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| Greg's diary |
| May 2023 |
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| Monday, 1 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 1 May 2023 |
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It was IBM. It was UNIVAC.
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Topic: history, technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Decades ago, I guessed round 1960, I heard a song, “Automation” by Allan Sherman, one of the first songs about computers. And it contained the words “It was IBM. It was UNIVAC.”.
And somehow today's calendar entry reminded me of that:
May 1 Greg starts working with IBM, 2001
May 1 Greg starts working with UNIVAC, 1973
50 years since I started earning money in the industry!
In passing, a couple of points about the song. It was written by Allan Sherman, not Alan Sherman, a computer scientist who had only just been born. And the words of “Automation” go on with “it was all those gears going clickety-clack”, something that nobody would associate with computers nowadays. On the other hand there's a reference to an RCA 503. I had long thought that this was a real computer, but it seems that it really referred to the RCA 501, the last digit changed to make things rhyme. And my guess as to the date was off: the album was released in 1963
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Still more communication issues
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Call from Joey Melendez of Vonex today, referring to the email I sent her last week. It's not clear why. She repeated what she had said last time, but said that my subscription (paid until the end of August) would end some time in June when all accounts were transferred. I suggested that they then refund pro rata, but I don't think that expression is in her vocabulary. In any case, she said that a “senior rep” would contact me.
Somehow the last 4 weeks have been full of miscommunication. It's amazingly frustrating.
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Bruno settles in
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Bruno is getting more and more comfortable with the dogs:
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Even Yvonne is happy that things have become normal.
| Tuesday, 2 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 2 May 2023 |
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Changing phone suppliers
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
So gradually I'm moving my VoIP service from MyNetFone Vonex
to Aussie Broadband, despite the
problems I have had with their documentation. In particular there seemed to be no
documentation on setting up voice mail or call charges. I couldn't even update my profile:
despite not presenting an “Email” field, it complained because I didn't enter anything in
it.
Called up this afternoon and spoke to Jordan, who surprised me by sending me exactly the information I needed. Voice mail setup is via number 101, and there's documentation for the VoIP service on the web, just not linked from anywhere I have been. He also updated my profile for me and connected me to Aaron, who started the process of transferring my second Vonex number (the one with permanent voice mail) to Aussie. All relatively easy (it still took 30 minutes, which seems to be typical of this sort of thing), and it points out even more clearly how bad the Aussie web site and documentation are.
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Air fryers: faster than deep fryers
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Mail from my New York Times subscription today: “sweet potato fries”. OK, I have expressed my opinion on “air fryers” enough in the past, but this one caught my eye: “faster than in a deep fryer”. Huh? No, it takes 15 to 17 minutes. OK, left a comment to the effect that it would take much less in a deep fryer. And how about that, the next time I looked, they had removed the claim. I suppose that's something.
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Colonoscopy, the third
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
Call from “anonymous”, generally a good indication that it's the Ballarat Base Hospital. And sure enough, they wanted to confirm that I'd be coming for a colonoscopy in tomorrow morning.
Tomorrow? I need two days' preparation! It took a while for that to sink in, but clearly that wasn't feasible. Somebody must have dropped the ball.
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RIPE: Progress?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been nearly a week since RIPE NCC said that they would consider things and get back to me. They did that this evening, just before I went to bed, still refusing to accept any of the documents that I had supplied, but...
After our internal evaluation, we have decided to make an exception this time and accept your transfer request...
FINALLY! Also, Mark Price has agreed to act as LIR, so maybe I'll finally get this mess behind me.
| Wednesday, 3 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 3 May 2023 |
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RIPE: Tying up the loose ends
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So what do I need to do to finally get rid of this thorn in the side that is RIPE NCC? A couple of messages from Mark Price today, in which he informed me that his LIR activity was not completely free: RIPE charge him 50 € per year for the function! He will pass it on without any extras, which is generous. Followed up with a long phone call, during which he agreed that he could fix the routing issues easily. In the process he pointed me at https://www.irr.net/ and https://www.radb.net/, which I must investigate. But the real issues are—again—bureaucracy! They want identification and proof that I am the legal successor of LEMIS (SA) Pty Ltd—exactly what I've been trying to tell them the whole time!
Mark also expressed frustration and even anger about the way RIPE had been treating me. Me, one of the founders of the Internet! They should be paying me! I think he went a little overboard. But he confirmed that he's in the thing at least for the interest: there aren't many IP address blocks that have been around since before the current structures come into place. It's good to know that he's on my side.
OK, where are we now? I'm now dealing with Mark rather than RIPE, which can only be an advantage. Send him the same old statutory declaration; maybe they'll accept it from him.
And identification (why, anyway?)? They ask for “A copy of your ID document (ID card, passport, etc.)”. Well, my last passport expired almost exactly 15 years ago, and there are no ID cards in Australia. All this reminds me of the pain I had with the German POSTIDENT last year. My driver license is all I have, so let's submit it.
But where is it? I couldn't find it. After some searching, I wonder if I didn't lose it after signing my stat decs last month. It looks as if I'll have to get it replaced, and VICROADS don't help. An incomplete web page which requires me to choose from a series of locations, none of which seem to be closer than 100 km away. They have Bendigo and Bendigo East, but no Ballarat or Bannockburn. What a pain “modern” communications are!
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X resource hog identified
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
Finally I've found the cause of the extreme X CPU usage that I had noted last month. It's www.fernsehserien.des episode pages. It also only seems to happen when the browser is running on a different machine from the server. Today I registered 35% CPU on the firefox process and up to 60% on the X server. My guess is that it's these rotating circles that never resolve:
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Somehow this site is broken. About every other time I access it, I get this message:
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I can recover from it, but something is clearly wrong.
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Bruno settling in
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Bruno continues to make friends with the dogs, at least with Larissa:
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It almost always happens with Larissa. Elena is still a little unsure of herself; when Bruno approaches, she runs away.
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Spam phone calls?
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Just before we went to bed, a call came in on my second phone line, one of the Aussie Broadband numbers. Number ported already? I missed the call, but that didn't matter. I got another. And another. Tried to answer, but no sound.
What's that? Mañana. For today I disconnected the phone connection.
| Thursday, 4 May 2023 | Dereel → Cape Clear → Dereel | Images for 4 May 2023 |
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Castrating Bruno
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Topic: animals, health | Link here |
Off with Bruno to Cape Clear today for his final round of vaccinations and to have him castrated:
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As usual, he was pretty groggy for the rest of the day, though not as much so as Pene had expected.
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More RIPE fun
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So now the transfer of my network block is well on its way, and I was asked to set up some kind of account at RIPE. I don't know why: all they wanted was my name and my email address—and NO LESS THAN 4 CAPTCHAs! The real work will be done by Mark Price.
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Having the network routed here is in fact more useful than I had thought. On the amusing side of things, I can now ping my mobile phone from anywhere in the world, as long as it's at home. More useful, though, is that I could really now host my web site at home. I'm currently on a 25/5 Mb/s link, but for $10 a month I could upgrade that to 75/10 Mb/s—I think: Aussie Broadband is too polite to tell me which. That corresponds to over 3 TB/month upload if I use the extra bandwidth. I'm currently being charged for about 1.5 TB, so this could actually save me money, assuming that I don't run into bottlenecks.
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Reinstating driver license
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Topic: general | Link here |
So how do I renew my driver licence? Yesterday I established that the VicRoads web site is completely broken. But somewhere I read that I had to report the loss to the police. That seemed reasonable, so called 5336 6000 and spoke to Jess, who had to connect me to the Ballarat police station, along with the helpful information that I should select option 1, then 2. After about 6 minutes' wait, was connected to a sheriff. Sheriff? We don't have sheriffs in Australia. Click. Phone call disconnected after almost 10 minutes.
Try again, explained to Ellie what had happened. This time it took less time, and the sheriff replied again. It's his surname! And no, not really their thing, though if I had lost it in the police station, Heidi might know. And yes, she knew: nothing like that found there. Call 131 444 to make a report, if necessary.
Why is this all so much pain?
| Friday, 5 May 2023 | Dereel | |
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Wi-Fi phone calls?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
During a discussion on IRC this morning, Jamie Fraser mentioned the possibility of using Wi-Fi instead of the mobile phone network for making calls.
Well, yes, of course. It's VoIP, and it has nothing directly to do with Wi-Fi. It's an Internet protocol, as the name suggests. But no, says Jamie,
android and iphone have the ability to use your wifi instead of the local phone network to place the call. i'm not sure why you'd want that, i suppose if you live somewhere with spotty or high-contention GSM but have good wifi it's useful?
I hadn't heard of that. Something to follow up on.
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ANZ does it again
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
My (ANZ) credit card payment is due in a few days. It gets deducted automatically from my ANZ bank account. But there's not always enough money in the account, so I need to transfer from another account.
How much is the payment? About double the normal maximum! How did that happen? Looking at the statement, I found:
| 16 APR | INTEREST CHARGED ON PURCHASES | $17.50 | ||
| 16 APR | LATE PAYMENT FEE | $20.00 |
Huh? They deduct the money from my account! But this time they didn't. Called up ANZ on 131342, once again fighting this HORRIBLE voice non-recognition system. Even the old trick “Consultant” doesn't work any more. The only result is that by the time I get to speak to a human (in this case Kim), I'm already angry.
So, he says, there wasn't enough money in my account to cover the costs, so they didn't deduct anything. Why didn't they tell me? They did. They sent me a “text” to my mobile phone. And indeed it seems that they have my phone number on record. But no, I didn't receive a “text".
But then I recalled something. On 22 April both Yvonne (first) and then I received a mobile phone call purportedly from ANZ, saying that card ending in 4337 was $59 in arrears, and I should pay immediately. Press here to pay...
As I said at the time, this is just the kind of scam that ANZ warn about. Was it genuine? I still don't know. The digits of the card number were incorrect, but the $59 was correct, as I only discovered today. Kim said that he would reverse the charges, but somehow that's not enough. The whole approach is wrong.
Following up after the call, I found:
We’ll use this email address to send you notices and statement alerts for your selected account(s), so please make sure it’s correct.
We're continually hearing of people being victims of scams on the Internet. Why do big companies like ANZ encourage them?
