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| Greg's diary |
| August 2025 |
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| Friday, 1 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 1 August 2025 |
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Jane Ashhurst arrives
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Topic: general, animals, food and drink | Link here |
Jane Ashhurst arrived today for a weekend. Yvonne had her first chance to drive her new car alone when she went to pick her up. Bruno was delighted:
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Jane brought an interesting paste with her:
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.
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Next cardiac choice
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
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.
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Nikkor 105/2.5
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
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 FM2 five 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.
| Saturday, 2 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 2 August 2025 |
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Signs of the times
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Topic: history | Link here |
Seen in my calendar today:
3/4 life: Wednesday, 17 May 2006
May 17 Greg last flew in an aeroplane, 2006
At the time I didn't realize what a turning point that was.
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Ossobuco
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Topic: food and drink, general | Link here |
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:
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Google Translate fail
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Topic: food and drink, language, technology, opinion | Link here |
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.
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Opening cans
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
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:
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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.
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Yet another Nikkor 105/2.5 article
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
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.
| Sunday, 3 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 3 August 2025 |
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Too much cooking
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Topic: food and drink, health, opinion | Link here |
Somehow yesterday's cooking exhausted me. I had planned huevos rancheros for breakfast and beef with orange and broccoli for dinner, but one after the other I found it too difficult. Instead I thawed out some lamb pilau biriani for the evening meal.
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.
| Monday, 4 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 4 August 2025 |
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Goodbye, Jane
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Topic: health, general | Link here |
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.
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More breakfast noodle experiments
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
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::
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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.
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lagune, finally
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
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:
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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:
=== yvonne@lagune (/dev/pts/1) ~ 7 -> rm .config/chromium/Singleton*
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.
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TRT: Still no access
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Topic: technology, multimedia, animals, opinion | Link here |
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:
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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.
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Old spice
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
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:
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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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| Tuesday, 5 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 5 August 2025 |
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Scale accuracy
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Last monh I found problems with my bathroom scales, and since ALDI had them on special, bought a second set to compare. The results were not good:
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The new scales are the ones on the left, and they showed less than the ones I had, though not consistently. Here it's 700 g less, but it varies. So, since they're on special and can be returned, we bought two more of them. They're all broken! I've established that my existing scales show the same as Yvonne's, or maybe 100 g more. But what I had from the new ones was, compared to the existing scales:
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In more detail:
| Scale | Average | Max | ||||||||||
| difference | ||||||||||||
| 1 | -0.5 | -0.5 | -0.3 | -0.8 | -0.53 | 0.5 | ||||||
| 2 | -0.8 | -0.6 | -0.2 | -0.4 | -0.5 | 0.6 | ||||||
| 3 | -2.8 | -2.4 | -1.6 | -2.5 | -2.33 | 1.2 | ||||||
So not only do they disagree with each other, they disagree with themselves from one reading to the next. Back they go, of course, but I'm really quite disappointed that they're that bad. I'm reminded of the German homonyms „Waage“ (weighing scales) and „vage“ (vague, inaccurate).
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Kangaroo crossing
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Walking the dogs today, saw this:
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Nothing unusual, but a particularly clear view of how kangaroos move across soft ground.
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Suffering Alyogyne
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Somehow our Alyogyne huegelii is not doing well. It has been windy recently, but I didn't think it enough to cause this kind of damage:
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Should I maybe try to plant another one in a more protected position?
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Ossobuco: worth the trouble?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Ate some more of Saturday's ossobuco today. Somehow it wasn't cooked enough (only 2 hours, as specified). Next time, if there is a next time, it will be 4 hours. But somehow it's boring. We should find better ways to eat truffles.
| Wednesday, 6 August 2025 | Dereel | |
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80 years since what?
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Topic: history, opinion | Link here |
Eighty years ago today, a nuclear warhead was dropped on a city in Japan, completely obliterating it. Have people become more civilized since then? I don't know. But it's sad to note the almost complete lack of mention of the incident in the world's newspapers.
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Jane left something behind
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
Woke up this morning with a scratchy throat, and Yvonne was also not feeling her best. It seems that Jane didn't leave soon enough to avoid infecting us. So far it's not serious, and hopefully it'll blow over soon.
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Reducing orange juice quality
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Topic: health, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Things have quietened down in the USA, though their supreme leader continues to cause pain. But today I read an article in the Washington Post: they're planning to reduce the amount of sugar in orange juice in the USA. What? That would ruin it.
