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| Greg's diary |
| September 2024 |
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| Sunday, 1 September 2024 | Dereel | |
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Dinner gone wrong
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Beef with orange and broccoli for dinner today. I had forgotten how much work it is, and in the process a number of improvements occurred to me.
But the result was disappointing. Not because of the work, but because of new sources of ingredients. Previously I had made it with this orange peel, which I had found surprisingly small:
But we had run out of that, and the new stuff looks like this:
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In addition, I had bought some “sizzle steak” (and not “sizzling steak”, the term that Woolworths use) from ALDI:
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It looks nice, marbled and natural, unlike the steak from Woolworths, and it's also more expensive than the Woolworths' offering. But it's tough! And the orange peel is also “tough”: it clearly needs soaking before use. The result was a somewhat disappointing meal.
| Monday, 2 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 2 September 2024 |
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Where did all my disk space go?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My nightly backups have another surprise in store:
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/da0p1 7,630,093 7,630,043 -76,250 101% /videobackup
tiwi:/spool 7,567,870 7,423,744 68,447 99% /spool
videobackup is a copy of tiwi:/spool, made with rsync. Why the discrepancy? Off to find out, and, not surprisingly, discovered a number of files on /videobackup that didn't get removed when they went away on /spool. OK, remove them:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/0) ~ 55 -> df
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/da0p1 7,630,093 7,563,450 -9,658 100% /videobackup
tiwi:/spool 7,567,870 7,420,523 71,668 99% /spool
How can that happen? What does du say?
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/0) ~ 56 -> du -s /videobackup
7563451 /videobackup
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/14) ~ 3 -> du -s /spool
7573170 /spool
videobackup usage is as expected, but /spool now has more storage in use than /videobackup, in fact more than the size of the disk and over 150 GB more than df shows! How can that happen? du doesn't follow symbolic links. Is there something hidden under a mount point? But nothing is mounted on /spool, and even if it were, df should have shown the correct values.
What happens if I umount and remount /spool? Not what I expected: the values are unchanged, but from all other machines I get:
=== root@lagoon (/dev/pts/7) ~ 12 -> mount tiwi:/spool /spool
mount_nfs: nmount: /spool: Stale NFS file handle
At first I thought it was an issue of processes having the old handle open, but tiwi:/spool wasn't mounted on lagoon when I remounted it on tiwi. I wasn't able to solve the problem, and I ended up rebooting tiwi—4 machines rebooted in 4 days! How that grates. And for reasons that I don't understand, tiwi started X, but came up without a window manager. That's low priority, though: tiwi should go away in the near future, and I don't use the display. More to the point, though, the backup disk was still full. Let's see what happens with the next backup.
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Another disk fail?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Seen in this morning's logs:
Sep 2 01:12:21 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): READ(16). CDB: 88 00 00 00 00 01 22 76 29 a8 00 00 00 08 00 00
Sep 2 01:12:21 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error
Sep 2 01:12:21 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition
Sep 2 01:12:21 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI sense: ABORTED COMMAND asc:47,3 (Information unit iuCRC error detected)
Sep 2 01:12:21 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): Retrying command (per sense data)
Sep 2 01:12:29 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): READ(16). CDB: 88 00 00 00 00 01 22 76 29 a8 00 00 00 08 00 00
Sep 2 01:12:29 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error
Sep 2 01:12:29 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition
Sep 2 01:12:29 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI sense: NOT READY asc:4,1 (Logical unit is in process of becoming ready)
Sep 2 01:12:29 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): Polling device for readiness
That's my “new” 10 GB backup disk, the one I bought only a little over a year ago. Is it failing already? Presumably it has a warranty of at least 36 months. But is it defective? What does “Information unit iuCRC error detected” mean? And the time is suspicious. From the inverter:
tstamp Pac Status SOC VBat PacGrid PacBat PacPV FromPV W1
2024-09-02 01:12:54 1046 Waiting to connect to On-grid 22 254 NULL 1100 0 0 0
2024-09-02 01:12:55 873 Off-grid 22 254 NULL 910 0 0 0
2024-09-02 01:13:00 515 Off-grid 22 255 NULL 540 0 0 0
2024-09-02 01:13:01 520 Off-grid 22 255 NULL 544 0 0 0
...
2024-09-02 01:13:21 512 Off-grid 21 255 NULL 536 0 0 0
2024-09-02 01:13:22 570 Waiting to connect to On-grid 21 255 NULL 594 0 0 0
That first line is strange; normally it comes after a grid outage, like the last line. Presumably this was a transient.
That's quite possible, but there are two issues: firstly, the disk error message was reported nearly a minute before the outage, and then it repeated at 2:25, when the inverter had no issues. On the other hand, Yvonne reported two failures of her bedside clock, one of them round 2:30. So for the moment it looks as if the errors are due to flaky power.
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Trump's hiding place discovered
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Topic: politics | Link here |
When I signed up for “Truth” Social, I had to choose 3 people to “follow”. Donald Trump was a clear choice, and to my surprise Kamala Harris is there too, so I “followed” her.
And the third? I was given a list, and the name catturd2 stuck out, so I followed him/her. So far he/she seems to have been the most amusing. Today I received this image:
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| Tuesday, 3 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 3 September 2024 |
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No hot water!
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Under the shower this morning, the water seemed cool. I was able to adjust it to normal shower temperature, but why did I need to?
Outside to take a look at the hot water system. Yes, it displayed an error code, E9, and power cycling didn't make it go away. What's that? I've had issues with this unit before, E11, and on that occasion I found the instructions online. But this time I couldn't find it. After all, the unit (apparently a Bosch Compress 3000 DW FOO, or maybe HP 270-2E0 FOO; why do these things always have two names?) is over 5 years old! But I had the URL of the document, and based on that I was able to find it locally.
So: E9 means “Incorrect system purging or Water pump blocked (water not recirculating) or Hydraulic circuit blocked (water not recirculating)". In each case, call a manufacturer's representative. OK, call Bosch (1300 30 70 37). Andrew answered immediately: it seems that their phone system was down, and he couldn't find the representative immediately, but he would call back.
In the meantime, how about Paul of Ballarat Plumbing Services (0418 527 576), the bloke who installed it. Yes, could come this afternoon. Please SMS details.
Did that, and how about that, Paul showed up in the afternoon as promised. He suspected a defective pump, but it seems that fortunately it was only clogged with some black gunge, which he says is typical of systems run off tank water (why?). Here the pump in the second photo, still bleeding now-clear water:
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But the thing takes hours to get back to temperature, and we won't know for sure until tomorrow morning.
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Wildflower recovery?
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
I had noted with some disappointment that the wildflower bush that we planted last year flowered briefly and then died. Here a year ago and today:
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That's the collection of twigs in the middle, not the healthy plants around it. But things are looking up:
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Will it come back? What happened in the first place?
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Finding the lost disk space
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
After my concerns about disk space yesterday, the backup ran normally today, and for some reason there was much more space available. Here yesterday, then today, seen from eureka:
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/da0p1 7,630,093 7,630,043 -76,250 101% /videobackup
tiwi:/spool 7,567,870 7,423,744 68,447 99% /spool
...
/dev/da0p1 7,630,093 7,372,189 181,603 98% /videobackup
tiwi:/spool 7,567,870 7,374,421 117,770 98% /spool
Why? A look around showed me that everything was gone from /spool/Videos, my collection of films. Ah, just a viewpoint. The directories are on hydra, and they're not visible from tiwi. On teevee I really do have other file systems mounted on /spool:
tiwi:/spool 7,567,870 7,374,406 117,785 98% /spool
hydra:/VB3/spool/Videos 3,815,019 1,762,948 2,013,920 47% /spool/Videos
hydra:/VB3/spool/Images 3,815,019 1,762,948 2,013,920 47% /spool/Images
Theoretically that would explain why the sum of the file sizes on /spool would exceed the size of the disk. But that doesn't affect the views from tiwi or eureka, as shown above. I should examine the backup logs more carefully.
| Wednesday, 4 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 4 September 2024 |
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Cooking rice, yet again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I'm out of deep-frozen cooked rice, time for a new batch.
I've been cooking rice for well over 50 years, and until recently I had no issues. Put the rice in the saucepan (I've found rice cookers not worth the trouble) and cover with water by that much. How much? About 2 cm.
Problem: that's not very repeatable. Use the same amount of rice in a larger-diameter saucepan and the water ratio will increase. So I started measuring and found that the water was about 1.5 times the amount of rice. But then I heard of people using as much as twice the amount of water, and recently I have increased it to up to 1.8 times. It seems to work. What about 1.9 times? That's what I tried today. Definitely too much, at least for this rice (ALDI's best long grain).
Now I should check less water again, and maybe give rice cookers another chance.
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New disk
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My new 16 TB Seagate Exos disk has arrived already. How do I install it? One issue with having hydra built commercially is that I don't understand it as well as the machines I built myself. Took off the covers and compared with the motherboard documentation (at https://download.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/mb/MAGX670ETOMAHAWKWIFI.pdf), and that's straightforward enough. But where do I mount the disk? When I picked up the machine, Seth pointed out disk mounting positions, but they're for SSDs. There seems to be no provision for 3½" magnetic disks. Should I put it on the base? Or remove the DVD, find an adapter frame and put it in there? Or just put it in eureka? That would clearly be the simplest solution.
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Bosch service
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Andrew from Bosch called back after only a little more than 24 hours. All done and dusted, of course, but he was able to give me another number to call:
If you need further service work for the heat pump then consider contacting Craig smith. 0434460771
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Installing a sliding gate
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has been having fun getting a quotation for replacing our defective gate with a sliding one like we had in Wantadilla. Things don't look good: we had one quote round $10,000. The current one, from BOE Constructions, was $6,050—without installation. Today Chris of Complete Fencing Solutions Ballarat came along to look at the installation. He later sent a quote—another $5,445! That's a total of $11,495! I can't recall what we paid at Wantadilla, but I think it was under $3,000. We can resist that.
In fact, it seems that he has quoted for things that were already in the other quote, the motor, controller and solar power kit, a total of $4,235. And that corresponds pretty directly to the $403.43 (including postage) that we paid for the current actuator!
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Sarawak pepper chicken
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I have fond memories of pepper-based foods from my time in Sarawak, so a while back I bought this spice mix:
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I've been meaning to use it for ever, but I was concerned that Yvonne might find it too overpoweringly pedas. It expired a few months ago, and today we had some other Chinese leftovers, so I got round to cooking it.
I had my doubts, and I should have looked at the recommended recipe more carefully: 450 g (isn't that a familiar number?) chicken, 150 g broccoli and 25 g carrot. And both vegetables should be cooked for only 2 minutes!
Despite all that, it didn't turn out too badly:
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But clearly I should read the instructions more carefully before buying these things.
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More NFS pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Watching TV in the evening, I wanted to watch a film. They're on /spool/Videos/, NFS mounted on an external drive from hydra. And I had an access error.
Oh. Yes, hydra agreed. Disk not accessible. I must have accidentally disconnected it while looking at the machine this afternoon, and /var/log/messages agreed:
Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: ugen3.2: <Western Digital My Passport 2627> at usbus3 (disconnected)
Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: umass0: at uhub2, port 4, addr 1 (disconnected)
Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus8 target 0 lun 0
Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: da0: <WD My Passport 2627 4008> s/n 575856324537304557343143 detached
Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: ses0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus8 target 0 lun 1
Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: ses0: <WD SES Device 4008> s/n 575856324537304557343143 detached
Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: (ses0:umass-sim0:0:0:1): Periph destroyed
Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Periph destroyed
Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: umass0: detached
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_PREVENT_ALLOW set for USB mass storage device Western Digital My Passport 2627 (0x1058:0x2627)
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: ugen3.2: <Western Digital My Passport 2627> at usbus3
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: umass0 on uhub2
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: umass0: <Western Digital My Passport 2627, class 0/0, rev 2.10/40.08, addr 1> on usbus3
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: umass0: SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x8000
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: umass0:8:0: Attached to scbus8
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus8 target 0 lun 0
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: da0: <WD My Passport 2627 4008> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: da0: Serial Number 575856324537304557343143
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: da0: 3815415MB (7813969920 512 byte sectors)
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: da0: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: ses0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus8 target 0 lun 1
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: ses0: <WD SES Device 4008> Fixed Enclosure Services SPC-4 SCSI device
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: ses0: Serial Number 575856324537304557343143
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: ses0: 40.000MB/s transfers
Sep 4 14:25:06 hydra kernel: ses0: SES Device
OK, force umount, fsck, mount. All OK. Mount from teevee:
mount_nfs: nmount: /VB3: Stale NFS file handle
I've seen that before, but the first time was only a couple of days ago. Why is this happening now? And I didn't find a solution this evening; we watched series episodes instead: they're on a different disk, on tiwi.
| Thursday, 5 September 2024 | Dereel | |
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Anniversary power fail
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Topic: general, history | Link here |
When I got up this morning I discovered a message on albo, my mobile phone: Powercor had become aware of a grid power failure at 5:52, along with another message telling me that power had been restored 41 minutes later. The air conditioner was running, but fortunately we didn't run out of power.
