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| Greg's diary |
| August 2026 |
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| Saturday, 1 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 1 August 2026 |
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More exiftool investigations
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Followed up on yesterday's plan to isolate the exiftool bug. To install the latest version, first remove the current version, once I found the name that it had been given:
=== root@hydra (/dev/pts/20) /etc 56 -> pkg delete p5-Image-ExifTool
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
Deinstallation has been requested for the following 2 packages (of 0 packages in the universe):
Installed packages to be REMOVED:
hugin: 2025.0.1_2
p5-Image-ExifTool: 13.36
How I hate the Ports Collection!
So I decided to install it on dereel, my test machine. The help from Google Gemini was less than perfect. It gave the wrong URL (https://exiftool.org/Image-ExifTool-13.10.tar.gz), and it took me a while to find the correct one. Or was it? It confused me by downloading a file called download:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg 26 -> fetch https://exiftool.org/Image-ExifTool-13.59.tar.gz
fetch: https://exiftool.org/Image-ExifTool-13.59.tar.gz: Not Found
...=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg 29 -> fetch https://exiftool.org/Image-ExifTool-13.10.tar.gz
fetch: https://exiftool.org/Image-ExifTool-13.10.tar.gz: Not Found=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg 30 -> fetch https://sourceforge.net/projects/exiftool/files/Image-ExifTool-13.59.tar.gz/download
download 7730 kB 3113 kBps 03s=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg 31 -> mkdir exiftool=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg 32 -> ls -l
total 176
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 7,916,358 28 May 02:44 download
...=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg 34 -> cd download
su: cd: download: Not a directory=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg 35 -> cd exiftool/=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg/exiftool 36 -> tar xvf ../download
x Image-ExifTool-13.59/
...
I wasn't done yet: it extracted into a subdirectory. But then things worked as described:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg/exiftool 37 -> l
total 1
drwxr-xr-x 8 501 staff 512 28 May 02:44 Image-ExifTool-13.59=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg/exiftool 38 -> cd Image-ExifTool-13.59/=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg/exiftool/Image-ExifTool-13.59 39 -> perl Makefile.PL
Checking if your kit is complete...
Looks good
Generating a Unix-style Makefile
Writing Makefile for Image::ExifTool
Writing MYMETA.yml and MYMETA.json=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg/exiftool/Image-ExifTool-13.59 40 -> make
cp lib/Image/ExifTool/IPTC.pm blib/lib/Image/ExifTool/IPTC.pm
...
"/usr/local/bin/perl" -MExtUtils::MY -e 'MY->fixin(shift)' -- blib/script/exiftool
Manifying 1 pod document
Manifying 209 pod documents=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg/exiftool/Image-ExifTool-13.59 41 -> make install
Manifying 1 pod document
Manifying 209 pod documents
Installing /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/Image/ExifTool.pod
Installing /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/Image/ExifTool.pm=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /var/db/pkg/exiftool/Image-ExifTool-13.59 43 -> exiftool -ver
13.59
After setting up some symlinks, I was able to confirm that the latest and greatest still has the same bug.
What next? My own version?
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Finishing the bird netting
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Bruno is due back tomorrow. Time to finish bird netting the dog run. Paul Donaghy along to do the work, while I put in a token appearance:
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The next step was to cut the netting to shape. But we couldn't! Even the strongest cutters couldn't get through. I suppose it takes a cat to bite through it. Still, while we're investigating, the run is pretty much escape-proof. The rest is just the keep small birds out.
And then Loretta Sayers called to say that she would have to postpone: she has laryngitis. That's a valid enough reason, but we've seen how she has been agonizing about having to return him, and I wouldn't be surprised if they found a way to keep him.
| Sunday, 2 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 2 August 2026 |
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Understanding the exiftool bug
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
As planned, spent some time today investigating the exiftool -geotag bug, in the process seeing a new claim for a download link: https://exiftool.org/Image-ExifTool-latest.tar.gz. Problem: this link also doesn't exist. The twins clearly have their limits.
First step was to reduce the GPS log to a readable format:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) /src/GPS/Tracklogs/Phones/GPSLogger/albo 8 -> sed 's:.trkpt lat="::; s:" lon=": :; s:".*time.2: 2:; s:Z.*:Z:' < 20260729.gpx
-37.800248333333336 143.75107333333332 2026-07-28T20:03:38.000Z
-37.80028333333333 143.75113166666668 2026-07-28T20:03:41.000Z
-37.80030166666666 143.75116333333332 2026-07-28T20:03:44.000Z
...
The Z at the end is part of the military time zone designations, representing UTC (or possibly GMT), so they're 10 hours behind. The first entry corresponds to 6:03:38 local time, and not surprisingly the coordinates show me to be at home.
The first surprise was that the specified location of the first image I discussed on 31 July was indeed exactly an hour before the image. It was taken at 8:11:04, but the location was stored as -38.0297806,144.0656194. And looking at the sanitized log file, I see:
-38.029781666666665 144.06561833333333 2026-07-28T21:11:04.000Z
That's 7:11:04 local time, exactly an hour before I took the photo—I had thought 40 minutes. And the coordinates stored in the image are the same—almost. In fact, they show a location 15.1 cm to the north-east. Why? The time is exactly one hour before.
So, is my time conversion simply out by one hour? No. Many of the images are exactly correct. So it seems that some, and only some, of the images get dated an hour too early.
The next step is to investigate why all the image taken at Leigh Grand Junction Bridge were given the same location. But even these sanitized log files, with their precision (most definitely not accuracy) of round 1 nm, are amazingly difficult to read. Some other time.
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A new GPS mapping app?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been using GPS Visualizer to draw maps from my GPS logs for nearly 10 years, and it works well enough. But it doesn't show where I was at a particular point on the route. Is there nothing else available? Once again a question for Google Gemini.
Yes, quite a few. Ignoring the easy drag-and-drop solutions, discovered GPXSee, which is available via the FreeBSD Ports Collection.
It installed an amazing number of dependencies, but no instructions at all. Well, not quite. It tells you how to install it (though not on FreeBSD) and how to report bugs. But not how to use it, not even on the web site.
Played around with it anyway, and it seemed straightforward enough. It was also blindingly fast compared with GPS Visualizer—clearly an advantage of running on my machine. And yes, it had popups (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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The problem: they're all the same!
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And it's wrong. It gives a time of 20:03:35, by which time I had long been home (never mind that the date is out by 2,000 years). Clearly the other information is meaningless. Quite possibly this is a result of there being no instructions. But before I move on to one of the others I should try to find out how to use it. One thing's clear: the elevation graph at the bottom shows a spike of up to 1,025 m. That's clearly wrong: nothing round here is anywhere near that high.
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Choucroute again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Choucroute garni for dinner tonight, something that we eat from time to time. And it's still a lot of work getting the proportions right. One thing is clear: all recipes that I have ever seen want far too much meat. I'm left with the feeling that they don't really like Sauerkraut.
| Monday, 3 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 3 August 2026 |
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DeliBen mi udang
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
For breakfast today tried one of the pastes that I bought in June, the DeliBen mi udang paste:
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The paste was in a second package inside the first. That proved to be good: it's very firm, and my guess is that I only got round 70% out before I had to rinse several times to get the rest. Even then, after cutting open the foil, there was quite a bit left over, which I was able to rinse out:
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And the taste? Not bad, but not as good as the Tean's paste. It has more chili (I think Teans has become milder since I first used it), but less prawn flavour. I don't think I'll buy it again as long as I can get Tean's.
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Scales accuracy
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I bought my new scales for two reasons: firstly, they're big enough to put things on, and secondly the scales I have appeared to be very inaccurate.
The bigger size has its ups and downs. Yes, I can now weigh a serving plate normally, whereas on the old scales it obscured the display. But on the other hand, there's the question of where to put it.
Regarding accuracy: I make 1600 g of mi udang from time to time. I do it in a pot that weighs 568 g, or maybe 576. So with the broth it should weigh 2176 g. But I find that I need at least 2200 g. Where do those 24 or 26 g go?
Today I made another batch, weighing with both the old and the new scales. Yes, the old scales are not very consistent, but in fact they're not that inaccurate after all. At the end there was only 1 g difference between the two, which is quite acceptable. Where did the rest go? Evaporation? That seems unlikely. Still, the convenience of being able to read the display more than makes up for that.
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Tomatoes: winter produce
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Topic: gardening, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Tomatoes are interesting things. In general our garden is not doing well. Plants are dying for no obvious reason, including the tomatoes that we planted. But then there are the volunteers. Yvonne picked these today, in late winter:
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We got none worth mentioning in the summer, and few in autumn. And there are more still ripening. It's a stark contrast to the first spring flowers:
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Which aperture?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
The background of the spring flowers was disturbing. Bring it out of focus with a large aperture, the largest I have: f/0.95:
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That doesn't really work. The background is still evident, but some of the flowers are also out of focus. I did a four image bracket, with apertures of f/0.95, f/2, f/4 and f/8. Probably, for this kind of image, f/4 is the best choice, but basically I need a different background.
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More playing with GPXSee
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Spent some more time with GPXsee today, with little to show for it. Yes, there is a kind of documentation, but once again it doesn't tell me what I want to know. It did, however, give me an idea why the results were so bad last year:
Can't find dimensions for 'Track.jpeg'
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What went wrong there? Looking in more detail
-38.00496 144.589895 2025-07-03T00:07:21.000Z
-38.00496333333333 144.589895 2025-07-03T00:07:23.000Z
-38.00496333333333 144.589895 2025-07-03T00:07:26.000Z
...
-38.00496333333333 144.589895 2025-07-03T01:07:40.617Z
-38.02714 144.56247166666665 2025-07-03T01:07:51.505Z
-38.02713166666667 144.56248666666667 2025-07-03T01:07:54.000Z
That's the Little River Bird Hide, but according to the log I was there for almost exactly an hour. And in that time the coordinates did not diverge by 1 nm. There were more cases of the same coordinates being recorded again and again. I can only assume that the GPS receiver malfunctioned, so my idea of taking two phones was good. I need to keep a much closer eye on these things.
| Tuesday, 4 August 2026 | Dereel | |
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More map software
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I give up with GPXsee. Based on the documentation, it's not even clear that it intends to do what I want, showing useful data for any point on the trail. But there's more, so today I tried a couple of web-based tools.
QuickMapTools GPX Viewer looked the best choice. But what a mess!
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Can that be improved? I didn't check. What I did find was the popups:
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A tastefully incomplete popup showing nothing of interest except the time, tastefully retained in UTC. You have to scroll down inside the popup to find any further information, and then it's just speed (conveniently displayed to the nearest mm per hour) and course:
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Why no coordinates? But clearly the product is useless. How about gpx.studio? At least the map is saner, but...
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The promised popup only occurs when the cursor is set on the altitude graph at the bottom, and then it only shows, well, altitude and gradient. It does show a blue point on the map, but that's all.
I'm baffled. Both of these products have all that it takes to show the location. You'd think most people would find that more useful than hdop, vdop and pdop, whatever they may be. Why don't they show them?
More investigation of my logs from last Wednesday round the Leigh Grand Junction Bridge showed other information. I took photos between 11:43:07 and 11:47:00. What did the log file say?
-37.81048 143.91852166666666 2026-07-29T01:43:00.000Z
-37.81048 143.91852166666666 2026-07-29T01:43:03.000Z
...
-37.81048 143.91852166666666 2026-07-29T01:48:40.000Z
-37.810475 143.91855833333332 2026-07-29T01:48:43.000Z
-37.810435 143.91856166666668 2026-07-29T01:48:45.000Z
-37.81037833333333 143.918565 2026-07-29T01:48:48.000Z
-37.81028166666667 143.91855333333334 2026-07-29T01:48:51.000Z
Oh. I didn't stand still, but once again it claimed that I didn't move more than 1 nm in nearly 6 minutes. What about hirse, my backup phone? I only had it set for one observation per minute, but what I saw was:
-37.81055749 143.91838268 2026-07-29T01:43:11.718Z
-37.81050092 143.91855529 2026-07-29T01:44:13.709Z
-37.81052095 143.9185512 2026-07-29T01:45:14.941Z
-37.81061508 143.91846138 2026-07-29T01:46:17.705Z
-37.8104297 143.91848828 2026-07-29T01:47:19.702Z
That's more plausible. Clearly that's an issue with the phone or the software. Set hirse to update every 2 s. And what about enzian, the old Redmi 9A? Booted it. It seems to be even slower than I remember, but the GPS logging works. Next time I'll take all three with me and maybe have something to compare.
