How many pages is that? Very difficult to say. There were a number of distinct phases:
1963: Small format diary, about A5, one page per day.
1964-1967: Larger format diary, somewhat larger than A4, one page per day.
1968-1970: Various larger formats, free format, somewhat less than 1 page per day.
2000-June 2007: Relatively short entries, sometimes only a couple of lines, maybe about
⅓ to 1 page per day
July 2006 to now: much more detail, maybe 2½ pages per day.
And then of course there's the medium. In the 1960s it was paper, and from 2000 on it was
machine-readable. In each case, from the perspective of the present, the number of pages
depend on the browser and how you have set it. But I've done a couple of print previews,
and come up with, for the month of November:
Year
pages
1963
20
1967
34
1969
25
2002
9
2006
24
2007
47
2012
77
2017
72
2020
75
2021
89
2022
78
My guess is that I could reckon 30 pages per month in the 1960s, 25 pages from 2000 to 2007
(when I retired) and 75 since then, for a total of 18630 pages (2730 + 2025 + 13875). But
that's not all, just the two large contiguous chunks. I've also written up other days,
either at the time or later. Each entry in the diary source starts with a PHPdaytitle invocation, so I can
count the days:
That's about 30.83 years, so I could increase my already inaccurate guess to 19,145 pages.
How does that compare with other long books? It seems that the longest work of fiction is
“Marienbad My Love” by Mark Leach, which according to this page has 10,710 pages, or “The Blah Story” by Nigel Tomm, which according to this page has 7,312 pages and is thus considerably longer than “Marienbad My Love”, whose page
count they're too polite to mention.
But my diary isn't fiction. What about the Oxford English Dictionary? It wins: the second edition (the last one printed) had 21,728 pages. Still, I seem to
be in the same ball park.
That's a lot of stuff, and clearly it points back to Friday or Saturday last week. But
what? Considerable discussion on IRC, during which Callum Gibson suggested
cgibson: probably NFS
That made sense. What do we have mounted? I tend to use df rather than mount
to show mounted file systems, but this time it didn't help:
Oh. Why can't I umount it? And while I'm pondering that, why is the daily run
hanging on a dead NFS mount? Spent some time discussing things, during which people came up with a number of
tools which I hadn't thought of. Of course rebooting teevee unstuck things.
I wonder why I mounted teevee's root file system on bde.
How about that, the spring wasn't colder than average; it was pretty much average,
but both the minimum and maximum temperatures were milder than in other years. But of
course the rain was much more. The rainfall numbers here are from my weather station and are somewhat on the low side; the
real rainfall for spring was
I've been looking at Luminar photo
processing software for 4 years now, and I've never found a good reason to install it. But it came close.
In April this year I considered it to fix the artefacts in this photo and others that I
took at the same time:
At the time I discussed the issues in some detail, and also the confusion I had between
their two products “Luminar AI” and “Luminar
Neo”. The reviews were also not overly encouraging, so I left it.
But now is the black season, it seems: It's been Black Friday for the past 10 days or
so. Skylum (the company that makes Luminar)
offered me Yet Another special offer for Luminar Neo. OK, is that the one I want? Off
looking. It seems that there's no mention of Luminar AI any more; potentially they have
merged them into one product, which makes a lot of sense.
So: off looking for tutorials, once again finding nothing of use. Documentation of any kind
is clearly not their forte. Is it even worth trying? One review suggested that the “remove
power line” tool works quite well up to a point, and presumably it could do a good job on
the fence lines.
OK, let's try. I have a 30 day money-back period, so I should really try it out in that
time. Off to buy it, in the process discovering that they honoured the discount
code SHOTKIT15 that I had picked up from one of the reviews.
Apart from the interesting detail that Skylum from Ukraine is really Shinyfields Limited in
Cyprus, there's nothing of
interest. Not even an obvious way to page down!
Then it went off installing over the net, giving no indication how long it would expect it
to take. Mañana.
Over the last few weeks I've watched a number of videos about cooking Malaysian street food,
including KL Hokkien Mee. There's not
much there that really excites me, but they did use more liquid. I've also bought some real
Hokkien noodles, so today I tried something new. The main differences were:
Ingredient
Old
Today
Chicken broth
20 g
48 g
Light soya sauce
20 g
33 g
Dark soya sauce
20 g
14 g
Caramel
15 g
21 g
Cornflour
12 g
15 g
Those are details, of course, and as a result the dish didn't look very different:
And in fact it didn't make much difference in taste. I can't see any particular advantage
in using fresh KL Hokkien noodles instead of bucatini, which are also much cheaper.