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Appalling Australian door fittings
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Today was the 8th anniversary of the handover of our house in Stones Road:
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Having houses built in Australia and Germany was interesting. Some things (insulation in particular) are much better in Germany, others (including electrics) are much better in Australia. And of course many are pretty much the same. I've already grumbled about the appalling insulation even in relatively new Australian houses, but there are other issues too. One is the appalling quality of door fittings. Last year we had to replace a latch, and it seems that's normal. And then there are these appalling striker plates:
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They stick out beyond the frame, and at least once I have caught a jumper in one and nearly torn it. Today, while removing Bruno from the bedroom, this one fell off on the ground. One screw had disappeared, and the other was so loose that it barely held. With much care and swearing I managed to put it back together, with the help of a spare screw from the guest bedroom striker plate. I'll need to find some slightly longer screws to do the job properly.
| Saturday, 6 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 6 May 2023 |
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Hokkien mee, the second
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Hokkien Mee again today, for only the second time. Still no bee hoon in the noodles, but the ingredients were frozen. How do I cook the squid, prawns and kangkong? There's only about 200 ml of broth, so the normal “small” pot seemed too big (here on the right):
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But the smaller blue pot is made of aluminium, and in any case it's too small for the induction cooktop, so I had to use the gas stove:
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And then there's the issue of using ⅓ of the broth each in three steps. After cooking the kangkong, there didn't seem to be much left:
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But it worked:
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I think I'll use the larger pot next time, though.
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Limits on net accessibility
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Finally it looks like the network block issue is being resolved. Mark Price seems to have all he needs to satisfy the bureaucrats, and I can sit back and recover from the stress.
And then Juha Kupiainen piped up:
from your diary "assuming that I don't run into bottlenecks." ... nbn - your wish is our command !! ... https://www.nbnco.com.au/utility/fixed-wireless-fair-use-policy
What does that document say? It's really hard to understand. Despite the title, it doesn't contain a “fair use” policy, but if you fight your way through the “we're too polite to show all at once” popups, you find:
Not surprisingly, the first in their list of FAQs is: “What is the Fixed Wireless Fair Use Policy?”. But they don't have an answer. Instead they refer to an Ethernet Fair Use Policy, which they also don't describe. Instead they link to their Wholesale Broadband Agreement, which doesn't define any fair use policy.
Further down, though, they go into detail:
nbn will identify that a Retail Service Provider has exceeded the Fair Use Policy average download threshold of 200GB across all their Fixed Wireless customers in a calendar month.
For these Retail Service Providers, nbn will identify any individual customers that have exceeded 500GB in the same calendar month.
In other words, people who sign up for unlimited bandwidth are being cheated. According to the Aussie price list, you can currently get 500 GB for $75 per month, or “unlimited” for $79.
There's a similar limit for uploads:
nbn will identify any customers that have exceeded 120GB uplink usage for a calendar month and notify Retail Service Providers about these customers.
Juha had more information: I can find my POI details at https://www.aussiebroadband.com.au/nbn-poi/, and usage statistics at https://abb-cvc.io/. So what do I get? The first gives me
| POI name | Ballarat | |
| CSA name | Ballarat 2 CSA | |
| Premises location ID | LOC000140826134 | |
| Premises technology | Wireless | |
| Premises service class | 6 | |
| Premises service class description | Serviceable by Wireless, CPE installed |
Then to https://abb-cvc.io/, which doesn't want any parameters: I need to select my POI (3BRA, Ballarat). And that gives me:
Now isn't that helpful? There are 4 links, and I don't know which I'm connected to. In addition, as it stands, it's not possible to determine which curve triplets (red, blue, green) belong together. First you need to select a link.
Ah, but we told you that, just before you asked for the details, and conveniently only visible if you page down:
Based on your IPv4 address, 121.200.11.253, you are connected as follows:
POI name Ballarat CSA name Ballarat 2 CSA CVC name Ballarat (Link 3)
But it doesn't make much difference. All the curves look similar, and the usage is always below the CVC limit. And adding them up, we get:
All this really shows is that the bandwidth use is within the CVC. In particular, it doesn't say how much data has been downloaded per link. But looking at link 3, the average traffic is round 4 Gb/s. At that sustained rate, the traffic would be 3.5 TB per day or 100 TB per month. To achieve an average of 200 GB/month, you would need 500 end users or less. Given the geographical area, that sounds very unlikely. So we're probably well below the limit.
While searching, I found a second source of the bandwidth information on the Aussie site. It may have marginally less information.
Of course, we've seen this all before. Nothing came of it then, and nothing will presumably happen this time. But maybe they could consider upgrading their network.
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A new king!
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Topic: history, general, animals, opinion | Link here |
Finished watching TV early this evening, and it occurred to me that we might see some of the Coronation of Charles III and Camilla. And yes, they were just about to leave Westminster Abbey, and we watched until the procession reached Buckingham Palace, for some reason going anti-clockwise round the Victoria Memorial. Princess Anne had decided to ride on horseback with the procession, and this she did surprisingly badly for an accomplished horsewoman.
| Sunday, 7 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 7 May 2023 |
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Opening the flood gates
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
So now I have my /24 routed from anywhere in the world. Here the entries for the block last month and then today:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/24) ~ 33 -> whois -h whois.cymru.com " -v 192.109.197.0"
AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name
NA | 192.109.197.0 | NA | AU | ripencc | 1991-05-01 | NA
4764 | 192.109.197.0 | 192.109.197.0/24 | AU | ripencc | 1991-05-01 | WIDEBAND-AS-AP Aussie Broadband, AU
So basically I don't need NAT any more. But before I remove everything, let's just try one system:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/4) ~ 231 -> ipfw add 41 allow ip from any to tiwi
00041 allow ip from any to 192.109.197.177=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/4) ~ 232 -> ipfw add 42 allow ip from tiwi to any
00042 allow ip from 192.109.197.177 to any
But look at all that traffic! Within seconds I had:
00041 5530 101909539 allow ip from any to 192.109.197.177
00042 11007 708234 allow ip from 192.109.197.177 to any
The second column is the number of packets, the third the number of bytes. That's 101 MB! And tcpdump showed:
14:56:15.007729 IP tiwi.lemis.com.11291 > 118.3.56.176.in-addr.suttk.ru.acmsoda: UDP, length 16
14:56:15.287857 IP 185.230.4.150.1337 > tiwi.lemis.com.13576: Flags [R.], seq 0, ack 3687880839, win 0, length 0
14:56:15.327192 IP 118.3.56.176.in-addr.suttk.ru.acmsoda > tiwi.lemis.com.11291: UDP, length 16
14:56:15.327558 IP tiwi.lemis.com.11291 > 118.3.56.176.in-addr.suttk.ru.acmsoda: UDP, length 98
14:56:15.390604 IP srv-141-98-11-13.serveroffer.net.59828 > tiwi.lemis.com.8080: Flags [S], seq 1602229466, win 65535, length 0
14:56:15.643961 IP 118.3.56.176.in-addr.suttk.ru.acmsoda > tiwi.lemis.com.11291: UDP, length 32
14:56:15.819086 IP remote.shepshedcarers.co.uk.50202 > tiwi.lemis.com.6890: Flags [S], seq 2224300570, win 64240, options [mss 1360,nop,wscale 8,nop,nop,sackOK], length 0
14:56:17.723831 IP 633977252.mad.cdn77.com > tiwi.lemis.com: ICMP echo request, id 61431, seq 9561, length 64
14:56:17.724194 IP tiwi.lemis.com > 633977252.mad.cdn77.com: ICMP echo reply, id 61431, seq 9561, length 64
14:56:18.367880 IP ec2-13-235-58-126.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com > tiwi.lemis.com: ICMP echo request, id 2, seq 773, length 16
14:56:18.368227 IP tiwi.lemis.com > ec2-13-235-58-126.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com: ICMP echo reply, id 2, seq 773, length 16
14:56:18.371097 IP ec2-13-126-169-168.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com > tiwi.lemis.com: ICMP echo request, id 2, seq 773, length 16
14:56:18.371396 IP tiwi.lemis.com > ec2-13-126-169-168.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com: ICMP echo reply, id 2, seq 773, length 16
14:56:18.639859 IP 890793563.mil.cdn77.com > tiwi.lemis.com: ICMP echo request, id 36817, seq 9511, length 64
14:56:18.640132 IP tiwi.lemis.com > 890793563.mil.cdn77.com: ICMP echo reply, id 36817, seq 9511, length 64
What is all that stuff? There's a lot of pinging—is that because of my diary entry recently? After a while I understood a large amount of the traffic: I was downloading a news video, and amazingly it weathered my continual firewall changes. But clearly there's more than meets the eye in the modern world. The last time I had the net visible on the Internet was before we moved to Dereel, 16 years ago. Clearly I need to think about this more carefully.
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Bruno and the curry tree
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Topic: animals, gardening, general | Link here |
Winter is coming, and we've moved the curry tree inside. Bruno was delighted. A real soil toilet!
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OK, cover it over with a couple of planks. Bruno not happy:
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And he managed to push the boards apart. Baling twine to the rescue:
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It can't stay that way, but a bit of chicken mesh on top of the soil should make it uninteresting again.
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Aussie Broadband resolves complaints
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
It's been over 3 weeks since I raised a complaint with Aussie Broadband about the lack of availability of qualified support personnel. Today I got a phone call on my mobile phone from a Lorens, who wanted to know what the issue was with the network routing. But he couldn't give me any details until I authenticated myself: name, date of birth, etc.
And how could he authenticate himself? He couldn't, of course. I have no doubt that he's genuine, but it's this kind of assumption that makes like easier for scammers. So he'll send me email.
| Monday, 8 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 8 May 2023 |
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Replacing driver license
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Somehow I've spent far too much time with bureaucracy, and it's having its effect: I'm getting frustrated and despondent. Why is it so difficult to get the simplest things done?
But some things have to be done. I need a new driver license, and last week I established that the bureaucracy involved was non-trivial, and the instructions potentially contradictory.
Dammit, there's nothing for it. Call up VicRoads and talk to a “consultant”.
Surprise, surprise. After the obligatory wait with appalling “music”, I was connected to Edward, who wanted my name, address and $25, gave me a receipt number 3434 2996 55 and said that the replacement would be in the mail in the next week or so. Amazing! My guess is that it was all over in 12 minutes, though the broken Vonex web site means that I can't confirm.
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Aussie Broadband
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Mail as promised from Lorens from Aussie Broadband. It's not even clear what he wanted, but I've been through this before, so I summarized the events of the last month, recommended that he pass them on to senior management (particularly my open letter), and even gave him an authentication method (one-time password “pink elephant”) if he wanted to call me.
Just before going to bed, I got an email from Melvin. Here are the only points of any interest:
First of all, I would like to offer our apologies if it feels like we are
unable to handle your previous complaint correctly within your expectations.
In other words, “you're being unreasonable, but we'll try to humour you”.
Would you like us to assist you with opening a new complaint instead so we can
properly handle your case and to somehow try and address the current queries
you have for us?