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Performance issues, part one
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Why is enzian, the old Redmi 9A, so slow? Asked Google Gemini, which came up with several suggestions, mainly using adb (“Android Debug”, nothing to do with the adb that we have known since long before Android came along. I should try that, some time.
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Performance issues, part two
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My external web server lax.lemis.com is overloaded again, with load averages over 100. Strangely, fra.lemis.com, which also answers to the name www.lemis.com, is unaffected. More DNS frobbing: cut out the name www for lax to watch what happened. Unlike previous occasions, the web traffic really did stop. But fra didn't get any busier! And lax didn't get much busier when I reinstated the www entry.
I really don't understand what's going on here. But one possibility remains: set up dereel.lemis.com (to my right on the desk top) as another www. That will probably overload my current network link, but we can increase that.
First, copy the web site across. That should be simple: the connection to eureka is 1 GB/s.
But I had an unexpected problem: I can't use ssh keys to connect from eureka to dereel. Yes, I know I have problems with ssh on eureka, but I didn't think that they were that bad. I don't understand the issue: eureka offers a valid key, but it doesn't get accepted:
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive
debug1: Next authentication method: publickey
debug1: Offering RSA public key: /home/grog/.ssh/id_rsa
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive
debug1: Trying private key: /home/grog/.ssh/id_dsa
debug1: Trying private key: /home/grog/.ssh/id_ecdsa
debug1: Offering ED25519 public key: /home/grog/.ssh/id_ed25519
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive
debug1: Next authentication method: keyboard-interactive
Password for grog@dereel.lemis.com:
I recall that RSA keys are no longer modern, though it's still in ~/.ssh on dereel, but it should have accepted the ED25519 key. What's the issue?
The main one, of course, is that the ssh on eureka is over 10 years out of date. But the protocols haven't changed, and apart from authentication everything works. I tried running hydra's ssh on eureka, running into one missing library after another, but culminating in:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/0) ~ 133 -> /hydra/usr/bin/ssh dereel
/lib/libc.so.7: version FBSD_1.5 required by /hydra/usr/bin/ssh not found
That's fatal: for reasons I don't understand, /lib/libc.so.7 appears to have been around for over 10 years, and I can't just change it. So I'm going to have to dig into the distasteful innards of ssh.
| Wednesday, 5 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 5 August 2026 |
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A year of Yaris
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
It's been just over a year since Yvonne got her new Toyota Yaris. She's very happy with it.
Not so I. Right from the start I had difficulties with it, but then I don't have to drive it. Well, not often. One of the problems is that we still have the VZ Commodore, which I now drive. And because of the photovoltaic equipment in the garage, it can only be parked on the right. And Yvonne has difficulty parking her car on the left, so yesterday, after parking my car too far to the left, I had to do it.
I understand Yvonne: it's not easy. There's a certain amount of dead play in the accelerator, and then it makes up for it by lurching forward. It's really difficult to park as accurately as I would have wanted.
But that's nothing compared to this morning. Not for the first time, I forgot that the ignition switch needs two steps to really turn it off. After turning anticlockwise as far as it will go, you need to press the key in and turn it further. If you don't, it drains the battery really quickly. This morning it was already down to 9 V. Nothing for it: send Yvonne off with my car and put hers on charge.
But once again how do you open the bonnet? Once again I had difficulty. Somehow it's really confusing. But it was nothing like the issue with the boot, which is controlled electrically. We couldn't find a way to open it. Later I asked Google Gemini, which told me to fold down the rear seats, crawl into the boot space (removing any contents if necessary), take a screwdriver and fiddle around in the dark to open it. What a mess!
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Web server on dereel
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
How do I replicate a web server installation? It's not difficult, but there are tricks along the way. Today I installed it on dereel.lemis.com:
apache24_enable=YES
This is needed even if you just want to start with apachectl start.
After that, it worked. But: it thinks that it's local (it is in the 192.109.197.0/24 net block, after all). So it doesn't find the photo hierarchy. I could fix that with a symlink, but what I really need to do is to find a better way to decide whether I'm local or not.
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Pizza fail
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
We have a new, large pizza stone, and I should give feedback on eBay. First we should check if it doesn't fall apart when heated.
Good news, bad news: the good news is that it behaves as expected. The bad news is that the big pizza bases that Yvonne found are difficult to handle, and in scraping one onto the stone I folded it:
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And that left lots of mess afterwards:
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Not the fault of the stone, but how do I avoid a repeat?
| Thursday, 6 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 6 August 2026 |
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Unusual spam
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Seen in my mail today:
896 + 06-08-2026 To Lehey Greg Advice (1518) + Confirmation that you are now a Responsible Person for The Unix Heritage Society Inc. [SEC=OFFICIAL] CRM:005100123009
Now doesn't that look like spam? Whoever the spammer is, he got my name the wrong way round. And “Responsible Person”? It's no secret that I'm involved (as secretary) with The Unix Heritage Society Inc., so that doesn't mean much.
OK, open carefully. The first thing I look at in HTML attachments are the links: search for http. And there I saw:
href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.acnc.gov.au/for-charities/manage-your-charity/charity-portal__;!!B2FmhzcL8Q!WJocNKMMVqdL3y-CvJ7hvimY6_RETOXNrzoEVhGkw14pJtWwuV8N63MwQqRK9L8xdCrXeY-vELblW7nUhIg$"
https://urldefense.com/? That doesn't look like an Australian Government site. More searching.
Oh. It's a protection service, and the following URL does look like an Australian Government site. OK, display the attachement:
Dear Lehey GregCongratulations on being appointed to the governing body of The Unix Heritage Society Inc. (47295586494) as a Responsible Person (also known as board or committee members, or directors). The Unix Heritage Society Inc. is registered as a charity with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC).
Oh. It's an official Australian Government message masquerading as spam, and it brings good news. I suppose it's typical that it turns my name around and mentioned the real purpose of the message in a subclause. Looking in more detail, it mentions all members of the committee. It has kept David Arnold's and Warren Toomey's name the right way round, but swapped Clem Cole's and mine, and then apparently sorted the entries alphabetically, rather than the more normal sequence of President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer. And of course there are syntax errors, like “Who the charity helps”, which sounds like a literal translation of German „Wer dem Verein hilft“, but apparently meaning exactly the opposite.
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More web site performance problems
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Continued installing dereel.lemis.com as my third web server. That went relatively smoothly, but in the process I discovered strangenesses with the other two. Until I understand them, there's no point taking dereel online.
The load on lax is relatively low, under a load average of 10, but I was getting response times of up to 25 seconds—only when I wasn't looking. Spent some time trying to understand wireshark again. I have always had difficulty, but this time I didn't get it to work at all. Instead I ran tcpdump and confirmed that everything responded immediately.
But then there are other strangenesses. Trying to access it site with lynx got errors like
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Is that because it's trying https first—there I do return a 301. But why should it try https when I specify http? And why does it take so long to recover?
Is it time to finally set up https?
| Friday, 7 August 2026 | Dereel | |
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Opening the Yaris boot
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Topic: general | Link here |
As expected, the battery of Yvonne's Toyota Yaris was charged this morning. But the boot still wouldn't open. She was going into town, so I suggested she took it to Sovereign City Auto to get them to take a look.
That proved not to be necessary. She tried opening several times on the way, and finally it opened by itself. I can only guess that it only works if the battery is fully charged, not just charged enough to start the car. What a stupid design!
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More firewall hell
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Now dereel.lemis.com is working as intended, almost. The web server does what it should, but I'm getting lots of messages like:
Aug 7 08:04:51 dereel sshd-session[10042]: error: maximum authentication attempts exceeded for invalid user ubuntu from 125.140.145.62 port 56762 ssh2 [preauth]
Aug 7 08:04:59 dereel sshd-session[10046]: error: maximum authentication attempts exceeded for invalid user ubuntu from 125.140.145.62 port 56849 ssh2 [preauth]
Aug 7 09:25:22 dereel mountd[858]: mount request from 149.88.27.158 from unprivileged port
Aug 7 10:14:27 dereel inetd[12388]: cannot execute /usr/local/sbin/smbd: No such file or directory
Aug 7 11:46:28 dereel sshd-session[13972]: error: maximum authentication attempts exceeded for root from 65.49.139.223 port 57436 ssh2 [preauth]
Nothing serious, but it reminds me that I should be running a firewall. OK, I've had pain with that in the past. Log in as toor with only local directories in the path. Run from the console:
=== root@dereel (/dev/ttyv1) ~ 2 -> kldload ipfw && ipfw add 1 allow ip from any to any
Hang! Why? I suppose I should really run ktrace to find out what it's trying to access, but for the time being this should help:
kenv net.inet.ip.fw.default_to_accept=1
What a pain!
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Choucroute ratios
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Ate more of Sunday's Choucroute garnie this evening. No, it's clear: even now, after reducing the meat:Sauerkraut ratio from 89% down to 40%, there's too much meat. And also far too many potatoes. Reduce the meat ratio to about 36%, and the potatoes by 40%.
| Saturday, 8 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 8 August 2026 |
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Cabbage and capsicum stir-fry
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I have a lot of cabbage and capsicum left over from previous meals. What can I do with it? Ask Google Gemini, which came up with this recipe. Once again I had difficulty with these silly US units, but with a couple of iterations managed to create this version.
It was relatively straightforward after that, though I noted that the gochujang stuck to the frying pan:
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The finished result:
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It didn't taste bad, but I wonder what use the capsicum is. It would be just as good, if not better, without the capsicum.
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Uneven lighting
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Topic: photography | Link here |
What's wrong with this photo?
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Yvonne didn't see anything, but it's clear that the top is slightly underexposed. It's taken with the studio flashes pointed at the kitchen area, so tried a couple of times to adjust them, with little effect. The only surprise was the view looking down to the cooking area:
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I don't see an easy way to get rid of those highlights. And yes, here again the top is slightly underexposed. But there are many potential reasons for that, and in this case at least one of them is that I took the photos at 1/320 s, when the flash sync speed is 1/250 s.
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dereel on the web
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
As planned, gave up on finding my firewall issues on dereel.lemis.com and used the same workaround that I had used previously:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /home/grog 2 -> kenv net.inet.ip.fw.default_to_accept=1
net.inet.ip.fw.default_to_accept="1"=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /home/grog 3 -> kldload ipfw=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /home/grog 4 -> ipfw show
65535 0 0 count ip from any to any not // orphaned dynamic states counter
65535 64 8352 allow ip from any to any
What's that first line? Is the // a comment or part of the syntax? In any case, after that I was able to load my rules and make dereel one of the addresses for www.lemis.com. And sure enough, in came the usual flood of requests. But what I wasn't expecting was the load: the load average stayed below 2 (on a 4 CPU machine), round 80% idle—but the output traffic (“upload”) soared way beyond what the other servers had. lax.lemis.com averaged round 300 kB/s, though it could hit 1 MB/s; fra.lemis.com was a little higher at round 400 kB/s. But dereel went way over 1 MB/s, and my “5 Mb/s” uplink went as high as 12.9 Mb/s, clearly not very well implemented throttling.
So: for the time being I removed dereel from the www list. I should try a second network link with a higher upload limit and see where it settles. But it's surprising that dereel should generate so much traffic at such a low load.
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Whence the 301 errors?
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Topic: technology | Link here |
One thing that had puzzled me were the 301 error returns (“moved permanently”) from my web servers. With dereel functional, but before opening it to the masses, I checked:
freefall.freebsd.org - - [08/Aug/2026:14:15:47 +1000] "GET /grog HTTP/1.0" 301 277 "-" "Lynx/2.8.9rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/3.5.7"
freefall.freebsd.org - - [08/Aug/2026:14:15:50 +1000] "GET /grog/ HTTP/1.0" 200 22943 "-" "Lynx/2.8.9rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/3.5.7"
That simple! Give it a directory name without the trailing /. Presumably the browser retries. But look at that time! It took 3 seconds to retry. Why?
| Sunday, 9 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 9 August 2026 |
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More mi experiments
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Somehow I have so many left-over cooking ingredients. Today it was basil, which I'm growing in a pot, but not eating. It has to go. And then there were left-over prawn heads. You can make a broth out of them. So I crushed them and boiled them up, yielding about 200 ml of broth. The a variant of my normal breakfast:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 65 g | Chef Lo noodles | 1 | ||
| 60 g | Chicken | 1 | ||
| 30 g | Small prawns (4 g) | 1 | ||
| Prawn broth | 1 | |||
| Basil | 1 | |||
| 40 g | Gai Lan stems | 1 | ||
| Dried chili | 1 | |||
| 10 g | Ginger | 1 | ||
| 15 g | Garlic | 1 | ||
| 15 g | Soya sauce | 1 | ||
| 10 g | Fish sauce | 1 |
Given the enormous quantities of cabbage and capsicum that I still have, I should have used some of them, but I couldn't face it. The result was different from what I expected, but not unpleasant. I should use more prawn broth and fish sauce.
