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| Greg's diary |
| October 2017 |
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| Sunday, 1 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 1 October 2017 |
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Summer Time!
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Topic: general, photography, opinion | Link here |
We moved to Daylight saving time this morning, which still involves setting multiple clocks. More and more are setting themselves automatically, though, including now two of my cameras, the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I and II. They set the time from a mobile telephone if you can manage to connect to them with this horrible OI.Share application.
Or do they? After fighting my way through the inevitable manual configuration (remove all other networks, connect to camera) and returning to “Remote Control”, nothing happened. It seems that you have to at least wait another 10 seconds until the phone takes over complete control of the camera.
And then the time was out by 30 seconds! Not surprisingly, the phone was too. A bit of searching revealed that there's yet another setting, Date and time/Automatic date and time. So I set that, but nothing changed. A clock display app showed that the phone remained out by 30 seconds.
GPS time? Out of the house to let the phone sync with the world, but it didn't, even after 10 minutes. Reboot. Hang. I think this one is “normal”, so I powered down and up again and tried to sync. It still took in the order of 10 minutes. Can this have something to do with the change to daylight saving time? It doesn't do that normally, and it didn't repeat it later.
Isn't it easy to have the time set automatically?
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More multimedia download insights
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
I'm still trying to find out how to download videos from SRF. MediathekView can download some of them, but only some of them. Yesterday I had tried to view one that doesn't show up in the MediathekView list, but had been told that, due to content restrictions, it was only accessible between 22:00 and 6:00, implicitly CET. That's OK here, especially since we moved to DST: it corresponds to 7:00 to 15:00 here. And then I was told it was only accessible in Switzerland.
It did that with some other programmes too, including stuff that was included as “free” in MediathekView. OK, can MediathekView download it? Yes, no trouble. So what's the issue?
Searching the web came up with this script, which claims to be able to download videos from SRF. It's not complicated, and it refers to a program rtmpdump. What's that? How about that, it's a port, and it's installed:
That's another one to investigate.
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Shame on Trump!
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Yes, we've come to realize that Donald Trump is a disaster for his country and, to a lesser extent, for the rest of the world. But he continues to astound. You'd think he had a motto “When in a hole, keep digging. Make it the biggest hole ever. Really!”.
I've already commented on his lack of support for Puerto Rico. But when the mayor of San Juan pleaded for help, what did he do?
...want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job. ...Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They.... The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.
Even by his standards, that's disgusting. When are they going to rid their country of him?
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New wildflower
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
A couple of days ago I saw some flowers blooming in the property two blocks up Stones Road. Today I came with a telephoto lens, though I didn't need to: I found another one on the side of the road:
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What is it? On the face of it, it looks exotic. Spent some time looking through the list of local wildflowers, but didn't find anything. But then Margaret Swan contacted me: it's a Freesia refracta, and apparently the “alba” variant, to judge by the offerings from Diggers Club. The normal ones are yellow:
| Monday, 2 October 2017 | Dereel → Napoleons → Dereel | Images for 2 October 2017 |
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New disks
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Topic: general | Link here |
Notification slip in the letter box today: two parcels for me in Napoleons. One was the disks that I had ordered last week, so off to pick them up. And the other parcel—a mixer tap for the kitchen—wasn't there! It seems that the slips are printed in the sorting office in Wendouree, so it's possible that the thing might not have made it to delivery. I would have been particularly unhappy if I had made a 40 km journey just for that.
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Misery Creek Road again
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Topic: gardening, photography | Link here |
The main Colac-Ballarat Road through Enfield State Park is particularly colourful right now. I can't remember it ever being so colourful before during the last 10 years that we have lived here.
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They prove to be one of the plants I had identified earlier.
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It's really high time to find out what they're all called. And other plants are also more prominent, like this one at the end of Orchid Track:
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And this tiny one is, I think, new:
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The individual flowers are only a couple of millimetres across, and it's easy to miss altogether.
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More multimedia download stuff
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Topic: multimedia, technology | Link here |
Continued investigating how to get programmes from SRF today. There's this script, which complained about non-implemented functionality. It starts:
Who uses /bin/sh any more? Linux people just link it to /bin/bash, so I guessed that it required bash functionality. Changing the first line to point to bash fixed it. Then I ran it, and got no output, neither on the screen nor on the disk. Time for some script reading. It seems that it's really just a wrapper for rtmpdump, which proves to be related to mplayer. The business end is:
And a couple of additional lines told me the truth:
It seems that the URL http://www.srf.ch/webservice/cvis/segment/$i/.json is an old, worn-out magic word. I haven't seen any response for any file. Do I care? Yes, I think so, but do I care enough?
The other discovery is that youtube-dl can also download a number of other sites. But it also had difficulty with SRF:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) /src/Series 55 -> youtube-dl 'http://www.srf.ch/play/tv/schweizer-film/video/der-koch?id=68e5b4b2-cee6-48e6-824e-b54b29feb545'
OK, free proxies are available. But they don't all do quite what I'm looking for:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) /src/Series 59 -> youtube-dl --proxy https://gateway.j-host.ch/ 'http://www.srf.ch/play/tv/tatort/video/goldbach?id=3d1ed3ae-3d41-40ce-be6f-f87d11bbde60'
That's enough pain for one day.
| Tuesday, 3 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 3 October 2017 |
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Upgrading lagoon
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I now have a new system disk for lagoon, Yvonne's computer. Time to upgrade the system, which also involves moving it to a smaller, quieter box, my old ThinkCentre that was once called despair.
First problem: despair does not have
a DVI output. Will I even be able to start
X on it in native resolution? But that's in the
future. For the time being, how do I migrate? Downloaded the latest FreeBSD installation disk and
started it. Things have changed at some point, and I was rather surprised to see the
install DVD want to fsck itself. Chose my standard disk layout: two alternative root
file systems, 40 GB each, 20 GB of swap, and the rest of the 2 TB 1.8 TB
as /home.
How do you boot from the second root partition? I made the choice easy by not using the first one at all; the prepared copy of eureso, my up-to-date virtual machine, will go there. So I installed and rebooted:
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Not completely unexpected, though not very clever: although it installed the root file system on /dev/ad0p4, it's looking for it on on /dev/ad0p1 (or, to use its inimitable terminology, 0:ad(0p1); when will people harmonize these names?). OK, that's simple: tell it to boot from 0:ad(0p4):
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No simple error message for us! Just a crash. But at least I have a name now: gptboot. Reading the man page was sobering: it seems that there's no way to tell it how to boot if you have a problem like mine. It goes through attributes in the GPT partitions: bootme and bootonce, and also sets bootfailed when appropriate, and to set the first two you need a running system. Somehow that seems wrong, and I'm still wondering whether I can be bothered to fix it.
Also discovered that I had chosen the wrong system. I have two boxes that look almost identical. In December 2015 it was a Core 2 Q9550, with a CPUMark of 3641 at the time (now 3997). But now I discover that it's a Core 2 Duo E6550 with a CPUMark of only 1499, much less than half the speed. I must have swapped it with stable. That'll need changing. Unfortunately, it doesn't make any difference to the lack of a DVI connector.
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More wildflowers
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
The weather is gradually becoming more friendly, and perhaps not coincidentally the Marriotts from next door are back from their tours round Australia. Because of the weather we took the dogs for a slightly longer walk, up the top of Stones Road to Westons Road, noting in the process various flowers:
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I thought it might be the same as some I have seen on Misery Creek Road, but I can't locate them. I really must get round to identify all these flowers.
Then there are these ones, of which Yvonne has already successfully taken cuttings:
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And this creeper caught her eye:
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So she's trying some cuttings of it as well.
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Tagine? Or Cous-cous?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
We've made tagines relatively frequently lately, not only because we have the hardware. One result is that we have a whole lot of cous-cous (semolina) which needs to be eaten. So: cook cous-cous (dish) for a change.
What's the difference between a tagine and cous-cous anyway? They're both slow-cooked dishes of meat and vegetables. I had asked Mohammed Ifadir in Marrakesh, and he told me the obvious: tagine is cooked in a sealed pot, and cous-cous is steamed. In addition, there are things that you put in cous-cous that you don't put in tagine, like pumpkin and cabbage.
Somehow the difference doesn't seem that important. Another one, clear to both of us, is that cous-cous (dish) is served with cous-cous (semolina). Since we don't have the steamer (or maybe we do, but not the experience to use it), I decided to make a tagine and serve with cous-cous (semolina).
And which tagine? At Yvonne's request, lamb with apricots and almonds. But also according to her request, with much more vegetables. Here's what I ended up with:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 6 g | cumminseed | 1 | ||
| 5 g | black pepper | 1 | ||
| 8 g | cinnamon | 1 | ||
| 5 g | ras-el-hanout | 1 | ||
| 16 g | ginger | 2 | ||
| 20 g | garlic | 2 | ||
| 1 kg | lamb, cut into large chunks | 3 | ||
| water to make a paste | 4 | |||
| 300 g | onion | 5 | ||
| 60 g | oil | 5 | ||
| 150 g | turnip | 6 | ||
| 200 g | parsnip | 6 | ||
| 500 g | courgettes | 6 | ||
| 400 g | potatoes | 6 | ||
| 400 g | sweet potato | 6 | ||
| 300 g | carrots | 6 | ||
| 30 g | salt | 7 | ||
| 200 g | dried apricots | 8 | ||
| almonds, peeled | 9 | |||
The big difference here is the quantity of vegetables: nearly 2 kg, compared to 1 kg in my recipe. Because of that (and the cous-cous) I left out the chick peas. I also left out the parsley, because we didn't have any, and I doubled the quantities of spices and put in 30 g of salt instead of 20. I also omitted the saffron: I haven't been able to taste it on previous occasions. The dish is enough for several days, so I only made a few almonds; I'll do more before further servings.
The result? Not bad, and the cous-cous suited the dish. But for my liking, there were too many vegetables. On the other hand, the double quantity of spices is good, and despite the increase in salt, it wasn't enough. That's partially due to the additional vegetables, of course, but I'll cautiously increase it in the base recipe, this time from 20 g to 25 g, and spread it over the top layer and let the condensation work it into the juice.
| Wednesday, 4 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 4 October 2017 |
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Upgrading lagoon
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yvonne was shopping in town today, a good time to upgrade lagoon, her computer. It went surprisingly well:
On eureso, the development VM, which has eureka's file systems mounted,
The name is deliberately short to make it easier to enter on the console. /src is a symlink from /home/src.
Boot the new machine from DVD. Start as “live CD”.
After that completes, reboot in single user mode and edit some files:
/etc/ttys, /etc/gettytab have specific additions that need to be merged.
/boot/loader.conf needed to be copied (by default it's empty), and the disk specification needed to be adjusted.
The big question: does X work? No. It came up in 1024×768 mode. I've seen this so many times before that I can't be bothered to try. What I need is a sensible graphics card. In the meantime I put the disk in the old machine, which meant that I had to copy the /etc/X11/xorg.conf as well. But then it Just Worked.
Left it there for Yvonne to discover, and sure enough, she (almost) didn't notice any difference. For some reason the firefox fonts are different, and her mutt mailbox was open read-only. The latter proved (bizarrely) to be related to the lack of the file /usr/local/lib/.muttrc, why, I don't know.
No good reason. As I discovered the following day, it didn't fix the problem.
But on the whole a relatively straightforward update. Gradually I can address the more complicated issue of upgrading eureka. In the meantime, time to start a HOWTO page on what to look at for lagoon.
In passing, it's interesting to note that you can copy a root file system with tar, as above, but you can't then just remove it with rm -rf: a number of the files have the schg flag set, and a couple have other flags set too. So it's good to know that you can reset all of them with:
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Latest compromise attempt
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Lately I've been getting a lot of mail messages like this:
They're from my web server showing failed web lookups (/dump.tgz <- http://lemis.com says that there was a link to /dump.tgz from http://lemis.com), and I send them to help maintain document integrity. But all of these are fake links to presumed database backups. Do people really keep their database backups where they can be accessed remotely? In any case, I was going to block the sites until I discovered that there were a whole lot of them. I wonder how many people will get bitten.