Now what good could that do? If they can't resolve this complaint, what good will opening a new one with the same content do?
Feel free to respond here or give us a call on 1300 880 905 between
8am-midnight AEST 7 days for any concerns and inquiries.
Why do I get the feeling that he hasn't even looked at the issues? Part of the unread message to which he replied was
Aussie phone support doesn't understand the concepts, and my emails go without reply.
All that this reply was able to do was to confirm that nothing has changed. How frustrating this all is! The good news is that the technical issues seem to be resolved, but does Aussie really not want to provide better customer support?
| Tuesday, 9 May 2023 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | |
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Network block: progress
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Mail from Mark Price today: RIPE NCC has accepted my driver license as proof of identity, and Mark has managed to drive up a deregistration certificate for LEMIS, showing (hopefully to RIPE's satisfaction) that I was the sole beneficiary. Things are looking up, and I'm very impressed that Mark managed to find the document.
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Another blood test
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
Into town today for yet another blood test. Nothing unusual, except that the phlebotomist couldn't see the veins. Painful insertion? No, quite the contrary: I didn't feel anything at all! And when I took a photo some time later, I couldn't see it either:
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But yes, I did see the blood flow. I'm very impressed.
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Fixing the striker plate: not
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
While in town, picked up some wood screws for the striker plate that got dislodged on Friday. The existing screws were only 12 mm long and loose, so this time I chose some that were 18 mm long: after all, they just go into the relatively soft wood of the door frame.
But things didn't work the way I wanted. I'm sure I didn't overtighten, but one of them sheared off. In the first image a new screw on the left, the old one in the middle, and what was left of the new one on the right:
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So now I have only one screw holding the plate, and a partial screw that I can't get out blocking the other hole.. What do I do now, apart from swear?
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Larissa's pain
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has been concerned about the dogs hurting Bruno, though her concerns have largely subsided. But today we saw a lump on Larissa's nose:
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What is it? Possibly it's a scab of some kind. and it doesn't seem to cause any pain. Did Bruno do that? His way of playing with her is to sink his claws into her nose, but this seems rather excessive.
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Vonex: We will disconnect whether you want or not
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I've been exchanging mail with Joey of Vonex for a couple of days ago. Some time ago she said that I couldn't cancel the numbers before 25 May, and I had to make it clear that I wanted the service to continue until the date for which I had paid, some time in August, but the last couple of times she wanted to terminate on 15 May—next week! I still have issues with the Aussie Broadband VoIP service, so I don't want to be put under pressure. How do I get across to these people?
| Wednesday, 10 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 10 May 2023 |
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The latest flash pain
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I've been having pain with flash photography almost since I started nearly 60 years ago.. For many cases, notably in the house, I've arranged things so that most photos are OK, mainly by using studio flash heads pointed at the ceiling for reflected lighting.
But anything special still causes pain. Apart from the studio flashes, I must have 10 other flash units, notably 3 macro “ring” flashes: The el-cheapo “Viltrox JY-670 Macro Ring Lite” and two horribly expensive units with TTL flash measurement: the Olympus STF-8 and the mecablitz 15 MS-1.
Today I took a number of flash photos with the mecablitz, none of which satisfied me. It has adjustable reflectors, and they need to be adjusted to match the subject distance, rather diminishing the utility of the TTL exposure. The results:
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In the first image, there's too much light from the left. Adjusting that reflector just makes things worse (second image). Adjusting the other makes it even worse (third image): I think the light is pointing too far away. The fourth is marginally acceptable, but only marginally. This was taken with the M.Zuiko Digital ED 30 mm f/3.5 macro, which comes very close to the object, probably too close for the flash.
And how about that, two years ago today I had exactly the same problem. But my example there was not a good choice, because it confuses the exposure measurements. I need to plan something like the screws (which won't move from photo to photo) and try various flash configurations.
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RIPE: All done bar the shouting?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I still haven't heard the last word about my network block transfer: there's still this proof outstanding that I am entitled to the legacy of LEMIS. But just before going to bed I got an email:
Date: Wed, 10 May 2023 10:41:40 +0000 (UTC)
From: "RIPE NCC (nccsurvey@ripe.net) via Zonka Feedback" <surveys@zonkafeedback.com>
Subject: How did we do?
Reply-To: nccsurvey@ripe.net
Mail sent successfully
Ah, they're too polite to use plain text. There's a link to a typical survey in the HTML version. Is that an indication that the pain is over?
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Aussie complaint resolved
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Another email from Aussie Broadband today about my complaint. Yes, they take my suggestions on board. It looked well written, but didn't go into any detail beyond acknowledging
At this point, we can take this situation as a learning experience and use it as an opportunity to improve. Your feedback has shed light on areas where we need to improve our knowledge, training, and communication channels for our customers, this will passed along as feedback so we can look to improve our handling of requests like this.
That sounds reasonable. Hopefully something will come of it.
| Thursday, 11 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 11 May 2023 |
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KL Hokkien Mee: More corner-cutting
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
I've been experimenting with KL Hokkien Mee for nearly 2 years now, and gradually it's becoming less work.
What remains? Making the greaves is the most difficult, followed by frying the squid. There's also the question of the caramel sauce, which is gradually running low. I've already established that crispy fried onions make an acceptable substitute for the greaves, and that I can fry the squid with less heat without it getting tough, but creating almost no smoke.
But what about the caramel sauce? Many recipes only use light and dark soya sauce. So today, instead of 15 g dark soya sauce and 20 g of caramel, I used 35 g of dark soya sauce.
The result?
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Not much difference to be seen. And I can't really identify much difference, but somehow something seems to be missing. I'll have to try each way a couple of times.
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Colonoscopy, the fourth
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Another phone call from anonymous today, a reasonable assumption that it's the Ballarat Base Hospital. My fourth appointment for my colonoscopy, next Wednesday. Will this one hold?
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Net block: tidying up
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So my net block 192.109.197.0/24 is now officially mine, as whois shows. But I still need to update my net handle GL3-RIPE, and I don't have reverse DNS lookup. Message to DENIC about updating the handle, and hopefully we'll find out about the reverse lookup soon.
About the only thing that's of interest is the now-you-see-it-now-you don't statement:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/pts/6) ~ 1 -> whois 192.109.197.0
% IANA WHOIS server
% for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
refer: whois.arin.net
organisation: Administered by ARIN
status: LEGACY
...
But that only shows on dereel. On eureka it comes up with very different information. Still, why do they keep claiming that this is not a legacy allocation?
In passing, it seems that I went through similar pain 20 years ago. Times have definitely changed since then.
| Friday, 12 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 12 May 2023 |
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Porting again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Last week a question appeared on the FreeBSD-questions mailing list:
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Tool to compare directories and delete duplicate files from one directory
I'm wondering if anyone knows of a tool like diff or so that can also delete
files based on name and size from either left/right or source/destination
directory?
Well, of course, that's what mklinks is for. Just install the sysutils/mklinks port and RTFM.
Oh. It's been decades since I wrote it—the first checkin was dated 1995/02/26—and I cleverly named it after a script of the same name in 4.4BSD, though the functionality is quite different. It's so stable that I haven't changed it in 10 years. But I never got round to putting it in the Ports Collection. Well, no time like the present.
First, bring dereel up to the latest and greatest:
FreeBSD dereel 14.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT #9 main-n262890-27e74c8fff35: Thu May 11 19:14:16 AEST 2023 grog@dereel:/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/main/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC amd64
I did that yesterday. Then upgrade all ports.
Oh. The new firefox (110.0) is even worse than the old one from a performance standpoint. Last week I had established that www.fernsehserien.de created so much load that two systems came almost to a standstill. But today it wasn't running, and performance was even worse. What is it? Clearly an indication that firefox REALLY doesn't want to run across a network, and that I should thus finally update my system. As it was, after stopping some other likely suspects, started a completely new session, which ran OK. At least that proves that it's probably a web page causing the problem.
Back to porting mklinks. It should be trivial, since it originated on FreeBSD. But it kept me going most of the day, mainly deciding what best practices are. I started with the Porter's Handbook and followed closely what was written there.
It wasn't smooth. Firstly, I needed a version number. But I don't have one, so I created version 1.0. Then the ports system unpacked the sources into the subdirectory work and then went looking for them in work/mklinks-1.0. I've seen that before, and there's some trick to tell the system not to look in the subdirectory of work. But I wanted it to be as vanilla as possible, so I renamed the files in the archive.
Then, how about that! The compiler had a number of warnings, all of them valid. Unused variable (well, I assigned to it, but that was all). Incorrect format specifications. False indentation! OK, all easy to fix. And the program built without any problems.
make install? There's this staging thing, and for some reason it created a staging hierarchy with no fewer than 495 directories! I only need 2 (/usr/local/bin and /usr/local/man/man1), but it couldn't find /usr/local/man/man1. Why not? Still more head-scratching.
Somehow this system has become too sensitive and too bureaucratic.
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The Burmese position
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Topic: animals, photography, opinion | Link here |
Bruno has a favourite sleeping place:
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Pene Kirk tells us that this is the “Burmese position”.
Taking photos wasn't easy. The on-camera flash isn't very bright, but it's clearly bright enough for both Yvonne and Bruno to squint:
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Yet another studio flash?
| Saturday, 13 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 13 May 2023 |
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mklinks port, day 2
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
A bit of idle thinking about why yesterday's port caused such problems. Which Makefile was to blame? The ports Makefile (/usr/ports/sysytils/mklinks/Makefile) or the package Makefile (/usr/ports/sysytils/mklinks/work/mklinks-1.0/Makefile)? At least I established that: mine, the package Makefile. But there's almost nothing in it. And for reasons I don't understand, it tried to put the man pages in work/stage/man/man1 instead of the work/stage/usr/local/man/man1 that it had waiting for it. But the Makefile contained:
DESTDIR= /usr/local
all: mklinks
install: all
cp mklinks ${DESTDIR}/bin
gzip -c mklinks.1 > ${DESTDIR}/man/man1/mklinks.1.gz
There are two issues here: first, it seems to have ignored DESTDIR, and secondly (presumably intentionally) the leading / got removed from the path name. But how can DESTDIR get removed? Is there some strange frobbing going on? Or is the issue with the PLIST_FILES in the port Makefile? They read:
PLIST_FILES= bin/mklinks \
man/man1/mklinks.1.gz
But no, reading the Porter's Handbook and other Makefiles in the sysutil directory, those are the correct semantics.
Also, while messing around, I managed to discard all my changes. They were in the work/mklinks-1.0 directory, and make clean removes that. Fortunately they were still open in an Emacs buffer, so I was able to recover them.