About the biggest surprise was that the sauce was so thick, though I used more liquid and
less cornflour.
OK, work round the typical Microsoft space pain, create a new
directory /Photos/1-Skylum, link the photos to it (for the fun of it I used the raw
images, which it claims to handle), and start:
That's a minimalist view. Where's my photo? I called it Kangaroos-47.jpeg, but the
original (translated from the Makejpeg file) is orig/48140390.ORF. Not on that
page. You need to scroll down, though I haven't found a scroll bar yet. And where's the
file name? It seems that if you hold the mouse over an image and wait a couple of seconds,
it will pop up. That's painful, but I can work around it when I know.
OK, work my way through the menu. First, get rid of the post in the foreground (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
That looks good, better than what I got with other programs. OK, now for the star trick:
remove “power lines” (again, run the cursor over an image to compare
it with its neighbour):
That's quite impressive, but there are still issues. The line between the kangaroo heads is
still there, and I had to remove it manually. And the line above it has been removed, but
the replacement isn't quite right: there's a dark mark round where the line used to be.
Still, not bad for a first attempt. Save the file.
How? There's no File menu, nor anything similar. Finally I found a way: select the
“exploding box” menu at top right, which offers “Share”, which can then either send it by
(e)Mail, connect to a device (whatever that may be) or access a “folder”:
And yes, that worked. In the process I have learnt yet more bad language.
More processing. Try to saveexport share again. “Folder” was greyed
out and didn't respond. It seems that I was in the wrong menu (Erase instead of “Develop”), though potentially there are other
details that I haven't learnt yet. After selecting that, it worked, and saved the second
file in a file that annoys any self-respecting shell script:
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 2,316,621 2 Dec 10:12 48140390.jpg
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 2,340,890 2 Dec 10:22 48140390 (1).jpg
OK, this is my first time, and I got results surprisingly quickly (in fact considerably
faster than writing up the experience). The results were also somewhat washed out (first
image, run the cursor over an image to compare it with its
neighbour)
But that's probably at least in part due to my choice of raw image without any enhancement,
which possibly indicates different or non-existent lens distortion corrections. It also
seems to show a different cropping of the raw image. Still, the software does seem to offer
promise.
Last month I turned my attention to an album that my father created probably 70 years
ago, showing some of his work up to about (my guess) 1961. There were also a number of
loose negatives in the album, as well as a number of loose photos.
Today I tried to scan the negatives in. Most of them were 35 mm, cut in strips of 3:
But what is it? Is this the “Ideal Home” for which he won a prize in 1960 or 1961? I can't
find any reference to the competition on Google, but the third image suggests that it was on
public display.
I can't scan them! They're in a rather unusual 6 × 4.5 cm format, and the scanner software
doesn't understand them. I also haven't found a way to just do a raw scan.
Only the day before yesterday I grumbled about the low “spring” temperatures. But now
it's summer, and all that has changed. Temperatures ranged from 11.5° to 34.1°, 3.3° higher
than any time in spring, and reminding me that we really need to overhaul the
sprinkler system.
In the process, found a new app for my mobile phone: BOM Weather,
from the agency that doesn't want
to be called BOM. OK, just what I need. It gives me a forecast for Dereel, just like the web site does (second image):
Now isn't that nice? Now I have a choice of forecast. How do they manage that? I can
sympathize with them having difficulty forecasting weather in the current situation, but how
can they come up with temperatures that depend on the platform?
Despite the weather Jesse Walsh showed up, planted most of the walking iris plants and
continued on the succulent bed, which now looks almost presentable. Here two weeks ago and
now:
Another warm day today, a high of 36° (or 31° or 32° according to the Bureau of Meteorology). I really need that irrigation.
Turned on the tap. No water!
Start the pump. No reaction. That's normal if it's already primed. Is it?
Another Diaxette showed up in
my eBay saved searches today, slightly
cheaper than the one I bought six months ago. Nothing special: it's pretty much identical to the one I bought,
though there are differences between models: Cees-Jan de Hoog has one with a serial
number that differs by only 3 numbers from mine (900139 and 900142), but his has a different
shutter.
Unsurprisingly, the serial number of the one on sale today is considerably different:
875088. But clearly Voss didn't make a million of these cameras, and the serial numbers
suggest that only the last 2 or 3 digits are actually the serial number, and the ones at the
start have some other meaning. That would give the serial numbers 88, 139, 142. Is that
plausible? I wonder how many were really made.
