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:
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:
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).
Ate some more of Saturday'sossobuco 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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
Yes, two different kinds of Strepsils, varying only in flavour. And yes, two different
kinds of cough mixture, one this horribleSenega& 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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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”.
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:
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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:
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?
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:
