|
| Greg's diary |
|
||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 1 May 2024 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | next | last |
Early this morning, while I was reading news on hirse, my mobile phone, an app failed to resolve a host name. Bloody Android apps! It wasn't until later that I discovered that that was the beginning of a 30 minute network outage.
OK, what's my MyAussie app for? Fired it up and discovered that it wanted a password. My passwords don't cater for mobile phones: this one was 31 characters long, sprinkled with special characters that are a particular pain to enter on a mobile phone (is that why so many password restrictors demand them?), and Aussie is too secure to display more than one character at a time when you enter a password. The result:
Or was it? They don't seem to know. But when I tried again later, it had decided:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
By the time I had finished messing around, the network came back, after less than 33 minutes. I give in: clearly Aussie wants me to use a less secure password, so I created one that it still accepted and tried to log in:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Sigh. Try again:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
I thought the option of saving a password to Google (Why? To reduce its security?) was a good touch. But finally I managed to log in, and was rewarded by the option of using the fingerprint sensor to log me in, which makes things much more bearable. And then I checked: no outages recorded.
Oh, you want NBN outages? Sure, we have plenty on offer:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Nine days of outages! Hopefully this is their typical inaccuracy.
In passing, how secure are fingerprint sensors? Probably secure enough for the purposes that the app fulfils, but wouldn't it be possible to capture an image of my fingerprint and use that instead? Yes! It happened to Ursula von der Leyen ten years ago. Are things safer now?
One of the more interesting culinary discoveries that I've made in the last few years is KL Hokkien Mee. And now I discover that there's something related in Beijing: Beijing Fried Sauce Noodles (Zha Jiang Mian, 炸酱面). There seem to be countless variations, but they all use a dark sauce, rendered fat pork belly and crunchy skin. One to try.
Bruno and Mona are still not lying in a basket together, but they're coming closer:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
That's either side of the TV.
Bruno is also getting more confident. He knows that he's not allowed on the dining table, but that doesn't stop him:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Even after I sprayed him with water, he dried himself and got back up there again.
In passing, I weighed them today. Mona didn't eat for the first day she was here, and a day or two later she only weighed 3.2 kg. Bruno is a particularly heavy cat, presumably US standard, where they write
The overall impression of the ideal Burmese would be a cat of medium size with substantial bone structure, good muscular development and a surprising weight for its size
He weighs round 5 kg. Today, though, Mona weighed 3.6 kg and Bruno 4.9. That's less difference than I expected.
After being asked if I wrote “Treasurer” and co-authored a paper with PO Box, today I got another one:
21 N 01-05-2024 To groggyhimsel ( 901) Mentioned by rm rf N “Greg Lehey” cited by “rm rf”
Is this Artificial Intelligence at its finest?
| Thursday, 2 May 2024 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Looking briefly through the news this morning, saw the headline Colombia breaks ties with Israel. Who would have thought that the student protests would have had such a success in such a short time? And particularly Columbia, who didn't seem to be listening very carefully.
Oh. I wasn't reading very carefully. Colombia, the country, not Columbia, the university. Still, it sets a signal. Now if the USA would finally stop supporting this genocide!
More and more, the Israeli government has been accusing their detractors of anti-Semitism. That's nothing new: there's a line of thought amongst many Jews that says “You disagree with me? I'm a Jew! You're antisemitic!”.
That's nonsense, of course, and Bernie Sanders recently clarified the distinction between disliking somebody because of his Jewish race or culture (a special case of racism) and disliking somebody because of his actions.
But what's special about anti-Semitism? It's just a special case of racism. Yes, 80 years ago many Jews were subject to horrible treatment at the hands of Hitler's régime, not unlike but even worse than what the Israelis are doing in Gaza now. But now people ignore that background, now that the Israelis are the aggressors and not the victims. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Carefully proof-read mail from ANZ today, telling of changes to their handling of accounts. No more cheque books! Once that was the primary access to a bank account. And “Access Advantage” accounts, whatever they may be, don't earn interest for balances over $50,000, as shown in a table indicating interest rates of 0.01% to 0.02% on amounts over $50,000. Yes, that's barely interest, only $20 a year for a balance of $100,000, but my guess is that they didn't read their statement carefully.
