|
| Greg's diary |
|
||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 1 April 2026 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | next | last |
Another of those day pairs where I do lots of things (yesterday) and spend the whole next day writing up about them (today). I didn't even finish before dinner.
Yvonne into town today, and while she was there she had a growth excised. She was given a sheet of paper, a copy of a message sent to Matthew Pilkington, a colleague of Paul Smith who had presumably written the referral. Diagnosis: "LEFT LATERAL NECK SHAVE NODULAR AND SUPERFICIAL BASAL CELL CARCINOMA” (why do they shout?). Then clinical notes: "Left lateral neck evolving flat red macule ? Bowen's disease”. No mention of a prognosis, and following up shows that Bowen's disease is different from basal-cell carcinoma. The general impression I get is that the matter has been dealt with now, but it would be nice to have some kind of confirmation. The Wikipedia pages suggest that there's not much danger, but why go to a doctor when “I read it on the Internet”?
File system full on fra.lemis.com today. Nothing unusual: it's the web server logs. Rotate (I must really automate this) and compress.
But then I saw a file /var/tmp/webfoo or some such, and it was big (gigabytes) and growing. Where did that come from? lsof to my aid. Oh, no lsof. OK,
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/1) /var/tmp 62 -> pkg install lsof
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
pkg: An error occurred while fetching package: No error
pkg: An error occurred while fetching package: No error
repository FreeBSD has no meta file, using default settings
And there it hung. This isn't a very old system (FreeBSD 14.2, not even a year old).
While pondering what to do, compressing the old web log completed. And webfoo went away. Was it a symlink maybe? It had a link count of 1. Strange name to choose, more like something that I might have thought up. But I have no recollection.
No named failures today, but it's only a matter of time. And currently I have no backup, so each failure means an average of 30 minutes with no resolution. Why not do it on fra?
Oh. fra has had a named running since December last year. Copy the latest zone files and try again:
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/1) /usr/local/etc/namedb 115 -> service named restart
named not running? (check /var/run/named/pid).
/usr/local/etc/namedb/named.conf:7: unix control '/var/run/ndc': not supported
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/named: ERROR: named-checkconf for /usr/local/etc/namedb/named.conf failed
There's something very strange about named.
| Thursday, 2 April 2026 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
So why does named no longer run on fra.lemis.com? Another question for the twins, which indicated that my named.conf is older than the named on fra. OK, fix:
@@ -1,10 +1,12 @@
+include "/usr/local/etc/namedb/rndc.key";
+
controls {
inet * port 52 allow { any; }; // a bad idea
- unix "/var/run/ndc" perm 0600 owner 0 group 0; // the default
+ inet 127.0.0.1 port 953 allow { 127.0.0.1; } keys { "rndc-key"; };
};
And yes, that fixed it. But BIND is now 40 years old. It's still unstable (version 8 at any rate), and you'd think that the new versions could accommodate the old ones.
One of the things that most irritate me about DxO PhotoLab is that by default cropping an image retains the original aspect ratio, and there's no setting to get rid of it: I have to reset to “unconstrained” every time. But today, for the first time in over 10 years, I found a reason to use it.
Well, not quite. The photo was taken with my OM System OM-1 Mark II and thus had a 4:3 aspect ratio. But Yvonne wanted it on the root window of lagune as a background, so it had to be 16:9. And I was able to set that:
Yvonne has been following the weekly petrol prices. This week they're lower. The government has halved the petrol excise tax, worth about 25¢ per litre:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
But look at the image quality. Here a cutout:
|
|
||||||||||
That should be perfectly legible. What went wrong? One thing, of course, is that it was taken with a mobile phone, but it still should be much better than that. To be investigated.
| Friday, 3 April 2026 | Today's diary | top | previous | next | last |
What did I do today? Nothing interesting that I could remember the following morning. I suppose this will happen more and more as I get older. It's not as if I didn't do anything, but it was just repetitive stuff not worth talking about.
| Saturday, 4 April 2026 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Sixty-three years ago I started keeping what has become this diary. At the time, I wrote a relatively detailed description of what I did throughout the day. But that's boring: get up, have breakfast, have lunch, ...