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More web site investigations
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Why did yesterday's web server trials look so strange? dereel.lemis.com, my local ThinkCentre, wass barely loaded, but it provided more traffic than both Vultrs put together.
The more I look at it, the more it seems that the Vultrs aren't providing full value. They're shared machines. What happens if all the VMs are busy? Their performance drops. That would also explain why lax.lemis.com is overloaded much more often than fra.lemis.com.
And then there's the issue with the name servers. named on lax keeps crashing. That might be due to the fact that lax is seriously down-rev:
=== root@lax (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 85 -> uname -a
FreeBSD lax.lemis.com 12.0-RELEASE-p8 FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE-p8 GENERIC amd64=== root@lax (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 86 -> ls -l /boot/kernel/kernel
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 31297432 3 Aug 2019 /boot/kernel/kernel
OK, let's make a copy in San Francisco. Oh, no can do. “Silicon Valley” is the closest, and so I have sjc.lemis.com. Restore from a snapshot of lax and try to upgrade.
Not good. Trying to build FreeBSD 15.1 dies almost immediately:
cc -O2 -pipe -fno-common -I/usr/src/tools/build/libc-bootstrap -ffile-prefix-map=/usr/src=/usr/src -ffile-prefix-map=/usr/obj/usr/src/amd64.amd64/tmp=/usr/obj -g -gz=zlib -MD -MF.depend.fspacectl.o -MTfspacectl.o -std=gnu17 -Wno-format-zero-length -Wsystem-headers -Wall -Wno-format-y2k -W -Wno-unused-parameter -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wpointer-arith -Wreturn-type -Wcast-qual -Wwrite-strings -Wswitch -Wshadow -Wunused-parameter -Wcast-align -Wchar-subscripts -Wnested-externs -Wold-style-definition -Wno-pointer-sign -Wdate-time -Wmissing-variable-declarations -Wthread-safety -Wno-empty-body -Wno-string-plus-int -Wno-unused-const-variable -Qunused-arguments -I/usr/obj/usr/src/amd64.amd64/tmp/legacy/usr/include -c /usr/src/tools/build/fspacectl.c -o fspacectl.o
cc: error: unknown argument: '-ffile-prefix-map=/usr/src=/usr/src'
cc: error: unknown argument: '-ffile-prefix-map=/usr/obj/usr/src/amd64.amd64/tmp=/usr/obj'
*** [fspacectl.o] Error code 1
The oldest tree I could find was 14.3, which went a little longer:
c++ -O2 -pipe -fno-common -I/usr/src/lib/clang/include -I/usr/src/contrib/llvm-project/llvm/include -D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -D__STDC_FORMAT_MACROS -D__STDC_LIMIT_MACROS -DHAVE_VCS_VERSION_INC -DNDEBUG -DLLVM_DEFAULT_TARGET_TRIPLE=\"x86_64-unknown-freebsd14.3\" -DLLVM_HOST_TRIPLE=\"x86_64-unknown-freebsd14.3\" -DDEFAULT_SYSROOT=\"/usr/obj/usr/src/amd64.amd64/tmp\" -DLLVM_TARGET_ENABLE_X86 -DLLVM_NATIVE_ASMPARSER=LLVMInitializeX86AsmParser -DLLVM_NATIVE_ASMPRINTER=LLVMInitializeX86AsmPrinter -DLLVM_NATIVE_DISASSEMBLER=LLVMInitializeX86Disassembler -DLLVM_NATIVE_TARGET=LLVMInitializeX86Target -DLLVM_NATIVE_TARGETINFO=LLVMInitializeX86TargetInfo -DLLVM_NATIVE_TARGETMC=LLVMInitializeX86TargetMC -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -gline-tables-only -MD -MF.depend.Support_Program.o -MTSupport/Program.o -Wno-format-zero-length -Wdate-time -Wno-empty-body -Wno-string-plus-int -Wno-unused-const-variable -Wno-tautological-compare -Wno-unused-value -Wno-parentheses-equality -Wno-unused-function -Wno-enum-conversion -Wno-unused-local-typedef -Wno-address-of-packed-member -Wno-switch -Wno-switch-enum -Wno-knr-promoted-parameter -Wno-parentheses -Qunused-arguments -I/usr/obj/usr/src/amd64.amd64/tmp/legacy/usr/include -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti -gline-tables-only -std=c++17 -stdlib=libc++ -Wno-c++11-extensions -c /usr/src/contrib/llvm-project/llvm/lib/Support/Program.cpp -o Support/Program.o
/usr/src/contrib/llvm-project/llvm/lib/Support/Program.cpp:46:49: error: no viable constructor or deduction
guide for deduction of template arguments of 'optional'
PI, SecondsToWait == 0 ? std::nullopt : std::optional(SecondsToWait),
^
/usr/include/c++/v1/optional:683:41: note: candidate template ignored: couldn't infer template argument '_Tp'
_LIBCPP_INLINE_VISIBILITY constexpr optional(nullopt_t) noexcept {}
^
/usr/include/c++/v1/optional:689:24: note: candidate template ignored: couldn't infer template argument '_Tp'
constexpr explicit optional(in_place_t, _Args&&... __args)
OK, I already have a built tree on dereel. Upload that and then let's see how things work. But at 5 Mb/s, that's for another day.
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Attracting rosellas
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Lately we've been seeing a lot of Crimson Rosellas outside the lounge room window, from which I took these photos:
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They seem to like the rotten tomatoes in the bed below:
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Unfortunately I couldn't get a good one of the bird actually eating a tomato. And it's interesting that the bird was by itself; normally they come in pairs.
| Monday, 10 August 2026 | Dereel | |
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Network performance issues?
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Topic: technology | Link here |
I had expected yesterday's upload of an installable world to take a while. But I was still surprised when I came in this morning to discover that the upload was still going—at 5 kB/s! The “time to finish” was another 18 hours off.
What went wrong there? Network issues? No, no obvious issue in my network monitoring. Throttling? Some rumours claim that too much traffic can cause the RSP to throttle the link. But that should only happen after a warning. And it wasn't that: I could upload elsewhere at normal speeds. So it seems that it's an issue with this one machine.
About the only thing that I did discover (why now?) was that the object tree was orders of magnitude larger than the source tree, nearly 8 GB. That's too much to make the approach worthwhile. The alternative is to install a new system and set up packages to run on it. What do I need?
And that will take a while. Mañana. Destroy sjc.lemis.com and think about it.
But while I was looking around later, I found that the upload was continuing:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/pts/3) /home/var/tmp 13 -> scp /home/var/tmp/15-obj.tgz sjc:/var/tmp/
15-obj.tgz 968% 2723MB 3.4KB/s 23:12:15
And yes, the values were changing. But where is the data going? sjc is dead and gone. A ktrace showed:
30338 scp RET writev -1 errno 4 Interrupted system call
30338 scp PSIG SIGALRM caught handler=0x16c70871b970 mask=0x0 code=SI_KERNEL
30338 scp CALL sigprocmask(SIG_SETMASK,0x16c707633ccc,0)
30338 scp RET sigprocmask 0
30338 scp CALL setitimer(ITIMER_REAL,0x16c707633c30,0x16c707633c10)
30338 scp STRU itimerval { .interval = {0, 0}, .value = {1, 0} }
30338 scp STRU itimerval { .interval = {0, 0}, .value = {0, 0} }
30338 scp RET setitimer 0
30338 scp CALL sigreturn(0x16c707633d40)
30338 scp RET sigreturn JUSTRETURN
30338 scp CALL getpgrp
30338 scp RET getpgrp 30338/0x7682
30338 scp CALL ioctl(0x1,TIOCGPGRP,0x16c70763425c)
30338 scp RET ioctl 0
30338 scp CALL write(0x1,0x3b9537a72000,0x6e)
30338 scp GIO fd 1 wrote 110 bytes
"\r15-obj.tgz 968% 2723MB 3.4KB/s 23:14:11"
30338 scp RET write 110/0x6e
30338 scp CALL writev(0x4,0x16c707634350,0x1)
30338 scp GIO fd 4 wrote 4096 bytes
And tcpdump showed that data was going out to 45.156.87.147. What's that? No reverse lookup. But it wasn't sjc: that had the address 45.32.140.218. What's going on there? Where is 45.156.87.147?
=== root@hydra (/dev/pts/20) /src/FreeBSD/git/stable/15 103 -> traceroute 45.156.87.147
traceroute to 45.156.87.147 (45.156.87.147), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 radiation-tower.aussiebb.net (121.200.8.1) 34.484 ms 22.323 ms 35.706 ms
2 10.241.5.108 (10.241.5.108) 109.665 ms 138.321 ms
10.241.5.116 (10.241.5.116) 130.179 ms
...
10 193.109.190.124 (193.109.190.124) 272.320 ms 278.570 ms 280.740 ms
11 193.109.188.211 (193.109.188.211) 342.744 ms 302.116 ms 380.321 ms
12 ae18.1179.edge-vrf.cr1.egh.as49581.net (185.91.127.86) 279.044 ms 300.283 ms 277.925 ms
13 45.156.87.147 (45.156.87.147) 297.883 ms 305.009 ms 356.571 ms
Somehow traceroute is becoming less and less useful. But the time for the second step suggests “overseas” somewhere, and there are additional delays at step 10 and 11. Then there's the only real reverse lookup at step 12: as49581.net. whois tells me:
Domain Name: AS49581.NET
Registry Domain ID: 2682927775_DOMAIN_NET-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.antagus.de
Registrar URL: http://www.vautron.de
Registrar: Vautron Rechenzentrum AG
That's just the registrar, of course. But it's in Germany, nowhere close to sjc. I'm baffled.