Than another at 11:27, while we were having breakfast, this time only 22 minutes. The inverter didn't handle it well, causing various screams from the electronics, but the only thing really affected was the radio.
Clearly this was another fifth anniversary gift. But to be fair to Powercor, things have looked up a lot since we moved to Dereel. Let's hope they stay that way.
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NFS recovery
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
So why am I getting these stale NFS handles? Discovered a number of these messages in /var/log/messages:
Sep 4 18:40:48 teevee kernel: newnfs: server 'hydra' error: fileid changed. fsid 0:0: expected fileid 0x31700, got 0x2. (BROKEN NFS SERVER OR MIDDLEWARE)
What does that mean? The result of trying to remount a new mount on hydra? What does hydra say?
Sep 4 18:44:50 hydra kernel: UFS: forcibly unmounting /dev/da0p1 from /VB3
But that was a few minutes later. Nothing obvious. A web search brought up various stuff, suggesting that it's new, but nothing that helps much. What I did establish is that the issue is with hydra, not with teevee, and that it's not related to existing mounts: the same thing happens on lagoon, which didn't have the file system mounted.
So: what happens if I mount the same device on a different mount point on hydra, and then export that and mount it from teevee? That's a thing that I wanted to do anyway, so tried that. Instead of mounting and exporting /VB3, use the mount point name /Videos. Success!
So somewhere it seems that there's an issue in the NFS stack. I suppose I should follow up.
To confuse the issue, looked at the file systems mounted on teevee after that and found, inter alia
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
tiwi:/VB2 5,722,572 5,182,906 482,440 91% /VB2
tiwi:/spool 7,567,870 7,374,516 117,675 98% /spool
hydra:/VB3/spool/Images 3,815,019 1,762,948 2,013,920 47% /spool/Images
tiwi:/VB2 39,664 23,880 12,610 65% /VB2
hydra:/Video 3,815,019 1,762,948 2,013,920 47% /Video
hydra:/Video/spool/Videos 3,815,019 1,762,948 2,013,920 47% /spool/Videos
There are a number of issues here:
I've run into the “double mount” problem before. It doesn't appear to be limited to NFS. Why should it ever be useful to mount a file system twice, especially if two different file systems get mounted on the same mount point? I've already established that a umount will umount the last instance, but I still needed to force umount it
=== root@teevee (/dev/pts/12) /spool 55 -> umount /VB2
umount: unmount of /VB2 failed: Device busy=== root@teevee (/dev/pts/12) /spool 56 -> umount -f /VB2=== root@teevee (/dev/pts/12) /spool 57 -> df
...
tiwi:/VB2 5,722,572 5,182,906 482,440 91% /VB2=== root@teevee (/dev/pts/12) /spool 58 -> l /VB2
total 19428
drwxrwxr-x 2 grog home 512 12 Feb 2018 .snap
-r-------- 1 root wheel 33,554,432 1 May 2019 .sujournal
drwxr-xr-x 8 grog home 512 25 Jun 11:43 spool
drwxr-xr-x 23 grog wheel 512 29 Apr 2023 spool-old
This last ls shows what I expect, so I have the correct file system mounted.
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Installing the new disk
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So what do I do with my new 16 TB Seagate Exos disk? On the whole it seems to be a better idea to put it in eureka, where the old disk is. That would save issues with NFS and SMB, and there's plenty of space for it. So reluctantly shut eureka down for the second time in a few days, put the disk in, cabled it up, rebooted into the BIOS setup menu. No new disk.
What happened there? I know I've had cable problems in eureka—after all, it is over 10 years old—but I thought that this would work.
What are the alternatives? hydra after all? It seems a messy way to go, since the web server files are on /Photos, and the web server runs on eureka. I already have an issue with Yvonne's photos on lagoon:/Photos, for which I need to copy the photos to eureka (yes, potentially symlinks would do the job, but so far I haven't looked at it; one way or another it's an issue). So: how about putting it in a test machine, copying the data and then moving the disk to the physical position of /Photos in eureka? But which machine? In principle I have three spare ThinkCentres, but two are probably defective, and the third is still running as tiwi until I get my weather station software sorted out.
But there are still the two machines from Bruce Evans. I've decided that I don't like the HP Z800, which seems particularly hard to work with, but what about the other one, the one he called zetaplex? I haven't really looked at it very carefully, but it seems normal enough, if you ignore the silly lights:
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I'm sure that wasn't Bruce's choice. It's comparable to but about 11% faster than eureka (Intel i7 4790K instead of Intel i7 4771). It has enough space for all the disks on eureka, but only 16 GB of memory instead of 32 GB. Still, a good backup to have in case eureka dies.
The disk is in a tray with cables too short to remove it, possibly an issue with the assembly. I'll look at that later. But to my surprise I found 2 SSDs almost completely hidden in other trays, both too polite to mention their capacity; I'll look at that when the copying is done. Put in my quartet SSD, the one I set up a couple of months ago, and of course the new disk. Power up, into BIOS setup. Not seen! Of course, modern BIOS/UEFI screens are really hard to understand. Booted into FreeBSD anyway. It saw the disk. Reboot, into the BIOS screen. It saw the disk.
Is there something about the disk that wants somebody to throw the first stone? Would it have worked in eureka? I couldn't be bothered to recable all over again, so I'll never know.
So, time to integrate into the LAN. But I couldn't access the net! After some examination, I found that the box has three Ethernet interfaces, like the Z800 (why?). But there seem to be only two connections. My startup script had assigned the same IP address to both em0 and re0, while em1 remained unconfigured. Connect the cable to em0 (on the motherboard) and all was well.
Then a custom newfs for a disk with large files, something like I decided upon years ago:
=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/10) ~ 44 -> newfs -L Photos -O 2 -U -a 64 -b 16384 -d 16384 -e 2048 -f 2048 -g 3145728 -h 64 -i 2752512 -m 1 -o space /dev/ada1p1
After writing what seem to be far too many cylinder groups, it appeared to hang creating the journal, about 90 seconds. But it was apparently accessing the disk the whole time.
And that gave me the biggest file system I have ever seen:
=== grog@quartet (/dev/pts/2) ~ 23 -> df /Photos /newphotos/
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
eureka:/Photos 7,629,565 6,806,391 746,877 90% /Photos
/dev/ada1p1 15,257,008 0 15,104,437 0% /newphotos
That corresponds to nearly 10,000 IBM 3330 subsystems, my old yardstick for disk capacity. If I interpret this incorrect answer correctly, a 3330 cabinet has a footprint of 7.65 m², so we're looking at about 7.6 ha of cabinets, on top of which you'd need probably the same amount to move round the things.
Then the copy, using tar across NFS, running close to wire speed at between 90 and 110 MB/s. At that speed it should take about a day, filling the first IBM 3330 equivalent in about 20 seconds. But while looking at the results, I discovered that a lot of the directories had a modification timestamp 1 January 2009. The system clock had lost its memory, and that must have been the epoch for the BIOS. OK, run an ntpdate and fire up ntpd.
=== grog@quartet (/dev/pts/3) ~ 19 -> date
Thu 1 Jan 2009 14:21:09 AEDT=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/3) /home/grog 1 -> ntpdate eureka
5 Sep 18:25:31 ntpdate[2069]: step time server 192.109.197.137 offset +494744636.627861 sec
You have mail in /var/mail/grog=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/3) /home/grog 2 -> date
Thu 5 Sep 2024 18:26:46 AEST=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/3) /home/grog 3 -> ntpd
daemon control: got EOF
Huh? What does that mean? ntpd wasn't running. More web surfing brought me to this article, which at least confirmed that it's not a FreeBSD issue. Use the -4 to avoid trying IPv6. But that didn't help. On the other hand, /var/log/messages showed:
Sep 5 18:31:15 quartet ntpd[2088]: ntpd 4.2.8p18-a (1): Starting
Sep 5 18:31:15 quartet ntpd[2088]: Command line: ntpd
Sep 5 18:31:15 quartet ntpd[2089]: bind(23) AF_INET 192.109.197.151:123 flags 0x19 failed: Address already in use
Sep 5 18:31:15 quartet ntpd[2089]: unable to create socket on re0 (3) for 192.109.197.151:123
Sep 5 18:31:15 quartet ntpd[2088]: daemon child died with signal 11
Sep 5 18:31:15 quartet kernel: pid 2089 (ntpd), jid 0, uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
More web surfing, no insights. But one thing stood out: “unable to create socket on re0”. That's what comes of having multiple interfaces with the same IP address. Reset re0 and it found em0 and ran.
| Friday, 6 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 6 September 2024 |
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Disk copy, continued
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Into the office this morning to discover that my disk copy had failed after transferring 4 TB:
...
x ./grog/20160115/orig/P1153725.jpg
x ./grog/20160115/orig/P1153728.jpg
x ./grog/20160115/orig/P1153729.jpgtar: (null)
: Truncated tar archive: Unknown error: -1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
That wasn't completely unexpected. OK, continue with rsync, something that I'll have to do anyway a couple of times. In the process, discovered that the --delete-after option changes rsync's behaviour: it first builds a list of files, which takes some time. I wanted immediate results, so I restarted without:
=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /var/tmp 34 -> Log rsync -av --delete-after /Photos/ /newphotos
===== Fri 6 Sep 2024 09:30:09 AEST on quartet.lemis.com: rsync -av --delete-after /Photos/ /newphotos
building file list ... ^C=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /var/tmp 35 -> Log rsync -av /Photos/ /newphotos
===== Fri 6 Sep 2024 09:32:22 AEST on quartet.lemis.com: rsync -av /Photos/ /newphotos
sending incremental file list
.sujournal
rsync: [receiver] rename "/newphotos/.sujournal.8MXurP" -> ".sujournal": Operation not permitted (1)
grog/19640828/orig/hide/
grog/19640828/orig/hide/img466.tif
And of course it ran all day. But when it was done, I had:
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
eureka:/Photos 7,629,565 6,806,544 746,725 90% 1,764,224 1,479,422 54% /Photos
/dev/ada1p1 15,257,008 7,237,056 7,867,381 48% 1,877,934 4,608,208 29% /newphotos
Why the discrepancy? The used space can depend on the newfs parameters, which I should compare. But more obvious is the number of inodes used, 115,000 more than /Photos. That looks like link breakage. Where? Mañana.
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Computer photo challenge
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
How do I take a photo of quartet, previously zetaplex? A photo of a computer is straightforward enough, but in this case I wanted to highlight this silly blue illumination, so I didn't want much extraneous light, and the light levels were low. OK, no worries, pull down the blinds to minimize external illumination and take at high ISO:
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Acceptable, but not good. In particular, the aperture f/1.4 means that the back is out of focus, and the noise could be better:
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OK, mount on a tripod and try a longer exposure at 200/24° ISO:
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That's an improvement, but there's not much detail in the computer below quartet (distress).
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How about HDR? Two different ways, one with Hugin tools and one with Photomatix:
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There's surprisingly little difference from the normal shots.
OK, mobile phones are supposed to be as good as real cameras. Try that:
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Oh. Of course, they have fixed focal lengths. To be fair, I didn't think to try the “telephoto lens”, which I think doubles the focal length. But never mind, I can crop:
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But that has terrible detail:
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Or I can come closer and accept the perspective distortion:
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That doesn't help much either. Detail is terrible, and there's clear evidence of camera shake:
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So mobile phones are really not worth the trouble. It looks as if my best choice is the old camera on tripod and more aggressive postprocessing.
In passing, the Exif data for the phone claims +5 EV exposure compensation. That looks like a misunderstanding on the part of the firmware programmers. There was no compensation.
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A mouse? Rats!
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
Found Mona looking interestedly at the air conditioner return air filter. And indeed, I had heard some noise in there. Opened the filter holder, and in went Mona. Within 10 seconds she had caught and killed a mouse:
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Has she done that before? My guess is no. I think the killing at this point was accidental. Cats play with mice before killing them, and Mona showed interest in playing with it. But the mouse wasn't interested:
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After a bit of messing around, Mona walked off, while Bruno spent another 10 minutes or so playing with it. It's interesting to note that he didn't interfere with Mona at all. Ultimately he lost interest too, and I gave it to Larissa, who carried it off and presumably ate it.