It seems that the sugar content of current US orange juices is round 24 g per 8 oz glass. Yes, that's their bizarre measurement, and clearly they're 8 US fluid ounces, 29.573 ml and thus 4% more than an Imperial fluid ounce. Reducing to sane measurements, that's rather more than 10% w/v of sugar. And they're talking about reducing the allowable sugar quantity from 18 g to 17 g in an unspecified serving (I'm guessing at 7.2% w/v):
The FDA sets a minimum standard for the sugar content in order to call a drink “pasteurized orange juice,” the kind commonly sold at grocery stores without added sugars. If manufacturers fall below that threshold, they are essentially no longer allowed to call their products “pasteurized orange juice.”
What a horrible thing to do to sugar-addicted US Americans!
And here was I thinking that pasteurization was a process to prevent things going bad and had nothing to do with the composition. I took a look at our fresh Australian orange juice. 9.8 g/250 ml, still a strange measurement, but which clearly corresponds to 3.92% w/v. That's OK: it's not pasteurized, and it's more than sweet enough for my taste. Why do they pasteurize orange juice in the USA? Pasteurization doesn't improve the flavour. Do they have unpasteurized juice with less sugar? The juice in our fridge has a use-by date of 27 September, and we didn't buy it all this week.
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lagune: the next fix
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yvonne went shopping today, time to do some very little work on lagune. It's mainly working now, but mutt wasn't working correctly. It seems that the port didn't install /usr/local/lib/.muttrc (a strange place). Copying the file from lagoon fixed that, but we still have issues with the fonts.
And then there's this frustrating mail(1) program. It's part of the base installation of FreeBSD, but mailutils, a port dependency that I don't need directly, installs its own mail(1) in /usr/local/bin. And /usr/local/bin is in front of /usr/bin in my PATH. The result:
=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) /var/tmp 64 -> mail grog@lemis.com
Cc: fdafdasf
Subject:
(Interrupt -- one more to kill letter)
That Subject: prompt is the key. It shouldn't be there, and for reasons I have long forgotten, this version of mail(1) doesn't work well for me.
=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) /var/tmp 65 -> wh mail
15464781 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 216136 15 Jul 11:12 /usr/local/bin/mail
8976076 -r-xr-xr-x 3 root wheel 105296 4 Aug 11:40 /usr/bin/mail=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) /var/tmp 66 -> chmod -x /usr/local/bin/mail=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) /var/tmp 67 -> hash -r=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) /var/tmp 70 -> pkg which /usr/local/bin/mail
/usr/local/bin/mail was installed by package mailutils-3.19
Done!
| Thursday, 7 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 7 August 2025 |
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Under the weather
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Topic: health | Link here |
Yvonne was feeling decidedly seedy today and spent most of the day in bed. I wasn't feeling nearly as bad, though I also had sniffles and a cough. Hopefully it will soon be over.
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What's that stuff?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Found this in my washbasin in the course of the day:
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What is it? And how did it get there? My best bet is that it's something off a plant, but what? And how did it get there? Until proof of the contrary, it's a cat.
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cron on lagune
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Did relatively little work on lagune today. On the one hand, there isn't much to do, and on the other hand Yvonne is not very interested in her computer at the moment. But I can't get cron to run! Well, it runs and writes to its log file, but it doesn't do what I put in crontab. How do I debug that?
| Friday, 8 August 2025 | Dereel → Cape Clear → Dereel | Images for 8 August 2025 |
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Health
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Topic: health, general | Link here |
Yvonne was still feeling under the weather today, and she spent most of the day in bed. I wasn't feeling too bright myself. It started off alright, but by evening I was feeling decidedly unwell, although I didn't have any outward symptoms, and we went to bed 2 hours early.
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Off to Pene
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Yvonne had an appointment with Pene Kirk today to give Larissa one of her periodic injections. So I took her, seeing Pene for the first time in months. All over there and back in 45 minutes.
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lagune: cron and dma gang up
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So why doesn't cron work on lagune? Why, doesn't cron work on lagune? After some searching discovered that it did, but the mail system (dma, the DragonFly Mail Agent) wanted some configuration after all:
--- dma.conf 2025/06/26 10:49:45 1.1
+++ dma.conf 2025/08/08 02:21:45
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
#
# Your smarthost (also called relayhost). Leave blank if you don't want
# smarthost support.
-#SMARTHOST
+SMARTHOST mx0.lemis.com
# Use this SMTP port. Most users will be fine with the default (25)
#PORT 25
@@ -60,4 +60,4 @@
# MASQUERADE herb@ert will send all mails as herb@ert
# Directly forward the mail to the SMARTHOST bypassing aliases and local delivery
-#NULLCLIENT
+NULLCLIENT
After that, cron was able to send me its error messages, and I got things working. But it still doesn't explain why the @reboot line didn't work.
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Preparing photos for printing
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Once upon a time, all photos were printed, with the exception of slides and the ones I postponed for another day. But since we have computers and digital photos, I almost never do it any more. The last time was 3½ years ago, and it was enough fun in itself. But now Bev Smith wants some prints of the photos I took at the end of last month, and she wants to put them in a frame. That's more complicated: I need to crop them to a standard format. Which of these photos is best?
