button for at least 2 seconds, then select my zone with one of the symbols, then probably adjust from what it chooses, requiring up to 9 presses of the + button in some cases, which can take up to 3 seconds. If I want to adjust again later, I first need to select the zone again. That's not specific to this cooktop: they're all like that. I wonder how long it will take the manufacturers to realize that this is irritating.
And how even is the heating? I've already noticed that the diameter of the zones is the same for all zones, at 18 cm. That's not good, but it's also not as bad as it might seem. The 32 cm pan has a base diameter of only 23.5 cm and the 28 cm pan has a base diameter of 17.5 cm. But it would be nice to have something wider.
The other issue is how the heat is generated. It seems that this cooktop, like the old one, heats by time division: on for a while, off for a while. This is very obvious with a pan with a bit of water in it, where it boils for a few seconds and then stops again, only to repeat the cycle. I wonder if more expensive models heat by proper modulation of the heat output, like an “inverter” microwave oven.
| Thursday, 3 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 3 May 2018 |
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Off the net again
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
Coming into the office this morning, discovered that no mail had arrived all night. That's a bad sign, almost certainly that we're off the net. Bloody NBN!
But no, the net was up. My somewhat cryptic status messages looked like this:
That tells me that I had a ping time to the next hop of round 17 ms (normal for my fixed wireless link), that there was no packet loss, and (from previous entries) that pings to www.lemis.com were failing, and had been since Wed 2 May 2018 20:51:43 AEST (10:51 UTC).
Off to look at the “dashboard” for the system. System in state SHUTDOWN since 18:34:11, time zone unknown. Entered a ticket and discovered that there had been some host system failure, and that the time zone was UTC—so discovered not quite 8 hours after the system went offline. It wasn't done there, of course; they migrated the VMs to another host, which took its time, and I was back online at 1:32, nearly 15 hours after the failure.
Once again I'm left wondering what to do about this. These things will happen, of course. But why did it take so long for them to notice? Maybe I should set up a second system and put my photos in the cloud.
Did a bit of looking round at that—again—and still came to no solution that was useful, easy and cheap. Vultr have block storage, along with a document describing how to use it as a file system on FreeBSD. That looks straightforward enough, but they want $0.10 per GB, while others, such as DigitalOcean (recommended by Peter Jeremy) and Amazon S3 are closer to $0.025. Peter managed to point me to some documentation that didn't make the ridiculous claim that point and grunt was simple. And certainly the alternative has a learning curve associated with it. I suppose I will have to bite the bullet some time, but I'm left wondering why people make things so complicated nowadays.
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Crocus sativus, day 2
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Topic: gardening, photography | Link here |
In fact, the one Crocus sativus flower that I have doesn't look bad:
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If it weren't for the weed just below the stigmas, it would be quite a good photo. But that's the only one showing any sign of life, and I fear that the others have died.
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More on induction cookers
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Topic: food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
How do current induction cookers work? Yes, I understand the basic principle, but how do they regulate power? The ones I have clearly use switching to generate an average power. The new one cycles every 7 seconds, and it makes me wonder how much use it would be for the very gentle heating for which it claims to be suited.
So: do any induction cooktops regulate power electronically, so-called “inverter” technology? Off to Google, with spectacular lack of success. I did find a number of general guides, including this one from CHOICE (“Australia's leading consumer advocacy group”), which mainly served to confirm my decision not to become a member.
On the positive side, there's a section on “power management”, but it only describes how to avoid overloading the supply circuit (though it may, in passing, explain how my current cooker can get by with only a 25 A circuit). It also mentions a zone diameter of “larger than 21cm [sic]” for larger pans.
But it doesn't mention the issue of ease of control, and it comes up with silly claims like “Digital control readings: Digital readouts give you temperature accuracy”. They do? I haven't even been able to find out how much power they use, and temperature is completely beyond the control of the cooktop. And there's no mention of the distance between the zones. It also claims:
Will an induction cooktop save me money?When CHOICE compared induction to ceramic cooktops, we found there were no savings over the same period of time. Reduced cooking times may save a little money if you replace your electric cooktop with an induction – but the initial purchase price is still a big investment. However, this may change as they come down in price.
While they're clearly factoring in the price of the cooktop—no longer a significant issue—I'm left with the feeling that they haven't considered the efficiency considerations: there are fewer thermal losses. How much fewer? Hard for me to say, but it's what I would expect people to have tested.
| Friday, 4 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 4 May 2018 |
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Woo hoo! Your password has been revealed
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Mail from Twitter today informing me of a potential security breach, and recommending that I change my password.
OK, that makes sense, though I hardly use Twitter, and even if my password were to become public, there's little anybody could do with it except impersonate me on Twitter. But I changed it, and was rewarded with the message
Woo hoo! Your password has been changed!
How exciting! I wonder when these sites will grow up.
That wasn't the only message of that nature today, however. I also received, from Wikipedia:
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I've complained in the past about the lack of information that Google gives with its “potential compromise” messages. But this is ridiculous: no information whatsoever. And then there's eBay, who seem to delight in annoying me with password changes. Why do people do this?
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Cloud storage: the death of interoperability
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
In principle I'm interested in using cloud storage for my online photos. But how? Currently I store my files in a file system (after all, that's what they're for). But that's an old, worn-out magic word, it seems. Now you access files via a URL that the storage cloud makes up for you, though in some cases it may bear a relationship to the name it had in a file system.
Why? People have invented a whole new set of paradigms to access the storage, and they're not even consistent from one cloud to the next, though there seems to be a tendency for new arrivals on the scene to be at least marginally compatible with Amazon S3. If I take this route, I need to change all my software to use new access methods and path names. And if I decide to change storage provider, I might need to do so again. This is beginning to make the Vultr block storage look more attractive.
People tell me that I'm old fashioned, and that I should move with the times. But this kind of interface reminds me of the Bad Old Days in the 1960s, before people realized that interoperability is Good. Clearly I'm so far behind the times that they're about to lap me. But when?
Did some reading on the subject. This document compares S3 and NFS, noting in particular the improved security in S3. OK, fine, but that's no reason to make things so complicated. As they say:
Your web page can call an NFS file exactly like a local file using only the file path, without even the need to add the full URL
What does this say about perspectives?
But then there's S3Fs, a file system built on top of S3. That makes perfect sense, but it seems to be a niche product, and it's not clear if it'll even be around in a couple of years.
And then Google has “filers”, a replacement for the old, worn-out term “file server”. And the text goes on like that, confusing what should be an intelligible description with terms that need to be learnt:
With Cloud Storage, you can upload and download objects to namespaces, called buckets, which are similar to folders.
Of course, they're replacing bad language with new terms. But how similar is a bucket to a directory? Why do they need a new term? What pitfalls lie in wait if I assume that a bucket is a directory? Do the people who designed this stuff even understand what a directory is, and do they think that a folder is the same thing or something else?
| Saturday, 5 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 5 May 2018 |
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More panorama stitching pain
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Saturday is house photo day. I've been doing this regularly for over 10 years now, and I've been making panoramas with Hugin for over 9. In principle there's not much difference each week.
But things don't always turn out the way I expect. Today things were particularly strange. And for some reason, the errors weren't completely reproducible. Here an example, first what I got, then what it should have been:
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How did that happen? Two of the images were turned around, one upside-down and one on its side, shown here:
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The control point detector (cpfind in this case) seems to have found the control points:
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But because the the image was on its side, things didn't line up. I was able to recover this panorama by adding the images individually, and got a mean error of 0.3 pixel and a maximum of 1.1 pixels, very good indeed. So why did the control point detectors have such difficulty? The only thing I can see is that the criteria for detecting a control point are very different from what I would have used myself.
The other thing to note in the broken image is the change in colour. I prepare my images before stitching so that the exposure and hue all match. But they get changed:
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The EV values should all be the same (in principle 11.7 would be about right), and the Er and Eb values should all be 1. In particular the big deviation of Er on image 03 explains the funny colours.
This was all done with the “Fast panorama preview” Align button. Should I try the old way, with separate detection and optimization steps? Tried that and ran into even more trouble. Even documenting the bugs is complicated.
| Sunday, 6 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 6 May 2018 |
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Out of two make one
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Topic: general | Link here |
Amber Fitzpatrick is moving house, and she came along today to pick up some giveaways. She has a refrigerator to move, and Yvonne tried to lend her a trolley. Problem: we have two, but one has had a bad repair (damaged bearing), and the other has a tyre with a leak of some form or another. OK, remove the split pins and switch the wheels.
Problem: split pins are not designed to be removed, just cut out. It took me about 5 minutes to finally remove the two, after I had decided that a piece of wire would make a good replacement. And then I discovered that the only good tyre was the one with the faulty bearing! Before I had a trolley with a flat tyre and one with a wobbly wheel. Afterwards I had two half-trolleys:
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Warning: HostIfNotConnecting
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Another timeout on upgrading eureka, which I have been planning to upgrade for over a year. Tried to fire up eureso, my “next generation” machine. But it didn't resume cleanly: it hung at 97%:
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What's that? Tried rebooting, but then it didn't come up at all. And other VMs had the same problem, so it looked pretty much like an issue with the environment.
Much messing around, and finally it occurred to me that I may not have had the vboxnet module loaded. And that was the case, at the very least because that module no longer exists. Instead we have vboxnetadp and vboxnetflt. Tried vboxnetadp first:
What's that? Spent some time wondering about the version mismatch and the unsupported file type, but finally loaded vboxnetflt, which also doesn't have a man page. But that did the job. Wouldn't it have been easier for the error message to point at that possibility?
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Bosch error E:15
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Topic: food and drink, general | Link here |
The third dishwasher load of the day was rather different from the others. I saw water spilling out the corner of the dishwasher. Wiped it up, looked inside, and found the water level much higher than usual. But it pumped the water out, and I was able to establish that the filters were somewhat dirty, though they didn't look completely clogged.
Cleaned the filters, put things back together and turned the dishwasher on again. No go:
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Normally the display shows the time, so this was clearly something else. Where's the instruction manual? Ah, dammit, Google for bosch dishwasher error e15, which came up with numerous contradictory explanations and solutions:
This page tells me:
Error code E15 means, simply, that there is no water in the dishwasher, or that the machine believes there is no water in the machine.
It goes on to explain:
Open the dishwasher’s door, and unscrew the four screws holding the front of the door in place. Then slide the door off.
Problem: there are no obvious 4 screws, just a hinge with no visible screws. A picture would be worth a lot, so move on...
to the next one. This gave the same explanation of the cause, and with a similar explanation of how to fix it. But no photos of the process, just of the dishwasher itself, which looked quite different. So, try the...
If your Bosch dishwasher is displaying an E15 error code as you switch your machine on, it’s an indication that there is water sitting in the base of the dishwasher.
Well, that's certainly a different explanation. But that's about as far as it goes. The next step is “Once the impaired part has been identified and requires replacing, take a look at our extensive range of dishwasher spares”: they're a company that sells spares.