Why is this so difficult?
| Sunday, 14 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 14 May 2023 |
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Next porting effort
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So why am I having so much trouble porting mklinks? It compiles correctly, it installs correctly, and it was written for FreeBSD. But I've been chasing port issues (admittedly not very intensively) for days now. It's difficult to find the blame anywhere than in the Ports Collection infrastructure.
The first thing that I saw was that parts of the package Makefile were being ignored. I had a variable DESTDIR that overlaps with a variable of the same name in the Ports Collection. What happens if I change its name? It works!
Well, partially. But there's something basically wrong if this sequence in a Makefile doesn't work:
DESTDIR= /usr/local
install: all
cp mklinks ${DESTDIR}/bin
Part of this is doubtless to do with “staging”, where the files are first installed in work/stage and only later in the correct place. So my guess is that the staging code messes with the Makefile (probably making a modified copy) to perform the staging.
OK, and now? Yes, it installs the files in the correct places, and I can use them. But it's still not happy. It reminds me somehow of RIPE NCC. Now I get:
===> Installing for mklinks-1.0
===> Checking if mklinks is already installed
===> Registering installation for mklinks-1.0
pkg-static: Unable to access file /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/ports/sysutils/mklinks/work/stage/usr/local/bin/mklinks:No such file or directory
pkg-static: Unable to access file /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/ports/sysutils/mklinks/work/stage/usr/local/man/man1/mklinks.1.gz:No such file or directory
*** Error code 1
And sure enough, it installs the files, but there are no files at all in work/stage. That was with make install; make stage works, but again there's nothing in work/stage:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/ports/sysutils/mklinks 185 -> make clean stage
===> Cleaning for mklinks-1.0
...
===> Building for mklinks-1.0
--- mklinks ---
cc -g -O -Wall -fstack-protector-strong mklinks.c -o mklinks
===> Staging for mklinks-1.0
===> Generating temporary packing list
cp mklinks /usr/local/bin
gzip -c mklinks.1 > /usr/local/man/man1/mklinks.1.gz
====> Compressing man pages (compress-man)=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/ports/sysutils/mklinks 186 -> find work/stage/ -type f=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/ports/sysutils/mklinks 187 ->
Time for some serious RTFM. But why does this happen?
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Larissa
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Larissa has something in common with Leonid (first photo):
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Clearly there's room for devlopment, but the tendency is there.
While taking the photos, I noted:
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There are now two bumps where we only saw one a few days ago. I'm beginning to think that it has less to do with Bruno than with the harness that Yvonne has been using when walking him. It looks as if Lara will soon lose a significant amount of skin.
| Monday, 15 May 2023 | Dereel | |
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Ports staging: beaten!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So clearly my issues porting mklinks from FreeBSD to FreeBSD are related to the “stage” stage in the Ports Collection. And I hadn't read the Porter's Handbook from end to end. OK, read it and see what it has to say about staging.
Almost nothing! Definitely no indication of what the “stage” stage expects of the source Makefile. It really shouldn't have any expectations beyond that the file works.
OK, how do other ports handle the issue? Went through the sysutils directory looking for small ports that use PLIST_FILES, and finally came up with sysutils/obliterate, a real file deletion program written by my good friend Wes Peters (as I only later discovered). Like mklinks, it has only a single source file and a man page. But its Makefile looked completely different:
CFLAGS?= -g
PROG= obliterate
SRCS= obliterate.c
MAN8= obliterate.8
BINDIR= ${PREFIX}/bin
MANDIR= ${PREFIX}/man/man
.include <bsd.prog.mk>
Now isn't that short, sweet, and completely different from anything that I would have expected. And clearly with just a couple of changes it could be the Makefile for mklinks. Tried it out. Yes! It works!
Problem solved? At one level, yes. I was looking for a canonical Makefile that would work with the Ports Collection, and this is it. But:
Still, I've spent enough time on this thing. The more I work on FreeBSD lately, the more frustrated I become.
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50 years of microprocessors
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Topic: history, technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been somewhat over 50 years since the Intel 8008 processor was introduced, and 48 years since I started programming one:
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It was a horrible processor, but it has left its traces even on the most modern processors. It's amusing to think that the original 8008 had only 3,500 transistors, and the current AMD Ryzen processors have round 3 million times as many transistors.
But today I came across this article, which went further into the history of the 8008 than I had known. I knew that it was originally built for the Datapoint 2200, but I had thought that the Datapoint was a calculator, and it seems that it was a “programmable terminal” with aspirations to be a desktop computer. And even more interesting is that the 8008 didn't meet its objectives, neither time nor performance. On the other hand, the architecture was almost identical to that of the 2200, which continued to be built in discrete TTL.
Found the reference manual (PDF) for the 2200 with detailed architectural descriptions. It's surprising how much I remember from those days, even the instruction execution times (20 μs for register operations, 32 μs for immediate operations and some others, and 44 μs for jumps): the thing was so slow that every instruction counted. The minor differences in the 2200 architecture were immediately obvious: it had two register sets (much of the TTL on the board above is a second register set emulation), the stack was 16 words deep instead of 8, and the speed was roughly 4 times as fast as the 8008. No wonder Datapoint didn't take the 8008.
Why didn't Intel improve the 8008? The 2200 was pointing the way. But presumably they thought that the development effort was better served by bringing out a new processor, the 8080, which came out only two years later. And while it was a great improvement on the 8008, it wasn't exactly state-of-the-art even then.
| Tuesday, 16 May 2023 | Dereel | |
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More network problems?
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Topic: Stones Road house, technology, general, opinion | Link here |
While downloading videos today, I discovered that the downloading had stopped. Further investigation showed that the machines in other rooms (tiwi, lagoon) were not responding.
Network switch problem? Into the pantry. Yes, the switch was dead. But so was the Wi-Fi access point. Power?
Into the garage. Yes, the RCD had tripped, and it stayed tripped.
I've seen that before, more often than I like. The sump pump in front of the house? Disconnected it and things ran again.
The pump's not that old, and it was installed by UPI. Called them up on 5336 3420 (now, at least, they show their phone number on the web) and spoke to Kylie, who told me that all people were out, but that she would call back. She didn't.
The outage took the pantry, kitchen and lounge room with it, including tiwi (the TV computer) and fwaggle (the Apple in the kitchen). OK, time to finally put in the UPS that has been waiting for such an event?
More messing around with too-short cables in the TV cupboard, cables that didn't want to fit, and other irritations. Finally I had it done, went to the other side of the cabinet and discovered that tiwi and the TV were both on separate power points, and I could start all over again. GRRR. And while trying to get things working, ran into the old problems with flaky HDMI cables and a tiwi that didn't want to know where the console was. After an hour things looked a little tidy, but I still didn't have the UPS in circuit.
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Colonoscopy, the fourth
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Topic: health | Link here |
So tomorrow's the day for my colonoscopy, the fourth. This time I had the prep kit, they informed me in time, and the surgeon didn't go down sick. Time for the “prep kit”, starting at 15:00. I had been booked in for 7:15 tomorrow morning, but I got a call telling me that I didn't need to be there until 8:00, which is some relief.
Last time I wrote down many details, but not enough. This time I wrote down the details of how quickly the stuff went through me. TL;DR: it seems to have been different from last time. When it's all over I'll compare notes.
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You have an open port!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Strange mail today:
From: CERT-Bund Reports <reports@reports.cert-bund.de>
Subject: [CB-Report#20230516-10005299] Offene Portmapper-Dienste in Netzbereich 192.109.197.0/24
Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,
der Portmapper-Dienst (portmap, rpcbind) wird benötigt, um
RPC-Anfragen einem Dienst zuzuordnen. Der Portmapper-Dienst wird
u.a. für Netzwerkfreigaben über das Network File System (NFS)
benötigt. Der Portmapper-Dienst verwendet Port 111 tcp/udp.
Nachfolgend senden wir Ihnen eine Liste betroffener Systeme in Ihrem
Netzbereich.
What's that? Spam? No, it's a consequence of having my network block on the net again. I had set up the firewall to refuse most connection requests from outside, but this is UDP, a connectionless protocol, and I had only blocked some Microsoft-related ports. 111 is sunrpc, used by NFS and friends. And yes, it was open on a number of systems.
OK,
ipfw add 41 unreach filter-prohib udp from not 192.109.197.0/24 to any dst-port 111
And how about that, people are really hammering it. A few hours later I had (from ipfw show):
00041 539 36652 unreach filter-prohib udp from not 192.109.197.0/24 to any dst-port 111
I need to rethink UDP access. Clearly some, like 53 (domain) need to stay open. Which others?
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Bloody Vonex!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Unexpected mail from Vonex today: they had deducted $34.70 from my credit card. What part of this mail did they not understand?
- You will not deduct any further sums from my account without my
written consent.
Mail to Joey Melendez, who wrote:
We cannot credit back or refund since the cancellation has been
revoked and the services continue.
That's nonsense, of course. My account is in credit, and direct debiting is a separate issue from having an account with them. Wrote back with a deadline of tomorrow. And if they don't refund (which seems likely)? Whom do I contact? TIO? Bank fraud people? Why does this have to happen?
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SBS downloads again
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been well over a month since I last tried to find an incantation to download videos from the new SBS web site. I was left wondering whether I had provided the correct cookies or not. I had established that yt-dlp uses cookies from firefox or chromium, but it wasn't clear whether the cookies I extracted were actually correct. All I established was that it still didn't work with them.
OK, start with a clean (polished?) chromium, log in to SBS, stop chromium and see what I get. Got as far as saving them in a directory , and then ran out of time.
| Wednesday, 17 May 2023 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 17 May 2023 |
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Colonoscopy, the fourth
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Up at 6:00 this morning for the final preparation for my Colonoscopy, and left too early at 7:15. At least it gave me the confirmation that it only takes 30 minutes to get there at this time of the morning.
Then into the hospital:
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“We're here to help, but we're hiding”. But there's a sign:
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OK, thanks for saying where the Enquiries Desk is. I asked somebody passing by and she pointed round to the right behind a conveniently placed column; it's barely visible in the first photo, taken from further back, but completely invisible from the “Help” desk. Over there, and asked: go to first floor with the Gold Lift, turn right. Where's the Gold Lift? Hidden to the left of the yellow area in the middle background of the first photo.
OK, found that, came out:
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That doesn't help. By chance I knew what BRICC means (Grampians Integrated Cancer Service, named after the Grampians National Park 175 km to the west, and for which I can't even find a useful URL; the acronym hasn't caught up with the name change yet), but that wasn't where I wanted to go. Ah, look to the left:
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That's the red arrow, clearly visible. Finally! And that's a place I've been to before!
