It's apparently Neri ume, a sauce so obscure that Wikipedia doesn't know it. Google Gemini tells me
Neri plum sauce, or Neri Ume, is a paste made from pickled Japanese plums (umeboshi). It's known for its distinct
sour, salty, and sometimes subtly sweet flavor. It's incredibly versatile and can add a
fantastic tangy kick to many dishes.
We had sushi for dinner tonight.
Gemini had continued with
Sushi Rolls: Use Neri Ume as a filling or accent in maki sushi rolls.
So I tried some with that as a dipping sauce. Probably not the way to go; I'll investigate
the alternatives. Jane uses it for a quick rice dish along with bonito flakes.
Call from Professor
Peter Kistler today to discuss whether Yvonne should
get a stent. Spent some time
getting a laptop running Microsoft for a Zoom call, but this time he just
called on the “phone” (the modern word for “mobile phone”, which at least omits the pain).
We thought it was about stents, but he thought it was about her medication and prescribed
Sotalol instead. Somehow he
hadn't been informed of the chest pain that Yvonne had had a few weeks back. He dismissed the idea that the pain was due to cardiac issue: she
had had an MRI last year. That
doesn't tally with my records, but it suggests that things can't get worse. But what could
be done is to have a pacemaker installed, which would obviate the need for medication, something that Yvonne would like
very much. And Dr
Rodney Reddy can do the implant.
Downsides of a pacemaker? None. But he (Kistler) needs to do a minor ablation a month
after implant to turn the thing on: if it stops, so does the heart. That sounds like a
downside to me. I get the feeling that it's no longer his area, and that another talk with
Reddy would be a good idea.
Saw a link to a video on the Nikon Nikkor 105 mm f/2.5 lens. I
have one of them, one that I got with my Nikon FM2five years ago. I was not overly interested in that lens—I found the 50 mm f/1.4 and
85 mm f/1.4 more interesting. But it seems that the 105/2.5 is also a classic lens, and the
article came up with a lot more information, including pricing that I hadn't expected: he
showed this particular model (AI-s aperture coupling) on sale in Japan for 48,800 ¥,
currently rather over AUD 500, the upper limit of what I established 5 years ago. And that
lens appeared not to have been in as good a condition as mine.
Then there is another article on the lens on
the Nikon web site, which I must read. Other links are here and here.
The Nikon page also has articles on other lenses, including the 85/1.4. A lot more
investigation to do if I ever find the time.
Margaret Swan has left us a truffle. What do we do with it? It's an obvious accompaniment for risotto alla milanese. And that's what you
eat with ossobuco. So ossobuco it was today:
It's been a while since I made ossobuco, so I
checked on the web, including the the Italian Wikipedia site.
Seemed straightforward enough, but to be sure I understood everything I put it through
Google Translate. After that I
understood nothing. The best mistranslation was (original on left, translation on right):
Ingredienti principali
Main Ingredients
Carne bovina
Beef
burro
donkey
“Carne bovina” means “bovine meat”, and the context makes it clear that it should be veal.
But that's nothing compared to translating “burro” as “donkey”. « Burro » means donkey
in Spanish, but
not in Italian.
More playing around (I think a couple of backward and forward translations) led me to even
stranger things:
The ''''''' ( (the (the (the ( : in Milanese. other handwriting; pronunciation: ) is a
typical dish of obtained from the homonymous (the (the (the ).
It's been a long time since I've seen such a mess from Google Translate.
Once upon a time everybody had a can opener, but nowadays most cans have a ring pull. The
tomatoes I used for the Ossobuco didn't, though. Nearly 10 years ago I bought a rather strange opener which removes the entire top,
but somehow I don't like it. So today I found another conventional opener and used that. I
wish I hadn't:
Of course, I should have known better. I had exactly the same pain five years ago with the same opener. It's gone now. I still have an electric one
that I should try again.
Just before going to bed, found another article about the Nikon Nikkor 105 mm f/2.5. He wants it to be reintroduced. Why? Yes, it seems once
to have been a particularly good lens, but that was half a century ago. Only five elements!
Now even prime lenses have up to four times as many elements, and certainly for good
reasons.
Problem: there were only 2.1 portions, according to my notes. OK, make some alu masala. That's not difficult. But then Jane
complained of a cold, and though she did eat something, we didn't finish the biriani, and I
didn't even finish cooking the alu masala. Not a very satisfactory day.
Jane was feeling no better this morning, and she had decided to return home today. She gave
me just enough time to warn Yvonne that she needed to be at
the railway station at 9:30. And almost before we knew it, she was gone.