So, was it a mouse? I had looked at the tail and thought a young rat. And on the following day Pene Kirk agreed with me.
| Saturday, 7 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 7 September 2024 |
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Another ALDI spice mix
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
We have a lot of carrots that have to be eaten quickly. What do I do with them? A fantasy stir-fry, in the process trying this spice mix that is also approaching its use-by date:
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The result:
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Edible, not much more. The paste is sticky, and the 80 g I used were barely enough. Next time I'll use a whole sachet (120 g).
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Spring on its way
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Gradually the weather is getting warmer, and more flowers are appearing:
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Jesse Walsh came along to tidy out the “trough” round the terrace, and Yvonne was able to find at short notice somebody known only as “Eugene” to come and collect the leftovers:
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Eugene tells me that he had a friend in Geelong called Phil Lehey. That would be interesting, but I suspect that he had misunderstood the spelling of the surname.
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Understanding the disk copy issues
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So why is the copy of my /Photos disk so much bigger?
=== grog@quartet (/dev/pts/2) ~ 31 -> df -i /Photos /newphotos/
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
eureka:/Photos 7,629,565 6,806,976 746,292 90% 1,764,291 1,479,355 54% /Photos
/dev/ada1p1 15,257,008 7,237,056 7,867,381 48% 1,877,931 4,608,211 29% /newphotos
It strongly suggests symlinks changed to separate files. Off for a look, and discovered—not surprisingly—the main discrepancy in /newphotos/grog:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) /Photos 83 -> du -s /Photos/grog
6603970 /Photos/grog=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /newphotos 97 -> du -s /newphotos/grog
7011999 /newphotos/grog
Those are sizes in megabytes! 408 GB size difference. OK, go down a level. The big difference was:
eureka: 93834 www
quartet: 383635 www
Really?
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) ~ 85 -> du -s /Photos/grog/www
383632 /Photos/grog/www=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) ~ 99 -> du -s /newphotos/grog/www
383635 /newphotos/grog/www
Yes, this must be a link issue.
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) ~ 86 -> find /Photos/grog/www -type l | wc -l
1099=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) ~ 100 -> find /newphotos/grog/www -type l | wc -l
1099
Oh. Exactly the same number of symlinks. In fact, both disks have exactly 4005 symlinks. Not the issue.
“Hard” links? You'd see that from the link count. But the directories that I looked at all had exactly the same content and link counts. Is it possible that two issues are ganging up on me? The “big” files in the www directories are supposed to be linked to the corresponding file in two levels above in the hierarchy. For example:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) ~ 89 -> ls -l /Photos/grog/20240903/Hot-water-system-1.jpeg /Photos/grog/www/20240903/big/Hot-water-system-1.jpeg
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 3,270,177 3 Sep 15:37 /Photos/grog/20240903/Hot-water-system-1.jpeg
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 3,270,177 3 Sep 15:37 /Photos/grog/www/20240903/big/Hot-water-system-1.jpeg
But they're not! I need to see whether I have broken something, and whether older images are correctly linked. In that case there's more to be repaired.
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Dinner with Pene Kirk
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Topic: general, food and drink | Link here |
It's been some time since we have had guests for dinner. Ten years ago Chris Bahlo was a regular visitor, but she has now found a life, and we no longer see her very often. But today we were able to host Pene Kirk, and Yvonne went to some trouble: bisque de fruits de mer, bef Strogranoff and poires gourmandes:
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Somehow we spent more time talking about animals and health than I expected. Pene was one of the people who recommended cataract surgery when I was thinking about it, and she confirmed my experience that the cataract diminishes colour recognition and makes everything look a bit yellowish. And looking at yesterday's “mouse”, she agreed that it looked more like a juvenile rat. My assumption was based on the tail, which was hairless, but Pene based her assessment on the shape of the head.
| Sunday, 8 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 8 September 2024 |
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Unwise actions
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Received in the mail today:
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Yes, I'm still with “Wise”, despite my annoyance last month. My searches show that they're the best of a bad lot. But now they're asking me to migrate my secure desktop environment to my mobile phone. Or are they? This is just an email, asking me to log in. Most emails of that nature are scams. What do they say on their web site?
How do I access the web site? Once again these HORRIBLE CAPTCHAs, asking me to identify fire hydrants, whatever they may be. A quick Google search shows:
But there was nothing like that on the CAPTCHA. OK, “Wise” are a British company. What do British fire hydrants look like? Pretty much the same:
But it seems that the CAPTCHA wants me to identify US fire hydrants! How can they expect me to know what they look like? That reminds me of other things they want to know, like identifying “crosswalks”, whatever they may do. My guess is that AI can do better than I can.
Finally fought my way in and checked on the app. NOTHING AT ALL! No warnings, no mention of an app. What kind of security is that? About the only thing that looks kosher is that the app is available in the Google app store. Signed in and got mail from Wise confirming it, another marginal proof that it's legitimate. And it allows me to sign in with a thumbprint.
Am I really overly critical? There are so many warning bells, and even the idea of using a mobile phone for anything related to security scares me. The app description includes:
Safety starts with understanding how developers collect and share your data. Data privacy and security practices may vary based on your use, region, and age. The developer provided this information and may update it over time.
Well, for me safety starts with understanding how malicious people can abuse the system. On the whole I trust the developers. Since they asked me to review it, I gave it 2 stars with the comment:
This app scares me. "Wise" send me email asking me to install it by logging in from the email message. Their web site doesn't mention it. This has all the hallmarks of an exploit. Hopefully I'm wrong.
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Sushi?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Jane Ashhurst is a fan of Japanese food, something that I still barely understand. We had planned to make sushi, something I have never made before, but I decided that it might be a good idea to try it first. I have a sushi kit that I bought from ALDI years ago—so long that it has passed its use-by date—and today I tried making some.
The instructions for the pack were short but helpful. 300 g of rice. Cook with (only!) 400 ml water, add vinegar (which proved to be 40 ml) to the mess and spread on the nori. Add filling ingredients.
After preparing the filling, back to look at the video that I located a couple of months ago:
A little late. I had done a number of things differently, including cutting the ingredients finely. But it was of help, and I followed it as best I could.
That wasn't very best:
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Oh. Not quite the way it looked in the video. Try again:
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At first sight that looked better, but only at first sight. As soon as I touched it, it self-destructed:
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OK, the video shows the cook using half sheets of nori. How about whole sheets?
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That looks marginally better, but still nothing like good. After a bit more experimentation, ended up with:
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What went wrong? The biggest issue is wrapping. How should the ends of the nori overlap? Our expert cook didn't have an issue, of course, but I still don't know how to do it right. Yes, leave the ends free of rice, but how do I get them to line up? I need to find a video “how to ruin sushi”.
In passing, it seems that a full width of nori takes about 100 g of rice, much more than I expected. And it was good to have the vinegar measured out in the kit. states to use 20% by volume vinegar to dry rice (which, of course, is already cooked). But the instructions seem to be right: 40 g vinegar to 300 g dry rice, or 13⅓%.
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Miso soup
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
What goes with sushi? Miso soup, it seems. And I have plenty of shiro miso. Just find a recipe. It seems that a typical recipe is with doufu and spring onions. But I need dashi. I can make that in various ways. One is with seaweed.
Last month Jane Ashhurst brought some ingredients with her, including this:
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What is it? There was nothing written on the bag she put it in. My guess is that it's some kind of kelp, but what? I'll have to ask.
But then there was this:
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Jane can't have bought that. About the only thing that I could read, apart from the pretty useless “Nutrition Facts”, was that it expired nearly 10 years ago. And I have a number of bags of it. What is it? With some searching I found the word wakame hidden on the side. And the rest? Google Translate to the rescue:
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Use in miso soup! 1 g for who knows how much soup? That seemed a little, so I put in 2 g:
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I don't think I've ever seen anything swell up that much. In the end I threw half of it out again.
Next, how much miso? One recipe called for 2 tablespoons in 4 cups, whatever that may mean. It seems that there are 16 US tablespoons to a US cup, so that's 1/32 of the volume. While searching, came up with another ratio of miso to water, ¼ teaspoon to 1 cup. If I have that right, it's a ratio of 1:192, almost nothing. To be generous, I took a 1:20 ratio: 500 g water, 25 g miso, 30 g spring onion and 65 g (the size of the block) of doufu.
The result? Boring. Certainly not too much miso. After some investigation, it seems that the wakame is not a substitute for dashi, as this photo from the Wikipedia page shows
So for next time we need to find some good dashi.
| Monday, 9 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 9 September 2024 |
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NBN advice for morons
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The National Broadband Network sends information emails from time to time, maybe monthly. I've only just found out about them and signed up. I don't know why I bothered.
Today I got a newsletter offering Avoid the ‘Wi-Fi gap’ and get the internet you need (capitalization original). It also offers a TL:DR (punctuation also original), which can be summarized: buy new equipment and a faster Internet link. No mention of troubleshooting of any kind. Thank you, NBN, for reinforcing my negative impressions.
To be fair, though, there was more information about the upcoming outages: this page explains that they're upgrading the system to new “5G mm Wave technology” (yet again original typography). What's that? I hadn't heard of it, and there's little to be found on the web so far. It's spelt “mmWave” and refers to frequencies of, well, millimetre wavelengths, specifically above 24 GHz. OK, well and good. The bandwidths are more interesting.
And there's more about that here:
nbn Fixed Wireless Home Fast offers peak wholesale download speeds between 200-250 and upload speeds between 8-20 Mbps.
nbn Fixed Wireless Superfast offers peak wholesale download speeds of 400Mbps and upload speeds between 10-40 Mbps.
Plus, we’ve boosted speeds on our most popular plan; Fixed Wireless Plus. Wholesale speed capability has now been lifted from up to 75/10Mbps to up to 100/20Mbps.
That does sound interesting. What does Aussie Broadband have to say about that? Oh, another of these stupid 2FA things, and after accepting it, the page hangs. Aussie, can you do anything right any more?
And the outages? The first page contains information about the upcoming outages, which I calculated as being 37 hours
During these upgrade works, you may experience reductions in service and periodic outages as we roll out the upgrades in your area over several weeks. In most cases, the outages may range from 3-4 minutes. However, for others, some periodic outages may occur throughout the day and last for up to 12 hours. While the upgrade works are being completed in your area, you may experience more than one outage. We’ll notify your provider of any outages ahead of time, so they can keep you informed. We understand how frustrating outages can be, which is why we’re working hard to keep these to a minimum and reduce the occurrence of outages wherever we can.
How we’re minimising the impact of potential outages:
“In most cases, the outages may range from 3-4 minutes.” Admittedly, it can be longer. And I particularly appreciate the fact that they're preparing in advance.
And of course there's the other shoe: if I get connected to 5G mmWave, they'll have to
change the antenna ODU. More downtime.
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Academia surpasses itself
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
For years I've been getting email from Academia with questions like “Greg Lehey ✏️ Did you write "Treasurer"?”. To answer I first need to pay them money! I can do without that.
But today I got the ultimate question:
131 ND 08-09-2024 To academia@lem ( 903) Mentioned by Greg Le $1, 30 day trial. “G. Lehey” mentioned by “Greg Lehey”
| Tuesday, 10 September 2024 | Dereel | |
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Chili sauce revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
A few months back I found a chili sauce mix that I liked, at least for huevos rancheros. But I've finished the batch, time for a new batch.
Why so much sesame oil? Why sesame oil at all? Despite the origins, this isn't intended for Korean food. So I left it out, and while I was at it, I added even more garlic.
And the result? Tasted at least as good, but it was so watery. Why? My guess is that the gochujang that I used last time wasn't the freshest, and it had dried out.
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Understanding the photo size discrepancy
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been a few days since I investigated the cause of my excess data usage on the new /Photos disk. I had suspected issues with links between my photos processing directory and the “big” versions in the web hierarchy. Both images are the same, so they should be links, not copies. But preliminary investigations showed that they were copies on the original as well.
That was for photos taken on 3 September 2024. Was it always that way? Off looking. No!
=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /Photos/grog 119 -> l -i $DATE/*jpeg www/$DATE/big
1480997 -rwxr--r-- 2 grog lemis 3,544,601 1 Jan 2015 20150101/Ceiling.jpeg
www/20150101/big:
1480997 -rwxr--r-- 2 grog lemis 3,544,601 1 Jan 2015 Ceiling.jpeg
That's the same file, as intended. Why did it stop? It seems that things changed in mid-April this year. But why? My scripts haven't changed in a couple of years.
More investigation shows, in /Photos/Tools/docopy:
if [ `hostname -s` = "eureka" ]; then
CP=ln
else
CP="cp -p"
fi
That makes sense, up to a point. At the the time, 4 years ago, I moved Yvonne's photos to a disk on her machine, lagoon. But the web files still needed to be on eureka.
Now, however, I'm doing my processing on hydra, but accessing eureka:/Photos via NFS. And I'm still copying! Yes, I could check for hydra too, but it makes more sense to check whether the source and destination are on the same file system.