It wasn't until I processed the photos that I saw a detail that I had missed on a column far from anything else:
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It's too small to be sharp, but that doesn't help: it doesn't point to the Day Procedure Unit. The closest is an arrow pointing in the wrong direction to the Gold Lift.
Why do they do these things? It would save a lot of time for everybody concerned if they put clear, correct instructions where people could find them.
In the Day Procedure Unit the usual wait, and round 8:45 I was picked up by Karina to do the preparations, repeated questions, blood pressure (127/81), blood glucose (8.0!), and then taken to change, where even more people came to talk to me than last time, including what proved to be an anaesthetist who put in a particularly uncomfortable catheter, and a doctor whose name I kept forgetting: it wasn't Sanjay, but something similar (Samad? Sajit? Doesn't sound right), and he knew all the potential dangers and told me all about them. Very informative, but I suspect that he would have scared a lot of people. Finally Doctor Dan (clearly not Twining) who turned out to be another anaesthetist and referred to the first one as his “apprentice”.
Finally into the procedure room (what do they really call it?), where the equipment has become a lot more modern in the last 7 years. It seems that there is also an audio (and presumably video) recording of the procedure. My guess would be that it started at 9:55 or so, but not before Doctor Dan repeated his degrading references to his “apprentice”.
Waking up was different from the previous occasion. It wasn't just off/on; it took me a couple of minutes (starting at 10:11) to come to, and I wasn't wheeled out until 10:16.
Gradually I came to, and a nurse came to offer me coffee. I asked if I could get something to eat. No, no provision for that, just coffee. OK, bring me some coffee, please. “Would you like some sandwiches with that?”. Yes, please. So, nothing to eat, just sandwiches.
Spent quite some time recovering, including taking some uninteresting photos of my surroundings, and Yvonne picked me up at 11:10. What a way to spend the morning!
And what did they find? This time I got a printout of the results, including 4 images. This one apparently shows a 5 mm sessile polyp with a typical adenomatous appearance (bottom left), which of course they removed and will send for histological examination:
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That could take up to 3 weeks, so I had to put off my appointment with Paul Smith until then.
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Exposure strangeness
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
While in the hospital, I took a number of photos. One was intended to be a full-height “selfie”. I failed. Here the first attempt:
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What went wrong there? The photo of my hand was correctly exposed:
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Comparing the two, both were exposed effectively the same (1/60 s, f/1.7 or f/1.8). But the second was at ISO 250/25, while the first was at ISO 2000/34. Why? The only difference was that I set the self-timer for the first image. And no, it wasn't a one-off: I tried again with the same results.
OK, I can use manual exposure:
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And there the exposure was correct, but the photo, like the other two, was out of focus. Why? Did it set exposure and focus before I pressed the shutter button?
| Thursday, 18 May 2023 | Dereel | |
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Where has all the time gone?
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, animals, opinion | Link here |
Somehow this has been a busy week. Yvonne had an appointment with Paul Smith on Tuesday, which led to another with Rodney Reddy today. Nathan Delaney came along to tidy up the paddocks, which took him all day. Steven of UPI came along to look at the pump. And somebody came along to consider buying Dana—an untrained horse for a 13-year-old!
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Fixing the sump pump
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Steven of UPI along this morning to look at the pump that had tripped the RCD on Tuesday. The repair that Jason did last year proved not to have been waterproof. Steven put in what he claims will be waterproof. Hopefully it will stay that way.
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More VoIP issues
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Vonex has still not refunded the money that they illegally deducted from my credit card. Time for a complaint to the TIO, my bank and whatever authorities are responsible for abuse of this nature. Well, no, no time. But it'll happen.
As if to prove the point, I discovered that voice mail is no longer being mailed to me as an email attachment. I found no fewer than four messages on my normal phone voice mail, one from Joey of Vonex, who should have known better, and none with any date information. Apart from their dishonesty, the functionality has reached a point that makes it useless.
And what about the other number that only does voice mail, and which isn't connected to a real phone? How do I even find out if there is any voice mail there? And why hasn't it been changed to Aussie Broadband as I asked over two weeks ago? It would take another 30 minute phone call to even try to find out. But as it happened, today I received mail from Aussie confirming that it was on its way—with today's date! Why two weeks? Somehow the timing seems funny. Could it be that the transfer got stuck at Vonex and has only now been started?
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SBS download: fixed
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been nearly 2 months since I stopped being able to access videos on the SBS site. I need to supply user name and password, but that still didn't help, assuming that I had found my way correctly through the vague instructions.
More discussion on IRC today, and it seems that I was the only person with such problems. Others managed it with no trouble. But on further examination, they were using the latest and greatest yt-dlp, while I was using the one in the FreeBSD ports collection. I've been trying to avoid using the version on the web site, because it's maintained with git, one of my pet hates. But it was really not difficult:
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/7) ~ 12 -> cd /usr/local/bin/=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/7) /usr/local/bin 13 -> mv yt-dlp yt-dlp-ports-collection=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/7) /usr/local/bin 14 -> fetch https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp-nightly-build
And how about that, it worked! One more nail in the coffin of the FreeBSD Ports Collection.
| Friday, 19 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 19 May 2023 |
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OCR again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The report on my colonoscopy was on paper:
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I wanted to convert to text. There are so many programs that can do that, but years ago I bought a program from Ashampoo that captures the screen contents and can convert them to text. It only ran on Microsoft. What's it called? Something with OCR? The usual search functions didn't help, so I had to fight my way through a maze of twisty little icons, all different. Ah, there! “Ashampoo Snap”. Why didn't I think of that?
It's been a while since I used it, and it certainly wasn't intuitive. After a while I had captured my text. Now how do I save it? I couldn't work it out, and the “Help” didn't. What about my diary? There!.
Oh. I couldn't work it out there either. I'm sure that I found out how to do it, but it seems that I didn't note it in this diary. Every time I think that I'm being too verbose, this kind of thing shows me that I'm not going into enough detail.
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Larissa's wounds
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Topic: animals, health, opinion | Link here |
The scabs are off the wounds that I noted on Larissa's nose last week:
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Somehow I don't like the look of them. Why are they swollen like that? Is it because of the position on the nose? That wouldn't explain the ones on the jowls.
| Saturday, 20 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 20 May 2023 |
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Vonex responds
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Mail from Vonex: they're changing the “plans”. This is presumably the message I should have received a little over a month ago. But it contains information that Joey was too polite to tell me: the prices are going up. $1 a month more for the line I'm using, and infinitely more for the “SuperSaver”, which used to be free, and will now cost $5. Wouldn't you have thought that Joey would have told me that? By comparison, the fact that they have allocated the numbers incorrectly is more the kind of incompetence that I would have expected of them.
They also have a link to a Residential Plans page, which contains information apparently unrelated to what they wrote on the other page. But the one that infuriates me is:
I don't wish to continue my service. Can I cancel before the migration?Yes, you may cancel your service without penalty; however, we recommend using all existing call credits prior to cancellation. Unfortunately, unused credits cannot be reimbursed and will be forfeited.
I must finally get round to writing that complaint to the TIO, and also sorting out my ATA configuration.
| Sunday, 21 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 21 May 2023 |
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Microsoft predators?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Recently I've discovered that my Microsoft boxes dischord and distress have randomly come out of hibernation several times a day. Why?
Then it dawned on me. Network traffic? What does tcpdump say? ICMP6 echo requests! But I don't even use IPv6! OK, we can block that:
ipfw add 2 deny ip6 from any to any
But it didn't stop! Does that not block ICMP, maybe? Try blocking
ipfw add 2 deny icmp6 from any to any
At least tcpdump recognized that and changed it:
00002 4 196 deny ip6 from any to any
00002 0 0 deny ipv6-icmp from any to any
But it only blocked 4 packets, none of them ICMP6! And all this time I received stuff like:
14:58:47.578683 IP 192.88.99.1 > dischord.lemis.com: IP6 2002:c058:6301::1 > 2002:c06d:c5a9::c06d:c5a9: ICMP6, time exceeded in-transit for 2002:c058:6301::c058:6301, length 56
14:58:48.568694 IP 192.88.99.1 > dischord.lemis.com: IP6 2002:c058:6301::1 > 2002:c06d:c5a9::c06d:c5a9: ICMP6, time exceeded in-transit for 2002:c058:6301::c058:6301, length 56
14:58:49.578698 IP 192.88.99.1 > dischord.lemis.com: IP6 2002:c058:6301::1 > 2002:c06d:c5a9::c06d:c5a9: ICMP6, time exceeded in-transit for 2002:c058:6301::c058:6301, length 56
What's that nonsense? There's no IPv6 traffic, so why am I getting “time exceeded” messages? And why aren't they being counted? What is this 192.88.99.1 anyway? To my surprise, this page shows it to be something legitimate, and each of my systems (on different continents) connected to a different system with that IP address. But a quick scan of the description didn't enlighten me; Microsoft, maybe?
But whatever I did, the machines kept waking. It's not the messages above, though it's not clear where they got counted. And other requests did fail, like these:
14:56:43.270773 IP 49.89.190.140.5657 > dischord.lemis.com.telnet: Flags [S], seq 3228419497, win 35578, length 0
14:56:43.510680 IP 49.89.190.140.5657 > dischord.lemis.com.telnet: Flags [S], seq 3228419497, win 35578, length 0
14:56:52.791868 IP 122.114.37.28 > dischord.lemis.com: ICMP echo request, id 51172, seq 4663, length 16
14:57:04.876772 IP mason.census.shodan.io.29011 > dischord.lemis.com.4782: Flags [S], seq 3839047926, win 37124, options [mss 1460], length 0
14:57:11.736608 IP 167.94.146.65.6713 > dischord.lemis.com.8883: Flags [S], seq 753924976, win 1024, options [mss 1460], length 0
14:57:28.586604 IP 196.190.64.222.54924 > dischord.lemis.com.microsoft-ds: Flags [S], seq 4070897922, win 8192, options [mss 1380,nop,wscale 2,nop,nop,sackOK], length 0
14:57:31.295654 IP 198.235.24.104.52505 > dischord.lemis.com.4786: Flags [S], seq 102200212, win 1024, options [mss 1460], length 0
14:57:35.450651 IP prod-jerry-se-scanners-blr1-49.do.binaryedge.ninja.33600 > dischord.lemis.com.8443: Flags [S], seq 545570647, win 65535, options [mss 1460], length 0
14:57:46.703744 IP 120.150.216.162.bc.googleusercontent.com.53512 > dischord.lemis.com.22443: Flags [S], seq 15426057, win 65535, options [mss 1460], length 0
14:57:47.748680 IP 157.210.203.35.bc.googleusercontent.com.56362 > dischord.lemis.com.2227: Flags [S], seq 2050948503, win 65535, options [mss 1460], length 0
14:57:50.780649 IP 211.149.216.162.bc.googleusercontent.com.55460 > dischord.lemis.com.46700: Flags [S], seq 3662695545, win 1024, options [mss 1460], length 0
Times have clearly changed since I was last visible on the net. The obvious solution also saves power: shut the machine down. I barely use it anyway.