OK, there are more. I was looking for something with photos, so how about this YouTube video?
It has the great advantage of showing a dishwasher very similar to mine, but it's all Greek to me, and the explanation was very important. About the only word that kept coming up was “apocalypse”, which presumably means to uncover. He spent a lot of time pointing to the left side of the dishwasher, including details that looked almost identical to mine, but I have no idea what he wanted to do.
So on to the next one:
This one is in a language I understand better: Swabian. And this one also shows a dishwasher similar in appearance to mine. He has a simple solution: pull the dishwasher out from under the work surface, turn it on its side and let the water out.
A little primitive maybe? Here's another one, also in German with a slight northern (Berlin) accent:
This one looks very close to ours, and he explains how it happened: he put liquid detergent in the dishwasher, and it overflowed. He shows in detail how he took it apart. His method is quite a bit of work.
By this time I had all I needed, but I finally found an explanation in English:
His method was close to the Swabian one, except that he tipped the dishwasher backwards instead of on its side. Somehow the Swabian method seems more effective.
So: first remove the dishwasher from under the work surface. It proves to be held in place by two badly positioned screws. Assuming that the hoses are long enough, I can then just pull it out and turn it on its side.
But what caused the problem? Was it really just dirty filters? They weren't that dirty. Or did an input valve jam? I'll have to keep an eye on it. One way or another, though, it's not an easy way to fix the problem. That could be as simple as a plug underneath the front of the unit.
| Monday, 7 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 7 May 2018 |
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How to waste a day
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Topic: general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
When I was a lad I read a book, the title of which escapes me, relating to “Parkinson's law”, by C._Northcote_Parkinson. The one story that remains in my head is how an old lady can take a whole day to write and post a letter, while a secretary in a company can do the same thing in five minutes (well, this was 50 years ago).
As I approach (or exceed?) the age of the said old lady, I sometimes get the feeling that I'm living proof. But it's not that simple: the secretary would write a significantly shorter letter, and frequently miss the point or omit detail. I started keeping this diary over 55 years ago, and the level of detail I go to has changed in both directions during that time (including a period of nearly 30 years where it dropped to 0).
Today I wrote up my diary for yesterday in detail, and it took up most of the day.
The rest was involved in getting rid of this annoying E:15 error on the dish washer. I was going to take a video, but in the end I couldn't work out how to position the camera, so I gave up. Removed screws for the dish washer, pulled it out, forgot to disconnect the power plug, put out a couple of towels, and turned it on its side, like yesterday's Swabian video.
Surprisingly little water came out. OK, try. E:15 gone! Total time about 5 minutes. Started washing some dishes, and 10 minutes into the cycle I got the error again. By that time it was almost to be expected: for some time there had been a hissing noise that sounded like water running in to the machine.
Good news, bad news. It wasn't my fault for not cleaning the filter. But it's a fault in the machine. OK, call somebody to come and fix it. Yvonne's repairer proved to do washing machines, not dish washers, and he gave her the phone number of Barclays, (03) 5339 9034. Called up there. Yes, we can repair the machine. How about an appointment on 21 May? Two weeks!
OK, we can have it faster (and cheaper): just bring the thing in to them. Yes, we can do that. But it's still likely to be a week or more. What do we do in the meantime?
Round here, my Tandem Computers background came into play: have a hot standby in case one fails. That didn't sound that stupid: we frequently have more to wash than a single dish washer can do, and we have space for it in the laundry (next to the kitchen): put it where the clothes dryer is, and the clothes dryer on top. So we planned to take the old machine in for repair tomorrow and buy a new one (a Whirlpool WFE2B19XAUS, $398 from The Good Guys, who seem to be the only people to know the model: even Whirlpool doesn't. But maybe they're just too polite to steal The Good Guys' thunder) to use until the old one is repaired.
And that took all day! At my consulting rates, the diary entry would have cost considerably more than the old dish washer.
| Tuesday, 8 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 8 May 2018 |
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The first daffodil of autumn
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Found outside the front door today:
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I've become used to bulbs flowering early here, but this must be a record. There may be places in Canada or Scandinavia where they're also just flowering.
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Dish washer, day 2
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Topic: general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
As planned, set to taking our dish washer for repair today and to buying a new one. Things weren't easy. First, we were reminded that we had just dismantled our last two sack trolleys on Sunday. OK, thinking about it, since we're buying a new dish washer, there's no longer any hurry getting the old one repaired. Instead we can enquire where it's likely to be the cheapest. Buy a new sack trolley in town, and we can transport both.
Next, was the Whirlpool WFE2B19XAUS from The Good Guys the best I could find? Did a bit of surfing around and found a couple of others at the same price, but they were strange brands I had never heard of, and there were few details. OK, nothing cheaper, so let's go for the Whirlpool.
Did we say $398? Oh, that was yesterday. We also said “20% off”. So today the price
is $498$728.
Huh? Yes, it was on the web page in traditionally small print:
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Why $729? Who knows? Is that maybe a fair price? Since nobody else sells it, it's hard to say. On researching on the following day, the price had changed again, the third time in 36 hours, back to $515.
OK, Good Guys have a price guarantee: if you have been quoted a price, it should be good for two weeks. Off into town and spoke with Greg, whom I've seen before, and who made much of the fact that we both had the same name. No, nobody had registered my telephonic reservation yesterday. Much messing around, including (complicated) check if one of the three reserved machines had been reserved for me. No. He came to the conclusion that whoever had taken the call had written it down on a piece of paper for computer entry when he had got his head round the process, and recommended that I be given an invoice number next time.
The real issue was that they no longer had one in stock: I would have to take a display model.
By comparison, honouring the old price was not an issue, and after a good half hour they loaded a bubble-wrapped machine into the car.
Next off to Bunnings to buy the sack trolley and an adapter to run the dish washer off the same tap as the washing machine.
I never cease to be amazed at Bunnings. Cheap sack trolleys are frequently available on special round $30, but there was no special, so the price was $59.00. But for $58.90 I could get a combination thing that could either be a (much more robust) sack trolley or a horizontal trolley with four wheels. So I took that.
And the adapter? The taps look like this:
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I wanted a Y piece that allows me to connect two outputs. After 15 minutes of searching, first for the item and then for personnel, the best I could find was an adapter which required removing the tap. There's an alternative, of course: garden hose equipment, which is thread-compatible. But surely there's a saner way.
Back home and tried to remove the old washing machine, which had been installed in a most complicated way. It took us both about 45 minutes to get the hoses in and out of the cupboards, not helped by an oversize leak protection system on the Bosch machine, the complexities of the cupboards, holes that were too small, and somebody (almost certainly my favourite electrician, Jim Lannen) who had put a cable in the visibly inaccessible space between two holes. Here above and below the shelf under the sink after we had finished. The orange cord is a length of baling twine that we used to get the hoses through, and which we now can't remove:
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I was just about to drill a new hole through the right-hand wall when Yvonne finally managed to get the last hose through the hole. Nearly two days to replace the machine. And somehow it appears to be deeper than the old machine;
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Whirlpool WFE2B19X: first impressions
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
The first impression of the new dish washer is that it's very similar to the old one. There seems to be a convergence, and much of the internal layout is the same. But first, what do I need to do to get the trays to move smoothly? That's explained in the “DAILY REFERENCE GUIDE”, an abridged version of the USE AND CARE GUIDE (page 6 in the latter):
ADVICE REGARDING THE FIRST TIME USEAfter installation, remove the stoppers from the racks and the retaining elastic elements from the upper rack.
OK, that would explain the difficulties moving the upper tray. But where are the “retaining elastic elements”? No illustration. No other mention. There were these red things on the side:
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Was that it? No, they weren't elastic, and they didn't just snap out. It turned out that it was the mechanism for adjusting the (by default too low) height of the upper tray. The problem with the hard-to-move tray proved to be that one side had fallen out of the rails.
Next, set (non-existent) water hardness. Like the Bosch machine, it won't allow you to set 0° specifically, and the units are either °dH (a German unit) or °fH (French). And this in a unit with a model number showing that it is intended for Australia.
Setting the water hardness is mind-boggling: turn unit on. Turn unit off. Press the right-hand button (which looks like the Play/still button on a video recorder, but to which the instructions refer to as “Start/Pause” button) for 5 seconds until it beeps. Turn on again. Press the P button to cycle through this display until the correct LED lights:
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It seems that the left-most one has the value 1 in the hardness table, and the right-most one has the value 5.
Running the machine is similar: you turn it on and use the P button to cycle through the same display, this time meaning the programme. It's easy enough to read if you have your face at the same level as the display, presumably the conditions under which it was developed. But it's 76 cm above ground level when installed, and even if I kneel it's 50 cm lower than eye level. For those conditions, the non-intuitive icons are too small, and the white on black doesn't help. I took this photo (after many unsuccessful attempts to minimize reflections):
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It required 3 EV more exposure than this one of the Bosch, taken under identical conditions:
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And how messy it looks! I hadn't cleaned either panel before the photo, but this is a machine that I have barely used, compared with one that has been in constant use for 3 years.
I know now that I have to cycle through to the second from right (4 presses every time). These are irritations that aren't necessary. A different inscription on the front plate would help a lot. So would separate buttons for each programme, like the Bosch has on both sides of the display (above):
Yes, the Bosch has 12 push buttons instead of the 6 on the Whirlpool. But is that such a cost factor? It seems that the whole user interface has been badly thought out. The Whirlpool also doesn't tell you how far the cycle has progressed.
And the function? The baskets look very similar, but there are subtle differences. This one might be better than the Bosch for glasses. But it's not designed for plates:
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There's no way to put in normal size plates: the space isn't wide enough, and they end up at an angle. I'm puzzled about that. Still, things came out from the 30 minute “express” programme as they did from the 29 minute Bosch cycle, and this one also has a pre-wash cycle, so it's not all worse.
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More plumbing pain
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
While preparing dinner, Yvonne had problems. She turned on the tap in the kitchen: no water.
Damn, what's wrong with the water this time? More pump problems? No, in the bathroom everything worked fine. I had recently repaired the defective head that I had received six months ago. It worked for some time. Could it somehow have been clogged? Took the head off and checked. No, still no water. Then I discovered that the cold water worked; only the hot water was off.
Finally it dawned on me: the tap for the dish washer. There are two, one for hot water and one for cold water, here conveniently hidden behind the drain pipe:
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So far we have been using the hot water, but that's “not recommended” by the maker, and potentially it is part of the problem, so when I connected the new dish washer, I used the cold water. And I noted that the tap had been on—sloppy plumbers! Of course, I turned the hot tap off.
And that was the problem: the mixer tap is also connected to those taps. Turn on the hot water and all was well.
Really? No, the head was still off. Where's the hose? Retracted into the housing. That's OK: just push it up from beneath. But that just produced the hose, not the ferrule that connected it to the head. That was deep down inside the housing and not directly connected to the hose. Managed to get hold of it with needle-nosed pliers, but I could only pull it so far: there's a step constriction towards the end, and it got caught in that.