The other thing of interest is the depth of field indicator. At f/16 it shows a hyperfocal distance of about
14½ feet (yes, it doesn't show metres at all—neither does Cees-Jan de Hoog's camera—but
it's about 4.4 m). But for a hyperfocal distance like that you'd need a circle of confusion of 30 μm.
That would limit resolution to 800×1200, considerably less than I'd expect. Maybe it's
reflective of the capabilities of the lens, which is really not very good. But I should
compare the markings on other old lenses. Other lenses I have have hyperfocal distances
between 3.8 m (Schneider Xenar) to 4.8 m (Super-Takumar, Nikkor). My other Cassar also has
about 5 m. They're all 50 mm lenses, so with the exception of the Xenar they all seem to
have about a 30 μm circle of confusion; the Xenar is closer to 40 μm (600×900).
Another interesting thing about the shutter. It runs from only 1/25 s to 1/200 s, but it
seems that it can be set to just about any time between those limits; the 1/50 s and 1/100 s
seem to be only indications.
Much mail from Skylum today, extolling the
uses of Luminar. And I wondered: they
keep referring to Ukraine in
their materials, but what do they really have to do with it? The company is in the
USA, and there's no
domain skylum.ua.
But a bit of searching helps: In a blog
entry I read:
Skylum was founded in Ukraine, and the majority of the team is here.
But the croton was looking very unhappy. We had planned to repot it, but that didn't
happen, and what was left relatively quickly lost a lot of leaves. Can we propagate them?
This
article says yes. So that's what I did, even before getting photos of the old plant.
What we have now is:
Somehow Luminar shows itself from two
different perspectives. On the one hand I'm almost bombarded with suggestions about how to
do clever things. But they're not what I'm looking for right now. On the other hand, I
still want to process my kangaroo photo.
Last time I just went off and played around, and I had surprisingly good results
under the circumstances. But they weren't spectacular, and today I tried working on the
background image on tiwi, effectively the same photo cropped. This time things
didn't go as well. In particular, the “remove powerlines” didn't work At All. After
expending considerably more time than on Friday, I was left with this transformation (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
In particular, if “power line removal” doesn't work, there's very little reason to use
Luminar. Other software that I already have can do it manually, though admittedly the
fencepost removal looks better than what I have achieved with other programs.
And the gradation? It could be better. In particular, the flanks of the horses have a
distinct purplish tone, which seems to be very common in underexposed areas. I had hoped
that Luminar could help there, but so far I haven't had much success.
I keep various logs of videos that I have watched. The canonical one ends like this:
Sun 2022-12-04 19:14:31 -> 21:21:52 x /spool/Series/90-min/Bergretter/13/13-06-Augen-auf-20211223-201500.mp4
Sun 2022-12-04 21:23:02 -> 22:24:34 x /spool/Series/Hubert-und-Staller/10/10-05-Mord-mit-1.600-Umdrehungen--153--20220209-185000.mp4
Mon 2022-12-05 10:14:11 -> 10:14:20 k /spool/Series/Alles-Finster/Folge_1_-_Alles_finster_S01_E01.mp4
Mon 2022-12-05 15:38:59 -> 16:00:01 k /spool/Docco/AlJaz-15.mp4
Mon 2022-12-05 17:30:25 -> 17:30:30 x /spool/Docco/Putins_Propagandamaschine_-_Das_manipulierte_Volk.mp4
Mon 2022-12-05 19:08:16 -> 20:14:55 x /spool/Series/Notruf-Hafenkante/04/04-06-Kais-Entscheidung-20170111-103000.mp4
Mon 2022-12-05 20:15:08 -> 20:58:41 x /spool/Series/McLeods-daughters/4/4-21-Secrets_And_Lies.mp4
Mon 2022-12-05 21:10:37 -> 21:59:07 x /spool/Series/Koeter-Rex/05/05-07-Blinde-Wut-0707167312.mp4
That's one entry per video, showing start time, end time, end status (x means
deleted, k means kept; I think I once had others) and path name. Currently this log
file has 9,722 entries.
It's useful to keep track of when I have watched a particular series, so I have a second
list that shows the last view time for a series. The corresponding entries are:
This list only contains series, and it only shows the last date and the series title, not
the episode. The * in front of Alles Finster indicates that it has not
been finished (corresponding to the k in the first log).