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Phantom phone calls?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the issues I have migrating from Vonex to Aussie Broadband VoIP is the issue of phantom phone calls. We've seen this before, and as a result we migrated to a different port (sip-tls, port 5061 instead of sip, port 5060). It has nothing to do with TLS, but it seems that the spammers don't try that port number—yet.
OK, get Aussie to do the same again? Somehow the real solution would be to set a firewall rule, but that needs investigation.
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Vonex does it again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the issues that I have with Vonex is that I no longer get voicemail sent as email messages, nor even notification when I get a voicemail. OK, that's simple: disable voicemail and put it on the local phones, all of which have answering machine functionality.
Oh. There's no longer a way to configure voice mail. All I can do is change the announcement. But while I was messing around, I got a stored voice mail from my daughter Yana. No date or time, of course, but I recognized the message: it was sent on 26 December 2021, announcing that she was a “close contact” of somebody with COVID-19 and thus unable to come to visit us. But why has that message resurfaced? What else does Vonex have lying around?
| Monday, 22 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 22 May 2023 |
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Garden flowers in late autumn
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
It's a month before the June solstice, time for the monthly garden photos.
The trees and shrubs in the east bed are looking relatively healthy, though many have lost their leaves earlier than usual in the year:
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The Magnolia x soulangeana that I got a couple of months ago has now lost all its leaves, but not the buds:
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Hopefully they will flower in early spring.
The Abutilons are a puzzle. They looked OK a year ago, but six months ago they were looking decidedly seedy, particularly the one planted in the ground south of the house:
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It had two stems, but one died completely. But now it has grown almost beyond recognition:
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And the other one, now on Piccola's grave, is also doing well:
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The Alyogyne huegelii on the north side of the house has started flowering again after the Cannas next to it were removed:
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But the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis on the other side of the Cannas hasn't. It has only produced 2 insignificant flowers all year. Here this time last year and today:
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The Fuchsias in the hanging basket in the house entrance are also a shadow of their former selves. Again last year and today:
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On the other hand, we have a solitary Clematis flower. I suspect that the vine is still recovering from Bryan Ross:
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Somehow the roses seem to take all the punishment they can get. They weren't looking good earlier in the year—too dry?—but there are still a number flowering:
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And looking forward to the spring, the first snowflakes are flowering:
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Reporting Vonex fraud
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Still no reply from Vonex about the fraudulent deduction of sums from my credit card. I've really been dreading the work it would take to report it, and I was right: over 2 hours today, and I'm only about half way through it.
First called the bank, fought my way through the voice recognition service, and spoke to Alvir, explaining the details: On 16 May Vonex deducted the sum of $34.70 from my credit card despite my express prohibition. Who? Vonex, like I said How much? $34.70, like I said. When? 16 May, like I said. Sometimes I wonder why I bother stating the case up front.
Much umming and ahing, and finally, after barely 30 minutes, yes, we'll dispute the transaction. Can take up to 35 calendar days. We'll send email, and you'll get an update within 10 business days.
Why is this all so complicated? In Germany they'd revert the transaction immediately, leaving me to negotiate with the fraudster. I'll be interested to see if they do anything at all.
But what about the fraud? Um. Ah. I'll connect you. That proved to be to Anton, who was sympathetic, but who didn't know what do to either. Put me on hold for another long period, and finally came back to say that, since it's a scam, I should contact Scamwatch, whatever that may be. I tried 3 times to explain that it was fraud, not a scam, but he wasn't listening. A total of 51½ minutes on the phone.
But while waiting I had found the police fraud and scam page and was able to enter a report (number CIRS-20230522-97). This page also clearly describes Vonex' actions as fraud (“deceitful or intentionally dishonest conduct, involving acts or omissions or the making of false statements, orally or in writing, with the objective of obtaining money or other benefit from a person/organisation for him/herself or another, or evading a liability”).
Then on to the TIO, which allowed me to enter a complaint, reference number 2023/05/05195. It was a little light on details, so presumably they'll get back to me and ask for more details.
This is all so stressful! I really don't want to do any of this. I still need to find out what to do about these phantom calls on the Aussie Broadband connections, and also find out why porting the one number has taken such a long time. Then negotiate with Vonex to transfer the other number.
| Tuesday, 23 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 23 May 2023 |
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A day wasted with VoIP
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Call from Ben at the TIO today, as expected. For once somebody sensible! Normally I don't like phone calls because of the communication difficulties, but this time it was probably a sensible way to go. The reason I didn't need to give any details about Vonex became clear: they're well-known to the TIO, simply because there's only a limited number of participants. But Ben only knew them as a supplier of commercial services, and hadn't heard of their takeover of MyNetFone. He explained the details: they will communicate (almost certainly now have communicated) with Vonex and give them 10 days to resolve the problem. If it isn't done by then, I can get them involved again. All makes sense.
Wrote my own message to Vonex, clearing in the process that I had not revoked my cancellation of the services, and certainly not my prohibition of deductions from my credit card. And the DID number that they renewed has not yet expired, though it's close: 26 May. So they had no grounds for renewal. Gave them a list of conditions to fulfil; now the ball's in their court. Heard nothing more today.
So that leaves me with the next issue: phantom phone calls. I've been wondering how to catch them with tcpdump, but that's not relevant. Whatever is ringing my phone is going to the Aussie Broadband phone on the ATA, not the Vonex number. And the ATA is set up to only accept calls from those specific systems. So it must be associated with the Aussie connection. The only puzzling thing is why MyNetFone changed my SIP port years ago and made the problem go away.
Called up Aussie support, and got a quick response from Damian, who seemed clued-up—quite a different “experience” from the recent issues. Can it be that Aussie have put me onto a priority list? That would be good.
The first issue: why is the porting taking so long? Damien tried to interpret the log and told me that the request had been sent yesterday, nearly 3 weeks after I applied for it. But it's likely that he misinterpreted the log; there was something about waiting for 30 days until my National Broadband Network connection is completed. That happened nearly 10 years ago. Clearly something that should be handled by the service delivery team, who, unfortunately, were not easy to contact: I could be in for up to 45 minutes on hold, though in the early morning it could be better. He also gave me information on how to contact them directly.
And the phantom messages? No idea. Can I give him some photos of the display? Yes, that makes sense, but it occurred to me that the latest call is saved in the phone, so I don't even need to do that, though I did set up a camera to do so:
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And voice mail? The sound quality was so distorted that I couldn't understand it. He suspected a handset issue, but that seemed unlikely, since I was talking to him normally on the same handset, and it happened with another handset as well. But he took note of it, and hopefully something will come of it. He later came back with a suggestion to contact via a third phone, which could be an option. Still, all in all a much better interaction than I had last month.
Still, it seems that Aussie's VoIP service is a little bare-bones. For example, there seems to be no provision to send voice mail as an email attachment, like MyNetFone did. But even if Vonex were to reinstate the functionality, there's no way that I would stay with them. Are there other alternatives? Off to take a look, and yes, indeed, plenty. This one looks particularly interesting, but clearly there's even more to investigate.
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Sound via HDMI
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
A thread on the FreeBSD-questions mailing list caught my eye recently: “Why can't I output audio to HDMI?”. I don't have an answer: I just discovered years ago that I couldn't, and since I had an amplifier connected anyway, I didn't bother much.
But it's (maybe) worth following up on. This article points me to a device /dev/sndstat. And how about that, on tiwi I get:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/3) ~ 42 -> cat /dev/sndstat
Installed devices:
pcm0: <NVIDIA (0x001c) (HDMI/DP 8ch)> (play)
pcm1: <NVIDIA (0x001c) (HDMI/DP 8ch)> (play)
pcm2: <Realtek ALC662 rev1 (Analog 2.0+HP/2.0)> (play/rec) default
pcm3: <Realtek ALC662 rev1 (Analog)> (play/rec)
No devices installed from userspace.
So how about that. Now how do I talk to them? /dev/pcm0? No, no such device. Why not? I need to find out how the devices are named—some day.
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Firewall docco
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
How do I specify a specific interface in a firewall rule? A quick RTFM didn't help much. This page did: the via keyword. It might be worth reading more generally.
| Wednesday, 24 May 2023 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 24 May 2023 |
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VoIP phantoms
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Woken up at 1:17 this morning by the phone ringing. Another bloody phantom call! And I had left the wrong phone connected to the Aussie Broadband line!
Off to take a look at the details. It shows an invitation from 43.252.74.114. A traceroute shows that to be behind be3.core1.equinix-sg1.sin.aussiebb.net and 38758-sg1-ix.equinix.com, which I am guessing is one of the Aussie servers.
Does that help? Not much. One thing's clear: MyNetFone generates much more traffic to the ATA than Aussie does, and it clouds the trace. How about putting the line on a different ATA? After all, there's one right next to it—a Linksys (or is that Cisco)? PAP2T, just not plugged in.
Plug in the power. Red power LED. What's that? Dragged out the manual and confirmed that there's no mention whatsoever of a red LED, certainly not in the “troubleshooting” section. OK, I have a third ATA, also a PAP2T. Plug that in. Yes, it displays all green LEDs. It seems that the second one must have died of boredom; clearly it was working last time I used it. Yes, I had one die on me 9 years ago, but that wouldn't be the one I had had in circuit much more recently. Somehow these ATAs are amazingly unreliable.
The working one was set up with my current parameters. Change one line to point to Aussie, disable the other one to silence the network traffic, and we're away! And to my surprise the voice mail sounded normal. Is that the ATA or the line? Do I care? What I do see is that here, too, there's no way to set up voice mail to send me email. So I should just disable it and store it locally.
But do I want to continue with Aussie VoIP? I've had a surprising amount of trouble with it, and I don't get incoming call reports at all—something that would be very useful in tracing the phantom calls—and the outgoing call reports don't include times. I should really look at other alternatives.
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More medical stuff
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
Last week I had a routine medical examination in Ballarat. Today was Yvonne's turn, not quite so routine: a coronary angiogram at St John of God, a place that I have had great difficulty entering in the past. She wasn't to drive afterwards, so I went with her. The whole procedure was slated to take 2 to 2½ hours, during which I was to do the shopping.