How to get it out? Centre the ferrule exactly. Not easy with the hose sticking through it. While thinking about it, idly messed around with my finger, and it came out. But what a mess for nothing!
| Wednesday, 9 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 9 May 2018 |
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More garden work
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Mick the gardener along today to do what we thought would not take long, but he managed to trim the entire lawn and the space round the water tanks with a whipper-snipper, so he didn't even finish what I had had for him. Now we have a row of lilacs along the north-east part of the garden.
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We'll see how many of them survive. We had more than we expected, so put some along the south-east side of the dog pen, and I planted the last two pieces in a pot to see whether they will survive. I'm pretty sure that they will.
The incomplete garden work included spreading the remaining mulch, which has been lying there in a heap for nearly 3 years. It had acquired a growth, a single large plant which Yvonne classified as ground cover.
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Mick had removed it, but Yvonne rescued it. Now we're looking for somewhere to (re)plant it.
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More daffodils
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Tuesday's daffodil isn't alone. Here's another in the north garden:
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Trump: Don't rely on the USA
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
So today Donald Trump did what nobody in his right mind would do: he withdrew the USA from the JPCOA, the agreement under which Iran undertook not to pursue nuclear weapons.
Why? He doesn't know either, it seems. When asked how it would improve security, he didn't answer: he just repeated the assertion that it would improve security.
More and more I get the impression that his view of the world is very narrow, limited to people who live in the same circles as he. Like the Israeli government, his attitude seems to be “the punishments will continue until you like us more”.
The main reasons he quotes seem to be unrelated to the agreement: quoting Benyamin Netanyahu's comedy show last week (“Iran lied to us about the situation before the agreement”), and their manufacture of ballistic weapons (which other countries do too), he decided that it would be safer to have an Iran that no longer agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons than one that did agree.
That's stupid enough by itself. You don't need to look far to see that the whole situation is one-sided. Why aren't they getting Israel to disarm? How are they going to get North Korea to sign an agreement when they've just torn up the last one of this nature? What is the world going to think of making agreements with the USA if he can just tear them up if he doesn't like them?
Yes, some people point out, correctly, that this wasn't a signed and ratified treaty, just an agreement. But that's not the way the rest of the world sees it, and Iran abode by the conditions, more than the USA did. Since when is no agreement better than a partial agreement?
The interesting thing is that so far all the other parties, Iran included, are willing to continue the deal, though there are complications. It seems that the USA will try to penalize any company doing business with Iran. And they can: these companies also do business in the USA. Even if there might be some companies who do (I can see a number of companies being formed to do business only with Iran), the threat will dissuade the majority.
I can see things getting worse in the course of time. How long will it be before the USA is sidelined by the rest of the world?
| Thursday, 10 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 10 May 2018 |
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Repairing the dish washer
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Topic: general | Link here |
So we have a functioning dish washer again. Time to repair the old one. That won't be fun, and it occurred to me that since the problem occurred, I had considered the possibility that the problem was related to the hot water input: a likely candidate for the problem is a sticking water inlet valve. What if it still works fine with cold water? If we took it in for repair, not only would it be a waste of money, it would be a waste of more money than necessary, because the technician would not be able to find the problem.
OK, that's (now) straightforward enough: wheel it into the laundry, where we intend to put it anyway, and try it out. Did that and... it worked!
That can have many reasons, of course. It could be coincidence, it could be that my guess was correct, or it could be that the problem is sporadic. For the time being we can leave it there until the problem manifests itself again.
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Towards middle east peace
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday presumed Iranian forces bombed illegal Israeli military bases in Syria (or, as the
Times of Israel puts it, “Iranian forces fire 20 rockets at Israel”). No casualties, and clearly this was in
retaliation for Israeli aggression in Syria. So Israel responded with fire and
fury against legal Iranian intelligence sites in Syria, as the Times reports.
Bad Iran! Poor Israel! How could they do such a thing?
How indeed? It's really hard to blame Iran (except for maybe miscalculating the response). They're in Syria legally, on invitation of the government, going about the activities to which they have been invited. Yes, of course the Syrian government is despicable, but there are questions of international law. Either you declare war on Syria, you negotiate with them, or you put up with what they're doing.
Israel, on the other hand, is continually breaching human rights. Instead of looking for peace with their immediate neighbours, they're encroaching on their land, putting them under siege, shooting civilians dead while unarmed in their own country, and continuing to occupy lands despite UN security council resolutions calling upon them to withdraw. And they built the military bases in exactly this last occupied territory, which really belongs to Syria. It's not hard to see how Iran could call this protecting Syria from Israel, though it's clear that that was not the reason.
Ah, I'm being anti-Semitic, am I not? Of course not. Anti-Semitism is real, but that doesn't mean that you can't disagree with Semitic people without being Anti-Semitic. This is a question of international law. And of course Iran is not blameless.
More to the point, though, it happened almost immediately after Donald Trump cancelled the JCPOA in the name of peace. Now Israel fears no retaliation. Bravo!
| Friday, 11 May 2018 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 11 May 2018 |
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Flooding!
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Topic: general | Link here |
It has been raining for a couple of days now. Yesterday morning we registered 15 mm of rain, and this morning it was 30. The front of the house was correspondingly wet:
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The self-priming drain pump didn't, and it took me several attempts until it grudgingly cleared itself.
On the other side of the house, the water tanks are full:
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A good thing that I finally put a cover over the water pump (blue cylinder on the left).
And just as we thought it was all over, we found a flood in the laundry:
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That's where we had put the “leaking” dish washer. But we hadn't been running it. Where did the water come from? It proved to be from the washing machine. We had moved the drain hose from the designated hole in the corner of the laundry sink and hung it over the edge of the sink so that we could connect the drain hose from the dish washer:
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And the sink drain had been plugged, so the water overflowed. Understandable, but why do these things all happen at once?
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Huevos a la tigre again
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Another experiment today with huevos a la tigre. This time I modified things somewhat. Here the exact values; I've updated the recipe for more plausible quantities.
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 210 g | potatoes | 1 | ||
| 73 g | onions | 1 | ||
| 10 g | garlic | 1 | ||
| 50 g | chorizo, cooked and sliced | 1 | ||
| oil or fat to fry | 1 | |||
| 60 g | tomatoes | 2 | ||
| 36 g | capsicum | 2 | ||
| 8 g | salt | 2 | ||
| 1 g | chili powder | 2 | ||
| 40 g | peas | 3 | ||
| 2 | eggs | 4 | ||
The result? Too much. And there was too much chili powder, too; about half would be sufficient. But frying instead of grilling is definitely the way to go, and it's also a lot easier:
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More plumbing and protection for Yvonne
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Into town today through the pouring rain, mainly to look for protective riding vests for Yvonne, but while we were there took another look for pipe adapters for the second dish washer, this time in the garden department of Bunnings. To my surprise I found a large number of “just what I need”, and in the end we picked up this adapter:
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A third tap makes sense for the dog bath, and though we found three way adapters, they were considerably more expensive than the four way adapters, so we got one of them instead, with the added bonus of a couple of hose attachments, just what we need for the dog bath.
Then on to what I thought were horse trials at the Ballarat Pony Club, an association with two web sites, but I can't find anything to establish what the event really was. The horses we saw there were definitely not ponies.
The weather was still foul, and we had a lot of difficulty finding our way in: no signage, mud and slush, but finally we found our way to the club house, where Michelle Nichols of Southern Star Saddlery had a tiny 3×3 tent full of equipment. Yvonne tried on a couple of body protectors. The first was just (carefully thought out) padding:
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Yvonne didn't like it: it was uncomfortable and constricting. So Michelle came up with the Point Two Pro Air Jacket, effectively an airbag for riders. It contains a cylinder of carbon dioxide which is opened by a jerk on a safety line
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She liked that a lot more, despite the price: $790. But it seems a small price for saving lives. Michelle didn't have any in stock, so we have time to consider it.
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Another day of dish washer annoyance
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Topic: general | Link here |
Back home, put the water adapter in place, not without difficulty: the threads appear to be poorly cut, and I needed a pipe wrench to put it in place, when fingers should have been enough. But try as I might, I couldn't get the hose for the dish washer to connect. The hose for the washing machine was no problem. On closer examination, I discovered that the thread starts about 2 mm from the end of the connector:
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Apparently the ring at the end is part of the tap, so I can't just file it off. And dish washer water hoses have some kind of leak protection inside, which limits the amount of thread available when connecting to a tap. For some reason washing machines don't have this inside, so I was able to connect it. Potentially I could press harder to connect it, but potentially I could also damage the plastic thread, and I'd guess that this hose is particularly expensive. So back the adapter goes.
Why is this all so complicated?
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More STF-8 fun
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Somehow I'm not really making friends with my Olympus STF-8 macro flash unit. Today I put it on the camera to take a focus stack of the thread on the water adapter—and it turned off the flash function in the camera. I haven't had that before, and it made it completely useless for taking the photos.
Further investigation shows that focus stacking and TTL flash are (currently) incompatible, and the camera simply turns flash off, though I could select manual modes. But then the lack of a test flash button means that I can't measure the light output. It's just plain easier with the old, el-cheapo Viltrox JY-670 Macro Ring Lite.
And then there's the issue of shadows. A ring light is supposed to eliminate them, but the STF-8 isn't a ring light. It does come with diffusers over the flash heads, though. A lot of good they do. Which is the one with the diffuser?
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It's the second one, but I only know that because I kept notes. I can't see any difference.
What a waste of money.
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Weekend dinner on Friday
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Margaret Swan is in town, so we're limited to fish and vegetarian food for the weekend meal. Yvonne chose trout, which she bought on Wednesday. She had concerns that it wouldn't stay fresh enough until Saturday, so we had our dinner today, where Margaret showed her disdain for convention by drinking a red Côtes du Rhone with the fish. And yes, the fish was more than fresh enough for truites à la meunière.
| Saturday, 12 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 12 May 2018 |
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Quo vadis Israel?
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Seventy years ago a dream came true for many Jewish people: the State of Israel was formed, displacing many of the previous inhabitants in violation of the Balfour declaration. But the inhabitants had repeatedly attacked the peace-loving Jews.
Israel rapidly became the most modern country in the region. That's understandable, since the inhabitants had emigrated from European countries, where many had been highly educated people. They formed a modern democracy, while the Arabs around them were barely educated. Small wonder that the Arabs hated the Jews: they took their land and made it so much better than they had ever been able to do.
Attacks continued, and apart from being a modern democratic state, Israel also became heavily armed. In 1967 there was a war with the neighbouring countries, in which Israel achieved a decisive victory. They also took the opportunity to occupy the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the West Bank of the Jordan and, much more importantly, the third most holy site in Islam, the Haram esh-Sharif.
