I've more or less put my attempts to find good denoising photo processing software on hold.
None of them did close to what I wanted.
But there are still issues that I can address. One is a free set of “presets” from
ON1 that I haven't got round to looking at yet.
More and more it seems that presets are the way through the maze of settings, but it's also
a matter of searching, something that I don't like to do.
Another is what I already have: DxO
PhotoLab. I'm sticking to release 5 because there don't seem to be any improvements
in newer versions significant enough to pay the full price to upgrade. And release 5 also
has good denoising, which I use for higher ISO sensitivities.
But is that the only use? Nearly 12 years ago I took a sequence of photos of a kangaroo rescue. They didn't
come out well: flash in the open at night. Here one with particularly large background:
DxO improved the background at the cost of lots of spots which must have been on the lens.
It also produced noise where there was none before, not its fault: the noise was there, just
not visible. Can their “DeepPrime” noise reduction help? Yes. Here without and then with
noise reduction (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its
neighbour):
It seems that the whole world has changed in the ten years since we moved into Stones Road.
Once things were relatively stable, but then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What a horror! I've been
following events since it started, and also taken note of the opinions expressed that the Russsians
would play for time.
But it's difficult to concentrate on Ukraine. Israel has escaleted violence far beyond
anything that anybody could have expected, and almost nobody—certainly not the USA—has lifted a finger to stop their
atrocities. And then came Donald
Trump and turned the established world order upside-down, probably out of stupidity.
Try to win a Nobel Peace
Prize by attacking other countries indeed! And again almost nobody lifted a finger to
stop him. How unimportant Ukraine suddenly seems, though it's really more important than
ever.
All this looks surprisingly like what happened in Europe nearly 100 years ago. Clearly
Trump is different from Adolf
Hitler—he's much more stupid, for one thing—but it's worth investigating in more
detail. The last couple of days I have been watching a ZDF series „Countdown zur Diktatur“ (“Countdown to dictatorship”). While I think it might be overemphasizing some details,
it shows things that I hadn't understood, in particular that Hitler became Reichskanzler because his party had made the Reichstag unable to
pass any legislation—not very different from the situation I see in US Congress now. It's interesting to
note that the Weimar
Republic had 18 Reichskanzler in a little over 14 years.
Last night Yvonne found Bruno sitting in the toilet (room). He stayed
there all night!
Just before midnight I woke up to hear loud scratching. What was he doing? Observing. So
was Mona. The scratching came from
inside the wall! It must have been some rodent, but what? And what do we do about it? We
can't access it.
The scratching stopped after about 20 minutes, but Bruno didn't give up. In the morning I
found:
OK, it's probably legitimate, but I woke up in the middle of the night with the horrible
thought that it might change my network configuration, including the routing of
my /24 (192.109.197.0/24), probably something that people wouldn't think
about for residential customers. After all, the presumed reason for the change was
to remove old hardware, not only in the residence, but also on the wireless tower.
And that could involve upstream changes.
Called up Aussie Broadband and was
connected to Hayden after only 12 minutes' waiting. He knew nothing of the matter. He
raised a fault number for me, but said that any NBN changes would be transparent to them.
Hopefully he was right.
Call from Josh in the early afternoon. He told me that he was from the National Broadband Network, come to install new
NTD and ODU. Can he identify
himself? He was surprised, but he dragged out a couple of IDs on lanyards, one with the
UGL emblem. OK, that's enough. He
expected me to be off the net for round 30 minutes, which proved to be overly pessimistic.
First we were off the air for 7 minutes:
Feb 3 14:07:43 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to DOWN
Feb 3 14:07:54 eureka dhclient[1446]: send_packet: No route to host
...