Problem: this is a shell script that Just Growed, and it's horrendously inefficient. It
takes nearly 2 minutes to run. It also uses grep, which has difficulties with file
names with characters not in the current locale. OK, simple: rewrite in a more efficient
language. PHP comes to mind.
But how do I write it? The input file is sorted chronologically, so every time I find a
directory I can replace the previous occurrence. An array with the series name as index?
That should work.
Spent not very much time playing around with the new script, on the way running into issues
parsing the input. In principle the input file has 7 fields: weekday, date, start time,
noise arrow, end time and file name. Ideal for the PHP explode() function. But
some (and only some) of the entries have 2 spaces after the start time, as in the example
above, and explode() treats the second as a field by itself. Yes, I can modify the
file, but it's tacky.
Got as far as wanting to print out the results. How do I do that? I have only one entry
per series, the way I want it. And I can sort the array with, well, sort().
But sort() sorts from the beginning of the entry, so I end up with all Fridays at
the top and all Wednesdays at the bottom.
What do I do? PHP doesn't seem to have a way to call a collating function, and there
doesn't seem to be any more flexible sort function. I can write my own, of course, but
somehow I get the feeling that I'm using the wrong tool.
What do I use instead? C? Not exactly the
easiest language for this kind of problem, but it has the advantage that I know it.
Perl? Probably a good choice, but
I would have to learn it first. FORTRAN? You can write anything in FORTRAN, and it's bound to be ugly, so I wouldn't
have to worry about elegance. LISP? That might even
be a possibility. But why is this so difficult? I suppose the real issue is that I want to
do it correctly.
Seen in a post by Alexandr Kovalenko, originally dated 3 December 2013:
Putain was right!
There are Nazis in Ukraïne, or at least there were 9 years ago.
Background: if I have this right, the person in question is Mykola Azarov, the prime minister of
Ukraïne at the time, and they're
in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraïnian parliament). He was staunchly pro-Russian and did not speak Ukraïnian, thus the
nickname Азірів (Aziriv).
Yesterday's photo processing with Luminar was less satisfying than it should have been. Time to RTFM.
Oh. That's an old, worn-out magic word. First I read some of the copious emails I received
from Skylum, some of which ask me to buy
things, and others that show individual functionality. The confusion is illustrated in the
“Help” selection, which offers me a user manual but takes me to this FAQ
page, which starts with the following helpful information:
Where do I find my Extensions after installation?
Since HDR Merge, Focus Stacking, and Upscale AI require dragging the images to the tool
from the catalog, they are available in the Catalog tab on the right-side panel.
You can find Noiseless AI and Supersharp AI in the Edit tab > Tools panel:
Access the Background Removal AI Extension in the Edit panel > Layer Properties >
Masking > Background Removal AI.
That helps illustrate the confusion. One thing that I couldn't find was a user manual
But that's not modern. Now you watch videos of varying quality. Today it was this one:
First recognition: there is a “save” menu, in fact perfectly normal menus. They just
drop down from the half-emblem at top left, if you first click on it and then release it.
Apart from that, there were some useful general processing suggestions that apply to other
software as well, and also some suggestions that the sequence of events is important with
Luminar. That could explain why the powerline removal worked first time, but not the second
time.
But somehow this still doesn't cut it. One of the emails extolled the virtues of
“RelightAI”. And yes, it looks good in their display. But not on my computer: I still
can't find it! And that seems to be a general issue: now you see me, now you don't. As I
write this, I can no longer find the powerline removal tool.
The other thing, which is almost more of an issue, is that the functions don't seem to be
tuneable, at least not very much. I tried the “background removal” tool, which went off and
marked what it had decided was not the background (run the
cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
Powerline removal has the same issue. As I have seen, it doesn't recognize all “power
lines”, and fixing the rest makes the original function pretty irrelevant.
I had really hoped that this program would be an addition to my software collection, but
it's beginning to look like it will go back.
Into town again today for the weekly shopping. Somehow it's getting less all the time; this
time I didn't need to go to Woolworths at all, and
in general the shopping list was much shorter. But I did have to go to Campanas buy some cheese (Gruyère) for fondue. $80 a kg! Why is cheese so expensive in Australia?
In Europe it's less than half the price.
Or is it? It seems that I can pay similar prices for top quality cheeses. And we
discovered years ago that we shouldn't buy cheese in Germany; we went to Switzerland or
France instead.