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Where's my tap?
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Topic: general | Link here |
Yvonne stopped in at the post office to pick up the tap that should have been there on Monday. It still hadn't made it. Damn—not because it's late, but because making a complaint to Australia Post is such a pain. Went through the motions of entering a complaint. Tracking number, please. OK, can do that. Name of sender? Post code of sender? My name? My post code? When was the item sent?
Idiots! That's all in the tracking information, along with the fact that it was in Wendouree over 2 days ago. Spent another 5 minutes looking for a phone number and asking their stupid search functions. Finally found one (13 7678, which they obfuscate as 13 POST), along with one “From overseas”, hidden behind dots: +61-3-8847-9045. That's the one I want, since it's free. Called up, spoke to Josh, to whom I had to explain the situation twice. He put me on hold (“Sorry, I need to write an email”) and came back about 10 minutes later with the information that he had started a process and that I would receive an email. I didn't:
What a company!
As I discovered the following day, this was attempted spam. Australia Post didn't try to send me an mail.
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Injured kangaroo
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Down to the house forest today with the dogs, armed with a macro lens to take photos of what wildflowers I might find. As usual, Yvonne went first to be sure that there were no kangaroos, but one remained anyway. It appeared to have been injured and unable to jump the fence. It tried to jump, but fell over sideways.
What to do? If we left him there, he would die. Time for wildlife rescue.
This wasn't the first such occurrence—in fact, it was the fourth. I thought I had kept the number when Vince came around to save another kangaroo three years ago, but I couldn't find it. Found one on the web, and they took forever to attend to my call. Finally I was able to give the details, and an hour later I got a call back—from Vince. He was out in another 45 minutes, and we went down the back. This time he was alone, and the light was better. As expected, the kangaroo had not moved far, and he was able to approach it relatively easily:
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He was able to pick it up without wrapping it in the cloth he had brought with him, and again back into the car:
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Once again I was surprised by how quiet the animal kept. We spent a bit of time outside, and the kangaroo just lay there:
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Vince couldn't detect any external injury, but he thinks that it might have some internal problems. It's an Eastern Grey, male, about 2 years old, and underweight, which might be related to his other problems. He thinks it might have some chances of survival, though typically only about 25% make it. The rest at least have a more humane death.
One thing to remember: Vince's phone number, 0418 501 508. He's from the Wala animal sanctuary, where Karen is also available under 0409 137 323. They no longer have a web site, though the cards still mention http://www.wala-animal-sanctuary.com.au/.
| Thursday, 5 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 5 October 2017 |
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More lagoon problems
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Topic: technology | Link here |
It turned out that yesterday's “fix” to Yvonne's read-only mailbox issue didn't work. Her index page looks different, and the % sign indicating read-only status was in a different position. Back to my diary to find out what I did last time. On 13 June 2010 the issue was a missing rpc.lockd process. But that wasn't the case today. On another occasion I rebooted, and that worked round the problem. That sounds so Microsoft. So I went looking.
Permissions? Yes, that seems reasonable, but they were all correct. Make a local copy? Worked. So an NFS problem. ktrace showed the mailbox being opened twice, each time O_RDONLY. Why twice? And there was no obvious reason why O_RDONLY. The second time round it was after a program start of mutt_dotlock. Did that fail? I had started ktrace with the -i flag, but I didn't get a trace: it's setgid. And when I try as root, the operation succeeds.
OK, while I hunt down the problem, let Yvonne access the mailbox directly on eureka. Surprise, surprise! That also fails. That appears to exclude a number of potential culprits, including (obviously) NFS, but also apparently the new installation of lagoon. But it happened exactly then. I'm baffled.
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How do you like AusPost service?
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
Automatic phone call from Australia Post today to ask me how I liked yesterday's interaction with their customer service team. Answered appropriately, and was offered the option to be connected with customer service for a follow-up. OK, since they asked, selected the option and was connected to Orrin.
Asked him to forward a problem report to the IT people that their server 116.240.201.166 didn't have reverse lookup. OK, noted, will inform people. A little too fast (“let's get rid of this crank”). Asked him to repeat the number, and of course he couldn't. Asked to be connected to a supervisor, and he went through the motions, came back and started asking questions about my item. Sorry, this is a DNS issue. More questions. Sorry, this is a DNS issue. Sorry, I'm just responsible for parcel tracking. Understood, please connect me to somebody who can handle the problem.
Finally he connected me to his supervisor (Emily, I think), who sounded more interested. Orrin had told her that I was complaining about spam. Set her right, and after some investigation discovered that this was the second problem. The first was that Josh hadn't sent me an email at all yesterday: he didn't have an email address, but “hadn't noticed” when he sent the email. So the message really is spam.
Low marks to the front line “consultants” at AusPost. At least I was able to establish that the delivery driver had found the item in his car, and that it should have been in Napoleon (yes, Emily wasn't prepared to get that misspelling fixed) today.
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IP tunneling
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
ZDF seems to have a different algorithm from other German broadcasters for determining whether I'm in Germany or not, and for some reason they have decided that I am not. Presumably this is based on analysing different IP addresses.
OK, my Class C is routed internationally, though it stops somewhere in North Carolina. I can easily route it on to here, but various considerations make it a bad idea in general. What I really need is the way to tunnel a specific IP address from there to here.
OK, that's what an IP-IP tunnel is, right? I've used one of them before, and have exact instructions.
Problem: I need IP addresses at each end. I can't use existing ones without disrupting normal connectivity. In particular, my National Broadband Network connection only has one address, and my connection on the external server has a /30 netmask (4 addresses). One is the base address, one is the router, one is broadcast, and one is the SunOS memorial broadcast address. Nothing I could really use.
What are the alternatives? SSH tunnels are one, but they only handle a single port at each end. Is that enough? Probably not.
| Friday, 6 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 6 October 2017 |
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Yet another wildflower
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
I'm lagging way behind in identifying the flowers growing round here, most of them presumably wildflowers, but I keep finding more. Here's another one that I don't recall:
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Grampians wildflower show?
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Topic: technology, gardening | Link here |
This weekend is the Grampians Wildflower Show, whose web site includes a prominent 404 (“Spring into the Grampians”) and few details. The heading EVENT DETAILS promises more information closer to the date, and there's no address for the main venue; you have to find that elsewhere (it's 117 Grampians Road, Halls Gap).
While I was there, I looked for a few other locations of interest in another link that I found, with nice pictures but again hazy on location. Boroka Lookout looks stunning, but a 90m walk each way? That's too long for us, and it wouldn't fit in the time plan. It wasn't until I looked at it again that I discovered that it was 5 minutes and 90 metres. That's a surprisingly long time for the distance (5 metre elevation change), but certainly within our time constraints.
And then a nice gesture: Google Maps asked me if it should send the route to my phone. Yes, for once that makes sense. Clicked yes, it asked which device, so I selected Samsung Phone (talipon.lemis.com, as if it knew that). Shortly later the phone whistled at me. For once, things Just Worked.
Fire up the phone, which was sleeping. Where's the route? In maps, obviously. Nope, just a restaurant recipe somewhere that it didn't want to divulge. Messages? Nope, nothing there. GMail? Unlikely, and nope.
By this time I was out of options. The last one: ask on IRC. Not much idea there either. Finally Peter Jeremy came up with a helpful suggestion:
Finally he came up with the suggestion that I look at “Notifications”. Where's that? Checked all the funny icons, but couldn't find it. Ah, no, Notifications are a different, more complicated interface. Following Peter's instructions, start at the root window (or whatever it's called in Android):
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Swipe down, and you should see Notifications:
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Further down? Yes!
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Nothing useful there. Lots more swiping:
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Where does all this crap come from? I didn't ask for it, and there's lots of it. It completely obfuscated the map notification, which was there, but disappeared as soon as I selected it.
OK, this works. I wonder how many Android users learn to use their device just based on the documentation (of which I have received none). And now I need to work out how to get rid of these gratuitous news feeds.
| Saturday, 7 October 2017 | Dereel → Halls Gap → Pomonal → Dereel | Images for 7 October 2017 |
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eBay: No item, no refund, no explanation
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
As if I didn't have enough to do over the weekend, eBay decided about the “seller” who took my money and didn't deliver. They decided that that was correct, and that I should not get a refund:
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A final decision! With the option to appeal. That sounds right for eBay. But what nonsense! How can they refuse to admit a refund? And why don't they attempt to justify their decision? Of course I appealed. But why this nonsense in the first place?
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GPS: How to ruin an outing
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Topic: gardening, general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Off to Halls Gap today for the annual Grampians Wildflower Show, as mentioned yesterday. I had spent some time planning the route: unlike in other countries, small back roads are usually faster than the main highways. They're more direct, usually in acceptable condition, and the main Western Highway is usually congested. In the days before GPS I worked out a number of ways from Skipton to Ararat, and the navigator took me somewhere round there.
So yesterday I stored the route in my GPS navigator—not an easy business, since navigators go by addresses, not generally landmarks. So I had had to manually type in the coordinates, which it didn't like much either: not reachable by road. So in the end I was left with likely-sounding destinations like Mount Zero and Mount Difficult.
As described, I also stored the route from Google Maps in my telephone, and to be really sure I also charged up my old ALDI tablet as a backup.
Things didn't quite work out. When I came into the office this morning, both phone and tablet were dead, though both had been connected to the charger: the tablet has a bad charger connection, and I hadn't managed to keep it connected. The phone, it seems, had discharged because the GPS receiver was on; sometimes, but not always, it uses more power than the charger can provide.
Off on the route that the (dedicated) GPS navigator had chosen for us. All went well until past Skipton, but then it took us down an unmade road. Not what I had asked for. Checked my settings, and sure enough, unmade roads were not allowed. Where were we, anyway? The overview is terrible—after all, this is only a 7" display, and even the map view is impossibly vague. Worse, the bloody thing won't even show a compass direction! Still, the road didn't look too bad, so we took it anyway—only about 2 km.
But then we hit another stretch, much worse—there was a big pit in the middle of the road, which I managed to avoid, not without some cursing from Yvonne. What to do? I didn't have the foggiest idea where I was, nor even the direction I was travelling in. I really should have taken a real map with me, though that has the disadvantage that I can't easily transform the geographical coordinates to places on the map. So we continued—until we hit an impassable object:
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How deep was the ford? Only one way to find out:
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That's too deep for our car, especially since if we got stuck, it could be hours before we somebody could get us out again. So off back again, this time asking the navigator for “fast” rather than “short”. It took us over more unpaved roads, a bridge over the river, and then back almost exactly to the other side of the ford.
Finally we were in sight of the Grampians:
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On through Pomonal, where the most interesting plant was decidedly exotic:
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In Halls Gap, we were faced with the same issue that we had seven years ago: no signage. The bloke in the shop pointed us to the clearly marked information centre further down the road:
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But that wasn't the right place. It has some interesting stuff in there, including documentation of various walks, for sale for $2 each:
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It wasn't until later that I discovered that this single photo had captured all the sheets in perfectly legible quality:
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Apart from that, a rather incongruous statue of an Indian woman advertising the local http://www.spiritofpunjabrestaurant.com/ (a URL that took me ten attempts to type in correctly, clearly not intended for entry on a smart phone):
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The real exhibition was in a slightly better marked (“Now On”) building:
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First, though, I had to find a toilet. Conveniently, there was a sign at the top of the post on the right of the photo above, pointing across the road. Over to take a look:
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No further signs, of course—that would be cheating. Back to ask and was told (indirectly) that it was the building on the right with the ramps:
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That's a useful heuristic in recovering from inadequate documentation. Clearly toilets need entrances for handicapped people.