How do you do that? It seems that there should be a simple way, but I didn't find it. Instead I used the output of df(1):
SRCDISK=`df .`
DSTDISK=`df ${WEBDIR}`
if [ "$SRCDISK" = "$DSTDISK" ]; then
# Yes: link
CP=ln
else
# No: copy
CP="cp -p"
fi
And that works. A simple make web should do the trick:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/23) /Photos/grog/20240831 189 -> du -sc . ../www/20240831/
21203 .
149 ../www/20240831/
21352 total=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/23) /Photos/grog/20240831 190 -> df -i .
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
eureka:/Photos 7,629,565 6,828,390 724,879 90% 1,765,566 1,478,080 54% /Photos=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/23) /Photos/grog/20240831 191 -> make web/
...=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/23) /Photos/grog/20240831 192 -> df -i .
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
eureka:/Photos 7,629,565 6,828,244 725,024 90% 1,765,588 1,478,058 54% /Photos=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/23) /Photos/grog/20240831 193 -> du -sc . ../www/20240831/
21203 .
3 ../www/20240831/
21206 total
The 3 MB left in the www directory were the small and tiny images.
Now to fix up /Photos:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/18) /Photos/grog/www 4 -> for i in 20240[4-9]*; do (cd ../$i && make web); done
The result, before and after:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/24) ~ 8 -> df -i /Photos/
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
eureka:/Photos 7,629,565 6,828,244 725,024 90% 1,765,554 1,478,092 54% /Photos
...=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/24) ~ 12 -> df -i /Photos/
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
eureka:/Photos 7,629,565 6,820,747 732,522 90% 1,764,078 1,479,568 54% /Photos
It doesn't look like much, but it's still a saving of 7.5 GB.
So that explains the first issue. The second is the fact that apparently all the directories that I have looked at on hydra don't have linked files. Is that an issue with Samba (unlikely) or because I started with tar and completed with Samba? The way either works would be to copy the date files separately from the www hierarchy. To be investigated.
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Aussie web site hangs
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Why can't I access the tariff information on the Aussie Broadband web site? Started writing an email and looked on the web site for information. Pop! Up came a “chat” window. OK, ask Dominic. No, site working fine. Will he report that it isn't for me? No, not worth the trouble.
With a bit of insistence, along with my possibly visible negative response to the “are you happy with this response?” popup, he went off and investigated, something that took a total of round an hour, including a restart because of a timeout (7 minutes, he says) on his part. I ticked “send me the transcript” box for both chats, but I never saw one.
The startling answer: it's because of my “plan”, only 25/5 Mb/s. It's no longer in the Aussie offerings, and the web code hangs because of some unexpected issue. Will they fix it? No.
One thing that Dominic did give me was the correct page to find the “plans”, starting at $69 per month—they say. But all it offers is “Fixed wireless plus” (100/20) for $89 per month unlimited. It seems that that's all they currently offer. That's $14 more than I'm currently paying, so I'll pass. Presumably they'll force my hand some time.
| Wednesday, 11 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 11 September 2024 |
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Laksa over the millennia
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Topic: history, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
When I was a lad, I used to enjoy eating Penang laksa on frequent occasions.
Or did I? Looking back at my diary, I find only two mentions, both in (August and November) 1966. Then I ate much more in Sarawak in 1969. But that was probably different, as noted by Sonny Rajah's rejection of it on 26 August 1969. Even then I only ate it 19 times.
So it seems that my love of Penang Laksa is more a fond memory than anything that I really liked at the time. Still, when I found a way to make it myself nearly 8 years ago. And since then I've eaten it on a regular basis, though it's no longer such a favourite, and I've found other things that I prefer for breakfast.
| Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Richmond's Penang laksa isn't really as sour as I like, so I add tamarind to the mixture. That's easy enough—I have tamarind paste that I just mix in—but what's this?
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I've had it for ever, though it's too polite to say how old it is. It was a 375 g pack of “wet tamarind”, and now it only weighs 322 g and isn't wet at all. But it doesn't look as if it has gone bad, so I cut off some slices and tried to mix them with water:
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My guess is that it should have been strained, but I didn't do that. Despite everything, it tasted OK.
|
Towards president Kamala
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Today was the highlight of the US election campaign, the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
I watched a little of it, but clearly I wasn't the only one. And once again, the commentaries didn't match my own observations. But I can spend more time than I have reading the commentaries. The bottom line seems to be that Harris ran Trump into the ground, but that there's no particular reason that it will change the outcome.
But the New York Times advertising department found it a good reason to subscribe.
From nytimes@e.newyorktimes.com Wed Sep 11 14:04:16 AEST 2024
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2024 04:04:13 +0000
Subject: Sale: Save now before the U.S. debate: A$0.50 a week.
That was clearly sent 1½ hours after the end of the debate. Is that a good advertisement for the timeliness of their reporting?
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Understanding shell syntax
|
Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
While investigating my lost space on my new photo disk, entered this:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /Photos/grog 17 -> DATE=20101009 ls -li $DATE/*jpeg www/$DATE/big
ls: /*jpeg: No such file or directory
ls: www//big: No such file or directory
Huh?
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /Photos/grog 18 -> DATE=20101009=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /Photos/grog 19 -> ls -li $DATE/*jpeg www/$DATE/big=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/28) /Photos/grog 14 -> ls -li $DATE/*jpeg www/$DATE/big
863295 -rwxrw-r-- 2 grog lemis 3099465 9 Oct 2010 20101009/dam-dup-panorama.jpeg
...
www/20101009/big:
863295 -rwxrw-r-- 2 grog lemis 3099465 9 Oct 2010 dam-dup-panorama.jpeg
...
Why didn't it work the first time round? I do this sort of thing all the time. Some discussion on IRC, culminating in: yes, you can set environment variables like that, but they only get inserted into the environment of processes started by this command. They don't apply to the command itself.
Somehow that seems counterintuitive.
| Thursday, 12 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 12 September 2024 |
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More breakfast experiments
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I had some broccoli left over. What should I do with it? Build a breakfast around it:
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Nothing special, but for reference:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 67 g | doufu | 1 | ||
| 50 g | beef | 1 | ||
| 15 g | spring onions | 2 | ||
| 2 | shiitake mushrooms | 2 | ||
| 38 g | broccoli | 2 | ||
| 17 g | red capsicum | 2 | ||
| 30 g | light soya sauce | 3 | ||
| 12.5 g | dark soya sauce | 3 | ||
| 30 g | shiro miso | 3 | ||
| 150 g | Shandong ramen noodles | 4 | ||
About the only thing of interest is how to fry the doufu. It sticks to the pan:
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There must be a way of preventing that. Heat in a microwave oven first?
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Disk copy pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Copying my photo disk to the new 16 TB drive still isn't done! My first attempt ended up with far more inode and data use than the old disk. Part of that was because I used the wrong invocation: I omitted the H option, meaning that rsync created new files for each copy of a link. OK, start again with /Photos/grog to see if it works.
But it put the result in /newphotos/grog/grog, and I couldn't find a way to stop it. Next time I'll try something like cd to the source directory and referring to it as . (dot), specifying the destination accordingly. But while I looked at it, it occurred to me that my file system parameters were significantly different from the old /Photos. After removing size parameters, I had:
/Photos: newfs -L Photos -O 2 -U -a 4 -b 32768 -d 32768 -e 4096 -f 4096 -g 3145728 -h 64 -i 2469888 -j -k 1152 -m 1 -o space /dev/ada1p1
/newphotos: newfs -L Photos -O 2 -U -a 64 -b 16384 -d 16384 -e 2048 -f 2048 -g 3145728 -h 64 -i 2752512 -m 1 -o space /dev/ada1p1
OK, what the hell, let's start again from scratch. umount /newphotos, newfs it again with the new parameters, and start again.
umount hung! I couldn't stop it, but it was running and consuming CPU time:
=== grog@quartet (/dev/pts/2) ~ 121 -> date; ps aux | grep umount
Thu 12 Sep 2024 13:33:10 AEST
root 23962 2.4 0.0 12728 1820 0 DL+ 13:19 0:15.09 umount /newphotos
...=== grog@quartet (/dev/pts/2) ~ 122 -> date; ps aux | grep umount
Thu 12 Sep 2024 13:38:15 AEST
root 23962 2.4 0.0 12728 1820 0 DL+ 13:19 0:25.72 umount /newphotos
That's round 2 seconds of CPU time per minute. It was also performing about 200 I/Os per second. It finally finished at 13:48. Extrapolating, that's round 45 seconds of CPU time and 27,000 I/O transfers, at a guess 250 MB. What was it doing?
Finally ran newfs and started the transfer again. But how? tar seems to be the right way to go, but last time it failed in mid-transfer. For no reason that still seems good I decided to write a tar archive on the new disk. And that set off merrily with a transfer rate of up to 111 MB/s, pretty much exactly the bandwidth of the connection, and seldom dropping below 100 MB/s.
OK, how about a compressed tar? That way I might miss the bottleneck of the wire. But no, the transfer rate dropped to round 35 MB/s: the compression process maxed out a CPU. And there's no way I could get a 3-fold compression with my photos. So plain tar it is. 6.8 TB at 100 MB/s would take 19 hours, so no more work today.
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NBN outages: yes, no, maybe?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Email from Aussie Broadband today:
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2024 12:41:14 +1000
From: Aussie Broadband <no-reply@team.aussiebroadband.com.au>
Subject: nbn Unscheduled Outage
NBN has let us know that your service/s may currently be affected by an outage.
That's one of these “impossible” messages. How can I receive it if my link is down? Checked, and of course it was still up. But my phone (connected via my NBN link) agreed:
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Had there been an outage? Checked my NBN stats page. Yes:
Start time End time Duration Badness from to
(seconds)
1726103107 1726103311 204 0.001 # 12 September 2024 11:05:07 12 September 2024 11:08:31
But that was over and done with over 1½ hours before they sent the message.
Oh, sorry about that, try again:
Start time End time Duration Badness from to
(seconds)
1726103107 1726103311 204 0.001 # 12 September 2024 11:05:07 12 September 2024 11:08:31
1726109505 1726109741 236 0.581 # 12 September 2024 12:51:45 12 September 2024 12:55:41
That almost looks as if the second outage happened because of their message. And at 16:12, only 3¼ hours later, they acknowledged that it was over.
Done? No, more work needed:
NBN are doing **emergency network maintenance** between **Fri 13th September 2024 00:00 AEST** and **Fri 13th September 2024 06:00 AEST**, for **180 min**.
And yes, that's Aussie's inimitable markup, apparently my fault according to their “support” people. I suppose the emergency maintenance makes sense, and at least it's in the middle of the night.
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Do-it-yourself mousetrap
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
In the evening Yvonne feeds the animals:
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Those are pellets for the dogs. But today things looked different. What's that thing sticking out of the jug?
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Well, in this photo, taken after the event. it's a piece of insulation. But at the time it was a mouse tail! Where was the mouse? At the other end, of course, and very much alive. It escaped behind the fridge before any animal could catch it, so we'll have the fun of catching it later.
Looking in the food tun, I found two more! It seems that they had chewed a hole in the lid of the tun, fallen in and couldn't get out again. I'm reminded of the story of the Irishman falling into a vat of beer.
OK, Mona showed a lot of interest last week. Brought her to the tun, where the mice were happily running around. Not interested. Bruno was marginally more interested, but not enough. Took the tun outside and let the dogs take a look. Yes, they were interested and chased each of the mice as I let them out. And as far as I can see, they killed them within seconds, but they didn't really know what to do then. I only found one, but I don't think they ate the other one. We still have an uphill battle.
| Friday, 13 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 13 September 2024 |
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NBN outage?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So how long did the announced overnight NBN outage last? It didn't. It seems that it didn't happen, and both Aussie Broadband and NBN web sites deny all knowledge of it.
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Disk copy, day 9
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Into the office this morning thinking that I hadn't been overly clever by copying an archive to quartet. It had completed, after only about 24 hours, but now I had to extract it, and that could take as long again.
But it didn't. It was over in about 10 seconds: truncated archive. Now it was no longer 6.8 TB in size, only 2048 bytes! How did that happen?
Oh. In another xterm I had accidentally entered:
=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /newphotos 274 -> tar cvf Photos.tar /Photosiostat 1
tar: /Photosiostat: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: 1: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
Damn. Start again. Another day to go.
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Ethernet issues?
|
Topic: technology | Link here |
Seen in my daily report:
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: Watchdog timeout Queue[0]-- resetting
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: Interface is RUNNING and ACTIVE
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: TX Queue 0 ------
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: hw tdh = 785, hw tdt = 903
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: Tx Queue Status = -2147483648
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: TX descriptors avail = 903
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: Tx Descriptors avail failure = 5
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: RX Queue 0 ------
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: hw rdh = 330, hw rdt = 329
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: RX discarded packets = 0
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: RX Next to Check = 330
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: RX Next to Refresh = 329
Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: link state changed to DOWN
Sep 13 01:32:51 eureka kernel: em0: link state changed to UP
What's that? Is it serious? It repeated later in the morning.