And once again I was told that Jarlsberg was a Swiss cheese.
Once again I told the younger man that it came from Norway, and this time, it seems, he believed
me. I suppose that was something.
At the end of my shopping I went to the
physiotherapists for advice about my osteopenia. That was useful: the
exercises that Heather gave me were nothing like what Dr. Paul Smith suggested, and the
details were so important that she had to correct me several times.
They prove to be just around the corner from Whiteys. Took a menu and looked at it when I
get home. Dishes like Kabuli pilav and Tavuk şiş suggest
places I have been: Afghanistan and Turkey, neither what I
would call Central Asian. And the headers for the individual courses are in Turkish. But
it looks like an interesting addition to locally available dining. My guess is that it's
run by a couple, one from Turkey, the other from Afghanistan.
Sadly, I think they've made a mistake with their location. The area round the Victoria
Street/Albert Street roundabout has seen a lot of businesses come and go, and my guess is
that this is too esoteric for the populace. Maybe we should go and try something, though I
don't know when I was last in a restaurant.
Some time in April 1972 my parents took me to dinner somewhere near the corner of Orchard Road and Scotts Road. My mother told me of the
excellent deep-fried noodles that they made there, and ordered some.
It must have been a different cook. The waiter, and subsequently the cook, were very
unwilling, but finally they acquiesced. And indeed they didn't taste at all bad.
So: why don't I try that? I eat lots of noodles, but so far none that have been deep fried.
Start with the Chef Lo noodles, cook them normally, rinse and allow to cool in a sieve:
And the taste? Not bad. Next time I'll need to keep them in a better shape, and maybe it
would make sense to cut the noodles a little shorter before frying. As it was, it was a
little difficult to break the pieces.
Taking the photos of frying the noodles had an issue: the steam from the deep fryer
condensed on the lens. I could barely see anything through the viewfinder.
But the results didn't look nearly as bad. This first one was taken with the misted lens,
the second (carefully further away) with a clear lens:
Into town with Yvonne this morning for what we hope will be
her final X-ray. On the way we dropped off some prescriptions at UFS across the road, at which point Google Maps decided that we had arrived
at Sovereign Radiology. Round to
Sovereign, where Yvonne went inside and I stayed in the car for a couple of minutes to tell
Google Maps what I thought.
When I went inside, Yvonne was gone. It seems that she barely caught the radiologist before
she went off to lunch, and as I predicted she was done in a flash. Back to UFS, arriving
roughly 10 minutes after we left, and of course they were not ready with the prescription.
I had to wait another 10 minutes. That's the first time I've experienced that, and it makes
me wonder how they're going to handle things with the drive-in prescription service that
they're promising in their new building.
Oh. How much petrol did I lose? My guess is: none. The whole area around the filler was
completely dry. Still, another indication that I'm losing my marbles.
It seems that the Sebastopol branch of Sovereign
Radiology is celebrating its first anniversary, and to do so they offered all patients
a cupcake. Nice gesture, but there's more, a slice of icing showing where it came from:
Six months ago I made a laksa from “La mian”, who also call themselves “Prima taste”.
That's the second laksa mix from that brand, and as I decided last time, the quantities are
irritating: sachets with noodles for about 1½ portions, and they want the noodles cooked in
the laksa.
I had another three left over, so I decided to make 5 portions out of them, four to freeze
for another time.
And the noodles? They're cakes of 96 g each, where normal noodle portions are round 60 g:
So I cooked the other two cakes and froze them as 3 individual packages. But sorry, La
Mian, the laksa is quite acceptable, but that's the last time.
A more positive insight: recently I bought deep frozen raw prawns; typically only cooked
prawns are available. And the difference is like night and day! The cooked prawns are
already overcooked. Hopefully the raw variety will remain available.
Christmas is coming, and after it our annual Christmas letter. At the top of each letter is a photo of Yvonne, myself and as many animals as we can keep still.
So: what photo would summarize this year? The completion of the arena cover, of course.
But how do we summarize that? A photo of the whole entrance to the property? Today was
sunny (too sunny, it seems), so we tried it out.
We're still having fun with the watering trough. Maybe because it wasn't in use, it has
filled up with algae, and we still have issues with the float valve:
Jesse Walsh along today to work in the garden. A good thing, too. We had found a large
puddle in the area in front of the arena, which proved to be due to a torn-off pipe. Jesse
spent a considerable amount of time fixing that and other problems in circuits 3 and 4.