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Arguably none of them, but I don't get much choice. The first is the ridiculously wide rendition from my mobile phone, the second a 3:2 ratio (like 35 mm cameras and their modern successors) which could be printed at 8"×12", and the third a 5:4 ratio suitable for printing at 8"×10". While it's surprising how little difference there is (the native Micro Four Thirds system format of 4:3 falls in between at 1:1.333), I need to make a decision on every single photo. And that was a real pain.
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Cleaning up the bathroom cupboard
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne is coughing a lot, and I'm coughing too. She found some Strepsils in the medications Jane left behind, but they're for sore throats, not coughing. And in any case, I have some.
Do I? Where are they? Before I knew it, I was removing everything from the cupboard under the washbasin:
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Lots of stuff that I had completely forgotten about, the cruft of 10 years, much of which interested Bruno:
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Yes, two different kinds of Strepsils, varying only in flavour. And yes, two different kinds of cough mixture, one this horrible Senega & ammonia mixture that I got 6 years ago, and another one that I bought on the following day. We both tried it with uncertain results.
| Saturday, 9 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 9 August 2025 |
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Gradual recovery
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Topic: health | Link here |
Feeling a lot better this morning, arguably normal. Yvonne wasn't, and it took her all day before she started feeling relatively comfortable.
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Jack Hua revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I've been cooking the Jack Hua rice noodles in advance for ever, but last time I tried cooking them immediately before incorporation into the dish, somewhat hampered by not knowing the correct cooking time. Now I know it: instead of one minute in advance, I need 5 minutes: clearly the pre-cooked noodles soften in the meantime.
Today I did it again, and discovered that the noodles have a completely different texture, softer and slightly sticky, somewhat like Kway Teow. To my taste they're much better like that. I liked the noodles before, but this way they're even better, and they don't disintegrate.
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avidemux again
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Topic: multimedia, animals, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne was feeling much better in the afternoon, with the result that she went out and took some video of her horses.
Oh. That requires avidemux, which has caused me pain for over 10 years. I had seen it as the last frontier of bringing lagune up to speed.
OK, nothing for it, bite the bullet. It ran as slow as molasses—so did rdesktop to distress. But both ran without any further problems.
Hopefully the speed issues are related to running over NFS; I wouldn't put it past this kind of program to issue single sector I/O. Now that it's working in principle, I can move the photo disks from lagoon to lagune and then retire lagoon.
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Dak galbi?
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Topic: food and drink, language, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne was still feeling not hungry this afternoon and only wanted a soup. OK, time for me to look at one of the myriad spice pastes that I had bought without thinking that I would have to eat them alone. These three single-server Korean ones sprung to mind:
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The fine print (and Korean text) show that the first is really Bulgogi, the second is Jeyuk Bokkeum, and the third is Dak Galbi. But look at that spelling: 닭갈비. I've never seen the bottom of the first syllable before. It looks like a ㄹ, variously an r (at the beginning of a syllable) or an l (at the end), followed by a ㄱ (g or k). So I would have read that syllable as dalk or dark, not dak. High time to brush up on my Korean lexicography.
The second two promise Gochujang and “hot and spicy”, just what I need. What else do I need? For the Da[rl]?k Galbi, 250 g of cabbage amongst other things. So it's the Jeyuk Bokkeum. 280 g of pork for one serving! I ended up using 240 g, and it still seemed far too much:
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The result didn't look too bad:
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And of course it was far too much for a single serve. But it didn't taste too bad.
| Sunday, 10 August 2025 | Dereel | |
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Beef, broccoli and orange again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
As planned for last weekend, finally got round to cooking beef with orange and broccoli. To my surprise, the broccoli, now 10 days old, was still in perfect condition. And I skipped deep frying the meat, which on the one hand saved some work, but it left the meat unevenly cooked. I think that deep frying is really an improvement. And there wasn't enough sauce. More seriously, Yvonne decided that she doesn't like the orange peel, which is the whole point of the dish. I wonder if we can salvage the rest. Or maybe it would work with thin strips of peel.
Part of the process was to grind a star anise. Where is it? Oh, there, expired in March 2010. That was one that got away from my purge last week. Fortunately I found some fresh star anise, and it's amazing how much stronger the aroma is. I wonder if I should dispose of other spices that are “only” 5 years old.
| Monday, 11 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 11 August 2025 |
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Tonkotsu? Zum Kotzen!