But no cheque books? An end of an era. Now everything is electronic.
I've been dragging my feet on updating hydra's window manager, mainly because I don't know where to start. I wrote the configuration files nearly 30 years ago, and I have long forgotten the details, in particular what I changed relative to the defaults: this was before I religiously ran version control.
One of the big issues, though, was that fvwm3 no longer issues error messages! So I don't know what it doesn't like. After RTFM I discovered that I can get it to output messages to a log file, apparently with a predetermined name ~/. ~/.fvwm/fvwm3-output.log. That's particularly irritating in my situation, where I don't have a directory ~/.fvwm. I have a common directory with those contents, but then every window manager would overwrite the same file.
Still, let's try. Firstly, it didn't like the -s option (run on a single screen). Why? How do I specify a single screen? Left it out, and it seemed to only run on the specified screen. Does it now parse the display name maybe?
The log output was interesting.
[1714624576.085241] scan_screens: Case 1: Add new monitors
[1714624576.085273] monitor_mark_new: Added new monitor: DP-3 (0x8321c8180)
[1714624576.086994] main: Loading window states via (null)
That suggests that it didn't even try other screens. Then lots of complaints about style options using colours, as was to be expected, also missing fonts (another issue I need to look at). But then:
[1714624576.108044] CMD_Read: file 'xterms-hydra:0.3' not found in /home/grog/.fvwm or /usr/local/share/fvwm3
The invocation line was
fvwm3 -v -d hydra:0.3 -f /home/local/X/.fvwm/fvwm2rc-hydra:0.3
So it hasn't ignored the path name for the configuration file. It has just discarded the path and put in its own directory! That's definitely a violation of POLA, and arguably a bug. In the meantime I found a way to output the error messages to stdout, so I could put in a symlink:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/10) ~ 153 -> ls -l .fvwm
lrwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 19 2 May 15:23 .fvwm -> /home/local/X/.fvwm
And with that it ran, modulo colours. And try as I might, I couldn't find instructions on how to convert old-style colour definitions to what fvwm3 wants. Still, it works for the time being. The current invocation is:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/10) ~ 155 -> fvwm3 -v -o - -display hydra:0.3 -f /home/local/X/.fvwm/fvwm2rc-hydra:0.3 &
A few months back I ran into memory pressure on www.lemis.com, my remote virtual server. OK, add a “memory disk”. And that worked.
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swapfile bs=1m count=4096
# mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /var/swapfile
md0
# swapon /dev/md0
Until Vultr decided to reboot my machine. And then the md device was gone. It wasn't until today that I noticed. How do you ensure that they're recreated after reboot?
Sometime in the early evening it occurred to me that I hadn't received any external mail in over an hour. Problems on the external server?
Yes. The file system was full. This morning there were something like 13 GB free, but now it was at 108% with -3.5 GB. Something had eaten up over 16 GB in a few hours.
I knew where to look. The web server error log was full with messages like
[Thu May 02 07:42:26.457757 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628
[Thu May 02 07:42:26.457785 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628
[Thu May 02 07:42:26.457812 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628
What's that? At the very least, an error in my PHP code. But look at the time stamps! There were 55 μs between the three! OK, these views aren't that important. Remove the script.