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Leica: back to the past
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Topic: photography, history, opinion | Link here |
One of the most significant things about the evolution of cameras is the viewfinder. You want to be able to see what you are going to take, and ensure that it is in focus. Over the years, technology improved things. I've been through this in some detail a few years ago. TL;DR:
All of these were progress. What's next? I think we're done. More recent mirrorless cameras allow magnifying the viewfinder image for more exact focus, but that's about it.
So what do we do now? If you're Leica, start all over again. I've just discovered that they have a range of cameras, most recently the M11, which can be supplied without all mod cons, only the same kind of rangefinder that they introduced 92 years ago! And that not only at Leica's normal eye-watering prices (US $9,395, $400 more than the standard model, despite it having fewer components). To quote the article,
The company says the lack of a display will help users focus on "the elementary aspects of pictorial design such as composition, aperture, shutter speed and ISO.”
I'm amazed. Of course, they should go the whole hog and offer only a specific sensor sensitivity (ISO).
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No more wine in Dereel?
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
While walking the dogs, saw this at the Nyary's place:
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They're removing all the vines! Why?
Also saw this mystery flower again, the one that we planted in the south garden and then died. Or at least I think it's the same flower. Here two different bushes in different state of bloom:
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I'll keep an eye on them over the next few days.
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A new gate
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Fiona Drayton brought us a new front gate a couple of days ago, and this evening Rod DeGroot and mate showed up to install it. Done!
Yvonne is happy, but somehow it doesn't quite seem to fit:
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It also closes too “closed”, in other words further than the post. But it's minor, and Rod put in a bar to limit the travel, so now it closes cleanly.
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Hopefully it'll stay that way.
| Saturday, 14 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 14 September 2024 |
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Another power failure
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Topic: general | Link here |
Another grid power failure this morning at 4:04, which for some reason causes something to beep. Damn! How long is it going to last? Turned off the air conditioner and tried to get back to sleep. Another beep a little later.
The result? Only one outage, lasting 90 seconds.
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Disk copy, day 10
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Into my office in the morning to find that quartet had rebooted as a result of the grid power outage. Had it finished the copy? No. Mounted /newphotos (not in /etc/fstab) and discovered, to my horror:
=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 8 -> df -i /newphotos
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/ada1p1 15,257,008 903 15,103,534 0% 3 6,486,139 0% /newphotos
Only 3 inodes and 903 MB in use. What's that?
=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 10 -> l /newphotos|less
total 1279
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 82 3 Apr 2012 ._.TemporaryItems
drwxrwx--- 2 root operator 512 14 Jan 2016 .snap
-r-------- 1 root wheel 947,322,880 12 Sep 13:59 .sujournal
-rwxr--r-- 1 root wheel 754,482 28 Apr 2022 #foo#
drwxrwxr-x 2 grog wheel 512 13 Sep 12:07 0-grog
drwxr-xr-x 2 grog wheel 1,536 13 Sep 12:04 1-Skylum
drwxrwxrwx 2 grog wheel 1,024 13 Sep 12:14 2-grog
Well, the 903 MB are clearly the journal. But what about those other files? They don't match the 3 inodes. Why did the system allow me to mount a dirty file system? OK,
=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 11 -> fsck -y /dev/ada1p1
** /dev/ada1p1
** SU+J Recovering /dev/ada1p1
USE JOURNAL? yes
** Reading 947322880 byte journal from inode 4.
RECOVER? yes
** Building recovery table.
** Resolving unreferenced inode list.
** Processing journal entries.
***** FILE SYSTEM IS CLEAN *****=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 12 -> mount /dev/ada1p1 /newphotos/=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 13 -> df -i /newphotos
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/ada1p1 15,257,008 5,271,466 9,832,971 35% 889,919 5,596,223 14% /newphotos
That looks better. Continued the copy, but after a while quartet paniced! I didn't find out until it had rebooted, but /var/crash/core.txt.5 shows:
panic: ffs_blkfree_cg: freeing free block
That sounds like file system corruption. Journalling not good enough? Run a full fsck, which found many problems. After 45 minutes and 28.827 lines, it asked me if I really wanted to continue. Yes, why not. Finally, after nearly 90 minutes and 70,769 lines of output (roughly 1,250 pages in print), I got what I didn't want to see:
884600 files, 1342191538 used, 2563602610 free (613818 frags, 320373599 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation)
***** FILE SYSTEM MARKED DIRTY *****
***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
***** PLEASE RERUN FSCK *****
Clearly there's no recovery for this. In particular, only 884,600 files remained. The rest must have been “recovered”. And I want perfection for a backup disk. So, start all over again with another newfs.
While it was running, it occurred to me that I have seen this before. I should have disabled soft updates. But by then it was too late. Let's see what happens by tomorrow.
| Sunday, 15 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 15 September 2024 |
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Disk copy, day 11
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Into the office today to find:
x ./grog/20110827/Components/dam-panorama-CPL-6-1EV.jpeg
x ./grog/20110827/Components/dam-panorama-CPL-6.jpegtar: (null)
: Truncated tar archive: Unknown error: -1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
Another NFS issue! OK, that's enough. Try the rest with rsync, this time with the H option. And how about that, after hardly more than 5 hours:
grog/www/test/
grog/www/test/big/
grog/www/Photos/small/white-background.gif => grog/www/Photos/big/white-background.gif
sent 1,193,207,971,130 bytes received 18,071,175 bytes 63,800,349.81 bytes/sec
total size is 7,886,580,015,513 speedup is 6.61
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1359) [sender=3.3.0]
18702.08 real 433.88 user 1307.03 sys
What's that error? OK, try again:
=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/1) /Photos 20 -> Log rsync -Hav . /newphotos
===== Sun 15 Sep 2024 15:05:02 AEST on quartet.lemis.com: rsync -Hav . /newphotos
sending incremental file list
./
.sujournal
Log.log.quartet
Log.log.quartet.0
rsync: [receiver] rename "/newphotos/.sujournal.3wUiHl" -> ".sujournal": Operation not permitted (1)
Log.log.quartet.1
Log.log.quartet.2
Log.log.quartet.3
Log.log.quartet.4
Log.log.quartet.5
Log.log.quartet.6
sent 174,640,554 bytes received 88,974 bytes 146,893.26 bytes/sec
total size is 7,886,623,224,434 speedup is 45,136.18
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1359) [sender=3.3.0]
1188.83 real 4.47 user 28.22 sys
=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /newphotos/grog 65 -> date; df -i /Photos/ /newphotos/
Sun 15 Sep 2024 15:28:12 AEST
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
eureka:/Photos 7,629,565 6,841,077 712,191 91% 1,764,773 1,478,873 54% /Photos
/dev/ada1p1 15,257,008 6,845,610 8,258,827 45% 1,764,814 4,721,328 27% /newphotos
That looks better. And yes, the error was the attempt to copy .sujournal, the soft updates journal file. But we still have more space in /newphotos than in /Photos. Not surprising, given that I didn't delete files that weren't on /Photos. OK, a third time:
=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/1) /Photos 21 -> Log rsync -Hav --exclude=.sujournal --delete-after . /newphotos
===== Sun 15 Sep 2024 15:28:46 AEST on quartet.lemis.com: rsync -Hav --exclude=.sujournal --delete-after . /newphotos
building file list ... done
Log.log.quartet
deleting 0-grog/Wildflower-2.jpeg
deleting 0-grog/Wildflower-1.jpeg
...
deleting 6-HDR/PhotomatixResults01/e-from-house-0+0EV_+1EV_-1EV.tif
deleting grog/20240914/multishot~
deleting grog/20240914/magic-pto-now
sent 36,804,908 bytes received 34 bytes 52,540.96 bytes/sec
total size is 7,886,589,671,198 speedup is 214,280.73=== root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /var/tmp 79 -> date; df -i /Photos/ /newphotos/
Sun 15 Sep 2024 15:41:19 AEST
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
eureka:/Photos 7,629,565 6,841,077 712,191 91% 1,764,773 1,478,873 54% /Photos
/dev/ada1p1 15,257,008 6,841,899 8,262,538 45% 1,764,815 4,721,327 27% /newphotos
That looks better. But for some reason the iused field hasn't changed. I suspect that there's an issue with soft updates there. Still, finally I have a valid copy and an incantation to perform the sync. Only 11 days!
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Quality kitchen utensils
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Discovered this in a kitchen cabinet today:
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Where did it come from? I didn't buy it, and Yvonne denies all knowledge. What it is is clearer: a splatter guard for a frying pan. But what's that plastic foil? It's the remains of the packaging, thoughtfully applied before the handle was attached. To remove it, you need a screwdriver to remove the handle:
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And then I saw this:
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If there's one thing that needs a machine wash, it's this kind of device that catches fat in the fabric. What do the instructions on the package say? “Wash before use”. Nothing else at all. I'm amazed. My guess is that the advice is misplaced. I'll put it in the dishwasher, and if it falls apart, I'll throw it out
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½ US American? 1139 Israelis? 41,821 Palestinians?
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Topic: politics, general, opinion | Link here |
Ayşenur Eygi was buried today. The world is outraged: an innocent civilian was shot dead by Israeli snipers.
And so the world should be. But she was only one person. What about the 1,139 people, mainly Israelis, killed on 3 October 2023? That's several orders of magnitude worse, and the world rightly condemns Hamas for perpetrating it. But it almost seems that the death of Ayşenur Eygi was worse, a US citizen killed by Israeli snipers. Well, half: she was also Turkish.
But then there are the currently 41,821 Palestinians that the Israelis have killed since 7 October 2023. The number is rising daily. If the newspapers reported on each of them to the extent that they have reported on Ayşenur Eygi, it would take them centuries to complete.
Why this discrepancy? One death is enough. 1,140 are a tragedy. But 42,000! How can any country support such carnage, let alone one claiming to abide by human rights? And that's before you look at the destruction that was once Gaza. This page summarizes the horrors perpetrated by Israel. Currently it states that in Gaza every hour 42 bombs are dropped, 12 buildings are destroyed, 15 people (6 of them children) are killed and another 35 people are injured.
How can a supposedly law-abiding government commit such atrocities? How can the USA support it? By comparison, the Russian aggression in Ukraine is almost civilized. The US government is losing international credibility with the support of this carnage. If the death of Ayşenur Eygi can draw people to look at the atrocities, she won't have died in vain.
| Monday, 16 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 16 September 2024 |
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Back to the old slog
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So after only 11 days I have finally copied my disk. Time to shut down quartet and revert to the other system configuration issues I have.
One relatively minor issue is that the function of the Prev and Next keys (marked PageUp and PageDown) on xterm has changed: it should, as the inscriptions suggest, page up and down, but now it pages through the shell history.
Why? It must have something to do with the X resources. I've been playing with them recently, adding additional key bindings. Initially they were:
*VT100.Translations: #override \
<Key>Next: scroll-forw(1,page) \n\
<Key>Prior: scroll-back(1,page)
But in the course of my configuration attempts, I changed them to:
xterm*VT100.Translations: #override \
<Key>Next: scroll-forw(1,page) \n\
<Key>Prior: scroll-back(1,page) \n\
Shift <Key>Insert: insert-selection(SELECT) \n\
Ctrl Shift <Key>V: insert-selection(SELECT) \n\
Ctrl Shift <Key>C: copy-selection(SELECT)
That looks straightforward enough to me. Adding xterm to the resource shouldn't make any difference. Tried reverting. No difference.
OK, RTFM time. And once again I couldn't find anything that helps. What does #override mean? I haven't found any reference to it, though xrdb has an -override option:
-override
This option indicates that the input should be added to,
instead of replacing, the current contents of the specified
properties. New entries override previous entries.
But that doesn't seem to work here. Much searching, no results.
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Oh the springtime it brings on the deadlambs
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
It's been quite cool in the few weeks since the beginning of spring, a minimum temperature of 1.8°. And the Bureau of Meteorology has been warning of dead lambs.
And indeed, that seems to be the case:
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Those white spots in the foreground are dead lambs. There were more a couple of days ago, so it seems that they're dying daily. I wouldn't have expected that, especially since the weather wasn't that cold.
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Banking: the pain
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Last Wednesday Yvonne had problems with the Bank of Melbourne: her debit card expired in February, and she had to go to the branch in Ballarat to get money. It took her nearly an hour, and the person who dealt with it—clearly an immigrant—spoke English so badly that she could barely understand him. And this at the “we speak your language” Bank of Melbourne!