Feb 3 14:14:17 eureka dhclient: New IP Address (xl0): 121.200.11.253
Feb 3 14:14:17 eureka dhclient: New Subnet Mask (xl0): 255.255.252.0
Feb 3 14:14:17 eureka dhclient: New Broadcast Address (xl0): 121.200.11.255
Feb 3 14:14:17 eureka dhclient: New Routers (xl0): 121.200.8.1
Feb 3 14:14:18 eureka dhclient: New Routers (xl0): 121.200.8.1
Feb 3 14:14:43 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP
It's interesting that dhclient sets its parameters nearly 30 seconds before the
interface comes up. But that wasn't the only time off the net: he had to do some tests,
resulting in:
Feb 3 14:26:30 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to DOWN
Feb 3 14:26:34 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP
Feb 3 14:26:47 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to DOWN
Feb 3 14:26:50 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP
Feb 3 14:27:08 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to DOWN
Feb 3 14:27:10 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP
Feb 3 14:27:17 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to DOWN
Feb 3 14:27:18 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP
Feb 3 14:27:19 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to DOWN
Feb 3 14:28:42 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP
The new hardware looks somewhat different from the old. Here the NTDs, first old, then new:
Clearly I can do that that with the new one too. How hard can it be?
I gave up. First is the position close to the ground behind my office desk. I wanted good
definition, so I set the sensitivity to ISO 200°/24. And that gave me an exposure of 1/10 s
at f/4, the maximum for the lens, too slow for good hand-held. Yes, I could have used a
wider aperture lens, but I was already in trouble with focus. So I needed a tripod.
Oh. Where do I fit a tripod there? I have a toy tripod that doesn't quite fall over with
the camera on top, but the height isn't adjustable. How about propping it up on something,
like a toolbox?
Still too low, but I can lift it a little with my finger. At 1/5 s (and f/5.6) it shouldn't
be an issue. But I couldn't focus it. Presumably I had some setting that I have forgotten
about. In the end, the best I could get was this:
And the white balance is out: too blue on the left, too yellow on the right.
OK, think the unthinkable: what would my mobile phone do? Once again it was difficult to
get a straight photo, especially as I needed to come much closer with the 24 mm equivalent
lens:
I think that the slices are too big. Cut each in two the next time.
Flash success!
So how do I get the photo of the NTD
(NBN) that I failed to get yesterday? An obvious possibility is with ring flash or
some similar arrangement.
I haven't done any serious flash work for some time, and I found my four attachements mixed
up, with the adapter rings all over the place. In particular, the rings don't adapt all
flashes to all potential lenses. Finally I found an adapter for the M.Zuiko 12-100 mm f/4 IS Pro (72 mm) to the mecablitz 15 MS-1. Given my continuous
problems with flash over the last 60 years, what chance would I have?
Surprise: one image! And it worked, even showing the fingerprints that the NTD surface was
designed to collect. Here the photos from abo (my mobile phone), yesterday's
attempts and today (run the cursor over an image to compare it with
its neighbour):
I don't think that I have used it in the intervening 9 years. It's certainly in the same
configuration.
Tricking Mona
I don't know what it is, but Mona loves
sitting in front of the TV, obscuring the bottom of the display. I've chased her away up to
15 times in an hour, and she keeps coming back. Pene Kirk had recommended putting aluminium
foil there, but we found out last month that doesn't help:
Why do people buy old cameras? I do it for the fun of having cameras pivotal to camera
history, or something close to them. The Leica II (really a FED 1), a Kine Exakta (really
an Exakta
II), a Contax 3 (really a
Kiev 3a),
a Contax S (really a a
Contax D), an
Asahiflex I, twoNikon Fs are just the oldest.
They're all obsolete, of course, and even though I have two films waiting to be exposed, I
can't think of anything to do with them.
But for reasons I don't understand, the camera prices are going up. Both of my Nikon Fs,
which together cost $278, have Photomic heads. That's quite a price, in part claimed to be
justified by the fact that the second was all black. But a real Nikon F has a pentaprism.
I've been looking for one for years now, expecting to pay a price round $50. But I
discovered two things: first, most Nikon Fs seem to have been delivered with Photomic heads,
and secondly, the prices are going through the roof. Today I saw the most excessive of all:
a pentaprism, admittedly new, for $1014.93! And since it was in the USA, they wanted $50.74
postage, roughly the price I was expecting to pay for the whole thing. Who buys these
things?