Back at the exhibition, for $2 a head we got entry to a display of some interesting plants, including food eaten by the local Aboriginals (and, to be politically correct, non-existent Torres Strait Islanders). There were also suggested guided walks through the Botanic Gardens (who apparently don't have a web site) and some walks further afield.
Bought a couple of books on local plants—they're not that different from Enfield State Park at home—and off on our predetermined path. But we didn't find anything. The first stop was supposed to be Boroka Lookout, but it took us just past Silverband Falls car park and told us to drive into a gully. Time to look at the documentation I had printed out. Damn! I had left them at home!
OK, I still had the route that I had sent to my phone yesterday. Turn on the phone. Route gone! The phone had powered down, so clearly the route was no longer needed. Maybe there's a way to conjure it back, but I don't know the incantation. It was still on my computer at home, but that doesn't help much. Still, we didn't want Silverband Falls, so on—and back to Halls Gap.
Somewhat frustrated, looked at the route in the navigator. All waypoints still present. Dammit, let's go home! Cleared my painstakingly entered route before it occurred to me that I could at least have saved it for later analysis. Yvonne had shown interest in Lake Fyans, of which there had been a description in the exhibition:
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On the way, found a turnoff to Heatherlie Quarry. That was one of the places I had planned to visit, and the description stored on my camera told us, in pre-map terms, how to get there:
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Not easy to read on a tiny display, but what I did read was that there had been a bushfire in 2014, and it hadn't completely recovered. In addition, since September had been so cool, things weren't really ready yet. So we went on. It wasn't until I could read the description properly that I discovered that it might well have been worthwhile.
On the way to Lake Fyans, found a large number of flowers on the wayside:
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Very pretty, but exotic: they're Gazanias, from Southern Africa. Presumably somebody liked them and planted them there.
At Lake Fyans, we saw a number of Dianella revoluta bushes:
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But that was about all. Took a look at the adjacent caravan park, but apart from a rather pretty entrance feature, there was nothing worth seeing, in particular no information on wildflowers.
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On the way back home, we passed through Pomonal again, and decided to stop in at their wildflower show, which was mainly sales-oriented:
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They did have some nice stuff there, and Yvonne couldn't resist two plants, a grafted Grevillea bronwenae and an Eremophila nivea.
I originally wrote:and a plant without a label that they tell me is a Pultenaea nivea. I thought I had misheard the name, but there really is a species of that name. But it doesn't look anything like what I would expect of a Pultenaea.
Clearly that's understandable
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How were we to get back home? Presumably the navigator would choose the same way back. But no, it didn't. It took us to Ararat. From there I pretty well know the back roads, but it didn't go that way: it took me down the Western Highway (grr) for a couple of kilometres, and then down a road I don't know. At least no unmade roads? No such luck:
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This time it was much longer, but fortunately not as bad as Anderson's Lane, the road with the ford. But this is really useless. I bought a GPS navigator to have more control over where I go. Instead I end up with inaccurate map data causing not only discomfort, but real problems, and the lack of overview means that I can't even recover from them. I wonder if the Big Brands do any better. I certainly wouldn't rely on it.
What do we do next time? Plan routes with fallback to maps. Take the guided tours of the area. And what else? To be determined. Why is this all so difficult?
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Saturday night dinner
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Topic: food and drink, photography, opinion | Link here |
As a result of our journey, dinner tonight, with Chris Bahlo as usual, was less complicated: the rest of Tuesday's tagine. And, of course, the usual silly photos. Well, almost:
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You certainly can't complain that they were underexposed. In fact, that was after DxO Optics “Pro” did what it could to salvage the image. Before they looked like this:
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That's what I get for not checking my settings. For the indoor images in Halls Gap I had set the ISO to “automatic”, and so for these photos the camera chose 39°/6,400 ISO. Bad Groggy.
| Sunday, 8 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 8 October 2017 |
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eBay does it again!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Clearly it was a mistake on eBay's part to close my case yesterday without a refund. Maybe the first one was done by computer, but clearly an appeal should get the attention of a human. Maybe it did, but I was still astounded by their final (final) decision:
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Again no reason. How can they get away with this? Time to make some noise.
Every time (far too many of them) that I have trouble with eBay, I try to find some valid, honest reason. And in this case, it's quite possible that the reason is that they have a moron handling these cases. But it's time that the authorities took note and did something about it. I can see a long fight ahead. And maybe it's the thought of that fight that lets them get away with it. I wonder how many other people have this problem and just give up.
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Processing GPS information
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yesterday's journey left me with no fewer than 8 GPS logs, none of them covering the entire journey. I left the phone (talipon) charging until we got to Halls Gap, and the car navigator (the other seven) stopped logging every time I stopped the car, so I had some gaps.
In any case, I didn't know how to process the logs. There must be a converter...
After a bit of searching, found GPSBabel (“convert, upload, download data from GPS and Map programs”). Just what I need, and there's a FreeBSD port for it, so I installed it.
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/4) ~ 24 -> man gpsbabel
Clearly a modern program. To be fair, it has a 200 page PDF documentation, but that's almost too much. It also has a --help flag, which produces only marginally less verbose output:
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/4) ~ 26 -> gpsbabel --help | wc -l
It seems that GPSBabel can't recognize input file formats, so you have to tell it. That's OK, since you need to tell it the output format anyway. So you enter something like this:
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/4) /src/GPS/Tracklogs 38 -> gpsbabel -i igo8 -o gpx track033.trk track033.gpx
And it doesn't create any output. What caused that? The -i igo8 looks like the only choice for input file format. Is it wrong anyway? Or is this because the log wasn't closed properly? Is there a way to identify what kind of file it is? If so, I didn't find it.
Looking further, I found this page, which describes my navigator, which can apparently write GPX logs to an external micro SD card. Where did I put that card? They're far too small, and I'm sure I've lost numerous cards. The only one I have now is in talipon, and who knows what havoc I would wreak if I took it out. Called Chris Bahlo, got her voice mail, and asked for the loan of a micro SD card.
By the time Yvonne returned with an SD card from Chris, I no longer needed it: GPSVisualizer, a site I have used before, allows you to upload (m)any formats and convert them to GPX, with no more pain than the usual problem of specifying file names to firefox. And it also displays them on a map, and allows you to download the resultant image. Much slower than doing it locally—if it works—but not that big a deal.
In the process, firefox asked me what do to with the file. Open with marble? Or save it? Save it, of course. “Do this without asking” box? Greyed out. I'll never understand firefox. But what's marble?
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/12) ~/Documentation/GPS 56 -> pkg which /usr/local/bin/marble
It must be a dependency. Searching tells me:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/12) ~/Documentation/GPS 57 -> cat /usr/ports/astro/marble/pkg-descr
Certainly worth looking at—some other time. At the moment I only have part of a map. How do I merge the things? It seems that GPS Track Editor can do that. But that, too, can wait. The files from the car GPS are in XML, and they don't overlap in time, so I should just be able to cat them together and remove header and trailer information. And yes, that worked fine. I was then able to upload the map to Wikiloc, another site I have used before. Here, too, I need to learn a number of details.
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Grampians trip route analyzed
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Topic: general | Link here |
So now I sort of have a map of the trip we did yesterday:
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It clearly shows both the route to Halls Gap (southern route) and the return further north. Our fun at the ford is also clear (bottom left of the box):
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On the face of it, the route is probably about as direct as you can get. The real problem is that the maps appear to be incorrect, and to claim that they are surfaced when they are not. This is particularly obvious on the way back: the unpaved stretch was rather more than 20 km, fortunately not too bad.
Round Halls Gap itself, a couple of things are obvious:
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Firstly, the route is nothing like I put into the navigator. From Halls Gap we were supposed to go to Heatherlie Quarry, way up to the north. Here's the Google Map which I copied into the phone:
The map above only shows the bottom section of that map, down to Silverband Falls.
Secondly, the return from Silverband Falls to Halls Gap is shown as a straight line. That's presumably because the navigator wasn't logging at the time. When I find a way to merge two different logs, I should be able to fix that.
There are so many other things I want to do. Wouldn't it be nice to run the cursor over a route and have images and times pop up? Or just to add images at various points. I'm pretty sure that Wikiloc doesn't do that. I can add images, but they don't get incorporated into the map, and it doesn't display the location information associated with them.
| Monday, 9 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 9 October 2017 |
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Bloody eBay, day 3
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
OK, it's been nearly a month since I ordered a disk on eBay, and I still have neither item nor refund. And eBay, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that “A refund won't be issued for this case”. I've already complained vociferously about this decision.
But that's just eBay. I still have a case against Craig Weber (eBay seller klearview_au). Call up Consumer Affairs Victoria, and while waiting in the inevitable hold pattern, was referred to the web site. For once, that might make sense, and so I took a look. “Buying from a private seller online” fits the bill. And in my case, they recommended that I contact the police:
If consumers used an instant cash transfer system (such as Western Union or MoneyGram) or deposited money directly into the seller's bank account, it can be very difficult to track the money once the seller has collected it. In this case, consumers should contact the police.
They added:
Although we cannot resolve disputes arising from consumer-to-consumer sales, we can provide you with further advice. View our Contact us page.
OK, call the police? The first issue is to establish if the transfer had been completed. Fortunately Craig also has an account with ANZ bank, so it was an inner-bank transfer. Called up ANZ on the well-hidden number +61-3-9683-9999, and spoke to Jen, who first got necessary details of my account and then established that the transfer was made via “Internet” banking, another department. Connect to Aaron, who went through the same thing all over again, then said that he couldn't confirm whether the money had arrived, due to privacy concerns. Somehow that is a breach of the other obligation to trace my payments. On the other hand, he was able to make a request for refund, which wouldn't have made any sense if the transfer hadn't completed. He also repeated the advice of CAV to contact the police: the request is just that, a request, and requires the agreement of the other party. And the whole thing smells of fraud.
What do I do? Back to the eBay page. And there I saw:
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I suppose you can buy Schrödinger's cat on eBay too. But what an insult! Yes, Craig Weber opened an uppaid item case against me, and didn't close it. But they believed him!
Deep breath, got eBay to call me (“valued customer”). Spoke to Rayne, who was not only able to remove the unpaid item case (“because it's the first time”), but also explained the actions:
This creates more questions than it answers: why didn't they say so when they rejected the appeal? Why wasn't I warned in advance before committing to buy the item? Why was I given not one, but three different dates (28 September, 29 September, 5 October) after which eBay promised to “step in”? Why can't they refund the money? They help themselves to my account for fees, whether justified or not (as last May). Why can't they change their terms to recover such costs in a similar manner?
Left him with some suggestions, which appeared to genuinely interest him:
But eBay has been around for 20 years, and they're still such a mess. What's the hope that this incident will change anything? Surely there must be a way to increase public awareness of their policies. That should get their interest: it could limit their sales.
Sent Craig Weber a mail telling him that I expected the refund in my account by Thursday morning, and that I would not go to the police before then.
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Playing with Marble
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the GPS-related software components that I wanted to look at was marble, and did so today. It's a KDE application, which means that if I don't have a KDE environment, I don't get any help. Still, this stuff is straightforward, right? No, it's KDE. Climbing directory trees is bad enough with firefox, but KDE goes one step further by renaming the directories: Home isn't /home, it's (in my case) /home/grog/. How I hate software that tries to hide the system from you!
Tried it out anyway. There's an “Open” tab, which I used to painstakingly walk my way to my GPS logs. Found my log file, tried loading. Nothing. No action, no error message. Time to look for documentation after all. Found a handbook, but it's only HTML, in many small pages. Just working my way through was a pain. The manual itself could be quite good, and if it's available in single HTML or PDF form, it might be quite useful. But as it is, it doesn't help much.
Finally it dawned on me: KDE is not Unix! So when I give it a file name, it doesn't look at the file, it looks at the name, in this case car.gpslog, throws up its hands in horror, but is too polite to complain. All I needed was:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) ~/Photos/20171007/orig 61 -> ln car.gpslog idiots.gpx
Then I was able to load the log file idiots.gpx with no trouble.
| Tuesday, 10 October 2017 | Dereel → Ballarat → Misery Creek → Dereel | Images for 10 October 2017 |
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Breakfast: Mi udang
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another spice paste based breakfast this morning, based on Teans (a company with a null web site) Mi Udang paste, made by Suntraco food industries:
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The instructions stated that I should add a total of 1.5 litres of water for 6 big helpings. A lot hinges on “big”. This is what I got from one portion:
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The question is whether to reduce the number of servings to 3 or 4, or to add more water. It was certainly pedas enough.
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More physiotherapy
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Topic: health, general | Link here |
Into town today, in principle to have my neck massaged, but it's probably good enough as it is. On the other hand, my left arm has a pain round the area where I used to receive vaccinations, and it felt almost like that kind of pain. Heather did various tests and found a matching point of discomfort round my shoulder blades—referred pain, or something that I need to look up. Looks like I need to pay (more) attention to my posture, something that she was reluctant to mention.
On the way home, my quarterly haircut.
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Misery Creek Road again
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Topic: gardening, photography | Link here |
The weather today was warm, and has been for a couple of days. In Misery Creek Road things have changed: the orange bushes are gradually fading, but the Grevillea bedggoodiana are coming out, and the greenish flowers are tending towards red:
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There are also a couple of orchids:
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It's amazing how difficult they are to see in that photo (one at the top, one at the bottom). They're almost certainly Caladenia major:
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Another plant looks almost familiar:
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This appears to be a Pimelea species, though different from the ones growing on our property (of which, for some reason, I don't have a good photo):
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Looking through my diary, it seems that I found a number of these flowers last year, without identifying them.
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New kitchen mixer tap
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Topic: general | Link here |
Replacing our kitchen mixer tap hasn't been easy. The first attempt, over two years ago, failed because the hole in the sink was 1 mm too small. Then I took the easy way out and did nothing until a few weeks ago, when I found a plumber and discovered that, due to poor storage, the metallic coating had tarnished. Considering that the mixer costs less than the installation, it made sense to buy a new one.
That should have arrived last week, but Australia Post lost it (the postie carried it around in his van for a few days), so I didn't get round to picking it up until today. And what did we find?
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That join isn't intended to come apart. It was glued together, but the join broke. Yet another return!
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Debugging mutt
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Topic: technology, health, opinion | Link here |
Why did Yvonne's mutt stop working after I upgraded her system? I discovered that it was due to mutt_dotlock failing, and that unlike on previous occasions, it was not due to NFS. But it worked for me, and it didn't work for Yvonne. Why not?
Finally found time to have another look. Things weren't made any easier by the fact that mutt_dotlock runs setgid, so ktrace doesn't trace it. How about the good old debugger? How do you create a version of the program with symbols? A couple of months ago I found how to do it for FreeBSD software, but mutt is a port. In the end, I just copied the compiler invocation and added a -g to the compile and link options.
Ran gdb mutt_dotlock and... no output, because it's setgid. All that work for nothing.
Next, put messages in the source. They showed, surprisingly, that the only check done is whether mutt_dotlock can write to the mail directory. And it couldn't. Why not?
Back to look at the directory permissions:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /usr/ports/mail/mutt/work/mutt-1.9.1 102 -> ls -ld /var/mail /eureka/home/var/mail
Isn't that obvious? And yes, of course, a chgrp mail did the trick. Why didn't I see that before? I can think of two reasons: firstly, I was expecting the problem to be on lagoon, since I had just upgraded it, and there was no reason to change the group ownership of /eureka/home/var/mail—in fact, I still have no idea how that happened. And secondly, I'm sure that I looked at it, but didn't notice. I'm beginning to wondering whether the real problem is that my eyes are not what they once were.
And why did it work for me? I'm a member of group wheel, so the change didn't cause any problems.
| Wednesday, 11 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 11 October 2017 |
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Another new lens
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
In April I replaced my M.Zuiko 12-40 mm f/2.8 “Pro” lens with something longer. The choices were the Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4 and the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4 IS PRO. I chose the Vario-Elmarit.
Why? There were a number of reasons:
It was considerably smaller, as Compact Camera Meter shows.
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It had a maximum aperture of f/2.8, compared to the f/4 of the m.Zuiko.
I suppose there's a certain snob value to a lens with Leica written on it (middle of the barrel).
It was considerably cheaper ($979 compared to about $1750).
After getting it, I found a couple of issues that tempered my joy:
The f/2.8 is only at the extreme wide end. Even by 20 mm, the maximum aperture is f/3.3, and from 24 mm on it's f/3.5 or smaller, effectively f/4.
DxO Optics “Pro” doesn't support it. I was going to say “they don't believe in no steenking Maker Notes, so they identify the lens by focal length range and aperture range”. But that's not quite true: we have other duplicates, such as the M.Zuiko Digital 14-42 mm f3.5-5.6 II R and the M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-42 mm f3.5-5.6 EZ, which it can distinguish, and it also supports the Zuiko Digital ED 14-42 mm f/3.5-5.6 that I once had before the advent of Micro Four Thirds.
In this case, though, the Vario-Elmarit wasn't supported, and they have a false positive with the Zuiko Digital ED 12-60 mm f/2.8-4.0 SWD. So no support for this (important) lens.
The image stabilization wasn't worth it. Those few Olympus lenses that have stabilization (the 12-100 is one of them) interact with the in-body image stabilization, producing better results than either system by itself. The Panasonic/Leica ones don't. And I discovered that the lens stabilization of the Vario-Elmarit is considerably worse than the IBIS of the camera, so effectively useless in this combination.
Then Kev Russell offered a (barely) used lens on Facebook. The price was right, and I reconsidered. Yup, let's take it.
This is getting a little ridiculous, though. When it arrives, I will have no less than 7 lenses that cover the focal length range 14-35 mm (full frame equivalent 28-70 mm): the Zuiko Digital ED 12-60 mm f/2.8-4.0 SWD, the Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4, the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4 IS PRO, the Zuiko Digital ED 14-35 mm f/2.0 SWD, the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 14-42 mm f3.5-5.6 II R, the M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-42 mm f3.5-5.6 EZ and the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-150 mm f4.0-5.6. Yes, I should get rid of some of them, but I'm in no hurry, and the Zuiko Digital 12-60 has been on the market for months, so that's a secondary thought.
But that was (mainly) yesterday, and just today I looked in the usual place. And DxO now supports the lens, though they've taken the opportunity to forget its name. Here how it reports the Olympus and the Vario-Elmarit:
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lagoon: problems gradually arrive
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Last week's upgrade to lagoon went remarkably smoothly. The only issue was with mutt, which really had nothing to do with the upgrade. But today Yvonne wanted to send an important mail message, They wanted her to print out a file, fill it out by hand, scan it in, and send it by email.
She came to me and said “don't bother about the email I sent you. Chris will print it for me”. Huh? Why do we need Chris to print files for us? Went to show her how to download a PDF file and print it out.
=== yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) ~/Downloads 51 -> lpr MEA-Application-Form.pdf
Huh? What's wrong there? lpd is running. Restarted. No change. Finally it dawned on me: it's this horrible CUPS, which installs a file /usr/local/bin/lpr, masking the system /bin/lpr. I can't get rid of CUPS, because some ports depend on it. Is there maybe an official way to get rid of this file? I found an obvious inofficial way:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /etc 191 -> rm /usr/local/bin/lpr
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /etc 192 ->
And then I was finally able to print the document.
Next, fill out the form, scan it in and attach it to a mail message. Yvonne copied herself for some reason (a copy gets put in her outbox automatically). In this case, though, the reason was (indirectly) good. Her copy didn't arrive.
Looking at the mail queue, she had about 25 messages that weren't being delivered, like the one she was looking at:
Then it occurred to me: I hadn't transferred any of the configuration files. No time to do it then, so I bounced the message from eureka. But it's amazing how many basic functions can get overlooked for up to a week after an upgrade.
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Rain!
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Topic: general | Link here |
Yesterday was a nice, mild, windless day. I was planning another visit to Misery Creek Road today, but the weather changed completely. Winds of up to 40 km/h, and in the evening heavy rain—over 12 mm in an hour. What fun!
| Thursday, 12 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 12 October 2017 |
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Planting new plants
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Mick the gardener along this afternoon, mainly to weed—something that will keep him busy for a while—but he also planted our new plants. We had been planning to put them both in pots because of our poor soil, and also because it gets so wet in the winter—something that these plants, although grafted, would probably not stand.
But finding native soil is surprisingly difficult. Yesterday Yvonne had found small bags of native potting mix for high prices. What she brought home proved to be maybe enough for one pot. In the end, called up the vendor of the bushes, whose name I had conveniently photographed:
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And he told me that they were both equal to the worst soil we could point them at. The Grevillea has Grevillea robusta rootstock, and will even take phosphorus. So we planted the Grevillea bronwenae ended up at the corner of the verandah area, and the Eremophila nivea next to the Banksia:
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The Banksia is one of many plants that suffered during the recent heavy frost:
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But it looks like it's coming back quickly:
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Indoors, at least one of the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis cutting that I propagated four months ago has definitely taken. Today its first (somewhat underwhelming) flower appeared:
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Still, it has come quite a way since June:
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That's the one at top left in this image.
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Fixing lagoon mail
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Got round to looking at the mail system on lagoon today. Put in the configuration files from the old system, restarted postfix, and found:
dereel.lemis.com? That's been out of commission for years, since I put everything into eureka. Where did that come from? It wasn't (not surprisingly) in the RCS files. When I checked out the latest version, all worked, though clearly I need to pay attention to the warnings.
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Compressing web pages?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Discussing what a reasonable web page size is today on IRC. Jamie Fraser thought that 2 MB is too much. I wondered how big my diary pages are. Checked with last month's diary:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) /var/tmp 78 -> fetch http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-sep2017.php
Is that too big? That's even without the images. People suggested compression. Here a part of the discussion for my future reference:
On the other hand, there's probably a lot to be said for packaging diary entries differently. My current method started over 17 years ago, where my diary entries were much smaller:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) /var/tmp 86 -> fetch http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-sep2000.php
Compression is probably a good idea, but there are almost certainly other things I could do that would improve things, such as a sliding window into the diary.
| Friday, 13 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 13 October 2017 |
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Still more lagoon mail problems
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yvonne came to me today with a bounce message I had never seen before:
Well, yes, it's right. /var/mail/yvonne is a symlink. And so it has been for longer than I can remember, maybe 15 years. Is this some new thing in postfix? Digging found me this thread, also not new, in which Wietse Venema writes:
Unfortunately, symlinks to mailbox files are unsafe when the mail directory is writable by users other than root, regardless of who owns the symlink. You can thank the Linux, Solaris and IRIX people for that. This security check will not be removed from Postfix.
OK, I thought that it might have been something like that. But why did it happen now? I discovered that I could work around it by removing /var/mail and making it a symlink to /eureka/var/mail. But that doesn't explain the problem.
After some thought, it occurred to me that this might be a configuration problem. When does postfix on lagoon try to deliver locally? The only user is Yvonne, and she has developed a rather strange habit of copying mail to herself. I think that in the past lagoon must have forwarded all mail to eureka, which then stored it in the same mail folder. My recent configuration strangenesses must have meant that lagoon now tries to deliver mail to lemis.com locally.