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Spam from your site
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Message in the mail today:
From: Ensite <antispam@ensite.com.br>
This is an abuse report for an email message sent by mail server lax.lemis.com [45.32.70.18] on Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:15:36 -0300
For more information about this abuse format below, see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5965
Feedback-Type: virus
User-Agent: SPFBL/3.2
Version: 1
Original-Mail-From: [test@lemis.com]
Original-Rcpt-To: [alexia@nwnet.com.br]
Arrival-Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:15:36 -0300
Reporting-MTA: dns; cp7.americanet.com.br
Source-IP: 45.32.70.18
Authentication-Results: cp7.americanet.com.br; smtp.mail=test@lemis.com; spf=pass
Removal-Recipient: alexia@nwnet.com.br
Huh? Somebody spoofing my domain name? The important thing there is the source IP, 45.32.70.18. That's lax.lemis.com! OK, they gave me a time, so off to take a look in /var/log/maillog:
Aug 9 10:15:25 lax postfix/qmgr[865]: 59152287FF: from=<>, size=15287, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Aug 9 10:15:26 lax postfix/smtp[45196]: 59152287FF: to=<test@lemis.com>, relay=mx0.lemis.com[192.109.197.137]:25, delay=0.8, delays=0.03/0.04/0.55/0.19, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (host mx0.lemis.com[192.109.197.137] said: 550 5.1.1 <test@lemis.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table (in reply to RCPT TO command))
Aug 9 10:15:26 lax postfix/qmgr[865]: 59152287FF: removed
Aug 9 10:15:38 lax postfix/smtp[45159]: 5B78528774: to=<alexia@nwnet.com.br>, relay=mail.nwnet.com.br[187.17.160.109]:25, delay=47, delays=0.77/1.2/22/24, dsn=5.0.0, status=bounced (host mail.nwnet.com.br[187.17.160.109] said: 550-5.7.1 SPFBL this message was detected as possible malware. See 550 http://spfbl.net/en/feedback (in reply to end of DATA command))
Yup, guilty as charged. But that wasn't all:
Aug 9 10:15:38 lax postfix/cleanup[45142]: 86BFF287FB: message-id=<20260809101538.86BFF287FB@lax.lemis.com>
Aug 9 10:15:38 lax postfix/bounce[45155]: 5B78528774: sender non-delivery notification: 86BFF287FB
Aug 9 10:15:38 lax postfix/qmgr[865]: 86BFF287FB: from=<>, size=13748, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Aug 9 10:15:39 lax postfix/smtp[45196]: 86BFF287FB: to=<test@lemis.com>, relay=mx0.lemis.com[192.109.197.137]:25, delay=0.79, delays=0.02/0/0.57/0.2, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (host mx0.lemis.com[192.109.197.137] said: 550 5.1.1 <test@lemis.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table (in reply to RCPT TO command))
Aug 9 10:15:39 lax postfix/qmgr[865]: 86BFF287FB: removed
Aug 9 10:16:37 lax postfix/qmgr[865]: 144572815B: from=<>, size=2950, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Aug 9 10:16:37 lax postfix/qmgr[865]: 1C3C3286CD: from=<test@lemis.com>, size=2914, nrcpt=50 (queue active)
Aug 9 10:16:37 lax postfix/qmgr[865]: 069FA286A9: from=<test@lemis.com>, size=2914, nrcpt=50 (queue active)
What is that? Where did it come from? Further investigation took me to
Aug 9 20:11:42 dereel postfix/smtpd[32034]: connect from mame.habit.net[210.196.200.19]
Aug 9 20:11:51 dereel postfix/smtpd[32036]: B036148242E: client=mame.habit.net[210.196.200.19]
Aug 9 20:14:50 dereel postfix/cleanup[32040]: B036148242E: message-id=<>
Aug 9 20:14:50 dereel postfix/qmgr[1045]: B036148242E: from=<test@lemis.com>, size=2568, nrcpt=50 (queue active)
Aug 9 20:14:50 dereel postfix/smtp[32777]: using backwards-compatible default setting smtp_tls_security_level=(empty)
Aug 9 20:14:50 dereel postfix/smtp[32778]: using backwards-compatible default setting smtp_tls_security_level=(empty)
Aug 9 20:14:50 dereel postfix/smtp[32778]: B036148242E: to=<alexgv@aari.ru>, relay=mx0.lemis.com[192.109.197.137]:25, delay=181, delays=181/0.01/0.01/0.06, tls=none, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 45B4E26359A)
Aug 9 20:14:50 dereel postfix/smtp[32778]: B036148242E: to=<alexgrey@alexgrey.com>, relay=mx0.lemis.com[192.109.197.137]:25, delay=181, delays=181/0.01/0.01/0.06, tls=none, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 45B4E26359A)
...
Aug 9 20:14:50 dereel postfix/smtp[32778]: B036148242E: to=<alexia@nwnet.com.br>, relay=mx0.lemis.com[192.109.197.137]:25, delay=181, delays=181/0.01/0.01/0.06, tls=none, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 45B4E26359A)
dereel is set up by default as an open relay! And it sent hundreds of messages, sorted alphabetically. A good thing that it was caught so early. Yet Another firewall rule. I've been running my own mail for well over a third of a century, but I can't recall this happening to me before.
| Tuesday, 11 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 11 August 2026 |
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Indian Cabbage
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
What do I do with the cabbage I still have left over? Ask Google Gemini, which came up with a number of recipes. In the end I adapted the last one, Alu-patta-gobhi-ki-sabzi.php:
The usual: these silly US American measures, and in this case also missing salt in the ingredients, and also a requirement for “garish masala”, which proved to be a typo for garam masala. And how many portions? I adapted it for the quantities I had, which made roughly 2 portions:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 238 g | potato | 1 | ||
| 10 g | ghee | 2 | ||
| 3.4 g | cumminseed | 2 | ||
| 0.3 g | asafœtida | 2 | ||
| 10 g | ginger | 3 | ||
| 1–2 | green chillies, slit lengthways | 3 | ||
| 3 g | turmeric | 4 | ||
| 2 g | red chilli powder | 4 | ||
| 3 g | coriander powder | 4 | ||
| 20 g | ghee | 5 | ||
| 360 g | cabbage | 5 | ||
| 50 g | peas | 6 | ||
| 3.5 g | garam masala | 7 | ||
| 2 g | amchur (dry mango powder) or a splash of lemon juice | 7 | ||
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To my surprise, I didn't have any chili powder! I used 9.4 g chili oil instead, which proved to be too much. And there weren't enough other spices. I should probably double or triple them.
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Census
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Topic: rant, general, language, technology, opinion | Link here |
Today was census day, which for some time now we have been doing online. Once again fun with logging in: they provide an identification and password clearly delimited with spaces, but it seems that you must not enter those spaces when logging in. And while the questions were reasonable enough, somehow the bureaucrats have difficulty with normal English.
First, of course, I needed to set up a temporary password. Followed all their rules, but the came up with another one:
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I still can't understand why people make this restriction. But there are more important issues: where did I spend the night of 11 August? When was the night of 11 August? All I got was:
We will ask who will stay at this address and who will be away on Tuesday 11 August 2026, to make sure that we count everyone.Who will spend the night of Tuesday 11 August 2026 at 29 Stones Road?
From midnight to 7:00 (7 hours) or 19:00 to 24:00 (5 hours)? I presume that they meant the latter, but they didn't say anywhere. And what if I hadn't returned home until after midnight? Then it would have been 12 August.
Once I guessed at their intention, I had the next problem:
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It took me some time to understand that they wanted me to click on “+ List person 1” to continue.
And then there were questions about comprehension or grammar. What is my gender? This question refers to how Greg currently identifies or expresses their gender...
OK, gender is a property. Describe with an adjective. I'm male. But they weren't prepared for that. I apparently belong to a Man gender:
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That's a syntax error: “man” is a noun, and they should be looking for an adjective. But there's not just syntax: they're also semantics. OK, let's assume that English is my second language. I speak it well, but some things are confusing, and there are plenty of people who don't speak English that well, but who are required to fill out the census How does Greg describe their sexual orientation. “Their” is an adjective referring to a group of people. Who is this group? How do they relate to me? Am I straight or bent? Gay or morose? What does that have to do with sexuality? Yes, the terms are colloquially used to imply heterosexual and homosexual, but how can the ABS assume that everybody they ask understands their ambiguous usage? Why not spell it out? Like most people, I'm heterosexual. Why not give me the choice to say so?
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On the positive side, I was able to enter Yvonne's country of birth correctly: “German Reich”. Five years ago I tried (and failed) to enter “Thüringen”. That was her nationality at birth, but she was born in the (last gasps of) the German Reich. That looks like my failure.
Ah, a good rant makes me feel better. But the criticisms are justified: there are people who don't understand the questions. The ABS should make it easier for them by using standard English.
And of course I gave them negative feedback for ease of completion:
It took me 7 attempts to log in and create a password. Why no spaces?
Why do you use terms that are not in standard English, like "straight" for sexual orientation? The correct word is "heterosexual". People who don't speak English well won't understand that, and other things like plural pronouns to refer to individuals.
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iChoose: Worse than expected
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne back from shopping today. The $500 iChoose card didn't work at all. Contacting them took me a long time to discover that the card had been cancelled, and that they would issue a new one. What a pain these people are!
| Wednesday, 12 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 12 August 2026 |
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Power fail!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Another grid power failure today at 10:08. And of course lagune failed, despite being behind a UPS.
Why does this always stress me so much? I can't do much about it except turn off heavy power consumers like the air conditioner. Powercor doesn't help by giving contradictory claims about power restoration:
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Finally the power came back at 14:17:15, after 4 hours and 9 minutes, just as they had changed their minds and set the restoration time to 16:00, and I had started to wonder what to do if it weren't restored by sunset:
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Fortunately the sun came out enough to charge the batteries, so we managed to hit 100% before the power came back, helped by the excessive duration. A good thing that it came back then: the sun went in, and the battery charge diminished quickly:
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One outage? Two!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
As if the power failure wasn't bad enough, my Internet link died at 12:56:27. Clearly something external: the ODU LED on the NTD showed orange. But what could it be? Power to the ODU? I think that goes via the network cable. ODU failure? Who can tell? It seemed to be worth raising a fault with Aussie Broadband, not helped by the fact that it had temporarily forgotten my secret thumbprint and then claimed that my link was up. But in less than 10 minutes, during which I had been required to run the connectivity test three times, it finally accepted it. Fault 38813366. Will be “looked at” within 5 working hours, which could mean tomorrow morning.
But what if it's a consequence of the power failure? Power had been out at the radiation tower too, for 2 hours, 48 minutes. Maybe the National Broadband Network didn't envisage any longer power outage, and the batteries in the tower had run out.
That guess seems to have been correct. Power was restored at 14:17:15, the network at 14:29:45. So it seems that the radiation tower needed 12½ minutes to boot.
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Cat run done?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
In the middle of the outage pain, Paul Donaghy showed up to complete the bird netting in the dog run. As if to prove the necessity, found a small bird in there when we went out. In 3 hours Paul was done. There are still a couple of places where birds can get through, and Yvonne tells me that she has seen both a Crimson rosella and a red-browed finch in there. The rosella was perplexed that it couldn't easily get out again. Maybe they'll stop coming; otherwise there's patching to be done.
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| Thursday, 13 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 13 August 2026 |
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Finding Joe Speelman
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Topic: history, music, general, opinion | Link here |
I've heard from Lokman Merican, who wanted to know about a song entitled “Pantai Chinta Berahi by Dodo Millinger. The name proved to be Mailinger, a Hungarian musician who arrived in Singapore in the 1930s:
Brought from Surabaya to Singapore in the 1930s by bandleader Joe Speelman to play piano at the Raffles Hotel. He was widely celebrated as one of the finest pianists in the Far East.
And once again I lost the URL. But though I had never heard of Dodo Mailinger, the name Joe Speelman is immediately apparent: he arranged my very first public performance, in the Selangor Club (not “Royal” at the time) in December 1960. That brings back memories. It's surprising that there's also a connection to Pantai Chinta Berahi; in those days I didn't know of any such connection.
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Bloody AAMI again!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Unwanted paper mail today: a “letter of demand” from Credit Collection Services, for the claimed damage against Helen Miller's car on 18 October 2022.
What, again? I went through a lot of correspondence with AAMI over two years ago, culminating in my assessment that the people there would not pass the Turing test, and their giving up and handing it over to a debt collection agency (ARMA debt resolution), who seems to be staffed by similar people. After something like 8 repeats showing that they did not read my replies, they seem to have given up. Is this going to happen again? There should be something that can be done against this kind of frivolous action.
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Getting a credit report
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
But what if these horrible debt collectors have entered something negative in my credit profile? Off to take a look and discovered that there are two credit ratings listing companies in Australia. Chose one at random, Equifax, who are prepared to give me a free credit report. Sign up with their password restrictions, and then enter driver license number and Medicare number.
Alarm. Those are exactly the data that were used to steal money from my Centrelink account five years ago. Yes, it's clear that I have to identify myself to Equifax if I want a report. But is the report worth the risk? As long as Australia has these stupidly inadequate identification rules, I think no. Sorry, Equifax.
| Friday, 14 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 14 August 2026 |
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More Thai breakfasts
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
I have various breakfast ingredients that have been waiting around for ever: small dried prawns and yellow bean paste. Both are unopened, but the latter has expired. High time to try something. But what? It seems that the standard recipes using the paste include rad na and pad kana moo krob. The former looks too wet for my liking, and the latter is so unknown that there's no Wikipedia page. I've found this recipe, which seems to think that gai lan and kale are similar. Not in my book, but since Yvonne was in town and had access to kale but not gai lan, got her to bring some back. At least this lot has more leaves and fewer stems than last time, and they were thin enough to be incorporated into the food, so the kilogram price drops to about $9, only slightly more than the pork roast that we're planning for tomorrow. But I still don't know what to do with it.
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Spam with end
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Earlier this week I discovered that dereel.lemis.com had been sending spam, and that had a significant effect on my real mail delivery. But I identified the cause and stopped it.
Or so I thought. That was dereel relaying spam. But lax.lemis.com (mail.lemis.com) was still trying to deliver it to reticent recipients:
52CE3287C1 2903 Sun Aug 9 10:29:42 test@lemis.com
(Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=gmail.com type=MX: Host not found, try again)
ali1hafsat2@gmail.com
...
5021A280D0 2914 Sun Aug 9 04:28:12 test@lemis.com
(Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=winco.co.za type=MX: Host not found, try again)
admin1@winco.co.za
admin-discuss@skolelinux.no
...
5951728867 2903 Sun Aug 9 11:51:28 test@lemis.com
(Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=rogers.com type=MX: Host not found, try again)
amerey@rogers.com
(host mta7.am0.yahoodns.net[67.195.204.77] said: 421 4.7.0 [TSS04] Messages from 45.32.70.18 temporarily deferred due to unexpected volume or user complaints - 4.16.55.1; see https://postmaster.yahooinc.com/error-codes (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
There must have been over 100 of them. It wasn't until later that I noticed that the real issue was that Once Again my name server had failed. But clearly I want to get rid of those messages. How?
Once again the twins came to my help, culminating in:
=== root@lax (/dev/pts/3) /home/grog 30 -> mailq | grep ^[0-9A-z].*test@ | awk '{print "postsuper -d " $1}' | sh
And that got rid of them. But lax now has a bad reputation. Why not just send directly from my local eureka.lemis.com? Tried that. The results were not good:
<groggyhimself@freebsd.org>: host mx1.freebsd.org[96.47.72.80] said: 550-5.7.1 Service
unavailable; client [192.109.197.137] blocked using DNS-based denylists 550
5.7.1 in case of permanent delivery errors (e.g. 5XX SMTP errors) please
send your problem report from a non-blocked location (e.g. gmail/yahoo) to
postmaster@FreeBSD.org and include the following information: time (Aug 14
03:23:56) and client (192.109.197.137). (in reply to RCPT TO command)
<gurgled@gmail.com>: host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.251.12.26] said:
550-5.7.25 [192.109.197.137] The IP address sending this message does not
have a 550-5.7.25 PTR record setup, or the corresponding forward DNS entry
does not 550-5.7.25 match the sending IP. As a policy, Gmail does not
accept messages 550-5.7.25 from IPs with missing PTR records. For more
information, go to 550-5.7.25
https://support.google.com/a?p=sender-guidelines-ip 550-5.7.25 To learn
more about Gmail requirements for bulk senders, visit 550 5.7.25
https://support.google.com/a?p=sender-guidelines.
d9443c01a7336-2d3ae7815acsi35168555ad.5 - gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA
command)
Oh. I've been dragging my heels on reverse lookup because RIPE is such a pain to deal with. I now need a mobile phone to even log in! But that's a different level of pain.
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RIPE: Ripe for improvement
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Nothing for it, I need to access RIPE to set up reverse lookup. What do I need to do? Set up an authenticator on my mobile phone! And there even Google Gemini didn't help much. I had the choice of three authenticators, from Microsoft, Google or FreeOTP. FreeOTP seems to be the best choice of a bad bunch, so I installed that. Somehow this screen shot gives an idea of the issues:
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And setup? More by trial and error I was able to set it up and create something for access to RIPE. In fact, I ended up with two of them. Which do I use? I chose the second. I'm sure that I'll run into problems again next time I try. But at least I was able to log in this time.
And that was all. They have obfuscated their web site to a point where I can't even find the pages to update the database. Well, almost none. I was able to access the page for my network block (192.109.197.0/24) and confirm that I have update access—except that there's nothing to update there. I was, however, able to update my telephone number on my personal record (GL3-RIPE). But where is the page for 197.109.192.in-addr.arpa.? Not there, I suspect, but I couldn't find any way to access any of the parent domains either.
This once worked. What have they done?
| Saturday, 15 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 15 August 2026 |
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Very experimental breakfast
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
After yesterday's research into Thai breakfasts, I really wanted to try something with kale and yellow Thai soya bean paste. But I had the left over from Tuesday. That wasn't enough, so I faked a dish with small quantities of pork and kale:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 40 g | Pork “sizzle” steak | |||
| 40 g | Kale | |||
| Dried chili | ||||
| 10 g | Garlic | |||
| 11 g | Dark soya sauce | |||
| 14 g | Yellow soya paste |
The result? Very salty, as warned. This stuff can only be used sparingly. And I still can't see that kale is a good substitute for gai lan, though I'll reserve my judgement until I try a real recipe.
Also tried to spice up the alu patta gobhi ki sabzi. Added 2 g of garam masala and 1 g of ground coriander. I forgot the salt, but the result was probably better. The dish still needs improvement.
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Eye problems?
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Topic: health | Link here |
Strange occurrence in my vision early this morning. When I shut my left eye, there was a slight disturbance to the left and below the focus (about 225°). It went away after a while, but is it indicative of some developing issue?
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More anti-spam issues
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So mail from lax.lemis.com is being rejected, maybe based on IP address. I can't send from eureka.lemis.com because I can't find a way to enable reverse lookup. But how about Aussie Broadband? Part of my subscription includes mail relaying via mail.aussiebroadband.com.au. Set that. The results were immediate:
Aug 15 09:31:03 eureka postfix/smtp[84759]: A70202635A9: to=<groggyhimself@freebsd.org>, relay=mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25]:25, delay=2.2, delays=0.01/0/0.52/1.7, dsn=4.3.3, status=deferred (host mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25] said: 450 4.3.3 <groggyhimself@lemis.com>: Sender address rejected: Mail rate limit Policy rejection - Contact Aussie Broadband on 1300 880 905 (in reply to RCPT TO command))
What's that nonsense? I haven't sent any mail via that relay in the last year. And they want me to call them up! Sorry, Aussie, you'll get a fault report: mail server misconfiguration. I suppose it's typical that to enter any kind of fault report, it first needs to spend an inordinate amount of time checking my link, when that's completely irrelevant.
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Another dead kangaroo
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
There's another dead kangaroo down Stones Road towards Bliss Road, quite a young one. Yvonne wanted to get rid of it, but nobody on Facebook wanted to help. In the end she called Sandra Thompson, phone 0413 624 205, who was here last year. She came along and took a look, and decided that it was one for the wedgies.
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Roast pork, yet again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Pork roast was in special at ALDI recently, only $7.99 per kg and thus cheaper than the kale with which I had been experimenting recently. As I have noted before, the real issue is the crackling. This one was extreme: the fat layer went 270° round the roast, so heating from above wasn't an option. On the spit? That would require the “hair dryer” “air fryer”, and I've already established that that's not the way to go. In addition, it would have made it difficult to use a temperature probe. So put it in a pot and roasted at 230° with setting 5 on our oven:
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After 10 minutes things looked relatively crackled:
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So I tried the other side, which I left in for longer, maybe too long:
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Then I put it on the pan and grilled further:
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Maybe too much. Here after another 8 minutes:
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So I turned down to 200°, basted with cooking oil and continued. Maybe at this point I should have turned the grill off (setting 2 on our oven), but in fact it didn't get that much darker. The result:
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And apart from the slight charring on the crackling, it was better than before. But it took longer than I expected, 69 minutes per kilogram to reach 75° meat temperature. Was that because of the repeated removal from the oven? On the positive side, it produced less smoke than on previous occasions.
It also produced an amazing amount of fat, over 200 g:
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Given the price of rendered pork fat nowadays (round 6 times the price of the roast), that's an advantage.
| Sunday, 16 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 16 August 2026 |
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Hey, what happened?
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Topic: general, food and drink | Link here |
Today seemed just as active as any other day. But it wasn't memorable: even the next day I can't recall doing anything of interest. About the only thing was researching Thai recipes. I must start doing other things.
| Monday, 17 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 17 August 2026 |
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Fighting feral debt collectors
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Still more spam to delete:
91 + 17-08-2026 To Greg Lehey Credit Collection Se ( 389) + IMMEDIATE PAYMENT REQUIRED
But then I saw the sender. Yes, more email posing as spam. This time from Credit Collection Services, who had sent me a letter of demand last Thursday. An answer to my complaint? No, of course not. They didn't even mention it, though they must have received it to find my email address. Just a repeat of their unsubstantiated claims.
There's nothing for it. Yet Another round of this frivolous case about alleged damage to Helen Miller's car on 18 October 2022. I don't know if the people involved are just stupid, whether it's standard practice to demand payment for something that never happened, or whether they're trying to wear me down. But it's time to summarize what happened:
On 18 October 2022 Helen Miller, our cleaner, parked her car where I had repeatedly asked her not to, in the area where I backed out my car. I was in a hurry and didn't see it in time, and bumped into it, bumper to bumper. No harm was done, but I thought it only polite to tell her. I didn't have time to talk to her in detail at the time, but a preliminary inspection showed no damage. Helen claimed that the bumper was distorted, but I couldn't see that. I suggested looking at it later.
The same evening she sent Yvonne a Facebook message asking for my registration.
A week later and two weeks later she came to clean the house as usual. No mention of the car.
Three weeks later she was here again. Once again she didn't mention anything, but while she was here a letter arrived from AAMI, her car insurers, claiming damages. I went to look at her car and saw no damage. I wanted to take photos, but she refused and left. What photos I took (with an inappropriate lens) were taken while she was leaving and showed no damage. I was left with the feeling that Helen was trying to pull a fast one on the insurers. I replied to AAMI denying any involvement and got no reply.
On 6 April 2023 I received a paper letter from AAMI demanding payment. I replied referring to my previous unanswered message and asked for confirmation of receipt within 7 days. There was none.
On 12 April 2023 I resent the message with the reminder that they had not answered my issues. Again I received no reply. I repeated this message an 13 April and 17 April, again with no response.
Finally, on 17 April 2023, I received a message claiming that they had tried to call me on a different phone number from the one specified, and claimed that the number “was not connected”, though it does belong to me and was working normally. Checking the call log showed no attempts. It included 18 images, many completely unrelated to the claimed incident (front of car, interior). Only 6 images showed the area of the car, and they were contradictory not only to my photos, but to each other:
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One showed a scratch that had not been there three weeks after the incident, and another showed the same area without the scratch, but with paintwork peeling off. Another showed minor damage on the other side of the bumper. Given the way I made contact with the car, that's impossible. The Exif data had been removed from the photos, so there's no way to tell when they were taken. I replied asking for the original, unmodified files and an explanation of what they claim to show. I also asked for them to continue by email only.
On 27 April 2023, 10 days later, I received a reply: they claimed to have tried to call me on the same phone number as before. They appear not to have read my message. They did not include a reply, just a request for a different telephone number. I started to think that the matter had resolved itself.
On 11 April 2024, nearly a year later, I received another message from a different consultant, claiming that I had not responded to their demands. It included more photos, including one apparently taken on the day, showing the tyre marks of my car, and making it quite clear that I hit the back of her car at an angle. I replied pointing out that I was not involved in any damage.
On 23 April 2024 (11:21) I received a couple of screen shots showing that I gave my registration details. This, they said, was proof that I was to blame. I responded suggesting that they escalate the claim to somebody who understands the issues.
Also on 23 April 2024 (11:34, 13 minutes later), and before I had had time to reply to the first message, I received a PDF, apparently from somebody else in the company, telling me that they had transferred the matter
to our authorised external agent, who will be acting on our behalf. They will make contact with you shortly to pursue this sum. If you would like to discuss your liability or make payment, please contact us on .
The “contact us” omitted any contact method. I sent my reply to the first message anyway, pointing out that releasing my registration details was not proof of liability.
On 29 April 2024 I had progress. After 1½ years, finally “we noted that you are disputing damages to our insured vehicle”. They wanted me to send an assessor's report, to which I responded that the onus of any proof was on them.
On 12 May 2024 I received a message claiming that they had already sent their assessor's report. They hadn't, but it was attached. It showed no damage, as I pointed out to them. That was the last I heard from AAMI.
On 5 June 2024 I received mail from arma debt resolution asking for payment. I responded stating that the claims were incorrect, pointing to the assessor's report and asking them to dismiss the claim.
To be fair to arma, it seems that they did read my response. I received a reply the same day, including Helen's claims at the time, but no proof of any damage. I responded accordingly.
The following two days, 6 and 7 June 2024, I received a repeats of the first message of the previous day, with no further information. In each case I responded accordingly.
Also on 7 June 2024, they sent me a PDF with better versions of the photos that I received on 17 April. They show vertical scratches on the left and the right of the car, something that is impossible given the nature of the contact. It also included a copy of the Assessor's Report showing that there was no damage. I replied asking to stop this nuisance.
On 10 June 2024 and twice on 13 June 2024 I received the same old message first received on 5 June. On 13 June 2024 I also received another copy of the PDF with the Assessor's report. As always, I answered asking them to go away. And so they did, it seems. That's well over 2 years ago, and I haven't heard from them since.