That didn't help, of course. It was just a coincidence that I found these error messages. I tried a number of things, but it kept on coming. What was it trying to do? I kept some log messages for later analysis, but I couldn't find anything that made any sense.
ip7.ip-145-239-202.eu - - [02/May/2024:07:55:42 +0000] "GET /grog/diary.php?dirdate=20071110&image=dam-nw.jpeg&imagesizes=-1%20OR%203%2B45-45-1=0%2B0%2B0%2B1 HTTP/1.1" 200 45879 "http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
ip7.ip-145-239-202.eu - - [02/May/2024:07:55:41 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-jan2009.php?dirdate=20090101&image=nest-demolition-1.jpeg&imagesizes=bs&view= HTTP/1.1" 200 444161 "http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
ip7.ip-145-239-202.eu - - [02/May/2024:07:55:41 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-jan2009.php?dirdate=20090101&image=nest-demolition-1.jpeg&imagesizes=bs&view=http://dicrpdbjmemujemfyopp.zzz/yrphmgdpgulaszriylqiipemefmacafkxycjaxjs%3F.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 444161 "http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
ip7.ip-145-239-202.eu - - [02/May/2024:07:55:43 +0000] "GET /grog/diary.php?dirdate=20071110&image=dam-nw.jpeg&imagesizes=-1%20OR%203*2<(0%2B5%2B45-45) HTTP/1.1" 200 45859 "http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
By evening it had filled the log file again. I need to find an automatic way to block this kind of aggression. In the meantime, a regular check of log file size and rollover would be a good idea.
Downloading some files from hirse, my mobile phone, was particularly slow today. Why?
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/15) ~ 4 -> ping hirse
PING hirse.lemis.com (192.109.197.228): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=4432.006 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=4491.037 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=4636.822 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=4777.693 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=4885.086 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=3869.501 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=2954.141 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=1959.271 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=967.665 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=4.943 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=1.908 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=1.314 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=2.119 ms
It came good by itself. What causes this kind of issue? Android?
Mona continues to settle in—slowly. In this failed photo (Bruno moved away at the wrong moment) she approaches him, and she has done this a couple of times.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
She also no longer tries to run away when the dogs go past at a distance.
| Friday, 3 May 2024 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Winter's coming, time to bring the curry tree indoors. First move a table (glass mounted on an elephant statue). I lifted the glass, Petra was to take the elephant. But they were stuck together.
For a while, until I had lifted it high enough. Then they parted ways:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Yvonne is not amused.
Once again this morning the web server error log was full of error messages from ip7.ip-145-239-202.eu. But finally it seems to be over. All that remains is this strange error message
[Thu May 02 07:42:26.457757 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628
OK, I've blown away that file, but I have a local copy. Works perfectly. Copy it back to www. No photos found! Potentially that was the reason for the negative index.
But why? This worked before—didn't it? Did I make a local patch on www, and then throw it out yesterday? What do my RCS logs say?
revision 1.488
date: 2015/05/23 22:59:49; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +20 -15
Obsolete.
Oh. The date is significant: it's two weeks after we moved into Stones Road, at which point the Kleins Road photos stopped being updated. But that doesn't make them obsolete.
More to the point, though, I moved the photos off-site, and that required a considerable restructure of many pages. And sure enough, for the corresponding page for Stones Road I had:
revision 1.185
date: 2018/09/05 03:02:26; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +27 -13
Check for existence of image in photolist.php, not by looking for the
image, which could be anywhere in the Internet.
It seems that I never got round to applying that to the Kleins Road. The two pages are almost identical, and I was able to copy the relevant parts from one script to another, after which it worked.
But only that part. Click on the detail links (for example http://www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-view.php?view=verandah-centre), and you get an empty display. That, too, needs fixing. Mañana.
Just before going to bed, Yvonne let the dogs in. At the door, heard her curse. Cat run out? Called to her, but got no answer. Found a torch (where did I put these things?) and out. Yes, Bruno had seized the opportunity and went out into the dark. After a couple of minutes found him in the hayshed. But where was Yvonne? Somewhere out near the compost heap, where she managed to trip over something in the almost complete darkness. A couple of cuts on her hand and this beauty of a lump on her knee:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
The moral of the story: keep better, brighter torches, and call for help if Bruno escapes.
| Saturday, 4 May 2024 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Woke up at 5:15 this morning. What's that light outside? It was almost as bright as day. But the sun doesn't rise for another 2 hours. Turned around, went back to sleep and woke at 7:15, but couldn't get back to sleep. OK, get up. Looked at my watch. 8:42! My bedside clock was fully 1 hour, 37 minutes slow!