Really 2 to 2½ hours? I dropped her at the hospital at 9:40, and she called back at 9:45: yes, 2 to 2½ hours. So I went off to ALDI and started shopping. Another call at 10:00: she was about to be put into the oven, and she'd be finished in 30 to 45 minutes! I barely had time to finish my shopping before heading back to the hospital.
St John of God has always been a difficult place to enter, as I commented a couple of times two years ago. Since then, though, they have apparently closed this main entrance altogether:
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Now things look like this from the side:
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And I was required to use the entrance that I was not allowed to use last time. Still, things went relatively smoothly, and we were out by 10:53. Yvonne was hungry, so we went home instead of completing the shopping. She has more tests tomorrow, and I don't have to accompany her, so she can do the shopping then.
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Still more VoIP pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Call at 15:41 from Joey of Vonex, phone number 07 3667 8999, after I had stipulated that I wanted to communicate by email. The exhange speaks volumes:
Joey: How are you today?Greg: Not very happy.Joey: That's good to hear. I must remind you that this call may be recorded for quality purposes.Greg: I've already told you that I don't want to communicate via phone. I want to communicate by email so that I can record the exchange.Joey: I have sent you email. As soon as you reply, we will refund your money.Greg: Please refund the money now. It was obtained illegally. I shall respond to your email soon.
Later I took a look at her email. It wasn't a response to mine at all, just something that bore only a marginal relationship to reality:
We have received a request from you regarding transferring your phone number. Please check below details:To Port Out Phone Numbers: (first number) and (second number)
Please reply to this email to confirm the information given is correct and for us to proceed with the cancellation process once port out request completed.
But that's nonsense. Only the second number should be ported. What would they do with the first? Just disconnect it? And they most certainly did not receive this request from me.
Then:
The $34.70 that has been deducted from your card will be credited back to your account once the cancellation confirmed.
No, as I told her, that's not the agreement.
Your credit card details on our file is not fully shown in our system. Please provide the following information for your request:
* Account Name* BSB Number* Bank Account Number
What nonsense! They have the credit card information on file, since they deducted money from it. And the money should go back to the card, not to some other account. That's needed to close the dispute that my bank may be “progressing”. And somehow the request reminds me of various email scams that are going around. One way or another, given their track record, they're not going to get any further account details from me.
Surely this can just be stupidity. Nobody benefits from it. But presumably the TIO complaint will go via other channels, and maybe there's somebody there who can pass the Turing test.
| Thursday, 25 May 2023 | Dereel | |
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More VoIP investigations
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
What caused all the phantom calls on my Aussie Broadband line? Somehow the name “sipvicious” looked suspicious. What does Google have to say about it? Ah, it's a OSS security tool, one that can be abused for the kind of call I have been getting. This page,“How do I stop SIPVicious attacks?”, gives a solution:
The only solution is to block these type of calls is to ensure that SIP ports such as 5060, 5061 are blocked on the firewall or router.
Will that even work? Somehow it doesn't match the pattern I have been seeing. But let's wait and see when the next attack comes.
More investigation of VoIP alternatives didn't get me very far. Somehow there are far too many little details to investigate.
And now I have so many VoIP lines—even after closing down Vonex I will have 3. How about using one on my mobile phone? I had tried ZoiPer in the past, most recently a year ago, but I had run into authentication difficulties.
Try again. What information do I need? SIP host, identification (phone number) and password. All to be typed in on this horrible mobile phone not-keyboard. And to make it easier, ZoiPer doesn't display my input, not even for a second. Type it in. How do I save? I don't, it seems; it stores it automatically. But it doesn't connect, though now it adds to its cryptic “(60)”:
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I suppose that's better than nothing, though it still doesn't help. Is it an invalid password, a missing configuration detail, or a misunderstanding of their syntax?
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Reinstating GL3-RIPE
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been two weeks since I sent a message to DENIC asking for authentication to change my handle GL3-RIPE. Beyond two automatic responses with two different ticket numbers, no response. But the responses had phone numbers, so called them, first the DENIC Business Services in Frankfurt (+49 69 27235-272), ticket 2023051143000294. Automatic response “we will be with you shortly”, then silence, not even canned music.
After a couple of minutes called the other one, ticket 1848782 in Darmstadt, +49 6151 62 90 942, and almost immediately was connected with a Mr Ratna, who told me that they had considered the message (and presumably the reminder) as spam! But since it wasn't tied to a domain name, they didn't know what to do, and suggested that I call the Business Services in Frankfurt again.
This time I did get wait music, but was connected with a Mr Wein quite quickly. He, too, didn't understand the issue, expecting a domain name and not address blocks, and he couldn't find anyone who did: too early in the morning (8:30). Time must have changed in Germany. The last time I worked for a German company I was expected to start at 7:45 in the morning. He suggested that I call back an hour later and gave me a different extension number (-290 instead of -272). But possibly another attempt at email might work better, so I'll think of something there.
| Friday, 26 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 26 May 2023 |
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KL Hokkien Mee yet again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
A couple of weeks ago I tried KL Hokkien Mee without caramel sauce. Something seemed to be missing, so today I tried with the caramel sauce again, by accident too much: instead of 20 g caramel, 15 gram dark soya sauce I used 32 g of caramel and 12 g of soya sauce. The result? OK, but it wasn't obviously different from the time before last.
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Bloody monitors!
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Topic: animals, technology, opinion | Link here |
Round lunch time Yvonne called me. Bruno had jumped on her keyboard and reconfigured the display.
Oh. The screen dimensions had changed, making things narrower, and clearly the monitor itself showed only part of the X display. I've used that before decades ago: it should be possible to switch between the display resolutions with Ctrl-Alt-+ and Ctrl-Alt--. But that hasn't worked for some time, and since I didn't need it, I didn't investigate why. It didn't work today, either.
Dammit, restart X. It had only been up for 5 weeks. But it came up in the same resolution again, and so did the text display on the monitor: somehow the monitor had changed its parameters, not the computer. How did Bruno manage that?
And how do I change it? Every Bloody Monitor has different controls, almost invariably hidden behind invisible buttons or sensors. Spent some time trying to even find how to configure the display size, without success.
Dammit, get another monitor. The old BenQ G2400WD? Yes, it worked, but it was too dim. This must be the one with the failing backlight.
OK, next the one that I had connected to the test machines, the ΛΟC 2236. Yes, works, but it's too bright! How do I adjust it? I can't even find the buttons! Another 5 minutes trying to work out how to adjust it. Ah, they're sensors round the LEDs, one too few.
Finally it was done, though I still don't know what the original monitor will do when I connect dereel to it. But why do monitor makers make them so difficult to adjust?
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DENIC, where art thou?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Should I give DENIC another call or send them a mail message? The people I spoke to yesterday didn't seem to understand what I wanted, so maybe it would help to write email. Did that, and given the time difference it wasn't surprising that I didn't get a reply today.
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Vonex again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been 4 days since I reported Vonex' fraudulent activities, 3 days since the TIO contacted them about it, and 2 days since Joey Melendez contacted me with content that bore almost no relationship to the matter. And today is the expiration date of my DID number. Have they disconnected it? No.
Another email to them, specifying my demands. It's to residential@vonex.com.au, not to Joey personally, so somebody should be able to do something about it.
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Goodbye phantoms?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been 2 days since I moved my Aussie Broadband configuration from the Grandstream HT802 ATA to the Linksys (or is that Cisco)? PAP2T so that I could trace the phantom calls more easily. But there have been none! Is this somehow related to the ATA? I can't see how.
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distress distress
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
For the past week or two, distress, usually hibernated, has been waking up at roughly regular intervals. Why? External network traffic? I've blocked all incoming traffic (from the external interface), but it hasn't stopped. OK, let's see what happens if I block traffic on the internal interface. That means that I won't be able to talk to it, of course, but I can always remove the firewall rule when I do.
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ZoiPer config again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I still can't get ZoiPer to connect to my VoIP services. The obvious thing to suspect was an incorrectly entered password, since there was no way to check whether it was correct or not.
But there was! Yes, it displays as a row of stars, but this horrible keyboard replacement suggests a string:
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And that's correct. Isn't it also stupid? I also discovered typos in the user name. Fixed all that. No difference. Still can't connect. Do I care?
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Mice!
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, animals, opinion | Link here |
We're infested with mice in the garage. It's not the first time, but since Piccola has been dead there are lots of them. They're also cleverer than the old ones: they don't go into the mouse traps. They go up to the entrance, eat all the bait that I've put outside there for them to lure them in, but they don't go inside.
Time for Bruno to grow up.
| Saturday, 27 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 27 May 2023 |
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Chantilly lace
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Jesse Walsh along today to pick up some firewood, and while he was here he helped me move the potted “Chantilly lace” maple that we got last year. As we had half expected, it wasn't happy on the verandah, where it got too much sun. So now we'll put it next to the house entrance on the east, where the sun should cut off round midday:
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More distress distress
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Shortly after arriving in the office, distress came out of hibernation again.
What? I had firewalled everything going to it. And it had caught a lot of traffic:
00003 523950 32182090 deny ip from any to 192.109.197.172 via em0
That's over half a million data packets since yesterday. What are they? Last time I looked it seemed to be something on distress accessing the outside world, and possibly that's what it was. But since I've been blocking things, what could be waking it? Still, there's an obvious solution, pull the plug:
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distress is the bottom machine (the middle one is dereel, the top one a test box currently not being used). Run the cursor over the image to see what it was like before. We'll see how it works like that.
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Still more Vonex frustration
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
This whole week I have been trying to get a response from Vonex about the many problems I have with them. My last message (yesterday) contained:
1. Today the DID number expires. PLEASE DO NOT RENEW IT.
2. DO NOT CANCEL the connection (MegaSaver), nor the other associated DID.
3. Please cancel the SuperSaver before migration to the new system.
I do not wish to pay any money for this service.
4. Refund the money that you illegally deducted from my credit card
NOW. This is a demand, not a request. You had no right to deduct
it.
5. Please answer my email of 23 May, addressing the other issues I
raised there.
6. Please deal with the TIO complaint in a timely fashion. So far
you have not even acknowledged its existence.
No response yesterday, and the DID is still active. But this evening, finally, I got a response:
Below are the details for the service you requested to be cancelled:
Subscription ID: 4733
Service: SuperSaver II
Once we receive your confirmation, your VoIP service will be
effectively canceled on 2023-06-16.
We also received a porting out request of DID number: 03351370. This
number will be cancelled on our end after port out completed.