Lately I've been making breakfasts out of leftovers. Today was a good choice: we had
leftover cooked potatoes and leftover egg white. Time for a fake Huevos a la Tigre.
Not an unqualified success. I had intended the dish to be a kind of omelette, but it was
clear from the start that the white stuck to the (steel) pan. Would a “non-stick” pan have
been better? It's not clear, but quite early on I decided to not even try, and instead make
a fake scrambled eggs. That, too, stuck furiously:
That can't just be the pan. It must be the difference between egg white and whole eggs.
More to the point, though, it's boring. And that what I wrote in
the Discussion: section of the recipe years ago:
Somehow there's still something missing, probably spices.
Maybe I should just give it up as a bad job.
Off to Cape Clear
Larissa was due for another
anti-inflammatory injection today. Off to see Pene Kirk, as often before.
The journey is boring. How about a different way to get there? For the fun of it, in
Illabarook I went to Pitfield straight ahead past Cape Clear, which I had
thought would be only a small deviation, instead of turning left to the main road. In fact,
it nearly doubled the distance to Pitfield, from 4.7 km to 9.1 km. And on the map it's
clear what a diversion it was: the “left turn” ended up being almost straight ahead.
Nothing of great interest at Pene's, except that Lara jumped into the back of the car almost
by herself, maybe for the first time ever. She's almost as good as a Yorkshire Terrier. But then I
decided again to try a different route, this time at least as pointless, taking us through
uninteresting countryside, this time extending our 2.2 km to 14.8 km. The result was a
total journey of 95.8 km, when it would normally have been 43.4 km.
Finally we're getting rid of most of the food that we bought for Christmas. Today I ate the
remains of the duck meat for breakfast.
But last time was less than a complete success. Somehow the sauce didn't seem right.
OK, ask the twins. And indeed they came up with some
ideas. Here's what I made:
quantity
ingredient
step
20 g
hoi sin sauce (should have been 10 g)
8.4 g
vinegar (should have been 5 g)
20 g
Oyster Sauce
7.5 g
Light Soya Sauce
2.5 g
Kecap manis
2.5 g
Chinkiang Black Vinegar
3 g
Sesame Oil
1 g
Five-Spice Powder
0.5 g
White Pepper
The “should have been” were based on miscalculation. How was it? Not too bad. The sauce
looked rather strange:
If I find myself in this position again, I should reconsider, but it was better than before.
Making monkeys out of the Obamas
The press is up in arms again. Donald Trump has published (but then retracted) a video showing Barack and Michelle Obama as apes:
That image omits the background, arguably making it less offensive.
The Washington Post quoted Tim
Scott, the sole Black Republican in the Senate, who called it ‘the most racist
thing I’ve seen out of this White House.’
The blatantly racist clip is the latest in Trump’s pattern of promoting offensive
stereotypes about Black Americans and others.
And Trump says that it was taken out of context. For once, he's right. Yes, it's horribly
offensive, but we've come to expect that of Trump. But the Obamas get all the attention,
when in fact a large number of politicians are treated similarly. Al Jazeera published the original, but I
was too slow to download it, and it seems to be gone now. I recognized at least Bill and Hillary Clinton (as some kind of
bovine animal), a turtle (Kamala
Harris?) and Trump himself (as king of the jungle, of course). So homing in on the
Obamas seems to be one-sided. Is it because they're depicted as apes? In my book, apes are
more intelligent than bovines. And somehow the media attention has changed from general
offensiveness to skin colour.
Of course it's offensive and distasteful. But I think he should have left it up so that
more people could have been offended. That way he and his subservient party would be less
likely to prevail in the coming mid-term elections, and Trump could face his third
impeachment.
CDC 7600 in comparison
I have two performance comparisons with the Olden Days: the IBM 3330 disk storage unit and the
Control Data 7600, the fastest
computer on the planed when I started out nearly 60 years ago. It's relatively easy to
compare disks: the 3330 stored 1.6 GB on 8 platters and transferred data at about 800 kB/s.