How could that happen? The clock is electronic and synchronizes to mains frequency (which is somewhat fast). It doesn't seem likely that it would fail like that. And then I asked Yvonne. Yes, her clock stopped altogether round 1:15. She looked back quite some time later and it was showing the same time, so she reset it.
So whatever it was, it wasn't my bedside clock, and it seems to have started round 1:00. When I got into the office, I found that tiwi had restarted at 1:28:
May 4 01:05:13 tiwi wh1080[11827]: Rain: 2173.5000003.1
May 4 01:28:01 tiwi syslogd: kernel boot file is /boot/kernel/kernel
May 4 01:28:01 tiwi kernel: ---<<BOOT>>---
May 4 01:28:01 tiwi kernel: Copyright (c) 1992-2021 The FreeBSD Project.
But that was only 23 minutes after the last log message. And no other machines were affected, nor were the clocks in the kitchen. There was also nothing obvious in the PV inverter logs, though they do show a drop in power consumption. I'll need to think more about this.
Rebooting tiwi meant that my weather program didn't get restarted. Once again I had this issue with libmysql.so.18. I suspected that that was due to the fact that the directory usr/local/lib/mysql was a symlink to the directory on eureka. OK, copy the files over and run ldconfig on them.
It still didn't work! I was in the parent directory, so I simply wrote ldconfig -m mysql. And it seems that it doesn't like that. ldconfig -m /usr/local/lib/mysql/ did the trick. And hopefully now that the libraries are local, I won't run into that problem again.
I've been thinking of various ways to eat Ramen noodles for breakfast. One of the more interesting facts is that they really come from China, and the kind I have come from Shandong. I've played around a couple of times, but how about asking an artificially intelligent expert?
To my surprise, Google Gemini came up with a recipe that doesn't look bad. The interesting idea was to fry the noodles until crisp. That didn't work for me, and in general the experiment wasn't very successful. In particular, I didn't know that the Miso was salty, so the overall dish was just barely edible.
In passing, savour this statement:
You can adjust the amount of miso paste in the sauce to your preference. For a stronger miso flavor, add more miso paste.
Mona is gradually settling in well. In particular, she's coming to terms with Bruno. This evening they both sat on my lap:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
There's still a gap between the two of them, but that, too, will pass.
| Sunday, 5 May 2024 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
It was house photo day yesterday. And once again I had issues with the newer version of Hugin that I have on hydra (2023.0.0.d88dc56ded0e) while the older version on eureka (2018.0.0) worked fine.
I use a script that creates the project files (.pto) and then stitches them. Yesterday's panoramas had a number of problems, the most extreme of which was this one (first 2023 Hugin, then 2018 (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
What causes that? The project file is the same in each case, and so is the invocation to build the panorama, in essence
hugin_executor --stitching laundry-door.pto
Could it have something to do with masks? The black area at top left was masked out in one of the component images, but as the second image shows, there was enough information to cover the area, and the greyed-out area to the right of centre is hard to understand.
Writing yesterday's article on my weather program, I checked the current status. Nothing! It seems that it had stopped logging at 17:30 or so yesterday afternoon.
Checking came up with a continual stream of
May 5 07:00:03 tiwi wh1080[111]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5)
May 5 07:00:03 tiwi wh1080[110]: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16)
May 5 07:00:06 tiwi wh1080[116]: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16)
May 5 07:00:06 tiwi wh1080[115]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5)
May 5 07:00:08 tiwi wh1080[119]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5)
What went wrong there? Disconnected and reconnected the USB connection. No change. Power cycled (remove/replace batteries) the internal unit. No change, and it almost immediately communicated with the external unit.