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Tried another “instant noodle” dish today, ALDI's “Tonkotsu ramen":
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OK, how do I cook it? It's described on the back in tasteful condensed 5 point white on pale green text. Even when I enlarge it, it's still difficult to read:
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OK, identify the tonkotsu sauce and dehydrated vegetable sachets:
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And yes, this is the side with the “text”. There's nothing at all printed on the other side. It's a process of elimination. Next, where do I put it? They supply a microwave oven proof container and lid:
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But the instructions are explicit: put the ingredients in a “microwave safe” bowl. That doesn't sound as if they're referring to what they supplied. But more to the point, it makes sense to put them in the bowl from which they will be eaten:
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It's not very much water, only 220 ml. Normally I'd put between 280 and 320 ml. And there's clearly not much in there apart from noodles and dried vegetables. OK, add half a boiled egg, some small cooked prawns and a bit of chopped spring onions:
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How was it? It could easily have been the worst instant dish that I have had, but last month I had worse. This just tasted of nothing. After some soya and chili sauces it tasted better, mainly of soya and chili sauce. A revelation, to be sure: who eats this junk? And of course I find my word play appropriate: in German, „zum Kotzen“ means “to make you vomit”.
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Printing photos
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Harvey Norman have a special on photo printing at the moment, finishing tomorrow. When tomorrow? They're too polite to say. So to be on the safe side, I should order Bev Smith's photos today. How hard can it be?
Terrible!
The problem? It started with me not being able to log in, though I have an account. Stupidly, I hadn't written down the password, though I was relatively sure what it was. And while I was fighting their password recovery system (“Can't reset password right now”), it came up with my login details. But by then I had created a second account.
Then choose one of two different fonts for the same “album”, one existing and one new:
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And that one just didn't upload the images:
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“Failed”. Why, fool?
After half an hour of head-scratching, I looked for help. No human available, just another of these sites that only allow you to report problems that they have thought of. Sent off a request anyway, went out and thought it over. What if the image is too large for their system? The file I tried to upload was 20.16 MP or 6.4 MB in size, not inappropriate for an 8"×12" print, which would require 8.64 MP at 300 dpi. But try something smaller?
Yes! This stupid site can't accept normal sized images. The camera (OM System OM-1 Mark II) has a relatively low resolution. What about these “mine is bigger than yours” cameras with 80 MP or more, like the Fujifilm GFX100S with 102 to 408 MP? Sorry, we don't do Fuji?
Much more mouse pushing, and finally I had all the images in place.
Oh:
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After all the trouble I went to to crop the images to 4:5 or 2:3! This one was to be printed 8"×12", or 2:3. What do I have?
Size: 4417 x 2945 pixels (13.01 megapixels, 1:1.50)
But the exact aspect ratio would be either 4417 × 2944⅔ pixels or 4417½ × 2945 pixels. Is it really that fussy? Other images (the minority) got through without being “cropped”. By accident I put a 4:5 image in the 8"×12" section, and it was of course also cropped. But the display showed where it was cropped, so I'm relatively sure that these ones are correct.
And how did I delete the incorrect image? I didn't find out how. I just set the number of copies to 0, but it remained on the page.
Finally, check out:
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What does that have to do with payment method? I don't think they know either. And yes, I accepted both items to maintain my sanity. And it was done! We'll send a confirmation to brokenphotos@lemis.com. They didn't, but I have a confirmation number, and PayPal is my witness.
To be fair, this isn't all Harvey Norman's fault. The processing is done by Fujifilmimagine, a site too polite to reveal anything about itself—that's described on a different web site on a different domain: “Fujifilm Imagine is an award-winning multichannel platform successfully used around the world”.
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I wonder who supplied the award.
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Fixing the gate
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
We've had a really Heath-Robinson arrangement round the front gate to stop Larissa from escaping to the road:
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And it didn't work, so we had to close it with a chain, rather detracting from the electric gate. Yvonne has been trying to get Paul Donaghy to come by for some months now: pull the dropper and replace it closer to where the gate travels, and put some battens between the dropper and the other side of the fence post. Straightforward enough. We have the dropper equipment (on loan from Chris Bahlo), and Yvonne arranged that Paul would bring some battens.
Paul came this afternoon, where I really had other things to do (this damn photo printing pain). No battens. Clearly a loss of communication. So we replaced the dropper and put some more electric fence wire on the other side of the post. No, says Yvonne, Lara can still get through. Another dropper. OK, now it works.
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No, she still wants the battens. OK, just leave me out of it.
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Yellow-striped black cockatoos
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Topic: animals, photography, opinion | Link here |
Seen walking today:
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That could really have done with a longer lens. I really should take the 12-200 lens on such walks.