So why did she not get a new card? After over 30 frustrating minutes on the phone, we established:
Why is this all so complicated? Yes, establishing identity is good. But at the very least Yvonne didn't receive her replacement card, and they cancelled it without warning. There's no excuse for that. By contrast, my last similar interaction with ANZ went more smoothly, though I had my issues there too.
Change bank? Yes, it sounds like a good idea, but only if I can be sure that the new one is better. After my experience with Bankwest 3 years ago, I'm particularly wary.
| Tuesday, 17 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 17 September 2024 |
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Sau Tao: too much trouble
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I have a surprising number of different kinds of noodles, mainly of Chinese origin. Time to get rid of some of the older ones. Today I had mi udang for breakfast, requiring noodles like these:
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What's the difference? Very little in taste. They're intended as single servings: boil in water for about 2 minutes and they're done. But the first (Sau Tao) only weigh 45 g per portion, giving about 100 g of cooked noodles—not enough. They're also more difficult to separate than the other one (“Chef's world”), which give a better 150 g of finished noodle.
So: I had 5 baskets of Sau Tao, in this case only 207 g. Cook them for 472 g of finished noodles. That's three portions and the last of the Sau Tao.
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X breakthrough
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Why don't my changes to .Xdefaults make any difference? On a whim, started a new xterm. It works! So the whole issue was that xterm doesn't pay any attention to the .Xdefaults after it has been started. That makes sense, but it took me a while to get to it.
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First lawn mowing of spring
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Paul Donaghy along today to mow the lawn, the first time this season. For once nothing seems to have gone wrong, though he thinks that the drive belt for the lawn mower is slipping.
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Back to the makefs bug
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been nearly a year since I started investigating a bug in makefs(8), or at least in the FreeBSD version. It comes from NetBSD, where it works.
High time to get back to it. But it seems that kimchi, my NetBSD box, no longer has a debug version of makefs, and to build it I need to build a kernel. And for some reason, the build fails.
Dammit, any old (well, newer) version of NetBSD will do. But first I have to download things. And that took the rest of the day.
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Curry tree flowering?
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Our Curry tree, now 14 years old, was not happy about a lapse in watering a few weeks back, combined with the annual attack of mites:
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But new growth is coming, and it seems that it might even flower:
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It has only done that once before, and I had attributed that to the lack of mites:
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But that was only 8 months ago, and maybe it is just mature enough.
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Bloody flash!
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Taking photos of the curry tree wasn't easy. Clearly I needed flash, so I chose the mecablitz 15 MS-1, which also needs a trigger flash. This was on the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, so the obvious choice was the toy FL-LM3 flash that came with the camera. But I couldn't get it to fire! It seems that it has died after being used about once a year since I bought it 7 years ago!
Not surprisingly, the photos were ridiculously underexposed:
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More surprisingly, my photo processing software almost recovered it. This is the same photo after processing:
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But even after replacing it with the mecablitz 58 AF-2, the results were ridiculously underexposed. Once again, as I have been doing for 60 years, I wonder what use on-camera flash is.
So what do I do now? More and more I appreciate the studio flash units that I have spread around the house. In this case, though, I think focus stacking with natural light will do the trick. Mañana.
| Wednesday, 18 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 18 September 2024 |
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Exploit?
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Into the office this morning to see lots of messages streaming off the log screen. The first that hit me were these:
Sep 18 08:27:20 eureka Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from tiwi: postfix/smtpd[39164]: connect from localhost[127.0.0.1]
Sep 18 08:27:20 eureka Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from tiwi: postfix/smtpd[39164]: NOQUEUE: reject: MAIL from localhost[127.0.0.1]: 452 4.3.4 Message size exceeds fixed limit; from=<> proto=ESMTP helo=<tiwi.lemis.com>
Sep 18 07:45:54 eureka Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: postfix/local[11450]: C04D126359D: to=<grog@lemis.com>, relay=local, delay=0.2, delays=0.19/0/0/0.01, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered to command: exec /usr/local/bin/procmail -t 2>>/home/grog/Mail/procmailerr || exit 75)
Sep 18 09:05:40 eureka Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: postfix/cleanup[25410]: EB30626359D: message-id=<172661433578.1482.3761641752870526039@worldpartners24.com>
Sep 18 09:05:40 eureka Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: postfix/smtpd[25400]: disconnect from www.lemis.com[45.32.70.18] ehlo=1 mail=1 rcpt=1 data=1 quit=1 commands=5
Sep 18 08:55:25 eureka Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: postfix/local[18921]: 9124426359D: to=<grog@lemis.com>, relay=local, delay=1.4, delays=1.4/0/0/0.01, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered to command: exec /usr/local/bin/procmail -t 2>>/home/grog/Mail/procmailerr || exit 75)
“Message size exceeds fixed limit”. From tiwi? What's going on there. Shut down eureka's mail system while I'm investigating.
But then there were other messages:
Sep 18 09:19:11 192.109.197.137 Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: kernel: Limiting icmp unreach response from 203 to 200 packets/sec
Sep 18 09:15:06 192.109.197.137 Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: kernel: Limiting icmp unreach response from 215 to 200 packets/sec
...
Sep 18 09:12:46 192.109.197.137 Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.1
What's this nonsense? named was locked at 100% CPU, so I stopped that too. And still they kept coming, so I stopped syslogd. Gradually I was able to investigate things, which included messages like:
Sep 18 06:56:32 eureka Forwarded from homephone: HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]CallRecord::writeCDRFile, No space! current file size =51158bytes, need extra 91 bytes.
Sep 18 07:54:58 eureka Forwarded from homephone: HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]CallRecord::writeCDRFile, No space! current file size =51158bytes, need extra 92 bytes.
Sep 18 07:40:08 eureka Forwarded from homephone: HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]CallRecord::writeCDRFile, No space! current file size =51158bytes, need extra 91 byte
They're from the Grandstream HT802 VoIP ATA. And I had turned off all logging! Where do they come from? Why are they out of chronological order? About the only thing that isn't a surprise is the content of the message: that's indicative of the terminally buggy firmware of the HT802, as I have already discovered.
So what is it? The other messages don't make much sense either. Just these “Forwarded from” prefixes. syslog loop? No, it was only ever the same IP address, 192.109.197.137, which is eureka. I gradually restarted everything, and things worked normally. No idea when it started: the flood of messages had overwritten all the older copies of /var/log/messages and /var/log/maillog.
I'm baffled. I should investigate the Forwarded from prefix. syslogd sources?
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US-backed Israeli terrorism?
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
News of the day: a large number of pagers used by Hezbollah, a Lebanese political party, exploded at 15:30 local time, killing round 10 people and injuring thousands.
How did that happen? People are still trying to put the pieces together, not only of the hundreds who lost hands or eyes. But it seems accepted (not a good word) that Israel is behind it.
That's terrorism! From the Wikipedia page:
The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants (mostly civilians and neutral military personnel). Different definitions of terrorism emphasize its randomness, its aim to instill fear, and its broader impact beyond its immediate victims.
I've been disgusted by Israel's actions for at least a year now. Somehow there's no room left for an increase in disgust. But when will people do something about the US-backed Israeli terrorists?
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More NetBSD pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My NetBSD sources are in place, so I followed the build instructions. Oh. For some reason, they're for cross-builds. And the old make build seems no longer to be the way to go. OK, move on to the next chapter, compiling the kernel. And it failed! A typical situation is:
kimchi# config GENERIC
Build directory is ../compile/GENERIC
Don't forget to run "make depend"
kimchi# make depend
make: don't know how to make depend. Stop
Clearly it wants that done in a different directory, but which? /usr/src?
kimchi# make depend
... much output
# create lib/pcap-common.d
CC=/tooldir.NetBSD-10.0-amd64/bin/x86_64--netbsd-gcc /tooldir.NetBSD-10.0-amd64/bin/nbmkdep -f pcap-common.d.tmp -- -std=gnu99 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wpointer-arith -Wno-sign-compare -Wsystem-headers -Wno-traditional -Wa,--fatal-warnings -Wreturn-type -Wswitch -Wshadow -Wcast-qual -Wwrite-strings -Wextra -Wno-unused-parameter -Wno-sign-compare -Wsign-compare -Wformat=2 -Wno-format-zero-length -Werror -DLBL_ALIGN --sysroot=/ -DPCAP_DONT_INCLUDE_PCAP_BPF_H -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DENABLE_REMOTE -DPCAP_SUPPORT_RPCAP -I/usr/src/external/bsd/libpcap/lib -I/usr/src/external/bsd/libpcap/lib/../include -I/usr/src/external/bsd/libpcap/lib -I/usr/src/external/bsd/libpcap/lib/../dist -DYYBISON -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DINET6 /usr/src/external/bsd/libpcap/lib/../dist/pcap-common.c && mv -f pcap-common.d.tmp pcap-common.d
/usr/src/external/bsd/libpcap/lib/../dist/pcap-common.c:1131:2: error: #error The LINKTYPE_ matching range does not match the DLT_ matching range
1131 | #error The LINKTYPE_ matching range does not match the DLT_ matching range
| ^~~~~
nbmkdep: compile failed.
*** Error code 1
Never mind, I didn't want to build a kernel. How about the next chapter, Updating an existing system from sources?
kimchi# ./build.sh -O ../obj -T ../tools -U distribution
...much output
# install /usr/src/../tools/include/compat/nbtool_config.h
/usr/src/../obj/tools/binstall/xinstall -c -r nbtool_config.h /usr/src/../tools/include/compat/nbtool_config.h
cd: can't cd to include
*** Failed target: includes
*** Failed command: (cd include && find . -name '*.h' -print | while read f ; do /usr/src/../obj/tools/binstall/xinstall -c -r $f /usr/src/../tools/include/compat/$f ; done)
*** Error code 2
This is ridiculous. I've never had problems building NetBSD before. Yes, I can try to debug the thing, but this is a standard install following the instructions. What has gone wrong?
I have another image, probably the one I used last year. If that's the case, I already have a debug version of makefs, so I don't need to do anything.
| Thursday, 19 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 19 September 2024 |
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IBM 3330 space requirements
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Topic: technology, history, opinion | Link here |
For years I've been comparing the capacity and size of my disk drives with those of the IBM 3330, the big disk drive of the 1970s. Here an image from the University of Auckland:
It had 8 or 9 drives, though I've only ever seen 8, as in that photo. Each drive initially held 100 MB, but by the time I came on the scene they had doubled that to 200 MB, so an 8 drive configuration held 1.6 GB, coincidentally 0.01% of the capacity of my newest drive.
My most recent disk drive has a capacity of 16 TB, roughly 10,000 times the size of the 3330. But how much physical space does it take up? My current drive is a pretty standard 5¼" drive. And the 3330? Google Gemini fails badly and gives the information:
| Model | Width | Depth | Height | Floor space | ||||
| 3330-1 | 48 inches (122 cm) | 36 inches (91 cm) | 72 inches (183 cm) | 16.5 square feet (1.53 square meters) | ||||
It also includes identical information for the 3330-2, 3330-3 and 3330-4.
So what are those measurements? The disk packs were 14" in diameter. Can each bay really be 48" wide? That seems like a lot, more than 3 times the diameter of the pack. But the pack covers on top of the unit are about 15" in diameter, so it seems plausible. Certainly the height appears correct.
So: let's guess. Each bay is 1.22 m wide, with the exception of the controller at the right. There seem to have been many controllers with different widths, but for the sake of convenience I'll assume the same width as a disk bay. That makes a total of 6.1 m and an area of 7.65 m². But that's just the footprint. To change packs, you need to open a drive drawer. Assuming that there are several rows, how much space does each unit need? I'd guess an absolute minimum of 60 cm, making for a total footprint of 6.1 × 1.82 m or 11.1 m², or about 144 MB/m². It's been a long time since data took up that much area.
So at that density, you'd need 16,000 ÷ 0.144 or 11.11 ha of area. That's considerably more than my last estimate, but still smaller than the size of the Vatican City. For that you'd need the equivalent of nearly 5 16 TB disks.
And transfer speed? Hard to say. I haven't measured the speed of my new disk, but let's assume round 400 MB/s. The 3330 arrays would have a total of 80,000 disk packs, all capable that would be a transfer rate of round 40 GB/s, more than anything currently available.
| Friday, 20 September 2024 | Dereel | |
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Secure confirmation
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
For some reason I wasn't signed up for the ARD mailing list. OK, fight my way through the broken web site and sign up.
Obligatory confirmation message:
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2024 03:03:58 +0200
From: ARD Mediathek Newsletter <newsletter@ard.de>
Subject: Bitte bestätigen Sie Ihre Anmeldung
Bitte klicken Sie auf den folgenden Link, um Ihre Anmeldung zu bestätigen:
https://seu2.cleverreach.com/f/136025-139443/wss/1220015-cb7511128984
“Please click on this link to confirm your registration”. https://www.cleverreach.com? What's that?