But that's about all I did today. Also take the house photos, watch TV... Is it going to continue like that?
From time to time I have used formulations like “The firings will continue until morale improves” in humour. But there's no humour in this amazingly stupid war against Iran. Today I read in the Washington Post, quoting an unnamed “former official”:
“If the Iranian side is not flexible, then they can keep killing them until you find someone who is willing to cut a deal,” he said. “When you put more pressure, that’s what the Iranians seem to be more responsive to.”
Idiocy. They don't understand anything. Where will this end?
Call from Joe at thecatshack today with a quote for the cat enclosure: $5,200! We were expecting roughly 20% of that price.
After catching my breath, told him that that was beyond our means. What do we do now? Make the enclosure smaller? Many people live in less than the 85 m² that we had wanted to enclose. Yvonne came up with an alternative, a prefabicated frame with typical “metric” dimensions 1.8 × 1.8 × 5.4 m, not too small for the cats, for $802 delivered:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Is that the solution? How do the cats get in and out? Our previous plan would be simple enough: open the door and let them in. Here Yvonne was talking about a tunnel and a hole in the wall. To be considered.
| Sunday, 5 April 2026 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
So what do we do with the cat enclosure? We're really only a little further than we were a month ago. But maybe the dog run isn't such a bad idea after all. Yes, getting Paul Donaghy to do it will be much cheaper than Joe, but it will still be more expensive than the prefabricated unit that we were looking at yesterday. We'll need 156 m² of netting, about $750, and then the frames to hold it up, and of course Paul's time. What can go wrong?
We've seen these lilies before:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
They're clearly self-seeding, and in the past they have flowered mainly in March or earlier. Yvonne once liked them, but now she doesn't.
I've made a number of Semmelknödel over the last few years, but I've always had trouble with the quantities. Today I did it again, and finally it seems to be taking shape (spherical, of course). Conveniently, I now need 150 ml of milk, exactly the content of a small pack of UHT milk. A little less breadcrumbs (I think 140 g instead of 150 g) and we should be done.
| Monday, 6 April 2026 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous |
Strange message in my news feed this morning:
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.
Not the sort of message I usually see. Clearly somebody from Israel or the USA. Ah, there:
President DONALD J. TRUMPApr 05, 2026, 10:03 PM
The time, supplied by his “Truth” Social, appears to be our local time, in other words 12:03 UTC.
But even for Trump this is a new low. Is he really getting scared? May he die of fright!
It's been nearly 2½ years since I got hydra.lemis.com, my new desktop machine. And I still haven't finished configuring it!
I suppose I should take comfort in the fact that Bruce Evans apparently had the same issues with his “new” machine, which coincidentally I called hydra before it became evident that it was not worth keeping. And probably he had the same issues that I had: the software has changed in ways that I don't like, in many cases outright bugs. I've started collecting them in their own page. So far I have:
So what do I do about it? Keep eureka around, now over 12 years old and running FreeBSD 10.2, installed over 10 years ago. Under the circumstances it doesn't make sense to upgrade it.
Some time ago I bought this sauce for a recipe I found somewhere:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Where? I don't recall. I really should write these things down here. Off to look at YouTube videos, where I came up with Rad Na:
And there they showed a bottle that looked the same, but not quite. Mine is labeled (in English) “Soybean paste”, but theirs was labeled “Fermented Soybean Paste”. What's the difference? Much searching showed that they have at least five different labels, but only the one product. Their product description page shows yet another variety. The important detail is that it's “Soybean” paste A, and that there are no chilis in it (that's a different product).
Apart from the Rad Na, I also found a recipe for Pad Kee Mao.
And the twins came up with further names that I could follow: Khao Man Gai, Pak Boong and Gai Pad King.
Last year I found some camera strap clips that looked almost ideal. But I was cautious at the time, and it looks as if I was right. Today one came apart, sort of. It opened up beyond what should have been possible. Put it back together by moving the tongue sideways, and it looks almost acceptable:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
But looking at it from the side, it's no longer stable:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
That's almost impossible to recognize. But the clip has to go. When will people come up with a reliable, quick-open strap clip?
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.
| Top of page | Greg's home page | Today's diary entry | Greg's photos | Copyright information |