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Truffle omelette
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
We still have some of Margaret Swan's truffle left over. Nothing for it. An omelette, which I normally think of as being a breakfast dish:
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| Tuesday, 12 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 12 August 2025 |
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Sunrise
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Topic: general, photography, opinion | Link here |
Up at 7 this morning to go to the toilet, and saw this outside:
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Problem: I was in my underwear, and I didn't have time to get dressed. This photo worked, sort of. One that didn't was taken from my office with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO. The reflections kill it, but I can't make up my mind which of these two projections is worse:
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No banking without app!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Last month I received notice from my accountants that Macquarie Bank wanted me to use an app to verify every transaction. Normally the accountants do that for me.
I've already made my objections clear, but at the time my adviser, Peter O'Connell, was on holiday. He's back now and called me up and discussed the matter. Yes, I must approve every transaction with their Macquarie Authenticator, which replaces their previous system of sending SMSes.
I've grumbled at length about people who associate mobile phones with security. But is this maybe the misguided way of the future? It seems that we don't have much alternative. I need to contact Bank Australia and see if they can help, but I doubt it. Can I use my old mobile phone, the one that no longer works as a mobile phone? To be investigated.
Or am I incorrect? Is it really possible to be secure with mobile phones? Are face and fingerprint recognition reliable enough? There seem to be too many potential attack vectors that I can't oversee.
But I have seen some that the banks haven't, so I'm not confident. One example is an email that I forgot, dated 9 October 2024:
You may already be aware that from late November, Macquarie Bank will require clients to approve all new payments initiated by PPT Financial via the Macquarie Authenticator App. This will replace the option of approving payments via SMS secure codes.
But that's doubly incorrect: I have never approved a payment via SMS, and this requirement didn't happen. Does that increase my trust level?
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Laugengebäck again
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Baked more Laugengebäck today. Gradually we're getting our act together:
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That was after 18 minutes at 220°, rather longer than the recipe envisages. Are they dark enough? They're now very close to the image in that recipe:
But would more time in the lye help? Higher temperature? Longer baking time? Or is everything good as it is?
| Wednesday, 13 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 13 August 2025 |
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Toyota: RTFM
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has had her new car for two weeks now, and she's still very happy with it. But that's at least because she doesn't use the radio. It's modern, but the controls seem straightforward enough:
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Problem: pressing on the ⏼ does nothing useful. After much reading the detailed manual, which thoughtfully also provides information about models unrelated to her car, I discovered the solution. It's intuitive: press on the volume button underneath the symbol.
OK, try it out this morning. Oh. The radio was already off. OK, turn it on. Works as advertised.
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Turn it off again. Nothing happens.
So I still don't know how to turn the radio on and off, after two weeks! Why is this so complicated?
As if that weren't enough, I thought it a good idea to check the oil level. Open the bonnet with the convenient catch under the steering wheel, where I expected it to be. But I couldn't find the secondary catch under the bonnet. There's almost always a catch that you can feel easily, but not here. More RTFM. Yes, it's where I expected it, and there are two conflicting drawings, politely not showing the orientation, that describe this lever, slightly offset from the middle:
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You need to pull the lever up. Once again, why is this so complicated?
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Completing lagune
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So Yvonne has been able to process videos on lagune with avidemux. And I don't see any great issues with photos with DxO PhotoLab. Time to move the (external) disks to lagune, showing in the process that I'm even less agile than I should be.
But it didn't take long. Update /etc/fstab and mount:
=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 135 -> mount /Photos/
mount: /dev/da0p1: Device busy
Huh? I've never seen that message on mount. It would make sense if the device were mounted elsewhere, or that the mount point were in use, but neither were the case, and FreeBSD doesn't care if you mount the same device or mount point twice.
=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 137 -> df /Photos/
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/nda0p2 198,102 63,658 118,596 35% /
Nope, that's the root file system.
=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 138 -> mount /Photos=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 139 -> umount /Photos=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 140 -> mount /Photos/=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 141 -> df /Photos/
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/da0p1 7,630,061 4,123,279 3,430,481 55% /Photos
That looks right. But what happened the first time?
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Lithium-ion AA batteries
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
Yvonne back from shopping with a set of 8 Lithium-Ion AA batteries, which I hope will last longer in her wireless microphones. We've established that Nickel–metal hydride batteries don't have enough voltage to hold out more than an hour or so, and non-rechargeable batteries are unpredictable, so we end up changing them before they're discharged. We can do that with Li-Ion batteries too, but they should last longer, and they're rechargeable.
The batteries came with a remarkably complicated-looking charger that shows red (charging) and green (charged), along with a dancing display of blue on the batteries themselves. And it even has a beeper to tell us when each battery was charged.