Much searching. Why are there two copies running? I don't recall an execve() in the code. Even more searching showed that I had two copies of the wrapper script running, both started round the same time, and the two processes were fighting each other. How did that happen? Stopping one of them was enough for the other to communicate properly with the device.
Should I put in some kind of lock? No, I don't think so. If I expend any more time on this thing, it should be to adapt to a saner and more reliable device.
Mona and Bruno continue to come closer—too close, maybe. This afternoon I heard a lot of cat growling, and into the lounge room to find Bruno on top of Mona, holding her down by biting her neck—the position that studs use when mating with queens. That's nonsense, of course, since they're both desexed, but where did he get the idea from? Is it something sexual, or just an instinct?
Things got better, and in the evening they were once again together on our laps:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
But it wasn't all that peaceful:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Is Bruno jealous, maybe? It's unlikely, but not beyond the bounds of possibility.
| Monday, 6 May 2024 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
I've been using Jack Hua noodles for some time, and lately it has become clear that they tend to disintegrate after serving. Cooked too long? Well, they don't want them cooked at all, just soaked in hot water from 5 to 8 minutes.
Today I tried that, for 7 minutes. The result was not encouraging:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
So I should try for much shorter softening.
Sixteen years ago I started grumbling about bad language in cooking. In particular, Woolworths renamed many vegetables, the worst being spring onions, which they alternately called shallots (a different vegetable) or “Eschallot”, But today I find that they have seen the light. Here 16 years ago and now:
|
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
To make up for it, they have found a way to obfuscate their own name.
I've been in my current office for nearly 9 years, and in that time a lot has not changed. I still have the same computer and some of the monitors, and the computers under the monitors have also not all changed. Here the only photo I took 9 years ago, and how things look now:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
But I put a couple of audio amplifiers under the leftmost and rightmost monitors. The leftmost was my old Technics SU-3500, but it failed relatively soon after, so I replaced it with a Sansui San110, which ended up under the right-hand monitor.
But that, too, wasn't overly reliable. It works, at least on the right channel, but it irritated me, so I replaced it with a small modern device in September 2020. Both big amplifiers stayed there because they were still holding up monitors.
But now “fognozzle” on Freecycle was looking for old amplifiers, condition not important. OK, he can have both. All I need to do is disentangle them and replace them with a couple of old ThinkCentres (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Straightforward enough, bar the cabling and the accumulated dirt:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
And so it took me half an hour. At least I didn't dislodge anything.
Mona continues to make slow progress. It's rather concerning that Bruno is so aggressive towards her. I think it's really that he doesn't know any better, and Mona handles it well.
This evening she was on my lap when Elena came up to me and wouldn't be discouraged. Mona not amused, didn't want to stay on my lap. So I put her on the floor, where she hissed at Lena and chased her away. That's probably a good lesson for both of them.
| Tuesday, 7 May 2024 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Another network outage round 9:00 this morning, like last week. There was a difference, though: the display on the NTD was different, no signal strength indication at all. Clearly one of the blanket National Broadband Network outages that they're threatening all the time.
OK, now that I can access the MyAussie app without too much pain, let's see what they have to say.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Yes, of course we don't have an NBN connection, which is why I enabled mobile data. But even if I hadn't, “something went wrong” is a cop-out. And despite everything, I wasn't able to access the site:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Report a fault? How? The selection is under the error message here, but there's no way to select a service. In other words, much worse even than I had feared.
The net came back, then went away again. Are we to endure this for several more days?
The Israeli destruction of the Gaza Strip haunts me. How can civilized people behave like that? One reason, of course, is because the Bible tells them to, in Deuteronomy 7. And yes, that passage refers to the arrival of the Jews in the Promised Land and how they should treat the existing inhabitants—exactly the situation in which present-day Israelis find themselves.
Why don't people comment on this? Of course they do. Decades ago David Steinberg (a Jew) wrote an article titled Commandment for Genocide?. Why have the mainstream media not taken issue with this part of the Bible?