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IP-IP tunnel experiments
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Somehow I still can't get my head around IP-IP tunnels. Last time I set one up, I only had one end to contend with. Now I have two, and NAT in between to boot. Made a clone of a virtual machine to play with, and followed these instructions. They didn't quite work for me, but I'm wondering if my translation of the IP addresses wasn't to blame. One of the more bizarre messages was:
I suspect that has to do with use of the same IP range on different interfaces. At least I'm gradually getting to understand things.
| Saturday, 14 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 14 October 2017 |
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eBay: refund after all?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
A series of email messages from Craig Weber in my mail today. Here some of the text:
Interesting. And yes, he's right. I did pay for the thing immediately on purchase, but somehow I oversaw the matter. And he complained about non-payment twice by email and raised a complaint with eBay—6 days after I had paid—and didn't close it. With that, of course, he doesn't have a leg to stand on. And his suggestion of sending an empty package is significant. I fear that he speaks from experience about the police.
Why the change of heart? Maybe he does have something to worry about. In any case, I haven't contacted the police, mainly because I wanted to present them with a complete document, so I'll wait until Monday and see if the money comes back.
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Orchid hunt
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Topic: photography, gardening, technology | Link here |
On Tuesday I found a new orchid in Misery Creek Road:
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It's a Caladenia major, and it's out of focus (only visible on enlarging the image). Today the weather was calm, just the conditions for focus stacking, so off to Misery Creek Road again to look for one.
On the way found one of these Pimeleas that I seem never to have photographed properly, probably a Pimelea humilis:
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Nearby was a Dianella revoluta:
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Also got a better-focused photo of a Grevillea bedggoodiana and nearby a flower I haven't identified yet—I suppose I shall have to wait for it to flower:
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But the Caladenia was nowhere to be found. Down Orchid Track to see what I could find there:
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The first is almost certainly a species of Chamaescilla, but I haven't been able to identify the second.
Margaret Swan tells me that this is Wurmbea dioica, also called Early Nancy.
Also this plant:
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But no orchids. On through Berringa and past the old Misery Creek Bridge, which has further declined:
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To the area where we found the Caladenia tentaculata (spider orchids) last November, but there were none to be seen today, just these two:
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I suppose I should take more time to look at them, but it's tiring, so I left it at that. It looks like the next few weeks will have a number of such excursions.
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Dealing with technology
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
My trip to Misery Creek Road involved a fair amount of technology: camera, mount and GPS recorders. The mount worked well:
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I think that tripod is one of the best purchases I have made recently. But other things didn't work as well. The photos of the Chamaescilla came out so dark that I thought there was no recovery possible. DxO Optics “Pro” proved equal to the task, but why the bad exposure in the first place?
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Comparing to the next image that I took with the other camera, this one is underexposed by 3 EV. How did that happen? I was thinking that it was time to return the camera for service when I discovered that I had accidentally changed the meter mode to “Spot shadow”. That's far too easy in the field where you have the camera on a tripod. In general, the viewfinder issue still needs attention. This toy OI.Share really doesn't do it in sunshine.
Another reason that OI.Share is not much use is that the phone doesn't work well. This may be this specific phone, but today the GPS receiver didn't work at all—not until I rebooted it. And the thing sometimes gets almost too hot to touch when the GPS receiver is on, but only some of the time. At least I can use the car GPS.
| Sunday, 15 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 15 October 2017 |
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More Misery
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Topic: photography, gardening | Link here |
I wasn't really happy with yesterday's photos, mainly because of the exposure, so I headed off again today before breakfast and had another try. After all, with travel it's only 30 to 45 minutes.
It took an hour, and I didn't really have much to show for it. Yes, I got a better exposed Pimelea humilis, but it had started to wilt:
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Also another plant that I still need to identify, but not well taken:
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Certainly part of it is the viewfinder issue. Apart from the position of the camera, it's difficult to look through the viewfinder with a rail protruding to the back. In fact, the automatic viewfinder switchover doesn't even work:
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What I really need is some kind of goggle that will display like the electronic viewfinder, but away from the camera.
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Garden flowers in mid-spring
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
It's the middle of spring alraeady, time for the monthly flower photos. The evidence of recent severe frost is clear. The Strelitzia nicolai pups that we transplanted three months ago have suffered badly. Here then and now:
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The parent plant doesn't look much better:
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Other plants that I had expected to survive well were the Paulownia kawakamii and the Metrosideros excelsa, but no such luck, though the Paulownia has developed a new side branch:
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And one of the Hebes is also looking very unhappy, though that's probably due to near-drowning.
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On the other hand, the Box elder sapling is doing relatively well:
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There's really not very much of interest at the moment, though the Gazanias are looking happy enough:
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Then there's this flower that Yvonne planted in front of the house, and which I have yet to identify:
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I can only hope that things look better in a month's time.
| Monday, 16 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 16 October 2017 |
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Pump problems
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Chris Bahlo is on a freebie in New Zealand, and Yvonne is looking after her horses for her:
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But there was an unexpected occurrence. “El Reverende” (“Rev”) managed to destroy (and hide) the tap in his pen:
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So I had to come over and rummage through Chris' collection of random bits and pieces to find a replacement:
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And how about that, I found one:
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That proved to be the easy part. Next, turn the bore pump back on.
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But nothing happened. What's the reason for that? We have a very similar pump at home, and there's not much to it: connect power, press lever, and it runs. But here we heard nothing. Does it need priming? Is there something special required by the solar electric system? Back home and finally contacted Chris. No, nothing special, but the thing is set up so that we can pump rainwater into the system as well. Just open the blue valve in the middle:
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So we did that, and it worked, in the process showing that the replacement tap didn't work. But why didn't the bore pump start? Took the cover off the switch and found the usual collection of spiders:
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And the second image clearly shows burnt contacts. Tried cleaning them up, turned on again and... blew the RCD. OK, before I do any damage to the system, time for Chris to decide. We can run off the rainwater pump until she gets back.
| Tuesday, 17 October 2017 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 17 October 2017 |
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More water pump problems
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Topic: general | Link here |
Yvonne slept badly last night worrying that Chris Bahlo's mares might die of thirst: it seems that some of the troughs didn't fill properly yesterday, something that she hadn't told me. OK, over there again before breakfast to take a look.
Everything looked OK. It seemed that Yvonne didn't realized that the tap had to be open...
While I was there, tried again to get the bore pump running. It seems that cleaning the contacts had worked: when I turned on the switch, the other pump stopped running. Repeatedly. Jammed pump motor? The pump is about 50 m below the surface, so nothing I can do much about myself.
Contacted Chris in the afternoon and arranged to call UPI and get somebody to come out. Jarrod said that they'd try to make it next week, but I was able to make it clear that this was an emergency, so he said he'd try to make it on Friday.
An hour later, Nick called. Could he come in an hour? Could he! So over there, and he tried turning it on, just the way I did, and... it worked! On the one hand a good result, but it made me look silly, and it bears all the signs of a bug gone into hiding. Hopefully it stays that way. Nick tells me that if you try too often in quick succession, it will block, but it's not clear whether that means physically (and thus drawing lots of current, as I experienced) or none at all. In any case, he measured the pump current, and it was correct.
While he was there he also addressed an long-standing issue with the house water pump: the pressure switch didn't work. He first took apart the non-return valve, for reasons that I didn't understand, but found some junk in it:
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Those are scrapings from the inside of a water tank. Potentially they had stopped the non-return valve from working, so the pump wouldn't cut out. But after removing it, things still didn't work. So he dismantled the non-return valve and found the entrance clogged with mud. Finally it worked.
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Yet another new lens
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Topic: photography | Link here |
The Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4 IS PRO lens that I bought last week has now arrived, so in to Napoleons to pick it up. While so close to Ballarat, also went to UPI for a tap for Chris Bahlo's irrigation system.
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More orchids
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
On the way back from Ballarat, took my almost usual diversion down Misery Creek Road, mainly to see if these flowers (from Saturday) were flowering:
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There's progress, but not much:
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On the other hand, I found my Caladenia major orchids again:
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In addition, I found a second orchid, which might be a Caladenia gracilis, though the images I have seen of that flower are somewhat darker on the reverse of the petals:
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Limits of photography
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Due to laziness, I had deliberately not taken my tripods and things with me down Misery Creek Road today. It shows. This photo, the very first I took with my new Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4 IS PRO lens, was just a crop of the whole image, and it appears to be marginally out of focus:
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And this one of the Caladenia major was taken against a very dark background. Even with -2 EV compensation, it's overexposed:
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And it looks like it has lens flare, though it's not clear that it's not the software that's doing that. In any case, none of these images are as sharp as they should be. Moral: take tripod and time.
| Wednesday, 18 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 18 October 2017 |
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Lens image stabilization?
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
When I bought my Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4, one of the first things I did was to test the image stabilization. One of the drawbacks of using a non-Olympus lens was that I could have lens stabilization or body stabilization, but not both. And it turned out that the body stabilization was much better than the lens stabilization, so that feature wasn't worth much.
Now I have the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO, my first stabilized Olympus lens, so of course I wanted to see how much difference that makes. According to the hype, it's 6.5 “shutter speed stops”. You've got to savour this. Originally, the term “stop” referred to the detent on the aperture ring of the lens, in those days clearly 1 EV apart. I've never heard it applied to the shutter before. But basically it's the base 2 logarithm of the amount of light, just like EV is. So what they're really saying is that you can extend the shutter speed by a factor of 2 raised to the power of 6.5, or about 90. That's quite impressive, if it's true. Conventional wisdom has it that you can hand-hold a lens at 1/f, where f is the full-frame focal length equivalent. So at 45 mm (90 mm equivalent) I should normally be able to hand-hold the camera at 1/90s. With the promised image stabilization, it's 1s.
Testing proved more complicated than I thought. With the IS switch turned on, the camera reported (Exif). Here output first from exiftool, then from my exifx script:
All well and good, but that's exactly what an unstabilized lens reports. What happens when I turn the switch off?
OK, RTFM time. The camera “manual” doesn't mention stabilized lenses at all. The lens manual is more informative.
IS switch
ON: Stabilizing functions in the lens and camera operate. The IS operates according to the IS setting in the camera.
OFF:Stabilizing functions in both the lens and camera are off.
OK, that matches. But it begs the question why they bother to put a switch there. You can do exactly the same thing from the camera. It's also a lot less control than I have on the Leica lenses, where the switch does make a difference (between lens and body stabilization). My exifx says:
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Margaret Swan in town
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Topic: food and drink, general | Link here |
Margaret Swan arrived today to look after Chris Bahlo's house until Chris gets back on Friday. Over to the house again to confirm that the pump and irrigation are still OK. In Rev's pen we found:
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That's the new tap, and it works correctly, but why is there so much water around the area? We were concerned that there might be a leak under the ground, but we couldn't see any evidence, and Yvonne said that Rev had knocked over his water bucket, so we're hoping that that's the explanation.
In the evening, do-it-yourself noodle soup:
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Garden sprinkler failure
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Topic: technology, gardening, opinion | Link here |
It's getting warmer, and I've been keeping an eye on the soil moisture. Today I discovered that the sprinkler system wasn't working At All.
Further investigation revealed an interesting reason: the sprinkler controller was off the net. For quite some time I haven't really been doing much with my “Class C” network block, but it's probably about time. All my systems at home are in the top half, so I can do things with the other half, including migrating the web site to that area.
That seemed straightforward enough until I discovered that our sprinkler system wasn't working any more: a network configuration error. The sprinkler controller was one of the few devices in the first /25.
I suppose that's a first.
| Thursday, 19 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 19 October 2017 |
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New sourdough starter
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
I've been concerned for some time about the slowness of my sourdough, so a couple of weeks ago I bought a starter on eBay. It arrived a few days ago, all 50 g of it, and I've spent the intervening time making 3 full-size (144 g) starters out of it. It didn't seem noticeably faster in action than my own.
Today I baked the first loaf of bread. Yes, much faster. Breads from my starters were taking 5 hours and more to rise, and then barely made it past the top of the tin. This one was done in a good 2 hours, and in the oven was noticeably higher:
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We'll see how it tastes, but I'm not expecting any surprises there.