And that's all. Has she even read the emails? This has been going on for a month, and I get the feeling that they don't read what I write.
And that's not the only frustration. A similar period of time negotiating with RIPE NCC, issues with Aussie Broadband, ongoing issues with DENIC. Why is this so difficult?
| Sunday, 28 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 28 May 2023 |
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Image size strangeness
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
This morning I wanted to align two images for mouseover alternation (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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Somehow it didn't work as intended. The sizes of the images should have been the same, but the second one is higher. Why?
But after processing, I had serious performance problems displaying the input images. After a bit of head-scratching, discovered:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~/Photos/20230528 577 -> file Computers-?.jpeg
Computers-1.jpeg: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01, resolution (DPI), density 150x150, segment length 16, baseline, precision 8, 19233x16154, frames 3
Computers-2.jpeg: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01, resolution (DPI), density 150x150, segment length 16, baseline, precision 8, 19233x16512, frames 3
The images are round 317 MP in size! The originals were 20 MP. How did that happen? A quick comparison showed that it wasn't DxO PhotoLab, so somehow Hugin must have saved oversized images back to the originals. Why would it do that?
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Why xterm for Android?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Mail from Mal White about last' month's article about xterm for Android. He pointed me to various ssh implementations, and of course I know about them.
So why did I write that article? I no longer remember. What I need for Android is not an xterm, which is really not much more useful than ssh, but something that can display the Android screen on a real display. And I thought I had once had that, but I no longer remember. Doubtless some user-friendly Android “feature” got in the way.
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Shepherd's pie revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I've been planning to make a lamb biriani for a couple of weeks now, but somehow things—mainly my laziness—get in the way. Today was the day. Do I have all the ingredients? Yes!
But those pistachios looked suspicious. Unopened, but best before 5 May 2011, presumably bought at Hindustan Imports 13 years ago. Surprisingly, they didn't taste bad, but they didn't taste of anything much, and they were salted, something that I must have overlooked at the time.
So, another valid excuse to postpone the biriani again—it has only been 2 years. And then I found some meat for shepherd's pie, something that Yvonne had wanted for some time. That's a lot simpler than biriani. Do it!
Oh. Not that simple after all. Firstly, it was only the meat. I still needed to fry the onions, crush the bread, make the gravy and the mashed potatoes. And in almost every case I ran into trouble with the quantities.
Last time I came to the conclusion that there was too much meat per unit area (0.7 g per cm²), down from 1.5 g previously. So I put that in a baking form, and it was still too much.
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There would have been no space for the mashed potatoes on top, and I had to put it in a different form.
And the mashed potato? The pain there is that the packages don't include instructions, or at least nothing that makes sense. But I had written 1 part powder to 4.3 parts water, but that I should extend the water to 5.5:1 for shepherd's pie. And the recipe suggests 275% by weight of mash, in this case for a total of 800 g. OK, be cautious and use 5:1. That's still a lot of mash.
Or so I thought. It wasn't enough!
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Maybe I should go up to 4 times as much mash as meat.
And all that took 45 minutes, when I was expecting 10! Another 45 minutes to bake the thing, and we were late for dinner:
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What a mess! It's far too sloppy. I don't have a good solution for that one yet.
It took a couple of days to come to a different conclusion: make the pie deeper.
| Monday, 29 May 2023 | Dereel | |
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Still more VoIP pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I still don't have any useful response from Vonex, and it seems that Aussie Broadband's VoIP offering is a little too bare-bones. More investigation, though I really don't want to do this. Zadarma seems to have a number of things going for it, including no base fee and phone numbers in dozens of different countries. But to try it out means still more cables and another phone base. Do I want to do it? No. Should I do it? Probably.
So, signed up with them. The usual “make it easier for the crackers” password rules (“The password must contain letters and numbers, must be contain 8 to 30 characters in length”), and no fewer than three CAPTCHAs. Am I the only person who gets really annoyed by these things? But apart from that, signup was relatively straightforward, though their documentation could have been better. Now to get round to connecting up some hardware.
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Network trace for Microsoft
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Disconnecting distress from the local net seems to have stopped the random wakes from hibernation. So clearly it's something on the local net that is waking it. But what? I “haven't changed anything” there, but whatever it is affects dischord (Microsoft 7) as well.
Clearly a trace on eureka isn't sufficient. There must be something like Wireshark or tcpdump for Microsoft.
Off to take a look. Google has decided that I am now in Germany, or at least distress is. Everything was in German, and all the hits are from German sites. Found a Wireshark and installed it, but I couldn't get it to run. It found five Ethernet interfaces, presumably not all different, but I couldn't enter a capture option that it liked. I find wireshark is a pain to run at the best of times, but this interface looks nothing like the one I know on FreeBSD.
OK, how about tcpdump? Found a link on Heise Verlag and downloaded it.
Oh. File name is tcpdump_trial_license.zip. distress tried to “open” it with VLC.
Dammit, anything easier to install? Yes, windump. That installed relatively easily, but that was all:
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What a pain this Microsoft is!
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Aussie fixes phantom calls
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday I had received mail on my mobile phone from Aussie Broadband about my phantom VoIP calls, but the fix didn't relate to the menus I found on the ATA. But I did ask him to ensure that I didn't get called on my mobile phone again.
This evening, round 21:00, I got another call on the mobile phone. At least he knew the password I had given them (“pink elephant”), but not that he shouldn't have called on that number. I must get them to ensure that they only call in the daytime.
But he helped. He worked my way through the menus, and I was able to set the INVITE parameters to no. Hopefully that's the end of the matter.
And the difference in the menus? I had been looking on the wrong ATA (Linksys PAP2T instead of Grandstream HT802). Egg on my face.
| Tuesday, 30 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 30 May 2023 |
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Saddle fitting
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Topic: animals, food and drink | Link here |
Yvonne has been contacted by Minna Sarkkinen, the new Australian representative of Hidalgo saddles. Yvonne has been using Hidalgo saddles for some time, and Minna wanted to tap into her expertise. She arrived with friend Sally and a ute full of saddles, just in time for breakfast, giving us a chance to see how many eggs we could fry at once:
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Surprisingly everything went well. After that they spent all day testing and measuring:
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Much more on Yvonne's photo page.
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The eternal VoIP
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Surprising message on my phone today:
AussieBB here. 0353461370 has successfuly ported. Call your previous provider to ensure the service is now closed.
Why did they send an SMS? I almost never look at them. And of course it wasn't disconnected. Do I want the pain of calling Vonex again? No. It doesn't really make much difference who supplies it, and I have sent Vonex multiple messages telling them to disconnect it. If they don't, I'm not responsible for any costs.
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Fortune favours the brave
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yet another attempt to contact DENIC today, not made easier by a typo in the phone number. And once again I had difficulty with lines dropping and nobody in authority being able to address the issue. Though I called at 9:30 local time, only one person was available, and on another line. But my “consultant” sounded concerned, especially given the time it has taken, and said that she would chase it up. Her name? Frau Fortuna: Mrs Fortune.
And how about that, I finally got an email response: DENIC doesn't want to manage RIPE handles. Can I transfer it elsewhere? Can I! It looks like this pain is almost over.
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Shepherd's pie: the penny drops
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Ate some more of the shepherd's pie this evening. No, there's not enough meat. My issues with the quantities really relate to the depth of the pie, and most of my forms are not deep enough. So forget the 4 times as much mash as meat. Make the meat deeper, maybe back to the original 1.5 g per cm². That may require finding another form.
| Wednesday, 31 May 2023 | Dereel | Images for 31 May 2023 |
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Bloody mice!
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
I've been trying to catch the mice in the garage for weeks now. We've had that before and discovered that the electronic “Big Cheese” mousetrap did very good work. But not this time. The original mousetrap seems to have died, so we bought a new one. The mice seemed uninterested, so I put a trail of food leading up to the trap, and also inside it over the contacts that should kill them. The result?
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Not only did they enter and steal the food, but they left proof that they had been there. What's wrong with this thing?
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VoIP without end
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Call on the phone from Joey Melendez of Vonex today. Why? I had sent her no fewer than 5 email messages last week, none of which she had answered, and I had asked her to not call me on the phone. An obvious reason: I find it hard to keep my temper when dealing with idiots. But I did make the mistake of demanding once again that they refund the money they stole.
Sorry, can't do that, credit balance on an account can only be refunded when the account is closed. That's what the accounting department says. My guess is that she didn't give them the crucial detail that they weren't entitled to debit the money. And in any case, $30 of the sum is for the DID number that they claim to have disconnected.
What do I do? Wait until the TIO complaint times out early next week. See if they can sort things out for me. In any case, the sooner I get Vonex behind me, the better.
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Aussie Broadband strangenesses
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Strange message from Aussie Broadband support today: the email I sent them was empty!
Huh? Which email? They were too polite to say. So I checked, and the only one I had sent had been addressed on Monday. So I sent them another message, and got another strange reply:
Date: Wed, 31 May 2023 16:23:35 +1000
From: Aussie Customer Service
Apologies again there, but it appears that email you've sent through again is
also blank. Is it possible you can double check you're selecting the correct
attachment and try sending it through again.
Thank you in advance.
--
Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, 30 May 2023 at 18:19:11 +1000, Aussie Customer Service Level 2
> wrote:
> > Dear Greg Lehey,
> >
> > Apologies it seems like the email you have sent in is blank?
>
> That's hard to say. You don't have any reference, not even an
> In-Reply-To: header.
> ...
What's going on there? Clearly the message arrived and was readable, because he attached it. What do I do? Calling their service number is a waste of time. Wouldn't it be nice if they called me? But how can I get them to do that?
And then, only 20 minutes later, I got a call on my mobile phone from Hugh at Aussie. He looked at the ticket and decided that I had confused people by sending my reply “inline”.
What can I say? How can you reply sensibly to an email message if you separate the content from the text to which you're referring? Yes, I know people do this again and again, but the result is the kind of communication failure that I'm continually ranting about. Still, I don't suppose it would do any harm to put in a heading before any response saying something like “Response interleaved with your text”.
What Hugh wanted was to confirm that the porting of the phone number had worked correctly. No, it hadn't, as I pointed out to him. But it seems that some of his monitoring software had found anomalies. It proved that it was he who had called me on Monday (and whom I had asked not to call me on the mobile phone), and he tried tracing from various places. Ultimately it proved that the ATA settings that he had given me were not optimal. The Grandstream HT802 has two INVITE settings per line, and until proof of the contrary they should be set like this:
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And then everything worked except—wait for it—Vonex. Calling the number from a Vonex line still gets me to the voice mail message. Do I care? Not enough.
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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