Then, on 13 August 2026, I received paper mail from Credit Collection Services, starting the whole thing all over again. I responded with a complaint, since they didn't give me the choice of just contacting them, and asking them to contact me only by email.
And today (17 August 2026) I received mail from them: “we would like to work with you to resolve this matter. Please call us on (02) 8568 6500“. No mention of my complaint, though it came from the same address to which I had sentit (customerservice@ccsgroup.com.au), and presumably they got my email address from the complaint. Another reply, asking them to first read the mail that I had sent them, and threatening a formal complaint to Consumer Affairs Victoria if they don't stop.
Looking back, though: what stands out is that nobody has at any point described the damage that I am claimed to have done. There is damage in some of the photos, but they contradict each other, and the it's not possible that the incident could have caused any of that damage.
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Still more firewall pain?
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Topic: technology | Link here |
I'm running a local copy of my external web site on dereel.lemis.com. It's not known to the outside world, so it's almost completely idle, just what I want for running the validators. But today they couldn't access it.
What, more firewall issues? I've been hacking away at dereel's firewall for some days, in the process leaving things behind that can never be reached. But I couldn't find anything. OK, try locally. Yes, I can access dereel. No, I can't access the web server. To my surprise, it wasn't a firewall issue at all: restarting the server fixed it. That's the first time I have seen that.
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eBay dishonesty
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Topic: food and drink, technology, opinion | Link here |
I've had a bad relationship with fried eggs for over half a century, but from time to time I make one for nasi lemak, like today. I've found that I can get a nice, rounded fried egg from a 12 cm pan like this one:
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But it has two problems. The first is obvious: the coating is flaking off. The second is not so obvious: it's aluminium, so it won't work on an induction cooker. And the alternative on a gas cooker is less than ideal, as Yvonne shows:
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So off to see what I can find on eBay. Just what I want! The very first listing, sorted by ascending price, os a 12 cm pan, works with induction, only $5.10:
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Oh. Go to the order page and discover that you have to set a “color”. The pan costs $12.59. For $5.10 you get an otherwise unmentioned keychain:
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Whom does this help? Arguably the fraudster, here shopnest.store. Not eBay. Not the customer. But eBay provides no way of stopping it, so it will happen again and again.
I found exactly the same item from an honest seller for $9.87, less than shopnest.store wanted, so that's the one I bought. But I really wish that eBay would do something about it.
| Tuesday, 18 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 18 August 2026 |
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Understanding kale
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I suspect that it was a mistake to buy kale for breakfast last week. It may be Brassica oleracea, like gai lan, but claims that it is similar seem to base on misinformation or the choice of a different kind of kale.
What do I do with it? Today I cooked what is otherwise a pretty unspectacular mi goreng. Cut the kale very small and fry for a long time, in particular the leaves, which with gai lan cook very quickly. I'm also not sure that I shouldn't use less of the leaves. The result:
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But it still doesn't have much to offer. Never again. I think I said that last time.
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Pork crackling rewarmed
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Ate more of Saturday's roast pork this evening. What do we do with the now-soggy crackling? Take it off the roast and put it in the hair dryer, of course. The results were informative:
Here before and after:
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| Wednesday, 19 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 19 August 2026 |
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A third of a lifetime!
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Topic: history, general, opinion | Link here |
Seen in my calendar this morning:
2/3 life: Friday, 1 September 2000
Sep 1 Greg restarts online diary, 2000
3/4 life: Wednesday, 28 February 2007
I restarted this diary a third of my lifetime ago! Looking from the other direction, I'm now half as old again as when I started it. And the next anniversary is lurking in the shadows: nearly a quarter of my lifetime since we moved to Dereel.
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Migrating my Vultr
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So is the overload on lax.lemis.com due to the (Vultr) environment in which it is run? What happens if the host is overloaded? I could find that out by migrating to a different location, once again Silicon Valley. That would also enable me to work around current mail blacklists.
Did that remarkably easily, with the exception of over 2 hours making and restoring a snapshot. Update DNS and watch the fun. And within minutes, it was overloaded, though fra.lemis.com had no issues. That's a pity. Maybe, like many others, I should leave the USA, even if my reasons are different.
But it wasn't completely plain sailing. Initially it responded remarkably slowly, and in the logs I saw HTTP error code 408, meaning “timeout”. Why? It happened several times, but went away before I could trace it.
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Another blast from the past
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Topic: technology, history | Link here |
While reading log files, saw this:
Aug 19 13:15:25 eureka postfix/smtpd[55531]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[66.55.76.190]: 571 5.7.1 <majordomo@lemis.com>: Recipient address rejected: Service no longer available. See http://www.auug.org.au/; from=<majordomocritic@wxys168.net> to=<majordomo@lemis.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<wxys168.net>
Nothing unusual there, except for the message. The reference to http://www.auug.org.au/ is clearly decades old. Looking at the RCS logs, it dates from February 2004. And of course I should have included a better URL.
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ALDI enchiladas again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne was shopping today, and she brought back some specials from ALDI: chicken enchiladas and “Peking style” duck. We've had both before, the enchiladas on 6 April 2025 and the duck on 18 October 2025. Both were acceptable if not overly authentic.
Today we ate the enchiladas. First, how do you cook them? The instructions say for 20 minutes at 180° in an oven, by which time the insides should reach 85°. OK, how about in an “air fryer”? But they're so big (something that I noted last time) that they won't fit into the hairdryer. How about the bathtub? Yes, barely:
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I cooked them first at 180°, as requested, and when they were still far from the stated temperature after 15 minutes, increased to 200°. And they took 27 minutes to reach 71°, which seems more than enough for me. Why do they want such a high temperature? Part of it is due to the filling:
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That's not chicken. It's not an enchilada. It's a sausage roll! And it tasted terrible. Nothing for it, cheese and crackers:
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The “enchiladas” will go back, but my confidence in ALDI specials is seriously damaged. In particular, we have had the real thing in the same packaging last year, and then it didn't taste bad.
| Thursday, 20 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 20 August 2026 |
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Another eye disturbance
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Topic: health | Link here |
Another incidence of the visual disturbance that I had on Saturday. As far as I can tell, it was identical: it happened when I was sitting at my desk before breakfast, and in the same place. Potentially it's a reaction to the increase in brightness, but I suppose I should mention it next time I have my eyes checked.
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Toronto? No. Frankfurt/Main? Yes.
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Topic: technology | Link here |
As planned, moved a snapshot of lax.lemis.com to Toronto (thus yyz.lemis.com). I'm getting quite adept at this, though it was interesting to note how much faster the snapshot restored, round 10 minutes.
The result? Within minutes the load average shot up:
last pid: 3225; load averages: 164.79, 79.33, 35.86 up 0+00:27:17 03:14:13
It stayed that way, so yyz barely lived more than an hour.
What next? What happens to fra.lemis.com if it's the only server? To my surprise, no change. Load average less than the number of CPUs, system partially idle.
What do I do next? I need an external machine to handle mail, but it doesn't need to be big. And it looks as if North America is not a good place for Vultrs. To be considered. Certainly the option of different incoming and outgoing machines is a possibility.
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More cat pain
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has been looking for a companion cat for Mona for some time now, and today she told me about a cat that Helen Weir has to rehome: brown Burmese female, 8 months old. Are we interested?
Well, interested yes. So I called her up and left a message on her voice mail.
But the next cat-related contact came only shortly later and was less expected: the Sayers have given up on Bruno and want to bring him back this weekend. Mixed emotions: on the one hand it's sad that it didn't work out, but it seems that far from making friends with Scout, their other male cat, he attacked and even injured him. That's really so different from our experience with Bruno. But Yvonne admitted that she's rather looking forward to seeing him again.
Can we keep him? We now have the dog run made bird-proof and hopefully escape proof, so we can let him out there for extended periods. Will he calm down? Will he remain aggressive and even attack Mona? I don't think so; I think that the issue was that Scout is male. But we'll see.
Of course, by the time Helen called back in the evening, everything had changed. But she sent me some photos of the cat she has, Lucy, 8 months old:
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Yvonne immediately fell in love with her. What do we do now? Time will tell
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More web server hangs on dereel
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Topic: technology | Link here |
I'm still using the web server on dereel.lemis.com to give me an external view of the system. On the whole it works well. But once again today I had a case where the server hung. No message in the log files, and an apachectl graceful worked. But why is it happening?
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Chapatis again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Leftover food this evening: the South African biriyani. And to eat with that, roti.
Normally we use “wraps”, white wheat wrappers probably designed for hand food. But they're boring, and I still have a lot of atta in the fridge. Time to use it up. How can I make chapatis with the Mexican tortilla press? Once again Google Gemini to the rescue. Nothing overly surprising except for the suggestion of using oiled plastic sheets to press the chapatis. Tried it with my kitchen paper first, which was a complete failure, and then with the oiled plastic.
That worked, up to a point. Press the chapatis into form, and then remove the plastic. But how? I can peel it off, but then it sticks to the other side. I can't put it onto the hot roti maker with the plastic attached. And the raw chapatis are too soft to handle easily. I got two of four to work correctly, but the other ones folded on the way to the roti maker. I need to think more carefully about this.
And the biriyani? Boring. That's what I said last time, but I didn't read what I had written at the time:
I still have two-thirds of the meat left in the freezer, but no more spices for rice or lentils. I'll fake something next time, and with any luck it will taste better.
Now there's only one portion left over. Maybe next time I can make it more interesting.
| Friday, 21 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 21 August 2026 |
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Horse meets Borzoi
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Seen walking the dogs today:
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It's amazing how interested horses are in our dogs. They're bigger than normal dogs, and they don't bark. From a horse perspective, they're not real dogs. But what are they?
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Android file access: more pain
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
One of the better workarounds for Android breakage is AirDroid, which presents its idea of an interface to a mobile phone on a web browser. It tries to send the data half way round the world, but it can be persuaded to connect directly. Today I used it to try to access the photos that Helen Weir had sent me yesterday.
But they weren't there. The “Messages” section of AirDroid showed me messages that we had exchanged last year and the year before, but not today's message. It was an “RCS” message, presumably designed to be incompatible with the formats that had gone before.
OK, save the images. How do I do that? Ask Google Gemini yet again. It came up with a 14 step answer, some of it correct. To save an image you first need to select it, long press on the image until it changes colour. Then short press on the other ones. What a horrible way to do things! What if there were 237 images?
Then you [sic] “Tap the Save or Download icon in the top right corner”. Something goes and stores the images in a place that I can't find. Then “Navigate to Internal Storage > Pictures > Messages (or Download).” Doesn't that sound definitive? I finally found the files in /Pictures/Messages in the view that WiFi FTP Server gives me. And then I could do the easy part, move them to a Real Computer.
I never cease to be amazed by what a mess Android is.
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Video download issues
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
Lately I've found a number of corrupt videos and had to re-download them. I use yt-dlp, and with some tweaks things are acceptable, though I still can't get my eyes around subtitles, which seem to be a continual source of annoyance. But from time to time I get a message telling me that a problem has occurred, and the block load has been retried.
In some cases, the difference is obvious: the size of the defective file is less than the size of the newly downloaded file. But even if that's not the case, I find that the files differ. Here a download from ZDF:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/3) /spool/Docco/Julius-Caesar-Diktator/dup 104 -> for i in *; do cmp $i ../$i; done
Aufstieg.mp4 ../Aufstieg.mp4 differ: char 2463442, line 8775
Fall.mp4 ../Fall.mp4 differ: char 2474918, line 8523
Macht.mp4 ../Macht.mp4 differ: char 2424098, line 8545=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/3) /spool/Docco/Julius-Caesar-Diktator 107 -> l * dup/
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 43.098 20 Aug. 16:54 Aufstieg.deu.vtt
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 1.785.083.246 20 Aug. 20:06 Aufstieg.mp4
...
dup:
total 5096
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 43.098 20 Aug. 17:52 Aufstieg.deu.vtt
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 1.785.083.246 20 Aug. 17:56 Aufstieg.mp4
How can that happen?
| Saturday, 22 August 2026 | Dereel | |
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Revisiting breakfast noodles
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I've been eating various East and South-East Asian breakfasts for round 5 years now, and started writing down my recipes round then. But lately I've been doing more and more experiments, and coming back to a recipe like mi udang or curry laksa, I have gradually decided that the quantities need an overhaul. More liquid in particular: I've been aiming for 320 ml, but with the things I put in, there's barely any liquid visible. 360 ml? 400 ml even? And I've decided that Hokkien noodles are too heavy for many things. Thinner noodles seem like a good idea.