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Network foot-shooting
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Part of repartitioning my (IPv4) network is to reset the net masks. Previously they were full /24 spaces (netmask 0xffffff00), and now they need to be set to /25 (netmask 0xffffff80). On my external machine the interface configuration looked like this:
OK, that's simple enough:
=== root@www (/dev/pts/0) ~ 6 -> ifconfig xn0 inet 192.109.197.81 netmask 0xffffff80
No response. Oh. This machine isn't local—in fact, it's about as far from here as you can get on the earth's surface. How do I access the console? I've done it before, but forgotten the details. Where are the messages I got from RootBSD? Found plenty of them, but not what I was looking for. Call Mark Price? OK, have the number, do that, but by this time it was 16:19, so in North Carolina it was 1:19, not a time I could reasonably expect him to be there.
Gradually I pieced it together. The connection is via VNC. What do I use for that? vnc? No, no program of that name. File name completion gave:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/38) ~ 1 -> vnc
Which of those? For some reason (possibly misspelling) I couldn't find the man pages. vncconnect sounds good, but running it does nothing, not even a non-zero completion code. OK, what installed it?
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/38) ~ 4 -> pkg which /usr/local/bin/vncconnect
OK, off to http://www.tightvnc.com/, which offers me documentation that refers only to
If you have a question about TightVNC, or experience a problem, the first place you might want to look is the TightVNC FAQ.
Well, no, the first place I want to look is the manual. But I haven't been able to find one. The rest of the page went on to discuss implementations for “Windows”. And the FAQ doesn't include the all-important “How do I use the bloody thing?”.
I forget how I finally found it, but the correct answer is vncviewer, for which I found a long man page which didn't even tell me how to enter a password (only how to specify the name of a file with a stored, encrypted password). But that's not necessary. It prompts for the password, something that the man page doesn't mention:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/12) ~ 96 -> vncviewer lemis.rootbsd.net:5672
So finally I was able to connect to the machine. What did I see? I only had one IP address on the interface. The all-important main IP address was gone, so there was no way for the machine to talk to the word. My mistake was to omit the alias keyword:
=== root@www (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 6 -> ifconfig xn0 inet 192.109.197.81 netmask 0xffffff80 alias
Moral of the story: don't sit on the branch you're chopping off. Use a ladder.
In summary:
Start with:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/12) ~ 96 -> vncviewer lemis.rootbsd.net:5672
Replace lemis.rootbsd.net:5672 with the information from the information page. vncviewer prompts for the password.
| Friday, 20 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 20 October 2017 |
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The future of cars
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Margaret Swan has a new car—well, a different, newer one, a Subaru Forester with all bells and whistles. She's having difficulty with some of the bells (or was that whistles?), so I came over today and took a look.
There are two main issues of confusion: first, how do you start the car? For every car I have ever driven, there's an ignition key, usually coupled with a starter. Not on this car. Yes, there's a key, if you can reinterpret the information in the 300 page manual, which tells you to press in the wrong place, but you don't need it, and it doesn't help start the car. The key module communicates wirelessly with the car electronics and permits starting the car. And that's done by pressing a button.
Problem: what if you just want to turn the radio on? With conventional ignition keys there's an intermediate position that turns on most of the electrics, but not the ignition. You'd expect to find how to do the equivalent in the manual—after all, it's thick enough—but it's a generic manual with a description of all models, including information about left-hand drive models, models with old-fashioned ignition keys, and what kind of petrol the car needs in Beijing and the rest of China (but no information about what to do if you move between one and the other). We didn't find the information we were looking for.
Finally we found it by trial and error:
I haven't been able to establish the exact difference is between states 3 and 4, but some trip computer comes on when you press the button again.
This works best with two people. One engages the owner in conversation near the car, preferably close to the front passenger door. The other approaches the driver door, waves at it (it will obligingly unlock), gets in, starts the car, and drives off. The car will not stop when the key module disappears.
In general, I'm left wondering what the advantage of this whole system is, and why it is so badly documented.
The other thing that Margaret couldn't fathom was the GPS system (for which there is another manual with a title something like “Onboard SD Card System”). The documentation is voluminous and verbose, but I managed to find enough (marginally correct) information to start the thing. And surprise, surprise, it was the same iGo software that my el-cheapo GPS navigator uses. Well, almost. It seems to have been castrated: lots of functionality is missing, like the all-important “use unpaved roads”. This is iGo version 9, while mine is version 8. Has it been deliberately restricted, or is this a sign of the times? In any case, Margaret doesn't like it, and would prefer her old Garmin GPS, which at least has the advantage that she knows how to use it.
On the positive side, it displays a compass. I need to check if there's a way to enable that on my navigator.
Apart from that, it's nice to have the unit mounted in the dashboard, where it doesn't bounce or fall off on poorly paved roads. But, like the speedometer of the Mini 50 years ago, it points straight over your shoulder, and there's no way to tilt it. In a car with so many unnecessary “comforts”, you'd think they would have done something about that.
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More mystery flowers
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Petra Gietz in today after a drive down Misery Creek Road, bearing a present:
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What's that? The leaf shape is certainly interesting. I put it in a glass with some water, and when I came back I had a surprise:
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That looks like so many of the flowers I've seen in Enfield State Park. But did any of them have these pointed leaves? To be investigated.
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DBDRV responds
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Topic: Stones Road house, opinion | Link here |
Call from Maggie Keenan of the Domestic Buildings Dispute Resolution Victoria regarding the complaint that I entered in June. It has finally come to the top of the queue, and it looks like we will have a session together on 11 December. In the meantime, she needs more information. It seems that it needs to be in particular places: the additional information that I supplied in my complaint should have been put in the (Microsoft Word!) document, because otherwise it can't be processed. But she asked for my permission (granted) to move it there. I wonder what will happen to the layout. She also needs addition documentation: all mail exchange with JG King, and also the contract, building plans, and building permit. Why? No idea, but then I'm a mere mortal.
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Focus stacking revisited
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Topic: photography | Link here |
Dale Brabham started a thread on the M43 Tech Talk Facebook Group today: how do you use the focus stacking in practice? I've done a reasonable amount of focus stacking work, but I still have a lot of questions and an incomplete (read: barely started) page on the subject.
Out to do some more experiments today, this time with the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO, which doesn't support in-camera stacking, and the M.Zuiko Digital ED 30 mm f/3.5 Macro lens, which does. Took photos along a wall of the house and saw what it did. I forgot to check the focus differential setting, but it was set to 2. Here's the result of the in-camera focus stacking:
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Reading the Exif data was interesting. Here's the 12-100 with “focus bracketing”:
And here's the 30 mm with “focus stacking”.
As advertised, “focus stacking” jumps backward and forward. Why? The most difficult thing I have found with focus stacking of either kind is to set the start focus. With “focus bracketing” it's relatively easy: just in front of the closest point you want sharp. You still (currently) have to guess where it will finish. But with in-camera “focus stacking” you don't know either point!
The other thing is the question of overlap. These images were taken with the lenses at 30 mm and f/8. My depth of field program comes up with different depths of field from exiftool. Mine are based on a circle of confusion of 8 μm, and give:
Based on those figures, there are gaps in the depth of field, though they're not significant. If you can accept a 10 μm circle of confusion, they overlap. So maybe the way to look at focus stacking is to hypothesize that the focus differential is related to the size of the circle of confusion. For that to be the case, the steps would have to change with focal length and aperture. Time for some more test photos.
The other thing that occurs to me is that it's really not that interesting to actually process the images, so I can make them as small as I like (since I hate throwing away any image that I have taken). But I can see a lot of playing around ahead of me: try focus stacks with different focal lengths and apertures, and with both of the cameras that can do it.
| Saturday, 21 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 21 October 2017 |
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More Hugin problems
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Topic: photography | Link here |
House photos again today, with nothing much to distinguish them from other days—until I tried to process them. And then, for reasons I don't understand, the control point detectors didn't work. It's not the first time, and in the past I have blamed it on low contrast. But today the contrast wasn't that bad. I finally got things done, but not without a considerable amount of messing around.
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Misery Creek again
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Off down to Misery Creek Road again, this time prepared for a bit more work. And I was successful: there were still more plants that I hadn't seen before.
I think that this plant must be a species of Dillwynia. It's mainly interesting because it is orange instead of the more common yellow:
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When I took this photo, I thought that the plant was a Goodenia, but clearly it's not:
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And I've seen this one before, but I still don't know the name:
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And this one looks similar, but is much smaller:
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This one is so common that I had thought it was a weed, but apparently it's a native. But I can't find the name of it: my old plant books have gone into hiding, and the books I bought in Halls Gap two weeks ago don't mention it:
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And after more comparison, it's fairly clear that this is indeed a Caladenia gracilis. Somehow I still haven't got the right angle:
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Last week's Caladenia major are still not there. I think they may prefer more sunshine.
Then there are these flowers, only gradually opening. Here photos from last Saturday, Tuesday and today:
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And then there are these ones:
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I also got a couple of shots of the Pimelea species with the drooping flowers that I had noticed last week:
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Taking the photos wasn't easy:
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I really need some better remote viewfinder. Maybe I should really try the mobile phone “solution”.
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Dinner: photo failure
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Topic: food and drink, photography, opinion | Link here |
Saturday evening, dinner with Chris Bahlo. Today Margaret Swan was there too. I've been meaning to take photos of us every time, but things haven't worked out well. They showed up late, and I didn't have much time, and after a couple of these I gave up:
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What's wrong? Presumably the studio flash went off too early again. I really need to make this more reliable.
Dinner was sushi and sashimi from a new Japanese restaurant in town. Not my taste. There was stuff with things like mayonnaise, and others with thoroughly cooked fish, which tasted like it came out of a can. Chris tells me that they saw Japanese people eating there, so they clearly knew what to avoid.
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Stealing cars: reexamined
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
After my mention of “How to steal a Subaru Forrester” yesterday, Peter Jeremy came up with interesting aids:
We discussed it at dinner, and Margaret came up with the additional information that the engine stops when the car stops, and automatically restarts when you want to drive off. Would this still happen if the key module is missing? Otherwise people might need some modification to their driving style.
And who needs to steal a car for only one drive? It sounds ideal for a getaway car.
| Sunday, 22 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 22 October 2017 |
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Another unidentified bush
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
While walking the dogs, found this bush:
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What is it? It's on the corner of a paddock, but there's no reason to assume that it is indigenous. I really need to learn more about plants.
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More on focus stacking
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Topic: photography | Link here |
I'm still thinking about focus stacking, without making much headway. About the only thing of interest is that various people are coming up with more information, which I'm keeping in my focus stacking page. So far I have:
In particular, Richard Turton's article seems well worth reading.
| Monday, 23 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 23 October 2017 |
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Another radiation tower!
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
The Dereel Facebook group is active again. There's more construction work going on round the National Broadband Network radiation tower on the corner of Rokewood Junction Road and Ballarat-Colac Road:
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Had a talk with the people erecting it. As expected, it's for Telstra mobile phones. Finally! It should be finished less than 5 years after Denis Napthine promised. They should have the tower up by the end of next week or so. It's not clear how long Telstra will take to activate it, but the foreman tells me that they installed the other end of the microwave link (on the Buninyong tower) at the beginning of the year. Clearly politics has got in the way. That's also clear from the fact that there is another tower at all. The antenna would easily have fitted on the existing NBN tower, but the foreman tells me that very few antennas get co-located on NBN towers. On the other hand, there are a number of NBN antennas co-located on other towers, notably Telstra. Doesn't politics make life easy?
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Mobile phone GPS: inadequate
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Somehow the accuracy of the GPS receiver in my Samsung GT-I9100T mobile phone leaves a lot to be desired. Lately I've been taking it while walking the dogs, but the logs suggest that I haven't left the property. Today I took it with me while taking photos of the mobile phone tower, with the car GPS navigator as a backup. It's easier to get the logs off the phone, so I did that. But the location I got was over 500 m away! That's clearly a different problem: It was further south, where I didn't go at all. The car GPS navigator worked fine, but of course showed the location of the car, not the location of the camera. I'm coming to the conclusion that I need a better mobile phone.