How do 3 V Li-Ion batteries supply the 1.5 V that AA batteries should supply? Unevenly, it seems. Before charging the batteries had between 1.50 and 1.58 V. After charging, they had between 1.50 V (not the same battery) and 1.62 V. I wonder if there's some kind of voltage regulator in there. Strangely, there's little about them on Wikipedia, which only refers to the 3 V versions.
| Thursday, 14 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 14 August 2025 |
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More lagune pain
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
So now lagoon has been completely migrated to lagune. But there was still this strangeness that I noticed yesterday. I had managed to mount /Photos without difficulty, but then I had the same problem with the backup disk:
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2025 05:05:19 +1000
From: Cron Daemon <root@lagune>
Subject: Cron <root@lagune> /home/local/bin/syncphotos
mount: /dev/da1p1: Device busy
And what's more, /Photos was no longer mounted. A remount showed:
=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 150 -> mount /Photos/
mount: /dev/da0p1: Device busy=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 151 -> mount /Photos/
mount: /dev/da0p1: R/W mount on /Photos denied. Filesystem is not clean - run fsck. Forced mount will invalidate journal contents: Operation not permitted
You have new mail in /var/mail/grog=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 152 -> date
Thu 14 Aug 2025 09:36:21 AEST
Is there something wrong with the disk? Tried copying raw data:
=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 154 -> dd if=/dev/da1 of=/dev/null bs=1m count=1000
dd: /dev/da1: Device busy
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 18.072301 secs (0 bytes/sec)=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 155 -> dd if=/dev/da1 of=/dev/null bs=1m count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes transferred in 5.032489 secs (208361330 bytes/sec)=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 156 -> dd if=/dev/da1 of=/dev/null bs=1m count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes transferred in 5.040510 secs (208029758 bytes/sec)=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~ 157 -> date
Thu 14 Aug 2025 09:42:56 AEST
Once again this “device busy” on the first attempt, followed by a success on the second. What's in the logs?
Aug 14 09:37:07 lagune kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): Polling device for readiness
Aug 14 09:37:09 lagune kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): READ(10). CDB: 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00 00
Aug 14 09:37:09 lagune kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error
Aug 14 09:37:09 lagune kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition
Aug 14 09:37:09 lagune kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI sense: NOT READY asc:4,1 (Logical unit is in process of becoming ready)
Aug 14 09:37:09 lagune kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): Error 16, Retries exhausted
Oh. And when the backup was attempted?
Aug 14 05:05:18 lagune kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI sense: NOT READY asc:4,1 (Logical unit is in process of becoming ready)
Aug 14 05:05:18 lagune kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): Error 16, Retries exhausted
Aug 14 05:05:18 lagune kernel: g_vfs_done():da1p1[READ(offset=65536, length=8192)]error = 16
And immediately before it in the log file was:
Aug 13 21:02:32 lagune kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI sense: NOT READY asc:4,1 (Logical unit is in proce
ss of becoming ready)
Aug 13 21:02:32 lagune kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Error 16, Retries exhausted
Aug 13 21:02:32 lagune kernel: g_vfs_done(): da0p1 converting all errors to ENXIO
Aug 13 21:02:32 lagune kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p1[READ(offset=313759268864, length=32768)]error = 6 supressing further ENXIO
Aug 13 21:02:32 lagune kernel: UFS: forcibly unmounting /dev/da0p1 from /Photos
At least that explains why /Photos wasn't mounted. But why is all this happening? Everything points to the system not waiting until the disk is up to speed. What has changed between FreeBSD 12 and 14? Still more searching to be done in an area where I had hoped not to have to do anything.
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Web pages from the distant past
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Topic: history, opinion | Link here |
While looking in my RCS control files today, found this:
-r--r--r-- 1 grog lemis 7,942 11 Nov 1996 work-history.html,v
-r--r--r-- 1 grog lemis 4,138 11 Nov 1996 early-history.html,v
What's that? They prove to be the earliest web pages that I ever stored in RCS, thus also reinforcing my assumption that my home page, dated February 1997, was in fact started much earlier. I've tidied up early-history.html here.
Sadly, they're not very interesting, and not surprisingly they're full of markup errors. work-history.html doesn't render at all. Only after looking at the source did I discover that it's in roff format.
Interestingly for the dating was this first line in the files:
<!- Hey, emacs! Edit this file in -*- html -*- mode!
That's completely incorrect, of course, and the end of the comment is missing, but it suggests that I already had Emacs macros to handle web pages. Unfortunately I can't find any reference in the Emacs revision history.
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Many-coloured Schlumbergera
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
The Schlumbergera that Yana brought us over 2 years ago now seem to have all taken, though one is still thinking about it:
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But the others have a number of flowers in different colours:
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I wonder what the first one has in store.
| Friday, 15 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 15 August 2025 |
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More lagune fun
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So why does lagune time out trying to mount my external USB backup disks? Spent some time looking through man pages and myriad sysctls without finding anything obvious. Then, just for the fun of it, I asked Google Gemini: “How do I set the number of retries for a USB disk to become ready on FreeBSD?”
Now what's the chance of getting a useful answer to so specific a question? But I did! In fact, a surprisingly detailed description of the situation, along with what to do about it.
But it's so complicated that I can't help thinking that there must be an easier way. There is one, of course: just try to copy a sector from the disk before trying to mount it. It will probably fail, but by that time the disk will be up to speed.
Another thing I forgot: syslogd should log to eureka. Done, but it needs restarting syslogd. That shouldn't be necessary.
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More nvidia fun
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Display hydra:0.3 is dead! Not the monitor, just the display. Switch to server 1 and it's fine. Switch back and it's dead.
The background is understandable: I had used that monitor to look at some weirdness on distress, the Microsoft box. Clearly it had something to do with that. But why isn't it coming back again after correct connection? Fired up nvidia-settings and discovered:
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How did that happen? And how do I fix it? Spent some time pointing and clicking. It had a field Configuration, but I couldn't select anything. With a bit of moving around, it somehow came good, but this program always confuses me.
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Macquarie bank security
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
On Tuesday I considered the alternatives to Macquarie Bank's requirement of authenticating via mobile phone. One possibility would be to use my old mobile phone, the one that can not longer work as a phone. My guess is that their Macquarie Authenticator app will require the mobile phone network, even though a direct Internet connection would be more appropriate.
But that's only a guess. To be sure, let's install it and see what it says.
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Where is it? Ah, it's far too secure to say what it is. Just that black padlock “Authenticator”, also designed to make it difficult to find in the list of apps. OK, fire it up:
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That's clever, isn't it? I never had one. So I sent mail to Peter O'Connell, asking for it to be sent by normal post to avoid the insecurity of email. His response included:
Note, Macquarie will send you your ID number, however it has to be sent to your email address.
Under no circumstances, will they send in the mail..
Somehow every step scares me and convinces me of my suspicion that they don't know what they're doing. Others seem to agree. Here the current ratings section on the Toyshop page:
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| Saturday, 16 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 16 August 2025 |
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lagune: The last step?
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
So what's missing for lagune? Not much, just the issues with the USB disks and the connection with distress, the Microsoft machine. I really hate setting up Samba and Microsoft networking.
Finally got round to doing it. It wants a password! And I didn't write it down. OK, I can set one, since it's only for Microsoft to talk to lagune. Once again I dragged out my decades-old copy of The Complete FreeBSD. Time to add it to the new lagoon page.
Setting up on the Microsoft side worked without problems once I found their “share” page, which seems to wander from one unexpected place to another. I never will understand Microsoft.
With the disks, noted a reference to a port smartmontools with a program smartctl that, with the -a option, produces much output that I must investigate more closely.
The only other issue was for syncing to the web servers: she didn't have the ~/.ssh files for fra.lemis.com. That was easy enough to fix. Now all we need is for her to test it, which should come soon.
| Sunday, 17 August 2025 | Dereel | Images for 17 August 2025 |
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lagune: done?
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Topic: technology, photography | Link here |
So far the migration to lagune has gone relatively painlessly. In particular my
concerns about avidemux proved
unwarranted, and I was able to mount share file systems on Microsoft with
relatively little pain. So today Yvonne processed her first
photos.
All went well until I put them through my postprocessing scripts. They failed. No ExifTool. OK, run round in circles trying to find the name of the port (it's p5-Image-ExifTool-devel-13.33 or most of that string), install it. More missing ports. ImageMagick? Ah, you mean ImageMagick7. And then the one that completely caught me off guard:
for i in `ls *.jpeg *.gif *.png 2>/dev/null`; do echo $i; done | by 2 /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php /Photos/Tools `pwd` small 270000; MYDIR=`pwd`; IMAGELINKS=`pwd`/Imagelinks; if [ -f $IMAGELINKS ]; then (cd ~/public_html/Photos/`basename $MYDIR`/small && checkimagelinks $IMAGELINKS small); fi
sh: /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php: not found
sh: /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php: not found=== yvonne@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~/Photos/20250816 13 -> l /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php
-r-xr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 2,025 1 Jul 2021 /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php
Huh? Ah, this is sh's inimitable way of saying “I can't find the interpreter in the shebang line”:
#!/usr/local/bin/php
OK, install PHP. But which?
=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/8) /home/grog 6 -> pkg search php | wc -l
3292
Over 3000 ports for PHP alone! Does it understand just php? Of course not:
=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/8) /home/grog 7 -> pkg install php
pkg: No packages available to install matching 'php' have been found in the repositories
Much searching brought me to php85, which installed and worked.
Somehow most of the pain here is in the Ports Collection.