My fastest disk (eureka:/Photos) holds 16 TB, the equivalent of 10,000 3330s, though
it only transfers data at round 400 MB/s.
But how do you compare computers? Again, Google Gemini has the answer, or maybe more. I asked twice, but lost the first
one. It claimed
Memory and Storage: The CDC 7600 had about 3.8 MB of total memory (65,000 60-bit words). A
typical PC with a 7950X today uses 32,000 MB (32GB) or more—meaning a modern PC has nearly
10,000 times more RAM than the fastest supercomputer of 1969.
That's nonsense, of course. I can't be bothered to check the memory hierarchy, which is not
uniform, but 65,000 60 bit words correspond to 3.9 million bits, or 487,500
bytes. Compared to the 192 GB of main memory on hydra, that's a factor of about
394,000. But at least I have some kind of guideline. The more interesting part was
performance: 36,000 times faster if you go via floating point (double precision, since
that's all that the 7600 did).
Jesse Walsh along for garden work today, including still more sprinkler maintenance.
Somehow this is more work than it should be, and the current situation is evident:
Will they survive? I hope so, though the Ginkgo is hardly any larger than it was 10
years ago, so I could accept that dying.
Inside, we finally got round to moving the Curry tree onto the verandah—it should
have gone there in November. And then there was the issue of the sliding door to the
verandah. Which rollers? Oh. They're not damaged. But after putting the door back again,
it still jammed. Jesse thinks that WD-40 would be the answer.
Somehow this is all so frustrating.
Free electricity?
The transition from fossil
fuels to photovoltaic power has an interesting side effect: in the middle of the day there is more electric power
available than needed. That was once the case in the middle of the night, giving cheaper
rates then for things like heaters. But now they've started offering power for free
in the middle of the day.
I wish I had known that last year, when I was offered a completely inappropriate PV upgrade.
But is it worth it? I need to do some long, hard thinking. My electricity bill currently
runs to round $2,500 per year. Add, say, a 30 kWh battery and charge it from the grid
during the 3 free hours, and that could drop to round $500, assuming a certain amount of
guesswork. Assuming a 10% would make it worthwhile to pay up to $20,000 for a new battery.
Can I get one for that? Yes, according to the twins.
The down side? The energy market is changing significantly, as the “free” power shows. My
guesswork bases on it being available for 10 years. Will it be? Much thinking to be done.
The twins are also to be approached with caution. They write
Most [installers] offer free site inspections to see if your roof can support the large PV
array needed to actually fill a 30 kWh battery daily (usually requires 15 kW+ of panels).
That's greatly underestimating things. I have 10.8 kW of panels, and they only fully charge
my 6.4 kWh battery on sunny days. To charge a 30 kWh battery, I would need at least 50 kW
of panels. But the twins ignore the free power, though they knew about it earlier in the
discussion.
As always, my interest was in the flavour. Which should I try? “Korean style BBQ”,
whatever that means. It wasn't until I looked more carefully that I discovered that all the
packages had the same contents, udon noodles with dried vegetables and sauce, and in this case sesame seed that they claimed was toasted,
all neatly packaged in a single-use plastic bowl:
BBQ? That's a misspelt abbreviation for “barbecue”. Where's the meat? And the
packaging states “Suitable for Vegetarians and Vegans”! But it contains not even a
suggestion of how to make a full dish out of it. Instead the whole thing is supplied in a
microwaveable bowl, but the instructions state to put it into what seems to be another:
Still, who wants to eat from a plastic bowl like that?
It also states “Australian Standard Metric 250 mL measuring cup used”, though it
doesn't say where. It's not in the recipe.