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Centrelink does it again!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Letter from Centrelink (obviously the government agency that pays our pensions) today. Please supply your German pension certificate.
Huh? We did that only two months ago, and even then we had a lot of irritation. Why do they want Yet Another one? Decided not to call the free number that they supplied (0800 1802 482). That's a German number, but they put it anyway on a letter sent to an Australian address. And the other number (03 6222 3455) didn't work either: it just gave a bewildering number of redirections. So I had to call 131673 and pay money, although they have a “landline” number.
Connected to Sarah in a relatively short period of time. She was actually helpful: she established that yes, they already had the information, and that somebody must have forgotten to cancel the automatic reminder. Apologies, and please disregard this letter.
| Tuesday, 24 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 24 October 2017 |
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Police reports in time of Internet
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
OK, still no refund from Craig Weber, about whom I only know phone numbers ((02) 9638 5221 and 0412 25 00 00), eBay user ID (klearview_au) and email address (craigweber@optusnet.com.au). Time for the police.
Or is it? Checked the web site and discovered that it's not possible to report crimes online. Call the police station. So at 13:10 I called up the police in Ballarat on (03) 53366000, was presented with a long list of topics organized from their point of view, so finally chose “uniform”, something that is completely irrelevant to me. They weren't very helpful. After a while, they suggested an acorn.
Acorn? No, ACORN, the Australian Cybercrime Online Reporting Network, a name that sounds like a reverse fit to the acronym. Clearly it's a completely different category of crime when I buy something online as opposed to buying from a newspaper advertisement. They weren't very encouraging:
After submitting your report, you will not receive any further correspondence on behalf of the ACORN. If further information is required, the police agency investigating your report will contact you.
So I filled out the form, being continually reminded that I may never hear from them again. Maybe Craig was right when he wrote:
And as you know, the police won???t do anything
Still, let's give it a chance.
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More focus-stacked flowers
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Topic: photography, gardening | Link here |
There are now many wildflowers round the entrance to the house. Time to try some experiments. One of the biggest issues in taking focus stacked images is wind. There wasn't much wind today, but enough to be irritating, so I tried setting up protection:
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That helped, but not much, and for one of the plants I put in an additional rod as a prop:
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The out-of-camera images managed the motion very well, but they didn't give me the depth of field that I wanted:
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So I tried some traditional focus stacking, which Olympus calls focus bracketing. What a mess these menus are! I tried brackets of 20 images, but it keeps reverting to 99 image brackets (why not 100?). The result was that for only a few shots, I had a total of 365 shots, some in both JPEG and raw. Just converting them meant that I had to put the rest off until tomorrow, though there's some reason to believe that I could do with more than 20 images. Here images 1 and 67 of the first Burchardia umbellata sequence:
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The first shows the closest part of the the flower (petal of smallest flower on bottom right), and the second shows the Drosera in the background. So let's see what tomorrow brings.
| Wednesday, 25 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 25 October 2017 |
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Stacking photos again
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
Finally I have yesterday's stacked photos converted to JPEG. Time to stack them. Once again DxO Optics “Pro” had produced output images of marginally different sizes, so align_image_stack refused to touch them. I've run into this problem in the past, and I should be able to find a way round it, either with different settings for DxO, or by manually trimming the images.
On the other hand, align_image_stack has absolutely no support for deghosting, so presumably it would make a real mess of the moving flowers. So instead I used FOCUS Projects Professional, a program that I haven't used much. The results are really quite stunning. Firstly, it refused to accept my files: too big. I had to consent to having them reduced in size by a factor of about 6. And then it seems that it's at least one order of magnitude worse than the in-camera stacking when it comes to motion compensation. Here are two images taken with in-camera focus stacking, and then as processed by FOCUS:
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Now wasn't that worthwhile? Yes, the backgrounds are nice and sharp, but the motion of the flowers in the foreground completely confused it. There may be ways to work around the breakage, but I'm left wondering if it's worth the trouble.
Others swear by Helicon Focus, so I installed a copy of that. It didn't complain about the size of the images, but otherwise the results made FOCUS look good:
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Doubtless there are ways to get past these problems, but they're clearly not an out-of-the-box solution. The in-camera stacking looks better all the time.
In passing, it's interesting to note both the silly names that the software choose for output names, and also the Angst that they arouse in ImageMagick. This one is from Helicon:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/13) /Photos/4-Focusstack 523 -> ls -l
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/13) ~/Photos/20171024 524 -> convert /Photos/4-Focusstack/2017-10-25\ 11-20-32\ \(B\,Radius8\,Smoothing4\).tif Mystery-flower-3-Helicon.jpeg
| Thursday, 26 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 26 October 2017 |
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Induction cooking caveats
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Topic: food and drink, technology, general | Link here |
Changing the fat in the friteuse is always an issue. The fat is solid, but you can't heat it with the element because it needs to be immersed in fat. So in the past I've melted the fat separately in another pot and then put it into the friteuse.
But now I have an induction cooker, and the pan of the friteuse is ferromagnetic, so I can do it directly. And it works. But it's still not without its problems. While heating it, I saw a spot in the pan glow red hot. No chance for a photo, of course, but it left its mark:
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Yet another reason to use thicker metal for cooking.
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“Equivalent aperture”
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Olympus has brought out two new lenses: the M.Zuiko Digital ED 17mm f/1.2 PRO and the M.Zuiko Digital ED 45mm f/1.2 PRO. DPREVIEW announced them with a text that included:
The two lenses expand the company's series of F1.2 lenses, which are equivalent to 35 and 90mm F2.4 lenses for full frame.
I consider Digital Photography Review to be one of the better sites, but they've shot themselves in the foot here. Never mind that they don't understand what f/1.2 means and write F1.2 instead; what's this nonsense about F2.4? Also equivalent to f/4.8 on a 6×6 camera, or f/18 on a 10×8 plate camera?
This isn't the first time I've complained about this nonsense, but this time I put a comment in the thread, and was soundly trounced. There's still a lot of confusion. desmon2046 said:
MFT f/1.2 lenses are equivalent to full frame f/2.4 not only in terms of depth of field but also light gathering ability. If you're using full frame, you can crank up ISO and get the same image quality.
That begs the question of how he defines “light gathering ability”, but the claim of “cranking up the ISO” is interesting. That has absolutely nothing to do with the lens, of course, and a lot to do with the sensor.
JhvaElohimMeth wrote a more conventional viewpoint:
Sure, you're right. But many people want this "f/1.2" number for bokeh, and it's correct to say them that with the same angel of view (as you said, double the focal lenght) you just need f/2.5 (bit more, bit less) lenses on 35mm format to have the same amount of blur.
But that got me thinking. What does depth of field mean? Once upon a time it was simple: nobody could come up with a good, reliable definition of the resolution of film, so they just chose a circle of confusion, round 15 μm for full frame. I carried on with this approach with my Depth of Field program and chose 8 μm for Four Thirds sensors. And the results are as stated:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) ~ 182 -> dof 45 1.2 1
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) ~ 183 -> dof -c 16 90 2.4 1
But how valid are these values for circle of confusion? With digital sensors we can be much more specific. To get sharp images with smaller pixels, you need a smaller circle of confusion. For the sake of argument I'd say that a circle of confusion should be about 2 pixels wide (allowing for a complete Bayer sensor cell). Let's consider what that means:
My (really Yana's) first digital camera was a Canon EOS 20D with an APS-C sensor and 8 MP resolution. The pixel pitch 6.2 μm, so a double cell would be 12.4 μm. The focal length ratio to full frame was 1.6, so in the example above we'd consider a lens with 56 mm focal length. With these parameters, we would have:
My first four thirds camera was an Olympus E-510 with 10 megapixels, about a 4.7 μm pixel pitch. This would give:
My current camera is an Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II with the same sensor as the E-510, but with 20 MP resolution. That gives a pixel pitch of 3.33 μm, so our depth of field becomes:
Let's look at current full-frame cameras, such as the Nikon D850, which has a 46 MP resolution. The pixel pitch is 4.35 μm, less than that of the E-510. Depth of field is:
Clearly there's no comparison here. You certainly can't talk about “equivalent” apertures without making assumptions that may no longer be valid. The same applies to the idea of “cranking up the ISO”, which depends on the relative quality of the sensor.
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Cybercrime!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Received a strange email today:
Doesn't that look suspicious? I particularly like the “COPS” number. The message claims to come from NSW Police, but clearly comes from Gmail. It doesn't have my name on the To: header. The address doesn't include a city or town (“suburb”). And it doesn't refer to anything that I recognize. Everything about it screams “scam”.
Yes, I reported my problems with Craig Weber two days ago, so conceivably it could have something to do with him. Or it could have been done by somebody who had read my diary entry. How do I find out if it's genuine?
The web site was a dead loss, but gave me the same “Victims Access Line” number that was in the email. But no, they're just for victims of violence.
Finally I found a general enquiries number at https://www.police.nsw.gov.au/contact_us: 1800 725 631. Called up and spoke to Rebecca, who took the matter seriously, checked the phone number and told me that it wasn't valid. Obviously a scam. Then I read out the other details, and she discovered that yes, indeed, it was genuine, and after authenticating me (“What's your date of birth?”), confirmed details that I had entered.
I asked her to connect me, but she wasn't able to do that via the internal number. She confirmed that the email address was correct (or at least corresponded to the address that she had on record), and offered to send an email for me. But I can do that myself. And she wasn't able to give me a reference number.
Tried the number myself, and confirmed that it wasn't connected. Why was I given it? Sent an email to the officer, but by evening had no reply.
Somehow this doesn't heighten my trust in NSW police.
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Lost magpie
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Topic: animals | Link here |
While walking the dogs, found this bird sitting on a twig about 80 cm from the ground:
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It's hard to tell from the plumage, but it's an Australian magpie, presumably not able to fly yet. It kept completely still, probably the best thing it could do under the circumstances. I wonder what its chances of survival are.
| Friday, 27 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 27 October 2017 |
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Photos of paintings
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Topic: photography | Link here |
Yvonne has painted another painting, this time about 75×100 cm in size, and she wanted a photo and print in original size. Some research: yes, can be done. Normally the photo shops scan things that they want to print—photcopying rather than photos—but that won't work with a painting, so I had to take a photo of it.
The real issue with paintings, especially ones with dark background like this one, is reflections. The paint is slightly reflective, and the canvas reflects the dark areas in a way that is difficult to remove. In the end I took multiple images with slightly different lighting angles and merged them with Hugin:
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We emailed this and another image (of a different painting) to Quickprint Ballarat (“formerly known as Best Quickprint”—that asks more questions than it answers), and Yvonne went in to pick it up ahead of her long weekend of military equitation tomorrow. The first print I have made in well over a decade, and it didn't look bad—to me. Yvonne was apparently expecting something that would not emphasize the structure as much.
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Yet another wildflower
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Walking the dogs, found this wildflower:
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I've seen that dozens of times before, right? Wrong. There are plenty of flowers that look roughly like that, but this one is different: small and prostrate. I really need to find better reference material to identify this stuff.
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No rain!
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
According to my old-fashioned rain gauges, we've had about 36 mm of rain in the last 10 days, including 14.7 mm yesterday. According to my weather station, we've had 0.3 mm, all of it 10 days ago.