And then? Israel had demonstrated their military might, and there were few further Arab attacks (the Yom Kippur War comes to mind, but that, too, was won by Israel). Then there were international efforts to normalize relationships: friends don't invade each other. But that was only partially successful, and Israel not only delayed handing back the occupied territories, they built heavily fortified settlements on them in defiance of international law.
Round here it gets difficult to believe in their good faith. If they want normalization of relationships, they need to make friends, not enemies. But they have one strong friend, the USA, who have a veto in the United Nations Security Council, which enables them to flout condemnation after condemnation. Without that backing, they would never have got away with what they have done. And instead of liberating the occupied territories, they treat the inhabitants there like Untermenschen, something particularly shameful for people of their background.
A couple of years ago it looked as if the USA had had enough, and they did abstaine from the vote on United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which states that Israel's settlement activity constitutes a "flagrant violation" of international law and has “no legal validity”. The resolution thus passed otherwise unanimously.
But that was an old, worn-out president. Then Donald Trump came to power and backed Israel as much as possible, performing silly actions like moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem (and not specifically West Jerusalem). I doubt that Trump understood what he was doing there, but that's no excuse.
Thus emboldened, Israel has become even more rabid. It boggles the mind that they can claim that shooting unarmed people on their own territory can be in Israel's national interest, let alone self-defence. And their repeated violations of their neighbours' territorial integrity, most recently to destroy observation posts in Syria, is just plain illegal. Even their excuse (“Iran attacked Israel”) is wrong on at least one count: whoever did the attack targeted illegal Israeli posts on Syrian territory, the Golan Heights. And so far I haven't seen any evidence that this was an Iranian action. That's not their style, though they may have instigated it.
Where do we go from here? In three days it will be Nakba Day, the day after the 70th anniversary of the declaration of the State of Israel. What will happen then? How will this continue? For peace' sake somebody should restrain Israel.
And how democratic is Israel still? There are currently efforts under way to weaken the Israeli Supreme Court. For some reason, none of this has got the attention of the world press, but it's a worrying development.
Looking back, I'm beginning to wonder whether my goodwill towards Israel was not a little formed by press opinion, even 50 years ago. They violated the territorial integrity of their neighbours then too, without declaring war. And other “good guy” countries currently include Saudi Arabia, known for extreme violations of human rights and warfare in Yemen. On the other hand, Iran is the bad guy because they—shudder—manufacture ballistic weapons and have explored the possibility of nuclear weapons. Fine, upstanding countries like Israel would never do that!
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The pleasure of two dish washers
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Topic: food and drink, general | Link here |
The morning after the weekly Big Meal has lots of dishes to wash. But now we have two dish washers! Managed to fill both of them, and still had stuff left over.
The Bosch machine once again worked without a problem, but the location is really not ideal. In addition, I need to think of how to partition the load between the two machines. Fill and run them alternatively? Glasses and plates in one, cooking vessels in the other? It'll take me a while to decide.
| Sunday, 13 May 2018 | Dereel | |
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Induction cooking surges
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Topic: food and drink, general | Link here |
Boiling some noodles today was a good example of the “surging” that the new ALDI “Stirling SICT60” induction cooker does on lower levels, here 5 out of 9:
I find that irritating, and it would be worth paying more money for a cooktop that was more even. But how can I find out in advance?
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More planting
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
I got an exchange for the incorrectly packaged Crocus sativus on Tuesday, a bag of tulips. Today I got round to planting them, three in the new bed in front of the shade area, and the other 3 in front of my bedroom window. Also planted a Cyathea cooperi, a kind of tree fern that Yvonne bought a while back. I had no idea where to put it, but it was clearly calling out to be planted. We'll see how it fares.
| Monday, 14 May 2018 | Dereel | |
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Spare ribs sous vide
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Topic: food and drink, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
For weeks I've had a rack of pork ribs in the freezer waiting for a recipe. Today was the day. It seems that there are two basic recipes, one Western, one Chinese.
Which should I try? I really don't have much of an idea. One of the issues is clearly getting the ribs tender enough despite the large quantity of connective tissue. Sous-vide? After some searching I found The Food Lab's Complete Guide to Sous Vide Barbecue Pork Ribs, which goes into the kind of detail I was looking for.
But the recipe itself was less inspiring. They write “See the full recipe here for exact measurements”, but they lie. The recipe contains quantities like “2 whole racks St. Louis-cut pork ribs”, without specifying a weight, and, for example, “1/3 cup paprika, 1/3 cup dark brown sugar 1/4 cup kosher salt”.
Yes, I know that a US American cup is 236.6 ml, or maybe 238 ml, or then again perhaps 240 ml. But how much does it weigh? That depends on the consistency, and with the exception of “kosher salt” they don't say that. On the other hand, you could expect 60 ml of salt to weigh more than 40 g, and that's a lot for “two mumble pork ribs”.
And then there are the ingredients. Garlic salt? Not in this household. “Red pepper”? Clearly it's not “Paprika”, because that's there too. But probably too pedas for Yvonne. Kosher salt? In the past it took me a long time to understand the term. All salt is kosher, but kosher salt is very coarse salt intended to take the moisture out of meat to make it kosher. But why do you need coarse salt for a marinade?
In the end I guessed, and came up with the following quantities for the marinade (if that's the right word for a dry collection of spices):
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 700 g | pork spare ribs | 1 | ||
| 7 g | paprika powder (edelsüß) | 2 | ||
| 15 g | brown sugar | 2 | ||
| 5 g | salt | 2 | ||
| 10 g | garlic | 2 | ||
| 7.5 g | coriander | 2 | ||
| 2 g | pepper | 2 | ||
| 5 g | yellow mustard seed | 2 | ||
| 1.5 g | oregano, dried | 2 | ||
And then? Next come 24 hours cooking sous vide. I chose a temperature of 67°.
By sheer coincidence, in the evening we saw an episode of “Young Sheldon” which included a recipe for smoked brisket. It was, in fact, very similar, and I later discovered (on reading) that this recipe is a modified recipe for smoked pork ribs (it did include, optionally, “liquid smoke”, which also sounds dubious). We'll find out tomorrow.
| Tuesday, 15 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 15 May 2018 |
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Panic! fsck! fsck! fsck! FSCK!
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Backing up photos this morning had a funny twist at the end. Normally it ends with something like:
But today it hung after the df output. Why? Flushing buffers to the disk? The script umounts the disk after the df, so that would be the time. But no, nothing. And gradually the rest of the system hung as well.
After about 5 minutes, the system reset and rebooted. fsck! One of the disadvantages of my current setup is that for some reason the /home file system requires an fsck at startup, and due to the size of the file system it takes about 50 minutes. /home uses soft updates, which should mean that fsck is deferred until after system startup, but that doesn't work for reasons that I will investigate if I ever get round to upgrading the system. And, as so often, I got:
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OK, no need to continue with that, so I ran fsck manually. fsck! And as so often, it also discovered problems:
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That's the same directory. fsck! But that ran through: the repeat is due to a race condition where certain problems require a repeat of an earlier phase, and the second time through is almost invariably successful. On thinking about the matter, it seems that maybe it would have been a better idea to let the first fsck complete rather than start the manual fsck.
Finally it was done, and I was back to the single-user prompt. To be on the safe side, let's reboot. And it found the file system still dirty. FSCK! Does reboot not sync before rebooting? I have some recollection about that from the bad old System V days, but the man page doesn't say anything one way or the other. Note to grog: check the code.
And this time it fsck'ed the photo disk as well. Normally I do that after booting. Could it be that there's some other condition that must be fulfilled for online fsck? Note to grog: check the code.
After reboot, discovered that the system had paniced:
That's out of devfs_delete(), which suggests that it relates to the external disk that I was just umounting. But that doesn't match being called through namei. Should I look at the dump?
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Garden flowers in late autumn
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Middle of the month, and late autumn: time for my monthly garden photos. We've been here for over 3 years now, and it's interesting to compare these photos with the ones I took three years after moving into Kleins Road.
It has been relatively cool lately, but a number of things are still blooming. The last of the Cannas are still flowering:
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There's even one last Clematis that isn't quite dead yet:
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And the last roses of summer have long outlived that season:
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A number of flowers are showing signs of not having had enough water in the summer. The Alyssum that looked so unhappy in February now seems to have completely recovered:
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And the Strelitzia reginae are finally looking almost ready to flower:
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I don't expect them to flower this year. But then, last month I hadn't expected the Hibiscus in the garden to flower, and all the buds did. It's now more or less done flowering. Here later last month and today:
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Another group of shrubs that seem to be flowering late, probably also because of the watering issues, are the Hebes.
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On the other hand, I think that now is the correct time for the Senna aciphylla, which has already flowered once this year:
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One of the more puzzling things are the Tropaeolums. These have been there for nearly 3 years, and have hardly grown. Here two years ago and today:
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On the other hand, the ones I planted this spring along with the climbing roses have also climbed considerably. The flowers in the second photo are about 1.2 m above ground:
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I have some significant concerns about the soil south of the house.
At the other end of the year, more spring bulbs are flowering:
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And the various hedges around the front of the house are also showing signs of growth:
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The Carpobrotus that we planted in the island in the entrance 17 months ago has really taken over the island:
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Both it and the smaller version are flowering now, rather unusually.
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Maybe it's related to the watering.
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Spare ribs sous vide: the proof of the pudding
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Cooking the ribs suffered a setback overnight: the sous-vide cooker turned itself off, and by morning the temperature was back to 22°. Warmed it up again, faster than I expected, and carried on until evening.
And then? Looking at the photos in the article, the difference between 16 and 24 hours didn't seem to make much difference, so I decided to do it anyway.
Next, the recipe goes on to suggest baking for between 20 and 40 minutes at 150°. With that treatment, you hardly need to cook them sous-vide. I decided to do it until the surface was dry, which took about 10 minutes. I also did it at a more traditional 180°, which may have been a mistake.
The result?
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Not bad, but for my liking a bit dry and uninteresting. How do I improve it? Lower temperature all round would be one thing to do, and a different marinade (Chinese?) would be another. But Yvonne decided that she still doesn't like ribs, and it seems that nothing I can do can change that opinion, so it's probably one that got away.
| Wednesday, 16 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 16 May 2018 |
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Ransomware!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
CJ Ellis showed up this afternoon with the news that he had been targeted by ransomware a year ago, and hadn't bothered to tell me. Instead he had paid to have it unlocked. That's bad enough, but now they came and told him that the unlocking was only for one year, and now they wanted more money.
The interesting thing is that they had given him a lot of company contact details, and he had written them down. I scanned in the information: a company calling itself “Web Security Experts”, also “Kastra Logic” (not surprisingly marked as a scammer), with a phone number 1800-815-923, support email info@klogicsupport.com, also a web site http://www.helpme.net/ and a Facebook number (whatever that means). For his money he was promised 1 year of technical support and 3 years of security. . In return he paid his money and gave them the admin password for his machine.