Yes, on some reflection there's little that can go wrong. But it requires reflection, and it encourages sloppiness. Bad ARD.
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More makefs debugging?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So why can't I build a NetBSD system any more? Do I really need to? No, I still have the disk image that I was using last time. OK, replace the “disk” in kimchi with that image and reboot.
No networking! I've seen that before too, though I've never been able to work out why. Create a new VM using that disk, and all is well.
Except that I don't have a debug version of makefs there, only some output: as I discovered later, makefs contains debug options. OK, time for a new FreeBSD machine. Install 14.1 and upgrade to -CURRENT. And that almost worked: it seems that the /usr/obj has blown out to 18 GB! So it filled up the virtual disk, and I had to put it via symlink on /hydra. But then things ran without trouble, only not fast enough for me to do anything more today.
| Saturday, 21 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 21 September 2024 |
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Spring rains arrive
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Heavy rain overnight, causing me to decide to turn off the heating in case we had a power failure. That didn't happen, but we got round 22 mm of rain, or, as the Bureau of Meteorology put it, 2.2 mm:
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It's easy to understand inaccuracies in weather forecasts, especially for areas far from weather stations. But this app shows quite accurate rainfall maps, so it's hard to understand why they should be so completely inaccurate in recording rainfall.
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More weeding
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Jesse Walsh along today to do some weeding. Somehow it's not working. After an hour he had removed about 95% of the weeds from an area of about 8 m². In two weeks it will look the same as it did yesterday.
How do professional gardeners address the issue?
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Measure your IQ
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Today I saw an advertisement from a company called Cerebrum offering to tell me my type of intelligence: spatial, musical, mumble. Over the years I've noticed that different people address problems in different manners, and I've decided for myself that I'm very much spatial. But I've had very intelligent people at work who couldn't find their way round the building. Clearly not a spatially defined intelligence.
So this test looked interesting. Disappointing: it was all a matter of pattern matching, and some of the questions were quite difficult. Finally I finished. Show me the results? No, they wanted to send them to me. OK, another throwaway email address. And after a while they sent me a message telling me all about IQ, something that I didn't want to know. No mention of kind of intelligence.
OK, click on Get my IQ Score Now!. Error 404!
OK, contact. They have a bot. OK, tell it: “Your web link is 404”.
Hang. After 20 minutes, I asked “Are you still there”. Yes, “Hi, I'm the Cerebrum bot. What do you need help with?”. OK, maybe an easier-to-parse response: “You have sent me an email with a broken link”. Yes, this time I got an answer: “Hi, I'm the Cerebrum bot. What do you need help with?”.
Things continued like that, with alternate hangs, repeats and nonsense. In the end I gave up, but first I noticed the information at the bottom of the page:
© Cerebrium IQ - 2024. All rights reserved
30 N Gould St Ste R Sheridan, WY 82801 USA
They can't even spell their own name! Somehow they seem completely unintelligent.
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More on software maintenance
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Earlier this year I discovered a bug in the man page for make(1). make first looks for a file BSDmakefile, but it's not mentioned anywhere in the man page. In fact, it's not mentioned anywhere in the sources. Where does it come from? After some discussion on IRC, discovered that make reads a file /usr/share/mk/sys.mk, and that contains:
# Tell bmake the makefile preference
.MAKE.MAKEFILE_PREFERENCE= BSDmakefile makefile Makefile
OK, that's specific to FreeBSD. NetBSD doesn't know a BSDmakefile. How do we handle it? Started a mail discussion with Simon J. Gerraty, who considered the possibility of adding operating system dependent text. But I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense to remove BSDmakefile altogether.
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Roast beef again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Roast beef for dinner today. That's nothing new, but somehow the details evade me. Cook at 180° fan-forced to 53°, taking about 42 minutes per kilogram. That's the easy part. But this roast had a layer of fat on top. That calls for heat from above, also suggesting that the beef should be higher in the oven:
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Started like that. After 20 minutes, the inside temperature was still showing the initial 18°. Something wrong with the (wireless) thermometer?
OK, try a second thermometer, inserted not quite as deeply as the first. And sure enough, it rose more quickly. After the expected 42 minutes the temperature was 53°, just what I had expected. But the first thermometer was only showing round 40°. After 20 minutes' rest they were closer, round 50° and 60°.
That's understandable, but it brings back to me how difficult it is to specify a meat temperature. I don't know how to address the problem.
And then Yorkshire pudding. Not a success: it takes much longer to cook than I expected, and after 20 minutes at 210° it was still undercooked. More investigation required.
| Sunday, 22 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 22 September 2024 |
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Breakfast with Vanessa
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Topic: general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Vanessa Milamber along for breakfast today. She's travelling Australia (and the world) and is currently staying with Chris Bahlo.
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Garden flowers in early spring
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
It's the September equinox, time for the monthly garden flower photos.
It has been one of the mildest winters since I started keeping records:
mysql> select year(date),
min(outside_temp),
avg(outside_temp),
max(outside_temp)
from observations
where month(date) > 5
and month(date) < 9
group by year(date);
+------------+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+
| year(date) | min(outside_temp) | avg(outside_temp) | max(outside_temp) |
+------------+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+
| 2017 | -2.2 | 8.560618937140722 | 19.7 |
| 2018 | -3 | 8.791814473911545 | 19.7 |
| 2019 | -0.9 | 9.059936482458161 | 20.4 |
| 2020 | -0.8 | 8.716560253881685 | 20.7 |
| 2021 | -0.6 | 9.301671782613512 | 23 |
| 2022 | -2.6 | 9.085142510706916 | 20.4 |
| 2023 | -1.4 | 9.892861121292666 | 23.6 |
| 2024 | -2.8 | 9.608775174628834 | 24.4 |
+------------+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+
But somehow the garden looks less developed than in previous years. There's almost nothing worth highlighting. About the only thing of interest is this Abutilon outside my bedroom window, which has had its ups and downs:
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The parent tree of our blue-flowering wildflower is flowering nicely:
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But the best we can say about the one that we transplanted is that it's not dead yet:
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It looked much worse a few months back, so there's still (a little) hope.
The rest aren't dead yet, but they're taking their time coming. Here they are:
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“Air fried” chicken legs
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Grilled chicken legs for dinner tonight, something that we haven't done very much recently. In particular, I didn't have much for the “hair dryer” “air fryer”. Tried them for 30 minutes at 200°, but they were ready after 25 minutes:
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That was a relatively painless experiment.
| Monday, 23 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 23 September 2024 |
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DVD disaster
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
When I finalized the specifications for hydra almost exactly a year ago, one of the requirements was a DVD drive. That seemed like a no-brainer, but it later occurred to me that DVDs and CDs are gradually becoming a thing of the past, and that for the few occasions that I might need one, I could use a USB drive. As it was, the choice of an inbuilt drive limited my choice of case.
Today I had some data CDs that I had been asked to copy. OK, put them in the drive. It's behind a door. How do you open the thing? While trying to do so, saw a red light go on on top of the cabinet. The machine shut down!
This stupid idea of putting the controls on the top of the case!
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The one on the left is the power button, and it's only that far from the front of the case (extreme left). I must have pressed it while trying to open the door, which (I discovered) opens in the opposite direction. Why do people do this? It must be (relatively) modern, since Bruce Evans' zetaplex also has it. I need to put a plastic guard on top of it.
The machine came up relatively smoothly, as was to be expected with a clean shutdown. But:
mount: /dev/da0p1: R/W mount on /Video denied. Filessystem is not clean - run fsck.: Operation not permitted
Huh? What went wrong there? OK, mark it noauto in /etc/fstab and continue. Run fsck, which went for hours. Didn't I have journalling enabled? When fsck finished, confirmed: no, it wasn't enabled. OK, enable, then umount and remount 3 different file systems on teevee. But:
=== root@teevee (/dev/pts/12) /home/grog 10 -> mount /spool/Videos
[tcp] hydra:/Video/spool/Videos: No such file or directory
/spool/Videos is mounted on hydra:/Video/spool/Videos. /Video is already mounted. What's the problem?
=== root@teevee (/dev/pts/12) /home/grog 11 -> ls -l /Video
total 2019944
drwxrwxr-x 2 root operator 512 15 May 13:35 .snap
-r-------- 1 root wheel 655,589,376 23 Sep 13:59 .sujournal
drwxr-xr-x 11 root wheel 512 15 May 13:54 home
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2,116,891,893,624 16 May 04:28 homeimage.gz
OH. What's that? Where have all my videos gone? I don't have a backup for this file system.
Took a moment to recover. Did fsck find an old version of the disk? Potentially that could happen in very small areas, but we're talking about 2 TB of data here. The old random detection of USB drives after boot? But I only have one drive!
More searching. Oh, how about that, there is more than one drive. But it's not connected.
Still more searching. Oh, how about that, the drive is is connected, not just where I thought. And sure enough, not only was the drive undamaged, it was also clean. Panic over. And in the process discovered that the other disk has the same size as /Video, so I can use it as a backup disk.
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Insults from Bank of Melbourne
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Last week we had one of many annoyances with the Bank of Melbourne. I didn't note it at the time, but I asked them to take a complaint, for which they didn't give a reference number.
Today we received mail from the Bank of Melbourne. The promised new debit card? Information on how to pick it up? No, no mention of a new card, which had been promised by today.
It addressed the complaint. At least I now know the reference number, CS95140069. But I don't know what use it is:
Thank you for your time sharing your complaint. We are please we have been able to resolve the matter with you.
“With you”? There was no interaction, and if they have resolved the matter, then only to their satisfaction. You'd think they were deliberately trying to insult her.
If anything, the only effect of this message is to reinforce our intention to change banks.
| Tuesday, 24 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 24 September 2024 |
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KL Hokkien Mee: my version
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
It's been over 3 years since I first started to try to cook KL Hokkien Mee. Gradually it doesn't seem to be as complicated any more, but that's at least because of some of the simplifications made: use fried pork skin and onion flakes instead of greaves (chu yau cha, 猪油渣), don't brown the squid, making it possible to cook without smoking the place out, not like on this occasion:
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I also add chili and much more garlic than the recipes I have found. The result looks like this, before and after the onion flakes:
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New ports
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Somebody has broken xv, a program that I have been using for ever. It was one of the programs on my Applications for UnixWare CD, released in 1993. But the version I have on hydra doesn't recognize PNG images. I've established that the problem is with a library, not xv itself, but does that help?
There's a thread on the FreeBSD-questions list about mail clients, but there was one reply suggesting graphics/feh. Installed that. Yes, it works, displays PNG. But there's nothing that I can do to influence the display. As far as I can see, no rotate, no resize. Not really a replacement for xv, not even in this limited context.
Alastair Boyanich also recommended another tool for comparing source trees: meld. It's a GNOME application, but surprisingly installed easily and didn't pull in the normal hundreds of GNOME helper ports. I still don't dare try it out.
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Recovering the Yorkshire pudding
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Saturday's Yorkshire
pudding was not a success. Today we ate more of the roast, and I put the pudding in
the “bathtub” air fryer convection
oven for another 20 minutes at 210°. Still not a real recovery:
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But at least it tasted firmer. Clearly Yorkshire pudding is not a dish that you can recover like this, but it would be interesting to consider whether I could make it in the bathtub.
| Wednesday, 25 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 25 September 2024 |
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Cats and mouse
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
The cats have been interested in the garage for quite a while now, and we have suspected that they have found rodents. But I was still surprised when Bruno came out of the garage this evening with a live mouse in his mouth.
He went off to the front door with it, where he started playing with it. I put Mona there too, and they investigated in some detail:
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But they didn't attempt to kill it, confirming my suspicion a few weeks ago that Mona killed the rat by accident rather than by design.
So: what do I do with the mouse? Yvonne wanted to put it outside, but then it would just have found its way back into the garage. So: put it in a mousetrap:
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It's amazing all the things you can do with chopsticks. After that I put it outside to wait until the morning.
In passing, it's interesting that when Larissa came to join in the fun, Mona let her come really close without getting upset. Clearly there were more interesting things to do.
| Thursday, 26 September 2024 | Dereel | |
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What to do with a dead mouse
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Topic: animals | Link here |
The mouse that we caught yesterday evening was dead when I came out this morning. Probably it was on its last legs when Bruno caught it. What should I do with it? The cats were clearly not interested. Offered it to Elena, who sniffed at it and walked off. Offered it to Larissa, who took it off somewhere and presumably disposed of it.
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Yvonne unwell
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Topic: health | Link here |
This morning at breakfast, Yvonne was looking decidedly unwell, and she told me that she was feeling unwell in a manner that suggested that her heart medication wasn't sufficient. She took another Flecainide tablet, as instructed for such occasions, and gradually things weren't as bad. But it's happening more often. Time to talk to Rodney Reddy again. Called up and—as always—was put on hold waiting for an answer. But none came: after less than 4 minutes, the phone system decided it had had enough, told me to call back later, and hung up. Moral: don't call in the middle of the day.