I know that problem, but I've been too lazy to do something about it: spiders in the rain gauge, tying the mechanism together with a web. Up to check today, and sure enough, that was the problem. This bloke is about 1 cm long:
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I was so busy trying to get a good shot that I forgot to take a photo of the rain gauge itself.
| Saturday, 28 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 28 October 2017 |
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Timeline festival
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Topic: animals, photography | Link here |
Yvonne off today to Kryal Castle, east of Ballarat, for what was called Timeline Festival. It's difficult to summarize, and the official web pages don't even try, but it seems to be a collection of reenactments of ancient (horse-based) warfare, so of course Chris Bahlo was there:
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Yvonne took the photos—281 of them, in the process making friends with the M.Zuiko Digital 45 mm f/1.8, which she used on the E-PM1. And indeed the results were good. Here some of the ones that impressed me:
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Things weren't always above the belt:
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And then there are some completely incongruous ones, like this guard who apparently escaped from Eureka Stockade and has been living in the jungles of South-Western Victoria for the last 160 odd years:
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In the process Yvonne confirmed that horses do sometimes have all four hooves off the ground when galloping (and maybe in other cases):
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Diary: done!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
I've been keeping this online diary for over 17 years now, but it's not my first attempt. I kept an (paper) diary from 1 January 1963 to 1 October 1970, and I still have it. I had entered more interesting parts online, like the Asia Trip in April to June 1967, where my father and I drove from Singapore to London. Last January I wanted to look up something, not made easier by my appalling handwriting, and I decided to enter the rest of the diary online too.
One thing led to another, and since then I've been entering several days' worth of diary entries every day. Today I finished, for various reasons in the middle on 31 March 1966.
Was it worth it? Yes, for me. I don't know if anybody else cares, but that wasn't the intention. I pride myself on having a good memory, and the diary-keeping means that I can generally remember dates of things that happened 50 years ago to within a few days.
But it's amazing how many details I have forgotten. For example, in my last year at school (King's College, Taunton) I developed a strong antipathy towards everything English, to the point that I abandoned my intention of studying at an English university and spent a year reconsidering my options (what has since been called a “gap year”). As a result, one of the first parts of the diary I started entering was from May 1966. That's also one of the reasons that I finished the diary today with the end of March of that year.
I had had a fairly clear recollection of why I didn't like the English, based largely on how I was treated at school, and that treatment started in May or June 1966. But they proved to be incorrect: for reasons I didn't note, my aversion started several months earlier, for no obvious reason.
The other thing seems to be that I haven't changed my attitude to the world that much. People sometimes call me an old codger, set in my ways, but it seems that those ways set when I was a teenager.
The other thing that occurs to me is that, while the diary entries weren't short, I still left things out that I would have liked to know. For example, we had a number of concerts at school (“subscription concerts”), and three musicians stand out in my memory: Peter Pears, Julian Bream and Gerald Moore. The concerts were relatively intimate things: the audience was probably no more than 50, and Gerald Moore reshaped the concert to something more like a lecture with examples. But I can find no reference to Gerald Moore in the diary, and I barely mentioned the other two.
That's quite an excuse for my extensive current diary entries. I wonder who will be around in another 50 years to find any interest.
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Cooking hell
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Margaret Swan is here again because of the Timeline Festival, so time for more Indian food. That takes a lot of preparation, and Yvonne was busy taking photos, so I had to do it all by myself.
It didn't go well. I ended up with 5 different dishes to prepare, including a large batch of mixed dal. I managed to burn that, mix up the ingredients for two other dishes, undercook the fish, and just before serving I discovered that I had completely forgotten another dish. Strangely, everybody except myself was happy. But as a result, once again no dinner photo.
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Green onions again
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Cooking the dal required large quantities of onion, which were puréed and fried. And once again it went bright green while frying:
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The colours are relatively accurate, at least on my monitor. The grey area behind the pan is a grey card, which should relativize the colours.
What causes that?
| Sunday, 29 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 29 October 2017 |
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Timeline conclusion
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Yvonne off to Kryal Castle again today for the second day of the Timeline Festival. It seems to have been a success for Chris Bahlo, who won the bronze medal:
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Who won the gold and silver? Nobody. There was only one prize, and Chris won it: a bronze statue of a horse. After that she looked a lot happier:
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DxO: Changing of the guard
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
DxO Optics “Pro” is dead, long live DxO PhotoLab.
What's the difference? It's no longer Pro (a word that has long been meaningless), and it probably describes the current functionality better. Once it was just there for optical corrections, but in the 6½ years since I started using it, it has continually gained in functionality, much of which is not optical in nature. And from the somewhat garbled information I have on it, that trend seems to be continuing. So maybe the name makes sense.
Downloaded the software and tried it out. Yes, a very familiar looking interface. But what's that green hook over each photo preview? “Download DxO module”? Yes, it wants me to download correction modules for every image (well, camera/lens pair). But I have them already! And there are quite a few of them. Went looking for them, a pain in itself (this is dischord, a Microsoft box). Finally a use for Cygwin, which told me that I had 231 modules installed, occuupying a total of 582 MB. Apart from the time it would take to download them again, there's no good way to know what they are until I discover I need them again. The names don't help:
So where are they? Much searching showed that they were in /cygdrive/c/Users/grog/AppData/Local/DxO_Labs/DxO OpticsPro 11/Modules. And after downloading one module, I found it in /cygdrive/C/Users/grog/AppData/Local/DxO/DxO PhotoLab 1/Modules. OK, copy? Sure, but how? How can I enter these horrible pathnames with spaces in them? In the end, I stored them on eureka, my FreeBSD box (pwd is your friend), and created commands there using Emacs, and then executed them. The same applied to my “presets” and “workspaces”, in /cygdrive/c/Users/grog/AppData/Local/DxO_Labs/DxO OpticsPro 11/Presets and /cygdrive/c/Users/grog/AppData/Local/DxO_Labs/DxO OpticsPro 11/Workspaces. And how about that, with that I was able to migrate relatively seamlessly.
In the process, discovered a directory /cygdrive/c/Users/grog/AppData/Local/DxO_Labs/DxO OpticsPro 11/Cache, with no less than 27,922 files occupying 3.2 GB. Looking at the Preferences tab, this is advertised—I can use up to 10 GB of disk for this purpose, and it offers a functional “Clear” tab—but I didn't realize it was there until I went looking.
What new features does it have? I read some of the blurb, but it doesn't make much sense to me. The video that I looked at was designed to sell to people who don't know DxO, and I'll need to look further.
| Monday, 30 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 30 October 2017 |
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Nele and Magda visit
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Topic: general, food and drink | Link here |
As if the last two days hadn't been strenuous enough, today Nele Kömle and mother Magda came to visit. Magda lives in Graz, so we only see her about once a year. And of course we had promised to feed them.
OK, not a problem. We have plenty of food left over from Saturday, and we had some lamb that I had wanted to process to Lamb Madras. But Yvonne wanted Lamb Biriani. That's a more complicated dish, but so what?
Spent about 2½ hours in the kitchen putting all the stuff together, not helped by the fact that the timing in the recipe is too tight. Somehow I got everything sorted out only 8 minutes late, but it was much more work than I had intended
Lunch was fun. Nele had brought a bottle of bubbly (labelled “Blanquette de Limoux”), which I had thought was a veal dish. Limoux is in the area in the Département of Aude where we had been thinking of moving to in the mid-1990s. So we got talking about French, including the language. Magda is Flemish, from Oostende, and French was her second language. Why? I suggested that there are parts of Belgium where it would be useful.
Explosion. “I would never speak French in Belgium”. Yes, I know that the Belgians have a strong linguistic divide, but the intensity of her response was still surprising, and reminiscent of my own experiences and this extract from Astérix chez les Belges:
But for some reason she then spoke French, at least briefly and for no obvious reason—possibly to prove that we're not in Belgium now.
The bubbly needed cooling (in the deep freeze) before drinking, so of course I had to measure the temperature. Nele had never seen an infrared thermometer before, and did some testing:
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Nele's daughter Ellie has grown, of course;
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Apart from that, the usual silly photos:
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Learning about DxO PhotoLab
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
Yesterday I took a first look at DxO PhotoLab, but didn't find the tutorial videos. Off to look for them today. The web page doesn't inspire confidence: currently the menu at the top is non-functional, and when I finally found, at the bottom, a tab “Learn: How to get started with DxO PhotoLab”, which led me to a page with lots of tutorials about DxO Optics “Pro”, including old versions, and also completely irrelevant tutorials about their DxO ONE toy camera, but not a single tutorial about DxO PhotoLab. Maybe they'll come, but I'm left wondering whether DxO realize how bad an impression this makes.
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Camera collection
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Topic: photography | Link here |
Today Kev Russell posted a photo of his camera collection on Facebook. OK, I can do that too. The last time I collected all my lenses together and photographed them, I had 20 of them:
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Now I have, well, 20. But they're all lenses for my Olympus cameras, while last time I had 8 (or 9 if you count the toy body cap lens at front right). This time I wanted the cameras there too. But what do I use to take the photo? Simple: the cameras. Use one for the left half, the other for the right half, and don't worry too much about the angles: Hugin will take care of that:
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But the stitching proved to be very bad. Firstly there were bad seams, and secondly the projection was completely broken:
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Did a bit of looking at alternatives, but in the limited time at my disposal, I couldn't find a better projection. There's still so much I need to understand.
| Tuesday, 31 October 2017 | Dereel | Images for 31 October 2017 |
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Call the police—how?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Last Thursday I received mail from NSW Police relating to my fraud case. It was so garbled that I was not able to proceed, and the phone connections I had didn't help either. I sent an email to the (allegedly correct) email address with which I was provided. So far I have received no response.
OK, time to try again. Called up the “contact us” number 1800 725 631 at round 11:00 (MyNetFone doesn't record calls to 1-800 numbers), and was connected with Graham, who gave me a running commentary. What a big organization! And no, the address isn't 4, 219-241 CLEVELAND ST, unspecified town: it's 11, Phillip St, Sydney. And the email address is wrong too: there is no officer with that number. I suggested that maybe the number in the email address could be random, not necessarily the registration number, and he accepted that. In the end he gave me the number of the Cybercrime unit: 02 8264 9186, and left me to call it. He couldn't take a report on the difficulties I had had, because he's not allowed to get involved in matters relating to fraud and homicide. He didn't change his mind when I pointed out that this was a matter of complete inefficiency and nothing to do with the crime itself. In any case, he is sure that ACORN is probably to blame for the problem—never mind that there was little overlap between the ACORN report and the email I received.
I called the number and got voice mail (Jennifer Gaskin, if I recall correctly). I left a message to call back, but of course I got none. Of course, there's no reason to believe that the number has anything to do with the NSW police. ACORN, indeed!
Called back on the info line round 12:20 and was connected to Joan, who was much less helpful than Rebecca or Graham. She gave me another email address (sayw2tod@police.nsw.gov.au), but wouldn't take a complaint. That has to be done in writing to customerassistance@police.nsw.gov.au.
I summarized to her: I can't get a phone number for the officer in question. I can't report complaints over the phone. If I don't get a response to my email, I'm out of luck. Right? Joan: “Yes, that's right”.
So I sent an email to the new email address, asking for urgent response. So far I still have had none.
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Learning DxO PhotoLab
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Spent a bit more time today trying to understand DxO PhotoLab. The first thing of interest is that each version of DxO wants its own Modules directory. What about a symlink? Played around with that on euroa. I didn't get it to work. The first time round, after replacing the directory with a pointer, it just hung when I started it. Maybe building a database? There's a file CAFList1010.db in the main directory, and from previous pain I know that it relates to the correction modules. But after an hour, it still hadn't done anything.
OK, stop DxO PhotoLab, replace the local directories, and try again. Immediate silent crash. Later attempts caused hangs due to the program starting twice. It took me a couple of deinstallation procedures to get the thing working again.
Finally, looking for documentation. No, once again I couldn't find any. Yes, there's a web-based manual, but that's very slow going, and most of the content is the same as for the old “Optics Pro”. About the only thing I could find was the video, which showed some of the features, but they're very inaccurate. I suspect it was made with a pre-release version. It also glosses over the details. But with a bit of practice some of the new features should be quite useful.
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