OK, we have two ways of looking at this: there's a good chance that they've planted some malware on his machine, so the correct thing to do is to reinstall the system from scratch. I'm pretty sure he doesn't have anything of importance stored on his machine, so that's a possibility. But it's also a pain, so for the first we changed all his passwords. If he still has problems, we can still reinstall.
Of course, the first thing after changing the passwords was to confirm that they were correct. So I tried logging into Gmail with the new password. Not quite what I expected:
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What does it mean, it doesn't recognize this “device”? It's the one I've been using all along. OK, move on to another browser, and that worked. But why is Google such a pain?
As if to prove the point, CJ called me up later with the information that somebody in the USA had tried to access his account:
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In the USA? That must be the ransomware provider. Do we have a domain name?
=== grog@www (/dev/pts/0) ~ 1 -> host 45.63.116.55
That's my machine in Germany. Why is it telling me that it's in the USA? What do geographic services claim?
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That's completely correct. The site also offered the location of my home IP address for free:
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So why does Google get it so completely wrong? It puts my home address in Melbourne, 130 km away, while others can trace it at least to the Ballarat POI. But that's peanuts compared to getting the wrong continent.
Still, with that it's easier to decipher the puzzling “don't recognize your device” message. That browser uses ffm as a proxy. But instead of saying “we don't recognize your (proxy) IP address”, they say that they don't recognize the device. And how does this work with mobile phones?
Once Google was at the forefront of technology, and in many ways it probably still is. But there's an amazing amount of cruft that they're not fixing. 11 years ago I found their maps irritatingly inaccurate, but they haven't really improved things much. And the smart phone generation seem to think that it's wonderful, completely ignoring the fact that things were once much better. O tempora! O mores!
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Grinding pets
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
A week or so ago we received a nail grinder for the dogs, since we had had our fun cutting the nails. It seems to work OK, but today I came across the envelope that it came in and read more carefully:
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The mind boggles,
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ANZ: We don't like you
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne wanted to pay for something via the ANZ web banking service today. For the first time ever, they came up with one of these really stupid “security questions”: “Where was your wedding reception held?”. Yvonne didn't enter anything, just pressed “Continue”. Wrong, Fool! Your account has been blocked!
Clearly this isn't something that anybody would do with intent to defraud, though it's a good way to ensure denial of service. So we called up and asked for the account to be unblocked. Spoke to IB (that's what he said his name was), who asked all sorts of questions which are easy to answer when online, and very difficult otherwise. He also refused to let me hear the questions that he was asking a by now terrified Yvonne.
Why is this so difficult? The “security questions” are just plain stupid (though Yvonne's answers are not guessable): the answers need to be entered exactly as written, including capitalization and punctuation, so they need to be saved in a file. I have no idea how people can use them with mobile phones. Put in yet another complaint—I think. IB gave me a reference number for the call and said that he would enter the complaint. I wonder if he will.
| Thursday, 17 May 2018 | Dereel | |
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Buying second-hand cameras
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
For nostalgia's sake, I've been thinking for some time of buying an Edixa SLR, like the ones I had in the 1960s. They pop up on eBay from time to time, usually in pretty rough condition: despite being German, the quality was never good, as I noted shortly after I bought it over 50 years ago. Nowadays it's almost impossible to find one where the leatherette coating on the body isn't peeling off.
The last one went away for far too much money. But then it came again. It took me a while to recognize that it wasn't the same camera. Here the last one and this one:
Both of them come with a waist-level finder (shown on the first camera) and a pentaprism (shown on the second camera), so that difference in appearance is not significant. But the lens Steinheil Cassar 50/2.8) is the same in each case, and I had to compare the serial numbers to confirm that they are in fact different cameras.
They wanted $95, which is pretty much my limit, so I waited to see if there were any bids. No, and the auction ended today. So off to JustSnipe to put a snipe on it. Network error. But somehow it wasn't complete: I was able to place a snipe. But then it occurred to me that eBay had once again forced me to change my password. So I needed to fix that. Network error. And I couldn't get through.
Dammit, there are other snipers, including Gixen. Why didn't I use that? I see I had login details. But they were old, worn-out magic words, and I had to register again. Lots of noise, and when I finally found out how to snipe, I was placed in a 60 s wait loop. Finally that worked, and I placed my snipe. But unlike JustSnipe, they don't update the page automatically, and I couldn't find a way to do so manually.
Watching the last seconds. Yes, I won. Which snipe? JustSnipe just said Network error, and Gixen didn't say anything. I couldn't find a page to give me further information. They have a history function, but you have to pay for it! It wasn't until much later, when I logged in again, that I confirmed what I had expected, that Gixen had placed the winning snipe. JustSnipe just said “Error #20000”. If I could rely on JustSnipe, they're clearly the better choice.
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Human rights violations: their fault, not ours
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
The recent violence in Israel and Gaza has really upset me. How can a country that claims to be democratic commit such atrocities, such flagrant violations of human rights? Especially Israel, whose founders were subject to such atrocities themselves!
There was question about the matter on Quora. Do you think that the deaths of 60 Palestinians and the injury of over 1500 others in the last few days is the direct result of Trump's decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem?
No, of course not. The deaths of the Palestinians are due to IDF snipers firing on them. That's a completely separate issue, and that's how I answered. But that's not how many answered. “No they are a result of HAMAS actions, and also Hamas taking pot shots at their own people to encourage them to be more violent”, “The deaths are a direct result of incitement by the Palestinian leadership”, “Hamas used the opening of the Embassy as an excuse to stage a performance for the media”.
And that justifies shooting unarmed civilians dead? Ah, but they weren't civilians: most of them were Hamas members. And of course that justifies everything.
I wouldn't be so horrified if there weren't so many people who believe in this kind of justification. No wonder so many countries want to destroy Israel. Donald Trump wants regime change in Iran for far lesser (but still partially valid) reasons. Why not replace the current Israeli regime with one that believes in peace and equality? It could be a bloodless revolution.
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With friends like these...
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
President Donald T. made the news today in a big way:
Looking at the latest decisions of Donald Trump, someone could even think: With friends like that, who needs enemies?” ... “But, frankly speaking, Europe should be grateful by President Trump. Because, thanks to him, we got rid of all the illusions. He has made us realize that if you need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of your arm.
Clearly this President Donald T is not the one we all know and detest. He's Donald Tusk, the President of the European Union. And that's symptomatic of another issue that the US citizens also don't seem to understand: there's more to the JCPOA than Israel's rabid claims that Iran is out to destroy them.
| Friday, 18 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 18 May 2018 |
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Flooding!
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Last week we had a double flood: outside from the rain, inside from an overrun laundry sink.
Today it didn't rain. But somehow we managed to do even better with the laundry sink today, flooding not just in the laundry, but into the pantry, the garage, and the cupboard opposite:
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Unfortunately I missed the best photo: Piccola carefully stepping through water about 1.5 cm deep, then trying to jump onto the washing machine, slipping, falling flat on her back into the water, and running off, disgusted.
We've removed the plug from the laundry sink. But on investigation, there's another drain connection on the downpipe, so we should be able to connect the dish washer there.
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ANZ: Confirming your expectations
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
The other night I had asked IB to put in a formal complaint about ANZ's “security measures”, specifically asking that the response be from somebody in authority, thus rejecting the telephone complaints line asking that the response be in writing, and not via their broken mail system. I noted at the time that I had little hope of a sensible reply.
Today those fears were confirmed. Yvonne received an email:
How many confirmations of my complaints in one useless text:
A lot of this could be because IB didn't report the problem correctly, of course. But then they should have listened to the transcript.
The only thing that stops me closing my accounts is that I fear that other banks are just as bad.
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Hibiscus flowering again
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
My old Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, cloned from a tree at my uncle Max's nearly 10 years ago, took a pause from flowering after repotting, growing considerably in the period. Now the first of many buds is open, about 2 m above the ground:
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STF-8: flash of superlatives
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Nearly 4 years ago I bought a VILTROX JY-670 Macro Ring Lite ring flash unit. It was relatively cheap, and did what I wanted to—almost: it doesn't have any kind of automatic flash regulation.
So when I was offered an Olympus STF-8 macro flash unit for a (relatively) good price, I jumped at it. I summarized my first impressions on arrival: complicated, expensive, and weak.
Today I took some photos to compare the Viltrox with the STF-8. As mentioned, the problem with the Viltrox is the lack of automatic exposure. As a result, and despite a light meter, it took me three attempts to get a good photo. The examples here are without any post-processing correction, though the photo above has been corrected and cropped from the third of these images:
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By comparison, the first photo with the Olympus looked just about right:
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But look at those shadows on the wall!
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That's the difference between a ring flash and a double flash. OK, we can fix that: use the diffusers provided:
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Oops, not enough light for that. The subject was 0.9 m away, and I took these photos at f/14. That requires a guide number of about 12.6, more than the flash can provide, and possibly an explanation for the somewhat dark appearance of the first image. OK, take at f/8:
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The image looks better exposed than the first one, possibly confirming that the flash unit can't quite handle it. But there seems to be no improvement at all in the shadows!
Somehow this flash unit is a superlative in many ways. On the positive side it gives good exposure within its limits. On the negative side, however:
In summary, the purchase seems to be an failure. I wonder whether it's worth buying a mecablitz 15 MS-1. It has a guide number of 15, more than 6 times the power of the STF-8. It has a flash test button. It has some positively bizarre functions like remote function (for a ring flash!). About the only down side is that, according to the manual, it comes with only 3 adapter rings, 52 mm, 55 mm and 58 mm. Those will fit three of my lenses, including the other two macro lenses, but not the ones I want to use it with. Never mind, it's cheap enough to get a 46 mm to 52 mm or 55 mm adapter ring; in fact I already have one of each.
On the other hand, I read at B&H Photo Video that it comes with 52, 55, 58, 62, 67, and 72 mm adapter rings. But then they also sell a 62 mm adapter for the bargain price of only $22, roughly 25% of the price of the Viltrox. I really don't understand why the makers skimp on such cheap details.
Here's a comparison of the features:
| Feature | Viltrox | mecablitz | Olympus | |||
| JY-670 | 15 MS-1 | STF-8 | ||||
| TTL flash | no | yes | yes | |||
| Flash test button | yes | yes | no | |||
| Guide number | 14 | 15 | 6 | |||
| Price | 90 | 312 | 479 |
The prices are today's prices in USD, mainly from B&H Photo Video. They don't carry Viltrox, however, so that price is from eBay.
In passing, I need to look at the Exif decoding. It (currently) seems to be claiming that I took the STF-8 photos with manual setting of 1/10 power. That's not the case (in fact, it's not a possible setting): I had it set on TTL auto.