OK, I was thinking of something like bulgogi. How can I help? Take a slice of raw beef, marinate in soya sauce and
garlic, then fry. Put the instant ingredients in a serving bowl, first with the dried
vegetables and a drop of water, then the rest:
And it didn't taste bad. I should look at a bottle of a similar sauce that I have had for
ages. But these stupid single use plastics! The rest go back:
That sounds highly unlikely. It was quite a run-down cinema, though it did have a stage
that had seen better days, and which was quite noisy. But nowadays it's easy to check on
things like that. Maybe. Asking the twins tells me:
Based on historical records (as this information is not present in our immediate context),
Margot Fonteyn performed in Taunton on March 4, 1952.
Venue: She performed at the Gaumont Palace (now the site of the Mecca Bingo hall).
Well, March 1952 isn't exactly February 1963, though it seems that the venue matches. What
other information do I have? Again the twins: “Where did Margot Fonteyn perform in February
1963, and what ballet was it? ”
In February 1963, Margot Fonteyn performed with The Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House,
Covent Garden in London.
On February 7, 1963, she performed in Swan Lake alongside Rudolf Nureyev. This was a
significant milestone in their legendary partnership as it marked the first time they
danced Swan Lake together at the Royal Opera House.
So the time and the ballet match my recollections. What do other AI bots say? ChatGPT is (currently) inaccessible,
Claude offered me all sorts of things that it
didn't before, but not a question interface, and DeepSeek came up with a vague answer
suggesting that she had been rehearsing Marguerite and Armand all
month before premiering on 12 March. I think I'll go with Gemini.
But then there's Wikipedia,
which tells me that she performed Swan Lake on 7 and 12 February, so the time frame matches.
How accurate is that? Hard to say. I didn't pluck the name Fonteyn out of nowhere.
I did guess that the ballerino was Rudolf Nureyev. But I've had a
similar situation where my guess was almost certainly wrong: five months earlier my uncle Bob got a
(presumably free) box at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane for my sister and me to watch My
Fair Lady. Afterwards we went backstage and met the troupe. Who were the leads then?
Julie Andrews and
Rex Harrison.
Did I really meet them? No, I don't think so. My uncle was with a backup troupe about to
go to South Africa, and they must have done the performance on the off day of the main
troupe.
Probably the most interesting thing about the matter is that I can now research this kind of
thing, which would never have been possible 50 years ago.
... Taunton this week by the visit of the Royal Ballet to the Gaumont Theatre. On
Wednesday evening. I saw the company perform ' Swan Lake,' that supreme champion of all
classical ballets. Despite the appalling weather conditions, which had led to many
bookings ...
It confirms Royal Ballet, Gaumont and Swan Lake, but not Fonteyn. “Wednesday” was 6
February, which doesn't match well with a performance in London on 7 February. And the
article doesn't mention Fonteyn, though I have to pay to read more. On that day, though,
I did mention Swan Lake in my diary. So quite possibly it was a second troupe, like
“My Fair Lady”. Now if I were not so convinced that it was Fonteyn...
Getting up this morning, Mona followed
me into the bathroom with a live mouse in her mouth. She had to play with it, of course,
and it got away and disappeared under the kitchen cupboards. By the time I had my camera,
all I could get was this:
It can't be more than 5 mm high. How does a normal sized mouse (chest round 30 mm) get
through there? And in passing, I wish I had shown that to these idiots from JG King and DBDRVsome years ago, where they determined that the floor was flat.
Herzog decries antisemitism
The president of Israel,
Isaac Herzog, is visiting
Australia. Many people are not pleased, neither by the Israeli genocide, in which many
people see him as complicit, nor the preferential treatment that he received in the wake of
the 2025 Bondi Beach
shooting. This article gives one (distorted) viewpoint.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said antisemitism has been "festering" in Australia since
the October 7 attack in Israel.
Yes, Bougie, you've finally understood. But you're probably blaming the wrong people. The
people resonsible for the current increase in antisemitism are the Israeli government, you
very much included. I mentioned this over a year ago. Will they ever learn?
Bad labelling
Cooked some rendang this
evening, from this paste:
For the 500 g of meat that I had, it needs 200 g of coconut cream. OK, I have that much in
the freezer. It wasn't labeled, but it was clear what it was. But it wouldn't melt:
I don't know what it really was, but it must have been some kind of pasta. Won ton wrappers maybe? I really should
ensure that I have good labels on these things. I still have some green tomato paste in the
fridge that I had mistaken for salsa di pomodoro.