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More GPS issues
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
What's wrong with this photo?
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No location information. But it was taken at 14:42:12 yesterday, and I had my mobile phone logging GPS coordinates. Here in UTC (10 hours behind, so the time was 04:42:12):
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/19) ~/Photos/20260821 348 -> geotag orig/A8215780.ORF
GPSLOG /src/GPS/Tracklogs/Phones/GPSLogger/albo/20260821.gpx
exiftool -geotag=/src/GPS/Tracklogs/Phones/GPSLogger/albo/20260821.gpx orig/A8215780.ORF
Warning: Time is too far from nearest GPS fix in File:Geotime (ValueConvInv) - orig/A8215780.ORF
Warning: No writable tags set from orig/A8215780.ORF
But that's not correct. Here the relevant entries in the log file:
<trkpt lat="-37.80286666666667" lon="143.75119333333333"><ele>343.5</ele><time>2026-08-21T04:42:11.000Z</time><course>277.67</course><speed>0.0</speed><geoidheight>-6.4</geoidheight><src>gps</src><sat>30</sat><hdop>0.48</hdop><vdop>0.53</vdop><pdop>0.72</pdop></trkpt>
<trkpt lat="-37.802861666666665" lon="143.75115833333334"><ele>343.0</ele><time>2026-08-21T04:42:14.000Z</time><course>277.67</course><speed>0.0</speed><geoidheight>-6.4</geoidheight><src>gps</src><sat>29</sat><hdop>0.49</hdop><vdop>0.53</vdop><pdop>0.72</pdop></trkpt>
And the location (-37.802861666666665, 143.75115833333334, precise to 8 pm), is correct, as Google Maps confirms. I don't know how far away the time has to be to be ignored, but it's in the order of several minutes. Why didn't it like the data? Somehow I have lots of trouble with ExifTool lately.
| Sunday, 23 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 23 August 2026 |
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Bruno returns
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
The Sayers along in late morning to return Bruno, much sadness. I was hoping to get his first steps out of the basket, but people continually got in my way. But he was quite calm, and he recognized Mona immediately, and she him: one of the reasons that we took him back was because Mona was lonely. Even Larissa joined in the fun:
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And then we let him out and confirmed that the dog run is now (relatively) escape proof.
But in the evening, for some reason, Mona decided that she didn't like Bruno any more, and hissed and growled at him. What went wrong there? I thought that Lara might have confused the issue, but at the time she carried on relatively normally, and at no time did I see Bruno do anything towards Mona.
He did, however, jump over my armchair several times. I'm guessing that this is now his (inappropriate) way to say that he wants to go out into the cat run, where he spent several hours.
In passing, my kitchen scales are suited to weighing cats, if they would only stay still long enough (a few seconds) to allow the scales to settle. I've tried a cardboard box, with only limited success. My current weights: Mona 3.43 kg, Bruno 4.5 kg, both round 400 g less than I had guessed using personal weight scales (cat with me, me without cat).
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Garden flowers in late winter
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Topic: gardening, photography | Link here |
It's a month before the equinox, time for my monthly flower photos. There's really not much to see at this time in the year. It really seems as if the Solanum laxum has died. Here this a year ago and today:
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My best bet is that the relatively wet winter has drowned it. We'll see if anything comes back.
One of the succulents (some type of aloe, I think) is flowering nicely:
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And while my Camellia japonica has died, I see one from the laundry door every day:
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Where? Oh, that's the normal angle of view. At 100 mm (200 mm “full frame” equivalent), it's:
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But what do I have a long telephoto for?
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That's the Spiteri's house, and so I can't kill it.
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Still more web server confusion.
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The web server on dereel hung again! This time I went to some trouble to find out where. All I got was ECONNRESET, but for some reason tcpdump or Wireshark didn't report it. I established that it wasn't a firewall rule, and once again there was nothing in the server log file. And once again an apachectl graceful woke it again. But what's going on? How do I fix it?
In addition, it's been three days since I took lax.lemis.com out of the list of www.lemis.com, and it has been nice and quiet. So has fra.lemis.com, the last remaining active external server.
But today I tried accessing it and got some really slow results. Why? The system wasn't even fully loaded. I wish I understood this stuff.
| Monday, 24 August 2026 | Dereel | |
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Mee goreng mamak revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Mee goreng mamak for breakfast again today. I've been looking at other recipes, mainly to confirm whether karuveppilai are obligatory. No, they're not, it seems. But other ingredients crop up, including “curry powder”, and there's a mention of more liquid. So I added 5 g of garam masala and increased the sauce ingredients by 50%. And since I have karuveppilai, I added them anyway.
The result? The garam masala made surprisingly little difference, but the sauce did. I already had 40 g of light soya sauce, quite a bit, and 60 was definitely too much. But I can maybe stick with more of the others. Here a possibility, just for the sauces:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 40 g | soya sauce | 1 | ||
| 20 g | dark soya sauce | 1 | ||
| 45 g | sambal ulek | 1 | ||
| 25 g | tomato sauce | 1 | ||
In passing, came across a number of other uses for karuveppilai, including this video, which I must view.
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More cat worries
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Bruno continues to be as hyperactive as ever, and Yvonne has identified a number of potential new homes, including a couple in Ballarat. Mona has calmed down a little, but they're still not as friendly as they were 2 months ago.
Should we take Lucy, Helen Weir's 8 month brown? It sounds like a good idea. Called up Helen and arranged to come by later this week, probably Thursday. Another visit to Melbourne!
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More TUHS activity
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Topic: technology, history, opinion | Link here |
More activity on The Unix Heritage Society today. We're in a strange position: we're an Australian Charity, but nearly all, if not all, of our financial activity, both donations and obligations, are in the USA. And somehow the banks don't want to help. Today Warren Toomey set up a PayPal account in USD. But how do we put money in there? Transferring from our Australian funds incurs a whopping 4% worse exchange rate. Spent some time discussing that, during which I discovered that, though I ostensibly had access to the PayPal account, it was too confused to separate it from my private account. In the end I accidentally deleted my access. I'm not sure that I care; this is for the treasurer, not me as secretary.
| Tuesday, 25 August 2026 | Dereel | |
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More TUHSI issues
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
How does one transfer money from one country to another? Companies like “Wise” could make it easier, and they advertise support for charities in specific countries, including Australia, but for reasons we don't understand (and, I suspect, they don't understand either; I have always thought the name “Wise” to be inappropriate), they won't accept us. Transfer via PayPal? They want a 4% surcharge for currency conversions. Spent some time investigating today, and compared with my personal PayPal account. It wouldn't let me log in! I haven't changed the password, so my guess is that some of the messing around in the past couple of days had confused it.
After reinstating my password, came to the startling discovery that my personal PayPal account has three different currencies: AUD, USD and €, and that the default was USD. Where did that come from? It wouldn't be beyond the bounds of possibility that the USD came from the TUHSI infiltration, but the € must have been there before. So what happens with conversions? I bought some beer online today, clearly in AUD, and yes, it was processed entirely with AUD. What happens with USD? I linked my “Wise” card, so the preferable thing to do would be to deduct USD sums from my “Wise” card in USD. Is that would it would do? How do I control it?
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More experiments with ACDSee
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
It has been over two months since I looked at my acdsee Photo Studio Ultimate photo processing software. They and many others have been sending me mail telling me how much better their next iteration is, with things like image generation from text descriptions (what does that have to do with photo processing?). But I still don't know how to use the current version. Time to try it out. Somehow I can't get my head around how they understand processing. There's “Develop”, which you would think involved generating negatives, and subsequently “Edit”. Got as far as “Develop” today, looking in particular at this old photo, here in five versions. From left to right, the out-of-camera original (this was before I started using raw image capture), then processed with DxO PhotoLab, then subsequently optimized with Ashampoo optimizer, then reprocessed with a later version of DxO, and subsequently optimized with “Perfectly Clear” (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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There are at least 3 issues with the image:
So: what can ACDSee do? I still don't know. In the “Develop” section there's are drop-down choices “Remove Noise+” and “Remove Noise++”. They don't do very much, if at all, though they only take a few seconds.
But then there's “Edit”. And there there's yet another choice, “Denoise”, which seems to be trying to make DxO look fast. I left it do its thing and moved on to other issues.
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The daily Bruno
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Yvonne has identified a number of people who would be interested in taking Bruno, and we're still discussing it. But somehow, since he has been allowed out into the dog run, he is becoming less irritating, and Mona has also stopped hissing at him. Maybe they'll make friends again after all.
| Wednesday, 26 August 2026 | Dereel | |
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More ACDSee fun
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Continued with yesterday's experiments with acdsee Photo Studio Ultimate, and finally got the noise reduction in the “Edit” tab to complete. It took 8 minutes for a single image! And at the end, there was nothing to be seen, certainly no change. Normally it adds the version to the history list on the right, but in this case there was nothing.
Nothing for it, when I have time it's another RTFM.
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Upgrading ssh?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I am deliberately keeping eureka at its current status, now running a system dating back to November 2015. But try as I might, I can't get its ssh to talk to modern systems. OK, why not just build a second ssh? If it doesn't work, I can always fall back to the old version.
But where do I get it? openssh-portable sounds like an obvious choice. But it tells me “This is a port of OpenBSD's OpenSSH to most Unix-like operating systems, including Linux, OS X and Cygwin”. I don't see FreeBSD in that list. OK, try downloading the OpenBSD version.
That was interesting. The source tree looked almost identical to FreeBSD, but it died with an invalid option to cc. Fix the Makefile, and it went a little further, but died with
In file included from /home/grog/src/OpenSSH/ssh/ssh/../ssh.c:81:
/home/grog/src/OpenSSH/ssh/ssh/../pathnames.h:144:9: warning: '_PATH_CP' macro redefined
#define _PATH_CP "cp"
^
/usr/include/paths.h:49:9: note: previous definition is here
#define _PATH_CP "/bin/cp"
^
In file included from /home/grog/src/OpenSSH/ssh/ssh/../ssh.c:87:
In file included from /home/grog/src/OpenSSH/ssh/ssh/../kex.h:30:
/home/grog/src/OpenSSH/ssh/ssh/../crypto_api.h:40:11: fatal error: 'sha2.h' file not found
# include <sha2.h>
^
1 warning and 1 error generated.
*** Error code 1
Stop.
That's clearly more work than I need. Time to investigate OpenSSH instead.
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More web site overload
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been nearly a week since I removed lax.lemis.com from the www.lemis.com list, and fra.lemis.com (the only remaining one) seemed to be doing quite well. Until today, where it suddenly showed a load average of over 200, like in the worst times. Put lax back in the list, and things seemed to get better again.
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More PayPal pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So why can't we transfer USD to PayPal? More asking Google Gemini, which came up with this information. It should Just Work. So I got Warren to send me a PayPal payment request for 1 USD. Pay with my “Wise” card. Sure enough, it deducted me $1 US from my Wise card, which charged me
| Amount taken | 1.40 AUD | |
| Our conversion fee | 0.01 AUD | |
| We converted | 1.39 AUD | |
| Exchange rate | 1 AUD = 0.7178 USD | |
| Converted to | 1 USD |
That looks like 1¢ commission, but doing the arithmetic based on the exchange rate, in fact it was only 0.258 ¢. But PayPal was equal to the challenge: it deducted 31¢ (31%!) from the $1 for “fees” of unspecified nature (not conversion), so that option also bites the dust.
| Thursday, 27 August 2026 | Dereel | |
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All day cooking
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I cook rice and freeze it in portions, about 12 at a time. And that in two variants: standard nasi putih and nasi lemak. But today I wanted nasi goreng, and yesterday I had finally received the small frying pan that I had ordered 10 days ago, so of course I wanted to have nasi lemak some time soon. A total of 1.5 kg of raw rice to cook, and somehow it took all day.
As if that wasn't enough, I didn't have space in the freezer to put the nasi putih. But I discovered some pork fat, presumably bought to make chu yau cha (猪油渣, greaves). But that was over 11 years ago. Is it still edible? Got a description of the rendering process from Google Gemini, and discovered that the idea of cutting 1 kg of fat into 1 cm cubes was quite a bit of work, so put it through the mincer instead. Then in the sous-vide cooker for some hours at 85°, during which it did not smell overly good. Still, we'll see what the result is like.
| Friday, 28 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 28 August 2026 |
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More eye flashes
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Yet another case of visual disturbances in my left eye today. There must be something wrong with the eye: it's always in the same place, and almost always in the morning when I look at a white screen background for a while. This evening I saw it briefly looking at the TV, but that's the first time. And when I shut my eye, I can see a light patch in the same place.