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Where's that kangaroo?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Borzois are sight hounds, but they certainly do enough sniffing. There are many trails where kangaroos cross roads, and every time we pass one Nikolai has a good sniff. Here's a particularly good example:
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He's standing almost exactly on a clearly defined path across the road, but he's reacting to smell. Presumably he's looking in the “they went thataway” direction.
| Saturday, 19 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 19 May 2018 |
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A day in the kitchen
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Somehow I seem to have spent the entire day in the kitchen today, tidying up and cooking. I had planned to make both ayam lemak and chicken curry, but somehow I didn't find time, and I ended up making only ayam lemak from all of the chicken. Why is it so tiring?
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Bravo Erdoğan!
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is not my favourite politician. It takes the likes of Rodrigo Duterte, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Donald Trump to keep him from the bottom of my list. But today he did something that was long overdue: compare the State of Israel to the Nazi régime. To quote Haaretz:
"There is no difference at all between the persecution inflicted on the Jews in Europe 75 years ago and the brutality faced by our brothers in Gaza", Erdogan [sic] said.
"The children of people who were tortured in concentration camps in every way during World War II unfortunately today resort to methods against innocent Palestinians that are in no way inferior to those of the Nazis."
Yes, that's significantly overstating the case. But in each case they killed innocent people in flagrant violation of human rights. What Israel needs to do now is to prove that they're not like the Nazis. And to do that, they need to step back from the tactics they've been using in recent decades. But what do we get? From The Times of Israel :
Erdogan, who supports the Hamas terror group that rules Gaza, ...
It's a matter of opinion whether Hamas is a terrorist group or not. They are the legitimate government of the Gaza Strip. They also have a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, which comes closer to the definition of terrorists. But who has heard of them? No, it's Hamas that's normally mentioned. And I haven't been able to find anything that shows specific support by Erdoǧan for Hamas.
In passing, it's shameful that the government of Australia has joined the USA in opposing an investigation into the human rights abuses. But of course they're probably worried about the possibility of an investigation of human rights in their tropical gulags.
| Sunday, 20 May 2018 | Dereel | |
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Still more housework
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Topic: general | Link here |
Somehow the housework isn't letting up. Another 3 dish washer loads (5 since yesterday morning) are probably one way to measure the amount of work that I did, and there was enough left over in the evening for a sixth load. Thank God it's not always like this.
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The 18 minute umount
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Time for another photo backup today, as usual with Yvonne waiting impatiently for it to finish. And it took its time: instead of the usual 15 minutes it took 25. And then I had the same thing I saw last weekend: it hung after the final df.
That's exactly what happened on Tuesday. On that occasion I had suspected that it was something to do with umount flushing buffers, but I didn't see any activity. Today I took another look. Yes, umount was running. The disk was no longer mounted, but there was I/O activity, quite a bit in fact: round 150 32 kB transfers per second, 4.8 MB/s, probably enough to saturate the slow external disk. OK, that makes sense—up to a point. After 3 minutes I was puzzled, but given that I had a panic last time, I let it run.
18 minutes! That's over 5 GB of I/O! Why? In each case, I had deleted about 150 GB of temporary files, and the rsync process had to remove them on the backup. But that's a lot of metadata.
Tuesday's panic was related to soft updates. Why? Why should the backup disk run with soft updates? But it was:
Time to reconsider.
| Monday, 21 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 21 May 2018 |
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More house construction issues
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
For a while I've noticed that one of the power points in the kitchen was loose:
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As I said, “typical of my favourite electrician, Jim Lannen”. But there's not much of an issue: remove the face plate and screw the frame back tightly into its socket.
Unfortunately, that's not that simple: the frame is broken!
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How did that happen? It could have also been the tiler who replaced the ornamental tiles that he had installed upside-down. Certainly at that time the frame was still intact:
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So it seems that it was screwed back in again with so much tension that it finally broke. For once, Jim is off the hook.
| Tuesday, 22 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 22 May 2018 |
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Weather: too bad for weather
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
The weather lately has been particularly unpleasant, almost British: rain. Only 10 mm, but a drizzle that lasted all day long. And for some reason the two halves of my weather station stopped communicating with each other.
Why? Took the internal unit to the door of the verandah, where it's in direct line of sight with the external unit, about 20 m away. No reaction after a couple of minutes. Batteries? Changed them, and how about that, it worked again. Problem solved, especially as I discovered, as so often, that one of the batteries was weaker than the other two.
And then it failed again! Remove batteries, replace them. Worked again. What's wrong with this device? It really looks as if the retry logic isn't as effective as the initial discovery. But why was it failing in the first place? This repeated a couple of times, and the situation gradually became worse, to the point that I gave up. From 18:22 there was no communication at all.
But what caused it? While removing batteries from the internal unit, I discovered that they're not needed when it's connected via USB: it gets the power like that. So the idea with batteries was wrong in the first place. Are the solar-charged batteries in the external unit discharged because of the grey weather? From experience with the predecessor, a set of charged batteries runs for about 6 months, so that seems unlikely. Moisture on the walls? Would that significantly impede the reception? That wouldn't explain why it worked when I went to the verandah. Maybe there's more than one issue in play.
Reception finally came back round 1:30. At least that suggests that it wasn't the batteries.
Sometimes I wonder if it isn't time to stop worrying about perfect availability.
| Wednesday, 23 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 23 May 2018 |
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Mobile phone cameras: how good?
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Topic: photography, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has has a bright idea: get rid of the sofa couch in the music room, because it's too uncomfortable. Is that an issue? It almost never gets used. Here it is currently, giving a good idea of the amount of use it gets:
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So we agreed to give it to Amber Fitzpatrick, who will get it in the next few days.
And then Yvonne had an idea: we need a sofa bed. She found one on Facebook for only $50. How do I like the look of it?
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What terrible photos! I can barely recognize anything. What went wrong there? Yvonne says “what do you expect from a phone camera?”, but the fact is that I expect something a whole lot better than that, even in low light. To prove the point, I took some photos with my Samsung GT-I9100T, really not the best of phone cameras:
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They're recognizable as long as you don't look too closely:
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So what was wrong with the original photos? No idea. Anyway, today Yvonne went and took a look at it today, liked it, and took a real photo:
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At least I can recognize something there. So for $50 and a lot of carrying things around, we'll be back to the status quo.
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A new cat door
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Topic: general, animals, opinion | Link here |
We've been thinking about a cat door in the laundry for years, and even bought a door to fit into the glass outside door. Then, two months ago, we discovered that installation costs would exceed $800 because we needed a new glass panel. Since then we've been wondering if it's worth it, particularly since it would probably need to be removed if we sell the house.
But there are alternatives, like door panels that fit beside the glass door. We had looked at one for the dogs three years ago, but there wasn't enough space. Something similar is available for cats, as described in this video. So today Yvonne picked up one at Bunnings, and I installed it.
The good news: it works. Here it is without the sealing strips:
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The opening for the door wasn't exactly wide before. Now it's barely acceptable at 37 cm, but we can get through with no difficulty—if we turn sideways:
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Why didn't I install the sealing strips? Despite what the salesperson at Bunnings said, I can't find a good way to lock it. He had suggested putting the catch for the lock on the panel, but that makes no sense:
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Apart from the fact that there's no way to attach the catch to the panel, it's not anchored firmly enough. The method supplied with the panel is a bracket to be screwed to the sliding door with a bolt through the frame. I'll defer that until I'm sure that we're going to keep the thing.
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Understanding Edixa cameras
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
A little over 50 years ago I bought an Edixa-Mat Flex S camera body, and about 18 months later I replaced it with an Edixa-Mat Reflex D. That camera was stolen from me in Milano in September 1976.
For reasons partly of nostalgia and partly of interest, I recently bought a similar camera on eBay. It arrived today, and it's not as similar to the Edixa-Mat Reflex D as I thought. It doesn't have the slow shutter speeds of the D model (which, unusual for the day, had shutter speeds down to 9 seconds), and it also doesn't have an automatic diaphragm release. In those respects it's closer to my first Edixa camera, the Edixa-Mat Flex S, though I think that that camera didn't have speeds below 1/25 s. It also comes with a 50 mm f/2.8 Steinheil Cassar lens
Round about this point I came up with two basic questions: How old is this camera, and what's the difference between the individual models? It seems that in the entire lifetime of the Edixa reflexes (1954 to about 1970), the basic appearance hardly changed. And it also seems that the naming differences didn't necessarily make it to the inscription on the front panel. This page [apparently dead] gives one view of the naming. With the older models with no electronics, it seems that we have these sub models of the Edixa Reflex, though it's not clear that the Edixa-Mat Reflex was any different:
| Model | Year | Shutter (s) | Interchangeable | Instant return | Auto | Exposure | Self | |||||||
| viewfinder | mirror | diaphragm | meter | timer | ||||||||||
| Reflex | 1954 | 1/1000 - 1/25 | yes | no | no | no | no | |||||||
| Reflex S | ? | 1/500 - 1/25 | yes | no | no | no | no | |||||||
| Reflex | 1955-1965 | 1/1000 - 1 | yes | no | no | no | no | |||||||
| Reflex A | ? | 1/1000 - 1 | yes | no | no | no | no | |||||||
| Reflex B, Ba | ? | 1/1000 - 1 | yes | yes | yes | no | no | |||||||
| Reflex C, Ca | ? | 1/1000 - 1 | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | |||||||
| Reflex D, Da | ? | 1/1000 - 9 | yes | yes | yes | no | yes |
There are many more models there, but round this point I'm beginning to doubt their accuracy. For example, it claims that the Edixa Flex of 1959 included an exposure meter, which sounds very dubious to me, especially since it also states that the Flex of 1964 didn't have one. And my Edixa-Mat Flex S isn't even mentioned. I'll have to compare with other descriptions.
In any case, that table suggests that my new camera is either the first or the third on this list. After all, that's what it says on the front panel, and the features match. But when? My Flex S had the serial number 259171, and the Reflex D had the serial number 273753. The new camera has the serial number 152145, clearly much earlier.
This page has some indications:
| Model | Serial number | Year | ||
| Edixa Reflex | 102421 | 1956 | ||
| Edixa Reflex A | 111726 | 1956 | ||
| Edixa Standard | 204857 | 1960 | ||
| Edixa-Mat Reflex D | 265569 | 1961 |
What other indications are there? The instruction manual has, on the back, “Manufacturers of precision cameras for 30 years”. Wirgin made their first camera in 1924, so that would imply 1954. But I don't think the camera is that old. Another indication might be the film sensitivity dial around the film rewind knob: it's rated from 6 ASA/9° DIN to 400 ASA/27° DIN. By contrast, my Asahi Pentax SV, which I estimate to be from the early 1960s, has markings from 10 ASA to 1600 ASA. In general, it seems reasonable to date the current camera to round 1957 or 1958. The table above also suggests that my first Edixa-Mat was made in 1961, and the second Reflex D probably 1962.