Oh. This is the M.Zuiko
Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO, which has a switch for turning on image
stabilization (why?). And not for the first time, I have accidentally turned it off.
And while I was looking at it, another thing occurred to me:
That's something like an oat flake, and it had somehow found its way into the lens cap. It
had almost completely disappeared until I prised it out. How did that happen?
Still more leftover breakfasts
Somehow the leftovers never end. Today I had some braised vegetables that I had frozen 8
years ago and then thawed by accident (inadequate labelling). There was also some rice.
Add some dòufu and fry, and it made a surprisingly good breakfast:
I'm currently experimenting with Thai dried shrimp (and not prawns), and on the advice of the twins I put in a single shrimp (about 1 g, I would
guess). That's silly, of course: I had nothing to compare it to.
More finance issues?
Into town today to see my finance adviser, Peter O'Connell. I've been doing business with
him for nearly 19 years, but I haven't
seen him in person for nearly 7 years.
He had some new ideas: transfer most of the SMSF to a company called Netwealth,
who would do all that he can for less money (specifically, $3,186.50 per annum). As a
result, he no longer accepts SMSFs under $1 million (I'm way
below that). I'm still trying to get my head around the differences, one of
which affects the cash that's in the portfolio, currently a sixth of the total. And it
seems that we would have to split the SMSF into two, one for Yvonne and one for me, which could potentially be a problem. But my main concern is online security,
which the finance industry seems not to understand. With PPT I can go in person, obviating online issues. And that
seemed worthwhile: one of the documents he gave me was the Ongoing Fee Consent Arrangement
that had been sent to me by a company probably called Fusesign, who have sent me numerous forged messages
claiming to be PPT and asking for personal data. How would that work with Netwealth?
New glasses
While in town, also picked up my new reading glasses. They're just what I asked for, but
not what I want: the frames are really ugly, but that seems to be about all that Specsavers offer any more. And the
“near” glasses with +8 dioptre were only +5 dioptre, because that was the maximum that their system would accept. Still,
it's better than nothing.
Hamburgers? Beefburgers?
Occasionally we eat home-made hamburgers, with which we have problems. Apart from the difficulty in finding good
hamburger buns, they get soaked through, presumably because the thawed-out patties exude too
much moisture. How about “sizzling steaks”? They're 50 g steaks intended for quick fries,
but which I use for breakfasts.
Tried that today. Bloody Woolworths!
Without warning or notification they have changed the size from 50 g (8 steaks in a 400 g
pack) to 66⅔ g (6 steaks)! Somehow we cut them up and ate them. Yes, they're edible. But
somewhat too tough to eat in a bun. We'll go back to patties, and I'll try to find a way to
get them drier.
Her pulse rate was 44 the first time I measured it. Too much sotalol? That's one of the side effects.
The pulse improved to mid-60 in the afternoon, and she took her dose then. By evening she
was feeling much better.
One of the issues with this kind of episode is to know how seriously to take it, and when to
call in outside help.
BSDCan keynote
I'm on the committee for an annual
BSD conference. Who's going to hold the
keynote talk? After some discussion, I proposed a prominent representative of Free Software whom I
know. Good idea! Ask him! And he said yes, and was even prepared to find
funding. Wonderful.
And then today I get a message from one of the conference organizers telling me that there
would be no keynote. Call him off.
WHAT? You don't just chop and change. What does that do for the reputation of the
conference? What does it do for my reputation? Why don't people communicate any
more?
Where do I start? Well, of course, I started long ago, some time in May 2009, with my
Greg's camera equipment page. But
that's chronological rather than by importance. What I have now looks like this:
Spent much of the day trying to pick up yesterday's mess, considerably affecting my mood. Friday the 13th indeed!
Oak recovery?