Should I see an ophthalmologist? It could be a good idea.
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Superb fairywren
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Topic: animals, photography | Link here |
Preparing breakfast this morning, heard a soft banging noise from outside the laundry door. What I saw surprised me:
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A superb fairywren had seen its reflection in a dustbin outside, and was attacking it. It kept it up several times in the course of the day. Hopefully it will be around again when I can get better photos. What do I need to do? Come closer, have a faster shutter speed, and ideally miss the glass in between. But I don't see how I can do the last of those?
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More fat rendering
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
After yesterday's fat rendering, took a look at the result:
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OK, remove the fat and take a look at the greaves:
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But they were soft, nothing like what I need for chu yau cha (猪油渣). Ah, says Google Gemini, who spell the transliteration as zhū yóu zhā, you need a higher temperature to melt the greaves by themselves, round 160-180°. Tried that and again left it overnight.
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Next ssh attempt
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So OpenBSD is not close enough to FreeBSD for me to use its ssh implementation. How about OpenSSH?
First I needed to find it, which their documentation doesn't make easy. I didn't find a download URL at all Ultimately I got it with the help of Google Gemini from https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/OpenSSH/portable/openssh-10.5p1.tar.gz. Just build? No, first run configure in the top level directory. Not quite what I expected:
...
checking for openssl/opensslv.h... yes
checking OpenSSL header version... 1000110f (OpenSSL 1.0.1p-freebsd 9 Jul 2015)
checking for OpenSSL_version... no
checking for OpenSSL_version_num... no
checking OpenSSL library version... configure: error: OpenSSL >= 1.1.1 required (have "1000110f (OpenSSL 1.0.1p-freebsd 9 Jul 2015)")
How do I get around that? I don't want to change the base OpenSSL installation on eureka. More and more I'm getting the impression that dynamic libraries solve a problem that no longer exists (file and memory size), and create untold issues in return. Of course, what else uses OpenSSL? rsync does, for one.
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Next iChoose card
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Another prepaid debit card from iChoose. More pain registering it, not made easier by the fact that you have to destroy the instructions to access them at all: they're stuck to the back of the card.
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And when I tried to register it, it took me to the details of the old card, now shown to be locked. The replacement card?
Replace Card Note: There is a $15.00 replacement fee for ordering a replacement card, which will be deducted from your card balance. Sufficient funds must be available to order a replacement.
For once, the AI “chat” help worked: it pointed me to the correct URL, not the one that the site had presented me. And after that and countless 2FAs, the card was registered. Now to see if it works.
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Full moon
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Topic: photography | Link here |
Full moon this evening, and a clear view. In principle I have already decided that taking photos of the moon isn't worth it, but that was before I had as long a telephoto lens as I do now. I had established that I needed a focal length of 1300 mm or so (2600 mm “full frame”), but the 840 mm I have could make a difference. Here uncropped:
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To my surprise, cropping it increased the effective focal length to 2528 mm (5056 mm “full frame"):
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It still doesn't seem to be worth the trouble. And once again I have chromatic aberration at top and bottom.
| Saturday, 29 August 2026 | Dereel | Images for 29 August 2026 |
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Still more pork fat rendering
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
The third day trying to render fat! Today I had KL Hokkien Mee for breakfast. One thing is very obvious: to make zhū yóu zhā, the kind of greaves used in KL Hokkien Mee, you need to cut the fat into cubes, not mince it like I did. I still had some cubes, so I extracted them:
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There was also the skin of the pork that I used in the dish, so I tried deep frying it. First at 160°:
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Still not crisp enough. 170°?
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The lighter pieces are the skin, which fluffed up nicely. And the greaves were cooked correctly too. But they tasted rancid! A good thing that we can give them to the dogs, but for this experiment it's more experience than success.
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Be kind to donkeys
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Topic: politics, fiction, animals | Link here |
Things are getting interesting in North America. The fount of all wisdom has determined that Lake Ontario should be called “Lake America”, in the mistaken assumption that that would reflect on the country between the United States of Mexico and Canada. I've heard that Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of the United States, is considering renaming that country to the Estados Unidos Tejanos, after the part of Mexico that broke away in 1845, and that since the province of Ontario is named after the lake, Canada is thinking of renaming the province to “America” and putting a copyright on the name, prohibiting other countries from using the word in their names.
But that's all speculation. What is fact is that the premier of America Ontario,
Doug Ford, has invited Trump
to kiss his
ass. And how about that, the animal lover that he is, he did!
(original at https://www.instagram.com/p/DcfAPDBIFAP/)
There's nothing in the malicious rumour that Trump recognized a kindred spirit.
| Sunday, 30 August 2026 | Dereel | |
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Still more eye flashes
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Topic: health | Link here |
Once again I had these “eye flashes” in my left eye, under the same conditions: early in the day, looking at a monitor with a white screen. But this time things were marginally different: the area was slightly higher, maybe 250°, and it had a “tail” stretching from the middle of the optical axis. On the whole, that sounds better: clearly it's not retinal damage, or if it is, it's transient.
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SQL table editor
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Topic: technology | Link here |
One of the things that I have been looking for for a long time is a good SQL table editor. Decades ago I came across phpMyEdit, but people have prayed against
deprecated it, and it's a bit limited in its use. Is there nothing else? Something that
runs under Emacs?
Yes, say the twins. Lots of them, most not addressing my issue (one, for example, simply provides an interface to the mysql client, definitely not what I'm looking for). But there's one, Clutch, that claims to do it.
How? The twins keep changing their mind. One thing is clear: my hate of git is extending to github. Finding the source is relatively easy, but how do you install? In the end, I asked the twins about that too, and they came up with an answer that helped a little, without being correct.
Finally I got it installed, though it's not clear that it's done correctly, and using a different function from the one they stated (clutch-open-console, I think), I got a table display that looked like I could edit it. Only I couldn't: it displayed a text "row editing unavailable E/D off".
What does that mean? It proves that “E/D” means “editing/deleting”, in principle adding nothing to the statement. And there are many reasons for that, none of which ended up in my *Messages* buffer. In my case it was at least because the table didn't have a primary key. I can add that, of course, but first I need to think about how. Do I use a new column (auto-increment, for example), or can I assume that some column in the existing table should be unique? Still, it's some progress.
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More static builds?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
After Friday's problems with backporting ssh, considered the alternative of static linking. How do I do it? Once again, Google Gemini came up with suggestions, one of which almost worked:
make LDFLAGS="-static"
It at least tried to do so, but
checking for ldns support... no
configure: error: ** Incomplete or missing ldns libraries.
And that's because there is no static libdns:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/8) /usr/ports/security/openssh-portable 26 -> locate libdns
/usr/local/lib/bind-tools/libdns-9.20.26.so
/usr/local/lib/bind-tools/libdns.so
/usr/local/lib/libdns-9.20.26.so
/usr/local/lib/libdns.so
/usr/local/lib/samba4/private/libdnsserver-common-private-samba.so
That's probably only the first of many. Should I go to the trouble of building static libraries for each dependency?
| Monday, 31 August 2026 | Dereel | |
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More garden work
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Topic: gardening, animals, general | Link here |
Jesse Walsh along today to do some whipper-snipping. Bruno was intrigued by the dog run without long grass.
Jesse also helped me lubricate the runners on the sliding door to the terrace. It didn't help: though the wheels ran freely, the door still sticks. Is it a matter of pressure, or something else?
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More attempts with clutch
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Spent much time today trying to run Clutch to edit MySQL tables. I failed.
First, I need to set a primary key. Back up the table to be on the safe side. How? Once this was my responsibility, but that was decades ago, and if it was ever completed, the twins haven't found out about it. Instead I need:
mysql> create table lensbackup like lens;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.33 sec)
mysql> insert into lensbackup select * from lens;
Query OK, 268 rows affected (0.05 sec)
Records: 268 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0
Now set the primary key:
mysql> alter table lens add primary key (name);
ERROR 1170 (42000): BLOB/TEXT column 'name' used in key specification without a key length
Somewhere I read that I should change the type of the column to varchar:
mysql> alter table lens modify name varchar(64) not null;
Query OK, 268 rows affected (0.14 sec)
Records: 268 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0
So now I can finally create the primary key:
mysql> alter table lens add primary key (name);
ERROR 1062 (23000): Duplicate entry 'Contemporary' for key 'PRIMARY'
Oh. Do I have duplicate names? Yes:
mysql> select * from lens where name like "%Contemp%";
+-------+-------------------------------------------------+------------------+
| brand | name | min_focal_length |...
+-------+-------------------------------------------------+------------------+
| Sigma | Sigma 16mm F1.4 DC DN Contemporary Contemporary | 16 |
| Sigma | Contemporary | 30 |
| Sigma | Contemporary | 56 |
+-------+-------------------------------------------------+------------------+
3 rows in set (0.02 sec)
I had half expected that. So I do need an additional autoincrement primary key:
mysql> alter table lens add column id int auto_increment primary key first;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.12 sec)
Records: 0 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0
That was so fast that I thought nothing had happened, especially since it gave a record count of 0. But no, it had added a key value for every record.
Next, clutch. I don't know how to use it. I discovered that there is some documentation. You just need to understand github, and I clearly don't. Searching the Clutch page sequentially leads me to a heading “Documentation” which adds some instructions for SQLite only. There's a native client guide which is basically a set of key bindings. And Google Gemini is so confused that it keeps coming up with different instructions, many of them invalid, each time I ask. I really can't blame it.
Here some of the notes I made along the way. Some are almost certainly wrong, but which?
Step-by-Step Fix
Open a SQL Buffer
Create or open a SQL buffer in Emacs (e.g., C-x b query.sql RET).
GitHub
Ensure Major and Minor Modes Are Active
Make sure it is in SQL mode: M-x sql-mode.
Manually enable Clutch's minor mode in the buffer:
M-x clutch-mode
(You should see Clutch appear in your buffer's mode-line at the bottom).
Link the Buffer to Your Saved Connection
With point inside that buffer, run:
M-x clutch-connect
Select your entry from clutch-connection-alist (e.g., my-freebsd-db).
Execute the Query
Type your table query:
SQL
SELECT * FROM your_table_name;
Now press C-c C-c. Because clutch-mode is active, C-c C-c will execute the statement at point, split
the window, and open the interactive results grid.
Optional: Automate clutch-mode
To avoid having to run M-x clutch-mode manually every time you open a .sql file, add this hook to your Emacs initialization file:
(add-hook 'sql-mode-hook #'clutch-mode)
Once this hook is active, opening any SQL file or switching to sql-mode will enable Clutch automatically, allowing M-x clutch-connect and C-c C-c to work.
Mode hook confuses things
Use clutch-execute-dwim?
Out of this, what I remember is:
(setq clutch-connection-alist
'(("photos"
:backend mysql
:host "eureka"
:port 3306
:user "grog"
:database "photos")))
I get the message
Connected to grog@eureka:3306/photos
select * from lens;
Then press c-c c-c.
At this point, things go crazy:
MySQL query error: "[1064] (42000) You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'To create a file, visit it with ‘C-x C-f’ and enter text in its buffer. sel' at line 1"
| | id | brand | name | min_focal_length | max_focal_length |
│ 1 │ 1 │ Olympus │ Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 7-… │ 7 │ 14 │...
│ 2 │ 2 │ Panasonic │ Panasonic Lumix G Vario 7-14 … │ 7 │ 14 │...
│ 3 │ 3 │ Panasonic │ Panasonic Leica DG Vario-Elma… │ 8 │ 18 │...
│ 4 │ 4 │ Olympus │ Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8-… │ 8 │ 25 │...
│ 5 │ 5 │ Olympus │ Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 9-… │ 9 │ 18 │...
│ 6 │ 6 │ Panasonic │ Panasonic Leica DG Vario-Summ… │ 10 │ 25 │...
But any attempt to change anything has so far failed. The column widths vary from the output of the mysql utility, and I can't adjust them. Particularly lens name is important, since the names vary sometimes only at the end. And any attempt change anything comes up with a message like
funcall-interactively: Buffer is read-only: #<buffer *clutch-result: grog@eureka:3306/photos*>
This is a different message from the "row editing unavailable E/D off" that I got yesterday. What does it mean? Should I even be wasting my time on this? It's certainly a long way from the editing “experience” that I was expecting.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
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