Somehow I'm getting bored with my breakfast recipes. Today I had a number of leftovers to process, something that I normally do with
nasi goreng, but I didn't feel like
that today. So I made something like my fake pad Thai, just with a different ALDI spice paste and with some Beijing noodles::
The result was different, but not bad. I think it's time to start considering my noodle
dishes as variable, like I have been doing for some time with nasi goreng.
Without Jane, I finally had enough time to look at updating lagoon. It has taken me
less than 6 weeks. Build a new world, update ports to the latest and greatest, fight
the cables holding the thing in place, into Yvonne's office,
fight the cables holding (the old) lagoon in place, install a 16 port switch because
it's all I had apart from an old 10 Mb/s hub, and finally it was in place:
Things weren't perfect. Even before installing the new machine, I ran into cable problems
with the old lagoon: the display no longer connected it. But probably we won't need
that.
For the fun of it, I suspended the system with zzz(8) before moving it and watched
what happened when I powered it on again. As I feared, it booted normally.
OK, fire it up. Why do the NFS file systems not get
mounted?
Mount the file systems, start X. A good semblance
of Yvonne's environment. Just the mouse didn't have middle button emulation, something that
I need to automate:
# Find mouse index. This assumes that the last one in the list is the
# one we're looking for.
MOUSE=`xinput|grep -i mouse|tail -1|sed 's:.*id=::; s: .*::'`
# Look for the index of the enabler.
INDEX=`xinput list-props $MOUSE|grep 'Middle Emulation Enabled ('|sed 's:.*(::; s:).*::'`
# And enable
xinput set-prop $MOUSE $INDEX 1
Then the sizes and fonts of the xterms were wrong. That's a separate issue that I
haven't got round to fixing for over a year now, since the transition to fvwm3. No /var/mail: that's another
symlink to add.
Photo processing? We use distress (a Microsoft box) to run DxO PhotoLab and other stuff. But I can't wake
it. wake(8) needs to be setuid. And then it came up with my credentials instead of
Yvonne's, another configuration issue to look at.
By contrast, sound Just Worked: plug the plug into the output socket, and all is well. I
hadn't expected that.
The big issue, of course, was with web-oriented stuff. Both firefox and Chromium refused to
start. A new device! Chromium was the most helpful:
=== yvonne@lagune (/dev/pts/1) ~ 7 -> chrome [1674:69546526969872:0804/130003.158863:ERROR:chrome/browser/process_singleton_posix.cc:358] The profile appears to be in use by another Chromium process (74466) on another computer (lagoon.lemis.com). Chromium has locked the profile so that it doesn't get corrupted. If you are sure that no other processes are using this profile, you can unlock the profile and relaunch Chromium.
[1674:69546526969872:0804/130003.158884:ERROR:chrome/browser/ui/views/message_box_dialog.cc:198] Unable to show message box: Chromium - The profile appears to be in use by another Chromium process (74466) on another computer (lagoon.lemis.com). Chromium has locked the profile so that it doesn't get corrupted. If you are sure that no other processes are using this profile, you can unlock the profile and relaunch Chromium.
OK, fool, how do I unlock the profile? I've seen this before, but this time I asked
Google Gemini. Simple:
But why can't the browser offer that function, or at least the information?
And then there was WhatsApp,
which wanted her to involve her mobile phone and potentially its horrible glass
keyboard. After about 10 minutes I was able to work out how to do it without the keyboard.
And mail? I installed Postfix, but not its configuration. And the system came up running dma, the DragonFly Mail Agent.
Maybe that's a better choice. First I need to RTFM.
One of the pressing reasons for the upgrade to lagoon was because Yvonne had signed up for a subscription to TRT method, an equine training site that is particularly
fussy about what browsers it talks to. Now that we have the latest and greatest firefox and Chromium, it shouldn't
be a problem, right?
Wrong. First we no longer had a login, which was relatively simple to fix. But when we
did, the videos didn't display. What we got was:
Are those padlock icons an indication that it doesn't like something? It's too polite to
say. Sent off a message to support and got no answer by evening. I have been able to
access the videos before, so it's presumably a bug in their web software.
The alu masala that I made yesterday called for black mustard seed. Where is it? I couldn't find it. All I
had was yellow mustard seed, which had expired about 11 years ago.
How much else has expired? It's time to dispose of really old stuff, say over 10 years old.
And there was plenty of it:
It's gone now, though it hurts. Much of the stuff smelt perfectly usable. But in many
cases we also have newer versions. And somehow the spice shelves don't look any emptier:
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