More to the point, when will the USA stop supporting this horror? Instead they condemn the anti-Semitism that the Israeli government has inspired in people who can't distinguish between governments and people.
| Wednesday, 8 May 2024 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
While making breakfast this morning, the RCD for the kitchen tripped. That's the same one that has given me pain last month. And on that occasion, too, it happened while cooking breakfast. I had suspected the water kettle then, but there was no obvious connection today. Still, since it also took tiwi down, it might be time to replace the kettle.
The power outage also meant that I had to manually restart the weather monitor on tiwi. As last month, I had to run ldconfig to get the system to recognize it. So it wasn't the symlink. Presumably the issue was that MySQL wasn't installed on tiwi, and the hints file doesn't include the directory. Time to RTFM and check which hints file I should update.
Another two National Broadband Network outages this morning. Clearly we can expect more:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
And reading back in my diary for years gone by, that's nothing unusual. Five years ago today I had exactly the same problem.
| Thursday, 9 May 2024 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Over 5 years ago we bought some ceramic knives and found them excellent—for about 15 months. Then they had started to go blunt, and there's no way to sharpen them. So I'm back to using steel knives, though Yvonne still uses the ceramics. A good idea, but they don't last.
And then four years ago we bought the first of a number of non-stick ceramic frying pans, with which I was really happy. Here an omelette fried with no fat:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
Alas, like the knives, they don't last. Today I made some nasi goreng in another of the pans, a newer one. At the end it looked like this:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
The food stuck so firmly that I couldn't even scrape the remains from the pan. Even after washing it and putting it through the dishwasher, it wasn't clean:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Why is that? Could it be that they're too temperature-sensitive?
Into town this afternoon for my six-monthly blood test. I was asked to fill out a form asking if I had any incidence of prostate cancer (no), or whether a father, brother or son had had it (yes, my father), and acknowledging that I could be up for a bill of $110 otherwise. Clearly it doesn't apply to me, but I got a copy of the form I signed just in case.
Then to Dan Murphy to look for some Aqvavit. They hadn't even heard of it! I'm sure that they once had it, but like Kirsch, it's no longer available, and neither the assistant with whom I spoke nor his iPad knew what it was.
On to the Fruit Shack to look for ingredients for the Beijing Fried Sauce Noodles (Zha Jiang Mian, 炸酱面) recipe that I found at the beginning of the month. Very difficult. There are at least 4 ingredients that I don't know:
Dry yellow soybean paste (干黄酱). They admit that it's unlikely to be found outside China, and the recipe works around that.
Fermented yellow soybean paste (黄豆酱) or ground bean sauce.
Sweet bean paste (甜面酱).
The noodles. The recipe is a bit vague too, but it shows these noodles as an example:
What did I find? A clear indication that I need to understand Chinese better. The only item that I was able to identify definitively was this “sweet bean paste”, which, as advertised, contains no beans:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Then there was this:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Clearly it's not the fermented yellow soybean paste (黄豆酱). But is it related? It wasn't until I got home that I was able to follow the translation (Doubanjiang) to discover that it contains significant quantities of chili, not what I need here.
But then I found this:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Clearly it's Korean. The recipe mentions that something similar is eaten in Korea. But once again further research at home indicates that it's for seafood, as the right of the image shows.
And then the noodles. Almost nothing similar, though these Shanxi planed noodles may be suitable:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
I've had them before, but after a disastrous experience with something similar, I stopped eating them.
So: what do I do? Research other recipes and experiment. That should keep me busy.
| Friday, 10 May 2024 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Alan Mallows, known on Freecycle as fognozzle, along today to pick up the amplifiers that I had extracted for him. I had thought that I knew him, but that was somebody else. An interesting person, currently planning to devote his time to the study of counterpoint. Clearly he has more energy than I. He gave me some interesting leads, notable the Ballarat Repair Cafe and FlashDrive. The latter may be able to do something with Bruce Evans' mutilated computers.
| Saturday, 11 May 2024 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous | next | last |
Last week I reported the problems I had with the new version of Hugin and got a response from Lukas Wirz, who is working on enblend and has recently committed a patch to fix this kind of problem. So I downloaded the latest version of enblend 4.3 from https://sourceforge.net/p/enblend/code/ci/default/tree/, a link that I had to be told about: the home page only offered version 4.2, which is what I had been running. Building had also not been straightforward: the FreeBSD Ports Collection has a too-rigid structure to easily deal with changes of location and archive format, and the README in the archive is seriously in need of correction. But finally I had it compiled, version 4.3-e87da60fab22.