Apart from that, how does it feel after all these years? I never thought as much of the Edixas as I did of the Pentaxes, and this camera confirms this. The viewfinder is much dimmer, and the image is smaller. The lens has no assistance at all for full-aperture focusing: the only way to set the aperture is fully manually, and that's difficult without resetting the focus. But I recall that even at the time I had a low opinion of the Cassar. Overall, the Edixa seems so much more primitive than the Pentax. Given that it was one of the more popular German cameras, it's not surprising that the German camera industry succumbed to the Japanese, all the time looking down their noses at them.
| Thursday, 24 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 24 May 2018 |
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Assam laksa again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
It's been a while since I last made assam laksa for breakfast. I did so today, this time with rice noodles that were much thinner than they should be.
On the whole, not bad. But some details need fixing. Here's package and the recipe on the back:
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So I made my 1.5 litres. Too much. I think next time 1.2 litres would be about right.
And rice noodles continue to amaze. In the past I've discovered noodles that were supposed to be softened for a minute or so in cold water, but which in fact needed to be cooked for 12 minutes. This one wasn't quite as bad: it wanted to be left in cold water for 5 minutes:
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At the end of this time they were still hard. After 12 minutes, they were still hard, so I put them in hot (just off boiling) water for 5 minutes, after which they were al dente.
Here's the result:
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Fixing mplayer?
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been using mplayer for over 15 years, and in the course of that time I have found enough cause for complaint. But it works, sort of, and the code is clear enough that I was able to add missing functionality, notably the ability to store file positions and to display information on the screen in a useful (for me) format. As a result, I have a set of patches that I have to apply to every new version.
But there are still things that I need to do. MPEG positioning is only to a key frame, and there's no way to step backwards frame by frame—something that we had with VCRs 30 years ago. I have been considering adding support for some time, but it's non-trivial.
And then I went looking for alternatives, and discovered that mpv supports positioning to any frame (“HR seek”, they call it). And how about that, I have it installed already. Why didn't I use it? I tried six months ago and discovered that it had no support for lirc.
At the time that was enough reason not to consider it further, but in the meantime I've given up on lirc too. The whole interface was wrong, and I don't find it inconvenient to have a real keyboard on my lap instead. So now I can use mpv, and I only needed a few changes to get it to do almost what I want it to do. It has a configuration file ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf:
That last line bases on undocumented behaviour. By default, OSD (“on-screen display”) information is removed again after 1 s, something that irritates me. osd-duration specifies a different timeout in milliseconds. But 0 means “keep it on”. It's not documented, so it's not clear whether this is a feature or a bug from the implementer's viewpoint.
It also has the option of saving the current position in ~/.config/mpv/watch_later/. I'm not sure if I like that as much as my concept of storing the information in the same directory as the video, but it does the job.
And these two features effectively mirror my patches to mplayer. Apart from that, I need to consider my mmp script, which I used for starting mplayer with my personal options. Many of them are superfluous with mpv, but at least keeping a record of what I have seen isn't. But it's trivial compared to what works out of the box.
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Kangaroo tracks
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Topic: animals | Link here |
We see lots of kangaroo tracks when walking the dogs, but these are particularly obvious:
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| Friday, 25 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 25 May 2018 |
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Traffic Nazis again
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Two months ago Yvonne received a “speeding” ticket: I had been driving her car down an almost empty freeway in good weather and good condition, but I had been fined nearly $200 for driving at 105 km/h in a 100 km/h speed limit, a speed that would be legal just about anywhere where there are roads of this quality.
There's nothing you can do about this sort of thing. Yvonne sent off a “nomination form” saying that she wasn't driving, I was. And we heard nothing.
Some sane person at the fines department looked at the ticket and discarded it because it was stupid? Not a hope. Based on previous experience, it's more likely that they somehow lost the nomination form. OK, not to worry? To worry! They slap on penalties that can quickly exceed the original fine. So today I called up the fines department on 9200 8111. It took them fully 30 minutes to reply! Finally I got on to Vicky[sp?], who wanted confirmation that I was authorized to ask whether the form had arrived or not. Nothing to do: I had to go and find Yvonne, and Vick* asked her her address (on the form) and date of birth. And with that she was identified!
And yes, the nomination form had arrived. They've just been busy. You'd think that with the money they made, they could be more efficient.
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Moving furniture
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
As planned, Chris Bahlo came along with her ute to pick up the furniture we're giving to Amber Fitzpatrick: a sofa bed, a massage armchair with footrest (but sadly without power supply), a hanging chair for the verandah, and the table that we bought over 2 years ago, for which which we have never been able to find a good place.
How is that going to fit? Chris wanted to put the table upside down under the sofa. And the legs? I measured things and came to the conclusion that it would never fit. Chris was more optimistic.
Finally we got the table and sofa in place. To my astonishment, it didn't just fit, the fit was so good that it almost seemed to be made for it:
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And somehow we got the other stuff on the car too:
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More garden stuff
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Mick the gardener along again today, and he finally finished off the “mulch” heap that has been here for nearly 3 years. By this time it was more like compost than mulch, and the work he had to spread the stuff wasn't worth the trouble. He put the rest on the compost heap, and finally the pile is gone:
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We also finally have some lavender bushes along the driveway. I'm still not convinced that it's a good idea: we can't plant them all along the side because we need occasional access to the rear paddocks (second photo, taken from the opposite direction):
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At least the succulent bed looks relatively tidy now, including a new succulent that we found while walking the dogs a couple of days ago (front left in the second photo):
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But the next bed is full of weeds, and I don't know how to get them out. I sprayed them a couple of weeks ago, but now it's full of bulbs just showing their faces, so spraying is dangerous:
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Donald Trump: idiot or genius?
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
One of the more amazing things I've seen recently was the change of heart in North Korea and the planned face-to-face meeting between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. I had already noted elsewhere that if he pulls it off, he could be a good candidate for the next Nobel Peace Prize. What a conflict it would be for me to accept that! But then, not all winners are Really Good People. Think of Aung San Suu Kyi, for example, who in retrospect seems to fit more into the category of “the enemy of my enemy”.
Still, if he pulls it off, it will be worth it. But will he?
Today Trump cancelled a planned meeting with Kim, citing “tremendous anger”. Is it all off? People seem to think so, but for once I disagree. I even think that Trump might be playing it right. After all, if there is one thing that he can do, it’s make deals. That doesn’t mean that this one will work, but there are some subtle things that make me wonder: Consider:
A while back, North Korea got up on its collective hind legs complaining about US/South Korean military manoeuvres, though it had been made clear at the outset that they would take place. I see the complaints as a pretext: ”Don’t take us for granted”.
The US pulls out of the JCPOA ("Iran deal"). They must have known what effect that that would have on the Korean issue. Maybe the timing was deliberate.
Kim cancels his meeting with Moon Jae-in. More posturing?
Kim calls Pence a “political dummy”. Under the circumstances, that's warranted. Not a reason to cancel the meeting. And he could equally well have directed the insult at Trump. He feels that he has made the right choice for his posturing.
Trump thinks of the Nobel Peace Prize that awaits him if he makes significant progress towards Korean peace. Not a thing that he wants to give up.
Trump mints commemerative medals ahead of the meeting. Yes, stupid, but certainly an indication that he wants the meeting to go ahead.
Trump writes a really strange letter cancelling the meeting, but leaving all sorts of possibilities open. Also posturing, I think: “Don’t think you can say just anything and get away with it”.
Kim replies saying that he's ready for a meeting with few (no?) preconditions. Trump wins.
I will be very interested in how this pans out. I think it's very possible that the meeting will go ahead after the initial gesturing is out of the way.
| Saturday, 26 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 26 May 2018 |
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Protecting my private data
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday the GDPR came into effect? Or is that the DSGVO? Or maybe the RGPD? And like so many people, I have received hundreds of messages with subjects like “We promise to keep your data safe” from companies I've never heard of, as this page describes.
OK, probably the law is useful, though it seems that the provisions are so complicated that some sites have chosen to shut down rather than to attempt to comply. I have chosen to do nothing. Firstly, I feel that anything people put on the web is effectively public. That limits things like banking, of course, but my understanding is that there are separate laws for that sort of thing. Secondly, though, I just don't keep personal data beyond what I mention in this diary, so there are no secrets to divulge. Hopefully I'm correct in this view.
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More panorama stitching fun
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
House photo day again today, and nice weather. And once again I had difficulty with stitching my panoramas. Specifically, the control point detectors have difficulty finding corresponding points. Here what they made of the verandah panorama:
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Why? What has changed?
In fact, quite a bit. I have changed my HDR merge software from enfuse to Photomatix PRO, and I'm using TIFF for the intermediate files. Could it be one of them. Tried it the old way, and I didn't have that problem, so yes, it seems that something in the new method is causing or uncovering problems.
In the process, though, found good examples of why I wanted to do it the new way. Here a partial image done first with enfuse, then with Photomatix (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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Modern digital photography
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Topic: photography, technology, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Chris Bahlo along for dinner this evening (curry pierogi), and showed me a photo that she had just taken outside the house in the last fadings of twilight:
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What's that ring? Chris thought that it might be temperature sensitive. I thought that it was probably refraction in ice crystals and thus independent of the temperature. Out to take a look. Yes, the moon was higher, but the halo was clearly visible. Take a photo with a real camera. Summilux 15 mm f/1.7 ASPH.?
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That's completely out of focus! Also, the ring is too large to get the outside. I need something wider, but it also needs a large aperture. The difference in focal length of the Zuiko Digital ED 35-100 mm f/2.0 is probably not sufficient, and the M.Zuiko Digital ED 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO is too wide, so how about the Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4?
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Better, but still not good. I need a tripod.
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Dammit, this bloody expensive Manfrotto 808 can't get it up! This is the highest I could raise it:
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Does my el-cheapo head do any better? No: in fact, it seems to go to exactly the same angle, though there's no obvious reason not to go higher:
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Never mind, my panorama head can do it all. Put my camera on it, set f/8 in the hope of getting better focus, exposed for 30 s, and ended up with this photo:
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Nothing spectacular, but certainly better than the mobile phone photo. Only it had taken me 15 minutes, while Chris had just pointed and shot. And my 30 seconds had been long enough for things to move:
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Moving files in the smart phone age
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So Chris and I had each taken photos of the moon. Clearly I needed her photos to write today's articles. OK, download the photos. Or is that upload? Dammit, no. The word is “copy”.
We spent an hour trying. I had got Chris to install WiFi File Transfer on her machine, so that should have been simple. But of course she has a different phone from mine (a Samsung SM-930F, also known as herolte or one of the various nonflammable Samsung 7 range), so of course the directory layout was different. Never mind, we tried “My Photos”, and sure enough, there were photos, going back 2 years up to about a week ago. Chris looked on the phone and found others, but of course it was too polite to give dirty internals like path names.