Do we even have a referral for Dr. Reddy? Called up Health First and asked for one. More hold while the receptionist spoke with Paul Smith, who suggested that she go to the Emergency Department—that way madness lies—but reported that she had a permanent referral.
Called up Ballarat Cardiology later and was given the information that Dr. Reddy is on leave until the end of the month, but that she should contact Paul Smith, whom she would inform. That looks like a waste of time, but we should check.
Also asked her about mobile phone ECG devices. Apple Watch! I don't see that happening; apart from the presumed fact that there are cheaper and better devices, that Yvonne wouldn't want to wear something that obstructive, and that she would almost certainly need an iPhone to work with it. She didn't have any other suggestions, but at least I didn't get the line “these ECG devices are all useless”. So I'll do some further investigation.
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Another gardener?
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Nick Macdonald of macGARDENS along today, rather unexpectedly: he had been due to come yesterday, but didn't inform us, so we had written him off. He was here to take a look at the garden with a view to tidying it up. He recognized me instantly: “Wasn't I here a couple of years ago, and we didn't see eye to eye? You were quite antagonistic”.
Huh? Was he the bloke who wanted to come only twice a year? I do recall him, and that our intentions didn't match up. But no, he wasn't that one. Spent some time talking, and though he's really expensive—$1,430 per day—he doesn't have to come that often, and we should be able to get by with Jesse doing most of the work for a fraction of the price.
And was he here before? Yes, three years ago. He was the bloke who wanted to come only twice a year—or at least, that's what I wrote. Clearly some kind of misunderstanding.
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Linux on Intel 4004
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Topic: technology, history, opinion | Link here |
Interesting reference in email today: Dmitri Grinberg has run Linux on an Intel 4004:
This video is at least partially in fast forward. It's worth looking at the clock in the bottom right corner of the laptop display.
But how can it work? The 4004 only had maximum of 4 kB of memory. It seems that it really just emulates a MIPS instruction set. Still, an impressive achievement.
| Friday, 27 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 27 September 2024 |
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Instagram pain
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I've had an Instagram account for I don't know how long. It's not the kind of site that I find useful, but Nick Macdonald seems to have his only web presence on it. OK, take a look.
“Please login to view the remainder of this page”. OK, Instagram, if you wish. “Sorry, your password was incorrect. Please double-check your password”.
Damn you, Instagram. You have changed my password without telling me. OK, send me a “Login Link”. But nothing came. Repeat. Nothing came. The mail logs showed that it didn't even try.
OK, new email address, new account. Select nick? Sorry, they're all taken or “not available”:
| stupidinstagrambpas | user already exists | |
| biglier | not available | |
| endlessfrustration | not available | |
And yes, the first nick was really “stupidinstagrambpas”; I must have accidentally hit some extra keys. But “user already exists”? Come on, Instagram. You know that's not true, though “endlessfrustration” sounds likely. How about something in German? Yes, it accepted “verdammteidioten”. I suppose I should change it if I really want to do something with Instagram, but that's becoming ever less likely.
But my success was short-lived. A message from Instagram that at least looked amusing in the inbox:
10 26-09-2024 To broken-insta ( 125) Instagram Action needed on your account, verdammteidioten
The content, in HTML
Take action or lose access to verdammteidioten
Hi verdammteidioten,
Your Instagram account has been suspended. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn't follow our Community Guidelines on account integrity and authentic identity.
If you think we made a mistake, you have until March 26, 2025 to appeal.
It gave me a login link that didn't work. Somehow my link name seems appropriate. My guess is that they had a background checker (maybe human) that decided that my nick was not appropriate. But then they should have said so and not immediately disabled my login. Should I care? None of this would have happened if they hadn't broken my original login, which remains broken.
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ECG monitor: walk before you can run
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
So it seems that it's a good idea to buy an ECG monitor for Yvonne. But which? Clearly the Apple Watch is out of the question. But they have one at Chemist Warehouse that looks reasonable: the Biosignals ecgme. I could go into town and get one right now, assuming they're in stock.
But it requires a mobile phone app to operate. How closely are the data tied to the app? Can I back them up? Off to look for the user manual, presented as a single strip of 30 pages. Lots of warnings and things. How do I back up the data? No mention. Clearly this is a modern device.
Much more searching brought me to the Alivecor KardiaMobile, and also the better KardiaMobile 6L, both of which have much better instructions, in particular describing the fact that the ECGs can be downloaded in PDF format, which I suppose is the best we can hope for at the moment, though the text suggests that something gets lost in the translation:
Health care professionals (HCPs) may review and analyze the recorded EKG. The Kardia app provides users with the ability to forward the recorded EKG to their HCP in one of two ways, one by using a referral code with HCPs who use Kardia Pro, and the other, by emailing the EKG PDF to the HCP. When connected to Kardia Pro, the user’s EKG recordings are automatically transferred and made available to the HCP. HCPs can review the EKG PDF to perform rhythm assessments as well as measure the QT interval.
Also found a report that suggested that the KardiaMobile 6L performed much more accurately than the Apple Watch.
In passing, a few recognitions:
| Saturday, 28 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 28 September 2024 |
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Bad language in journalism?
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
In the course of my life the use of the English language has changed considerably, and I find many of the changes distasteful. I already have pages about bad language in computer terms and ("Rant/newspeak.php", "newspeak"); ?>, but the more I read news reports, the more strange terms I discover. Are they “bad language”, or just normal evolution? Some things that I have heard recently are:
| decimate |
Decimation was a severe punishment in the Roman army: one-tenth of the ranks were
killed. But for modern warfare, that's not enough. Now it's used against the enemy
and implies complete destruction.
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| execute |
“Execute” is a fairly well defined word meaning to perform. But it has other
connotations, in particular to execute a death sentence, and by extension the person
sentenced to death. But I continually hear of people in conflicts being killed
“execution style”. I haven't been able to determine what that means.
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| red-line |
It seems that a red line is an action which one should not perform. People are
continually crossing red lines in the current (2024) Israeli conflict, but it doesn't
seem to mean anything. So I really don't understand what they mean here.
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| spike |
“Spike” has many meanings, of course, but the press has singled out a technical
meaning: “An electrical pulse of very short duration in which a rapid increase in
voltage is followed immediately by a rapid decrease”, as the OED describes it. The press isn't so concerned about the fact that's electrical, but they
have forgotten “short duration” and “(rapid) decrease”: they use it for increases that
have no subsequent decrease. This really doesn't help much.
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There are other terms, like “spiral” and “skyrocket”, that I can't quite decide on. Certainly their excessive use detracts from their impact.
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Instagram: not to be outdone
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Back to look at yesterday's message from Instagram. But it has changed! Well, the page to which it has linked has changed. Now it won't let me do anything except “appeal”. Sorry, Instagram, you're really not that appealing.
But what about my original account? Tried that again, and got further:
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Sorry, Instagram, there are no asterisks in my email address. Get it to send anyway.
gurgle • Instagram
Enter the code we sent to i*******m@l****.com
Check your email
And again nothing happened, not even an attempt to send the message to the server. That's not an issue with my mail server: they have sent a number of other messages. Did they maybe really trt to send it to @l****.com? I could almost believe it.
I suppose I could get it to send to my Facebook account, but that basket is already full. This really can't be anything else to do with my choices. Why are things so broken?
In passing, 15 years ago today I had similar problems with Twitter.
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The last tulip
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Seen today:
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That's the first tulip I've seen in a long while. We planted many years ago, but unlike the daffodils they have gradually all died. My guess is that the advice to remove tulips in the spring and replant in autumn is really important. It's also too much work, so sorry, tulips, goodbye.
| Sunday, 29 September 2024 | Dereel | Images for 29 September 2024 |
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Photo processing pain
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday was house photo day, something that I normally don't mention here. But yesterday I made a mistake with the north-west view: I forgot the last component image, so all I got was:
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But I found out about that in time and went and took a complete sequence. It was an almost cloudless day, so I had to take photos with and without my hand in front of the sun. But once again I made a mistake. I didn't put my hand completely in front of the sun, giving rise to reflections:
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Never mind, I have a corresponding image from the first series. Use that instead. But somehow during processing I changed the panorama size, from 80 MP to 30 MP. No way! Back and do it Yet Again.
That worked, but in the process it changed the details. The only difference between the .pto file for these two images is the size. But some stitching details have changed (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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In particular, this part, at the left, stitched significantly differently:
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This is between the same pair of images in both cases. There are also other discontinuities, but I can't be bothered any more. They didn't occur to me until I looked very closely.
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Larissa: branch manager no more
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
Walking the dogs today, Larissa found a stick. She used to do that as a puppy, but it's been a while since she has done so.
Oh. Not a stick:
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That's a kangaroo leg.
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Instagram: you can log in
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Instagram seem to have finally fixed their mail problems. Tried again today, it promised to send me a code, and it delivered. And it didn't ask me to change my password.
Are things fixed? I have little confidence.
| Monday, 30 September 2024 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 30 September 2024 |
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Yvonne sick again
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
Once again Yvonne has heart problems. Not life-threatening, but concerning. And for reasons that I haven't understood, she doesn't immediately take a Flecainide tablet when it happens. She did try to contact Paul Smith, our GP, but he, too, is on leave until the end of the week. Once again the recommendation to go to the Emergency Department of the Ballarat Base Hospital.
Should we? It's associated with interminable waits, and it's not clear that they can do much. This is more a long-term issue: in the short term we can handle it with Flecainide, and indeed Yvonne soon started feeling better after finally taking one. But I'd hate to be wrong in my assessment, so off to Ballarat, where we had difficulty getting to the entrance because somebody had parked his car in the “no standing” area. This is 10 minutes later, after the cars behind it had cleared, but when we arrived we couldn't get to the entrance at all:
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Parked the car, back to find the obstructive parker still in the “no standing” area and Yvonne still waiting for any kind of attention. After about another 10 minutes, during which they at least measured her pulse and oxygen saturation, she was left with the information that she would be seen to sooner or later.
I off to do other things, including arrange an appointment with Rodney Reddy (across the road). When I was done, still nobody had seen her, so I went off home.
I had only been back for half an hour when I received a call: a nurse had given her an ECG test and found things normal. She could take a blood test and then see a doctor, but that would take longer. We already had the short-term good news. The rest is Reddy for to determine. So off to pick her up, managing the return trip in 56 minutes. That's 120-odd kilometres just for an ECG.
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How many Grevilleae rosmarinifoliae?
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
A few years ago I identified two different bushes as Grevillea rosmarinifolia. They're similar, but the flowers look different:
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But today, near the Ballarat Base Hospital, I saw this:
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Clearly also a Grevillea rosmarinifolia, but the flowers look different again. Or is it only that it is flowering so profusely?
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Meeting Ben Sturmfels
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been over 5 years since I first heard from Ben Sturmfels, and since then we've been planning to meet. It still hasn't happened!
But he has an office in Sturt St, Ballarat, just round the corner from the Base Hospital. Went down there and found that he wasn't there. But at least I tried. Who knows what the next 5 years might bring?
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The daily Instagram
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So did Instagram reinstate my password? Of course not. Tried to log in today and had exactly the same issue that I had on Friday
OK, try the password reset. Yes! It allows me to reset it, using a page with the heading “Facebook”. Sent me a code. Please enter.
Sorry, something went wrong
Please try closing and re-opening your browser window.
Am I really the only person suffering this pain? Thank goodness that I don't need Instagram
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Time for an ECG monitor
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Topic: health, technology | Link here |
Today we spent over 4 hours taking Yvonne to the Ballarat Base Hospital, ultimately just for an ECG measurement. Time to finally bite the bullet, so ordered an KardiaMobile 6L on eBay. According to the seller, it should be here tomorrow or on Wednesday. I'll believe it when I see it, but Wednesday would be good.
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What price SMS?
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Received an SMS from ALDIMobile today: my call credit had dropped below $5. OK, recharge, and while I'm at it check usage. Eight SMS, all sent at 10:42 on Saturday. Yes, I sent one SMS to Hannah McEwan at that time. Why was I charged 8 times?
Oh. That's a short message system. How short? Can it be that what I sent was a fragmented and reassembled? SMS is a pretty useless system at the best of times, but if it costs several dollars to send a single message, it rivals the prices I was paying for Internet access 30 years ago. Then I was paying 0.45 DM per kilobyte. Now I was charged $1.20 for 484 bytes! Yet another reason to use sane means of communication.
Of course, I'm just assuming that the length of the message is the answer. Maybe it was just an error in their accounting system. Do I want to check?
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
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