House photo day today, a good day to compare the stitching. Here 4.1.4 (from eureka), 4.2 as released and in the Ports Collection, and my new version 4.3-e87da60fab22 (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
So yes, the latest version is an improvement over 4.2, but not good, and not as good as 4.1.4. Did some more playing around and discovered that it's related to extraneous objects in the component images, notably the panorama bracket and the legs of the tripod, as this component image shows:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
But it's strange how it deals with it. The artefacts don't match the bracket. My guess is that it relates to the image overlaps.
Time to bake bread again today. But somehow my starters are not looking good. Here one of only two months ago:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
There's something on the surface that resembles little worms. I've seen that before years ago :
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
This was with a starter that I bought on eBay 6½ years ago, and the sample in question is about the 45th generation. Time for another one? Or should I consider what I wrote in 2010?
So possibly the form just indicated lack of moisture.
No, I don't think so. But maybe the relatively consistent hydration of the starter makes it easier for other organisms to attack it. Currently I'm using a ratio of 5:4 water to flour, in itself up from 1:1. How about 2:1? Tried that today, with the interesting effect that the mixture immediately produced bubbles:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
But maybe it's time to buy a new starter.
How do you take a photo of a surface with almost no distinguishing marks? Today I found one possibility: you don't. Taking the photo of the infected sourdough starter was easy enough, but I wasn't able to focus on the surface of the uninfected one. The best I got was this:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
And that doesn't bear closer scrutiny:
|
|
|||||||||
There was nothing for the autofocus to focus on, and I couldn't get enough contrast to use focus peaking. I suppose this is the way it always was decades ago, and the reason why so few macro photos were usable.
Seen while walking the dogs today:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
That's a spring flower. And autumn is by no means over yet!
We've had Mona for 3 weeks now, and she continues to settle in:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Bruno is becoming less aggressive, and they seem to be coming together. I have the impression that Mona wants to play too, but she's waiting for him to become gentler. And she's also not as terrified of the dogs any more, though there's still a way to go on that topic.
The current solar weather has given rise to particularly bright Aurora australis and Aurora borealis round much of the world, and they were visible from here—I was told. I went out round 22:00 to take a look, and there was nothing but cloud. Potentially it would improve, but after my experience with the Lunar eclipse 1½ years ago I couldn't be bothered. And despite some searches I couldn't find any photos on line from round here.
| Sunday, 12 May 2024 | Today's diary | Today's images | top | previous |
The sourdough starter that I started yesterday developed much as I had expected, and of course it was much thinner, making it easier to handle. Baked a loaf with it, as planned. The old method had 375 ml of water in the starter, minus 80 g removed for the next starter, and 760 g in the last stage, for a total of 1055 g. The new starter had 600 g of water, minus 128 g removed for the next starter, so I needed an additional 535 g to make my 1055 g. The result was a dough with exactly the same consistency as before.
But it rose so much more quickly and more vigorously:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
I hadn't expected that. Of course, it collapsed a little on baking:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Still, an unexpected change.
Yesterday's comparisons of the output of enblend 4.1.4, 4.2 and 4.3 were revealing, but they don't match the images I used last week. Followed that one up, and got (again, versions 4.1.4, 4.2 and 4.3) (once again, run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
This time the image from 4.3 was almost acceptable, but compared to 4.1.4 it still has serious issues, in particular gradation and a black triangle to the left of the tripod shadow.
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 |