She also had ssh installed on the phone, so after getting past the smoke screen (“User name is root, default password is admin”; in fact, of course, Chris had her own password, and the user was definitely not root), I was able to establish that the thing had 14 file systems mounted, some of which appeared to be re-using the same space (she definitely didn't have 200 GB of storage on the machine). And we found a second directory with photos, with some name like 6364-6330. But I couldn't access them, and when I tried to copy them to the other directory, the device ran out of space (or, as df put it, there were only 1.6 GB of space free on the file system):
But is /sdcard really on the root file system? That makes no sense at all. Is the mount maybe not registered? There's no full file system to be seen in that df output. One way or another, that's a real mess.
Chris tells me that she can see them all when the device is connected to her Microsoft laptop with USB. Why can't I see it with standard tools? Somehow people took a well-functioning operating system (Linux) and broke all the rules to make something which nobody understands any more.
In the end Chris used the “modern” approach: send me mail via gmail. Out over the 802.11 link to eureka, into the Global Internet to the other end of the world, where it was received and sent back to eureka. O Brave New World, that has such solutions in 't.
| Sunday, 27 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 27 May 2018 |
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Debugging Hugin
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Why am I having so much trouble with Hugin lately? As I considered yesterday, there are many possibilities. The first step was to go back to where I was some months ago, creating JPEG intermediate images and then merging the HDR images with enfuse. And how about that, that worked much better.
OK, which part of my current work flow is to blame? Photomatix PRO or the use of TIFF for the intermediate images? Tried creating JPEGs with Photomatix, and got results that seem to be intermediate between yesterday's problems and the old-style work flow.
A number of issues make this particularly difficult: it all takes quite a bit of time, and the preview image doesn't match the final image. I've known that for a long time where images overlap: it merges overlaps differently, which can produce significantly different results from the preview. Here an example from the verandah panorama. First preview, then what it made out of it:
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In the preview, the fence post in the mid-foreground is duplicated, while in the final stitch the protection round the Hibiscus is duplicated.
And then there's another issue: a lot of these bugs aren't repeatable. The first time I tried this panorama, it came out upside-down, and the control points were different.
About the only useful thing I found was that I could use the .pto files from the enfuse version to start off the Photomatix version, and that I could then re-align and get even better results. But there are so many questions to answer.
| Monday, 28 May 2018 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 28 May 2018 |
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Haircut and shopping
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Topic: general, gardening | Link here |
Into town today mainly for a haircut, but also to get various odds and ends from Bunnings: a replacement power point for the one in the kitchen that failed, a mousetrap for a mouse that had found an advantage in the convoluted holes in the kitchen cupboard, and some potting mix. In the process, found the sickest looking plants that I have ever seen for sale:
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Still, the price was right, so I bought a pot of parsley. We'll see how it works out.
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Olympus configuration problems
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
For some time I've had an issue with my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II: when I press the OK button in the middle of the arrow pad, I should get the “Super Control Panel”, which shows the most important functions on one hard-to-read screen. Here from the “instruction“ manual:
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But instead I get a flash menu:
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How did that happen? And how do I get rid of it? Sent a question to the M43 Tech Talk Facebook list, and got responses from “do a full reset” to a couple of useful ones. It seems that this is what you get if you enable remote wireless flash. And sure enough, it was enabled, but I don't know how: I don't use the feature, and the only way I could find to enable (or disable) it was via a relatively deep menu.
What's wrong with this picture? The SCP is pretty much the centre point of the menu system for everyday use. Why should something as specialized as remote flash replace it? In my case I wanted to change the ISO setting, and for some reason this camera doesn't allow that via the lever/wheel system of previous cameras when it's in M mode (instead it seems to do nothing useful).
Later still, Brenton came up with more information: press INFO to switch back to the normal display. But yes, it's (barely) documented on page 153 of the manual:
Select [On] for [RC Mode] in Shooting Menu 2.
· The LV super control panel switches to RC mode.
· You can choose an LV super control panel display by repeatedly pressing the INFO button.
That's so vague that I didn't understand it. And what's this “repeatedly”? It suggests that you have to try hard to get there. In fact, each press switches between the two displays.
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A real use for smart phones
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the myriad things that irritate me about the current generation of “smart” phones is the almost complete lack of interoperability. Spent some time discussing it on IRC today. Once again I'm amazed by how little insight shown by people whom I otherwise respect. Once we had ways of doing things that were bigger than the devices that perform them. But today I get things like:
the root cause of much of your angst is that you're expecting computers to make sense to computer scientists. most people are not computer scientists, if they only made sense to scientists they would not sell
Nonsense! There's nothing wrong with making computers easier to understand. But the attempt has to be successful, and what I'm seeing is one that works in some few cases, but breaks the overall concept irreparably. Why does the system need so many file systems? Why do they pretend to have lots of space when in fact one of the file systems is full? Does this make it easier for the end user?
I don't think you (and Chris) are "typical" smartphone users. For a typical user, sending a photo as an email attachment (or similar) is significantly easier that installing random tools to save sending the bytes around the world.
Yes, he's right. That's exactly what I'm complaining about. If it's easier to send it by email round the world, the alternative is broken.
But what's this “random tools”? That should be part of the system. Once the method was ftp, and it worked everywhere. Clearly that's an old, worn-out magic word, but where's the replacement? Instead we've gone back to the dark ages.
But there are things which really only a smart phone can do. For example, I may call
somebody and arrange to meet them. Where am I? My phone knows that if its GPS receiver is
on and I'm outside. How do I tell the person I'm calling? The only way I know is to
install an app (ahead of time, obviously), get it to display the coordinates, and read them
out verbally across the phone connection. Why isn't there a way to convey this information
at the pressswipe of a button?
One obvious reason, of course, is that telephone communications don't allow for this sort of information. They're analogue, or simulated analogue. Well, almost. We've had Caller ID presentation for decades, and caller location is available for emergency calls in some places.
What's really needed, of course, is a general standard for out-of-band communication for
mobile phone calls. Consider: I'm somewhere
in Melbourne and call a friend and ask
him to meet me. “Where are you?”. I pressswipe a button and a map appears on his phone. This
should be standard functionality, not a workaround (“app” is the Modern word).
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Location services for emergencies
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
There are plenty of workarounds for the lack of native support for location reporting. In the process discovered an app that might really be useful under the circumstances, Emergency+, a “National Triple Zero Awareness Work Group Communication”. Which nation? When I read “national”, I immediately think of the USA, since that's the country that usually doesn't bother to name itself. But “triple zero (000)” is the phone number for the emergency services in Australia. And sure enough, it's Australian. Installation worked easily enough, and then I had to read the license:
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How much of this stuff is there? When scrolling down, a scroll bar appears as long as you have your finger on the glass, here the tiny grey area at top right:
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There must be 50 pages of it! I'm reminded of the recent xkcd comment on the GDPR discussion:
Once I fire it up, it takes a while, and finally shows me:
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Does this mean that I still have to use voice to communicate the information? What a cop-out!
But the app also provides useful information, including a list of emergency numbers (not all free) to call in various situations. It's just sad that it doesn't seem to have a way of communicating the location.
| Tuesday, 29 May 2018 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 29 May 2018 |
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A mouse for Piccola
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
In to the kitchen this morning and found that one of our mouse traps had done its deed:
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Gave it to Piccola, who was at first disgusted that I should give her a dead mouse. She played with it anyway, and finally ate most of it, leaving behind just the head and what I believe is the gall bladder:
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It's amazing how cleanly she separated the bladder, and I wonder what happened to the tail.
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Chinese chess set?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
One of Yvonne's favourite pastimes lately is looking through the “for sale” groups on Facebook. Today she found two sofa beds, neither worth having, and a hand-carved chess set, apparently Chinese, but from Bali:
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Worth having? Might make a nice display piece. It was in Ballarat, so at first we agreed that Yvonne would take a look when she went shopping tomorrow. But then she saw the home page of the seller, and he looked just plain dangerous, so she asked me to go along with her this afternoon.
Off to Ballarat again, and found the place. No dangerous looking young man, just a gentle old woman who was selling things off after her husband had had a stroke. The chess set looked just like in the picture, but it was tiny: the pieces were only about 4 cm high. Not exactly something for a display, so we left it.
What a waste of time!
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Mount Buninyong
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
The current photo of Mount Buninyong in Wikipedia is less than perfect:
Yesterday I took a photo from Cambrian Hill, not for the first time. Once again I processed the image as an HDR image. This time it was better, but once again it was too hazy. Here first last month's attempt, and then today's:
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I really hadn't expected things to be this difficult.
| Wednesday, 30 May 2018 | Dereel | Images for 30 May 2018 |
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Hugin bug!
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
I've been assigned a bug report about the FreeBSD port of Hugin, which I maintain. The latest version of Hugin can't process PNG images.
Sample images to reproduce the bugs? None. OK, create my own. Yup, it can't access the images. Problem confirmed. And it doesn't exist on the 2017 version.
What can cause that? Looking at the changes between version 2016.2.0 and 2018.0.0 (the current version), there's almost no difference. Here the /usr/ports/graphics/hugin/Makefile:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/32) /usr/ports/graphics/hugin 4 -> svn diff -r422587 Makefile|less
Most of that is stuff that has more to to with the (constantly changing) structure of the Ports Collection than with Hugin. Sent a message to the Hugin developers lit and got a suggestion from Bruno Postle suggesting that I take a look at the vigra port. OK, look at that, and there's an option for PNG, but by default it's enabled.
OK, remove the vigra package and build it from scratch. Works. Remove the installed port and reinstall from packages. Doesn't work. An old version of vigra, perhaps? No, they're both version 1.11.0_2. But the sizes of the library are noticeably different:
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/3) /Photos/grog/20180526/C 19 -> locate libvigra | xargs ls -l
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/3) /Photos/grog/20180526/C 20 -> locate libvigra | xargs ls -l
There's this commit message:
But that was supposed to solve the problem. More investigation needed.
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Changing the power point
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
It's high time that I replace the broken power point in the kitchen. That's straightforward enough: remove the old power point (two screws holding it to the frame in the wall), remove the wires, put them in the new power point and screw it back to the wall.
That's the theory. In practice, one of the screws was very stiff, and I could hardly remove it. I had thought that the head was stripped, but that doesn't seem to be the case:
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I'm getting really fed up with cruciform screws. I always seem to have difficulty with them. About the only obvious thing is that I can use a straight screwdriver to replace these screws.
But there's another issue: the frame is only attached on one side of the opening. It's not the first time I've seen that: there's one in the music room too, which I saw before the power point went in. It seems to be a Jim Lannen specialty. Maybe he can get the screws in anyway, but how can I do it? Probably the broken power point was a combination of that and the tiler having to replace the power point. So Jim Lannen's fault after all, until proof of the contrary.
| Thursday, 31 May 2018 | Dereel | |
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Nothing to do?
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Topic: general | Link here |
I've been keeping a diary for, in sum, over 25 years now, and one of the things that surprises me is how much I have to report. Surely there must be days when I don't do anything worth reporting?
Yes, I can remember a couple, but only a couple. Today was another: spent writing up my diary (which is taking more and more of my day), and then... nothing. And why not?
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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