Last week Jesse Walsh did some work on the sprinklers, not before time. It's been a
dry summer, and some trees might not survive, though I suspect that this 90 cm high oak may:
Is that an improvement? It's hard to say. I thought so at the time, but I can't point to
anything.
Home-made chips
I've been trying to make potato chips at home for some time now. It's surprisingly
difficult: the deep fryer I have, a Breville, insists on powering on prepared to fry
chips, but the controls are unbelievably difficult to use, and the temperatures are just
plain lies: the first step is set to 130° and 3 minutes, but it heats the fat to 150° before
showing 130°. And in every attempt I have made so far, the chips are ready long before the
time is up.
My first attempt was with my newest mandolin, which was a failure, though the overall results weren't too bad. So I
bought a custom cutter, which is remarkably flimsy. I fear that it will break before long.
I've looked for alternatives, but it seems to be about the only device on the market.
So: could both of these issues be because I'm using raw potatoes? What happens if you cook
them? Tried that today, aiming for boiling them for 10 minutes. But I forgot and gave them
28 minutes.
That was interesting: after cooling down, they went through the chip cutter most of the way,
but then stuck together again:
That surprised me. They stuck together so well that many couldn't be separated. After
cooking (second image), the middle chip shows a line where it should have been separated,
but even then it was almost impossible. And for some reason the ends of the chips remained
in the cutter:
OK, Google Gemini, how can I use that in a
stir fry?
Tha answer wasn't surprising, but some of the
details are useful, in particular how to slice it and how to fry it. Apart from that, it's
pretty much in line with my normal stir-fries:
Why exactly these ingredients and quantities? To use up leftovers. The quantity of soya
sauce was at the last minute to make up for a misjudgement; probably I should have used more
of the other ingredients.
Those were volunteers. It doesn't seem worthwhile to cultivate something you can get more
easily in the shops. I discovered something similar five years ago today: 10 fruit from 15 plants.
BOM continues to impress
While looking through an old diary, found a URL that I hadn't seen for a while: https://www.bom.gov.au/places/vic/KFC2/. That has nothing to do with fast food:
it's the old URL for the local Dereel weather forecast. And in true BOM fashion, it doesn't agree with the new
one.
I read a news article recently stating that a large number of users are still using the old
site. I wonder why. But then, neither forecast (with claims of current local temperature)
has much to do with reality. As I write this, the outside temperature is 32.2°. But the
old one claims that the current temperature is 27.3° and the maximum temperature (which I
expect in a couple of hours) will be 30°, and the new site claims 26.8° and 29°.
I can understand that predicting the future is difficult, but they can't even get their act
together (nor, for that matter, predict the past when they're out of sync).
What should I eat for breakfast? I wasn't very hungry, so how about another Buldak?
Last time it was so hot that it nearly blew my head off. How about using only half
of the chili sauce? And add some of my standard additions: chicken, choi sam and spring onions:
I think I'll separate the components. Eat the noodles normally, and find something else to
do with the chili preparation.
Web site performance problems
After my frobbing in December to reject crawlers with invalid User-Agent specification, my web
servers are roughly back to normal, to the point where I wonder whether it's worth having
two. But today I had long delays again loading pages, in the order of 15 to 30 seconds.
What's causing that? Some change I made to my PHP scripts? I couldn't see anything. How do
you address a problem like that?
More bread links
Found today on Chefkoch.de, a not overly interesting German cooking site: a collection of bread recipes. At the moment they don't look overly interesting either, but it's probably
worth looking more carefully.
Another AI view of Grog
While looking for something completely different, found this on a Google Search:
LEMIS (Lehey’s Engineering and Management Information Systems,
http://www.lemis.com/index.php) is an IT consultancy and educational site operated by Greg
Lehey, a well-known figure in the FreeBSD community. It serves as a repository for
technical documentation, including the "Complete FreeBSD" book, and provides insights on
Unix history, C programming, and system administration. Key aspects of LEMIS
(http://www.lemis.com/) include:
Documentation & Books: It features extensively documented guides, notably "The
Complete FreeBSD," which covers installation, configuration, and administration of the
operating system.