In passing, it's interesting to note this message:
WARNING: The convert command is deprecated in IMv7, use "magick" instead of "convert" or "magick convert"
“IMv7” is clearly ImageMagick's way of referring to itself. And yes, that makes sense: “convert”, like many ImageMagick programs, breaks name spaces. I should read up on it, but even the brief help takes up several pages:
=== yvonne@lagune (/dev/pts/3) ~/Photos/20250816 18 -> magick | wc -l
magick: invalid argument for option @ error/magick-cli.c/MagickImageCommand/1358.
347
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Reading books again
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Topic: history, general, opinion | Link here |
A while back we watched “A Town like Alice” on TV. Yvonne was impressed, and wanted to buy the book.
What? What are public libraries for? So we borrowed it from the Ballarat library, and Yvonne read it and found it good.
Did I want to read it too? I have barely read any books in the last few years. They've been overtaken by digital media. But it sounded like a good idea, so I'm currently gradually working my way through the book, rediscovering in the process my liking of Shute's style. In this case it was particularly the geographical details, the part that Yvonne found boring. Sixty years ago my father and I drove through much of the area described in the march described in the book, and I was able to differentiate nearly all the real locations from the made-up ones. Only one detail was wrong: Shute wrote that the Japanese attacked Malaya after the Pearl Harbor attack; in fact it was before, in the early hours of 8 December 1941.
And also 60 years ago today I met my first real girlfriend, Lesley Cannings. I had planned not to mention this kind of anniversary, but Shute forced my hand
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More app vulnerabilities
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Another report of a mobile phone security breach. Some badly written app leaks sensitive information.
Sure, they'll (probably) fix it. But how many others are there out there that might do the same? How many will come in the future? I'm sure that there must be some testing facility, maybe one that's obligatory or will soon become so, but they can only ever prove the existence of vulnerabilities, never their absence. This app (“Dreamhome”) is on the toyshop, so that's not much help. The entry currently includes:
Data safety
Safety starts with understanding how developers collect and share your data. Data privacy and security practices may vary based on your use, region, and age. The developer provided this information and may update it over time.
No data shared with third partiesLearn more about how developers declare sharing
No data collectedLearn more about how developers declare collectionData is encrypted in transit
You can request that data be deleted
It's worth savouring these statements. No data collected, but it's encrypted in transit. You can request that it be deleted, but there's no guarantee that the request will be honoured. Doesn't that fill you with confidence? And it's all the more stupid because this is a vacuum cleaner. There's no reason on earth why you should need any credentials to run the thing.
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Roast pork again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Roast pork for dinner this evening. I've always had difficulty getting the crackling right, so this time I followed not one, but two recipes: the one on the packaging and this one from Australian Pork. Or at least, that's what I thought. Australian Pork, too, seem to have changed their minds.
In principle the recipes are similar, but the devil's in the detail. First oil and salt, then put in a hot oven for a while, then (maybe when the crackling starts to be evident) drop the temperature.
But that's where things differ. The instructions on the packaging want the meat cooked at 220° for 30-40 minutes, then 30-35 minutes/kg at 180°. No mention of meat temperature.
The Australian Pork recipe wanted it cooked at 250° with heat from above for 12 minutes, then at an unspecified lower heat until the crackling develops, then at 180° until the meat temperature reaches 80°.
That's what I recorded 3½ years ago. But since then, Australian Pork have changed their recipe completely. No top heat any more, only 220° to start with for 40 minutes or “until the rind crackles”. Then drop to 160° and cook for 30-35 minutes per kg, until the meat temperature reaches 65°.
I suppose the good news is that it's no surprise that I'm confused. In the last 3½ years Australian Pork has changed its recipe significantly. 65° is quite low for pork. 80° is too high, as I accidentally discovered today.
According to the recipes, my joint (1.17 kg) would take about 80 minutes to be done. My progress:
Start: meat at 14°, put into 240° oven.
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12 minutes:
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20 minutes:
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24 minutes: skin “pops”:
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Drop temperature to 230°.
40 minutes: meat temperature 59°, drop oven temperature to 160°.
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51 minutes: meat temperature 68°, change heat to top only
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63 minutes: meat temperature 78°, open oven door, leave on top heat to brown crackling:
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66 minutes: meat temperature 80°, stop cooking.
That's very different from what the instructions suggest. Yes, the third recipe wanted 220°, not 240°, but described it in a very misleading way: “preheat the oven to 240°C/220°C fan- forced.” What they clearly (now it's clear) meant was “240° in a conventional oven, 220° in a fan-forced oven”. But even that wouldn't explain the great difference in the times and temperatures.
While resting, the meat temperature went up to 89° before dropping again. That's far too much. And though the crackling was nice in places, it didn't go through to the meat:
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How do I get it right? Next time I'll read this entry again and take it from there.
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Bruno
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Bruno is continually on top of cabinets:
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That's a studio flash next to him, but it doesn't seem to interest him:
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