Technical Insights: The site offers in-depth articles, such as
analysis of the SCO-Linux controversy, and discussions on C programming nuances.
Open Source Advocacy: LEMIS contributes to, and documents, the
FreeBSD project, which is known for its permissive licensing and stability.
Historical Context: The site provides historical perspectives on
the development of BSD and UNIX.
Permissive Nature: BSD licenses allow for free modification, redistribution, and
commercial use with minimal restrictions.
BSD Licensing (via LEMIS/Klara Systems context): Key Requirements: Users must retain the
copyright notice, list of conditions, and disclaimer in source or binary forms.
Variants: The 3-clause license protects against unauthorized endorsement, while the
2-clause (FreeBSD) license removes this restriction for greater simplicity.
Commercial Use: Unlike GPL, BSD-licensed software can be incorporated into proprietary,
closed-source products.
For those learning about FreeBSD or Unix internals, the site offers practical, hands-on,
and often humorous advice from experienced system administrators.
That's an interesting view. And where did they get that expansion? LEMIS stands for (or
stood for) „Lehey Microcomputersysteme“.
What is it? It's clearly a relatively large animal, given the long thin part. But where
does the short fat one fit in? I'm guessing a kangaroo. Yvonne thinks that it's human.
But the instructions state to add 155 ml of water. The result tasted of almost
nothing, so I added 20 g of Por Kwan mild beef paste (about half the quantity for a normal
soup). The results still weren't enough. Basically, it tastes of nothing. And I have two
other pouches like that with other flavours. What do I do with them?
More web site overload
So why are my web sites so slow? I can access them easily with a shell, but accessing the
web pages can take up to 25 seconds.
I suspected that I had broken something in my PHP scripts, but what? But there's an easy way
to test: download a straight, no-frills HTML page without PHP. And that was just as slow, so the PHP scripts weren't to
blame.
Network issues? Time to run tcpdump or Wireshark. But before I could start, I hit another dreaded overload, like I had last
year, with both web sites going to load averages over 100. No testing possible. In fact,
access was also pretty impossible.
What was it? More rogue crawlers that bypassed my “fake ancient browser” test? The one
that was most obvious was
No, that's a modern browser signature. I can't block that. OK, how about firewalling it
and seeing what happens? Oh, ptr.cnsat.com.cn doesn't have a DNS A record! Fix the
logging and get (at the start of the log entry)
Multiple IP addresses that point to the same name! And further investigation shows that the
parent domain doesn't have an A record either, just MX records pointing to a different
domain. So I felt justified in firewalling them.
And it made an enormous difference. They were sending up to 60 requests a second!
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/1) /usr/local/etc/apache24 77 -> ipfw add 1111 deny ip from 202.46.62.0/24 to any 01111 deny ip from 202.46.62.0/24 to any
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/1) /usr/local/etc/apache24 81 -> ipfw show 1111; sleep 1; ipfw show 1111 01111 3525 233016 deny ip from 202.46.62.0/24 to any
01111 3586 236672 deny ip from 202.46.62.0/24 to any
The second column is the number of requests. It gradually dropped off, but only gradually.
And in the meantime John Marshall told me that he was getting snappy response
from www.lemis.com, so whatever the first problem was, it was gone. We're guessing
that there was some network constriction that only applied between Aussie Broadband and Vultr. At least one less thing to worry
about.
Keeping cats interested
I can't blame Bruno for being
hyperactive. He has nothing to do. Once again, Google Gemini to the rescue. It came up with some interesting ideas. One was to put some cat food in an egg carton and let them scoop
it out:
That worked, up to a point. But they'd have to be very hungry to stay at it. We'll keep an
eye on it.
Photo fail
Why were the photos of the cats in black and white, and of such poor quality? Finger
problems: I had the camera set on manual (1/250 s, f/10, ISO 200/24°) instead of automatic
exposure. The result was nearly 7 EV underexposed, the difference
between f/1.4 and f/14. It's amazing that anything was visible at all. But why do I do
these things?
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