Ate some of the cheese that I bought on Wednesday. Surprise, surprise: it was excellent.
What was it? The brand was Le Gruyère, and I
think it must have been 18 months old. I should check (and maybe encourage Campanas to sell more fondue cheese).
Off to Rocklyn (a place so small that Wikipedia hasn't heard of it, a few kilometres east of
Dean) today for a
gathering to view the new property of Melanie and Chris Bahlo and Tony Papenfuss, Melanie's
husband (I'm tempted to call them the “Bahfuss”). Google Maps had a wonderful route to
bypass Ballarat:
What a route! The rains of spring have sorely tested Australian roads, and they failed the
test. Potholes everywhere, like here at the junction of Springbank Road and Black Swamp
Road.
Made it there just in time (12:25 for a 12:00—12:30 start), but we couldn't find anything.
Did I have the right place? The property once had blue gums on it, like the images on
Google Maps show:
Called Chris on her mobile phone, but only got voice mail. And then a car came up behind
us. Got out to say “don't follow us, we're lost too”, but it was Melanie: we had, in fact,
arrived at exactly the right place. People started turning up, and things gradually got
under way.
Got answers to some of my questions: it seems that Melanie and Tony aren't planning to move
here in the next ten years, just to use it as a weekend house and then move here after that
when they retire. That makes more sense—it's 120 km and 90 minutes' drive from where they
work, and their sons are still at school in Melbourne. And it seemed that they have as good
as no Internet connection, something that doesn't worry Chris. But after checking with
National Broadband Network and fighting
their view of Australian addresses, I discover that it is, in fact, covered by NBN Fixed
Wireless. I had to give the address of the house next door, and discovered that it already
has a FW connection, which sounds more reliable than their guesswork maps.
Yvonne and I went up the hill to get a view. Yes, the
property is not nearly as level as Google Maps make it look, and the highest point is in the
middle of the east side, where our car is parked in this panorama:
It's not immediately apparent, but the “saplings” are growing out of the stumps of the old
blue gums. Melanie tells me that it will take a considerable amount of work to remove them
altogether, and that's one of the reasons that the property was so cheap, only about 6 times
what we paid for Wantadilla25 years ago. For that they get 32 ha instead of 20, but no house and
no cleared land. How prices have gone up!
When I came back to the car, Yvonne had disappeared. In the distance I heard a call for
help. Looking around, found her lying on the ground. Full of apprehension, told her to
stay where she was and went over, where I found that she was on the
ground and couldn't get up again. It took some effort to lift her, and I had
to help her back to the car.
Things improved a little, but not much, and we left early. On the positive side, we found a
better way home, one that Google Maps didn't even think of offering, via Pootilla (in fact
the way that Yvonne had suggested).
„Jennys Lammtopf“ for dinner tonight, a
perfect subject for testing the “bathtub” air fryer “convection oven”. The grille is wide enough to take two pots
next to each other, something that was a problem with the “hair dryer”. OK, prepare the
pots and put them in the bathtub:
But here the surface is browned as evenly as I could like. About the only issue is that the
grille only has 3 feet, which makes it particularly unstable:
It would be easy to say “well don't do that then”, but in fact this was the second time,
after I had already had spilt one and resolved to be more careful.
Clearly Piccola thought that I should have
marinated them.
Only minor changes to the quantities from last time, but this time I fried the squid rings normally rather than over high heat.
I also used less cornflour (6 g instead of 12 g), and I left the noodles soak in the broth
for about 5 minutes, during which they got considerably darker:
Somehow I'm not making much progress with my computer upgrades. The system on eureka
is now 7 years old, and I've been planning to upgrade it for over 5 years. Why the delay? Apart from laziness, it's this “let's get it right”
concept. And strangely the system has been remarkably stable since installation.
Still, there are issues. I can no longer run the latest version of firefox on eureka (nor many of the
not-so-late versions), and various sites don't want to talk to me. And it seems that
the firefox team is getting modern and making it more and more difficult to run firefox over a network link. So it's
getting more urgent.
But there's this machine from Bruce Evans lying around. It's an HP Z800, and if I understand
things correctly it has 2 CPU chips, each with 6 cores, each of which has 2 threads: 24
“CPUs” altogether. It used to be called besplex.bde.org, but clearly it should be
called hydra. Spent some time looking at the hardware, which also has a NVidia FX 8000 graphics card occupying 2 slots and offering only two DVI outputs. This page describes the drivers.
So what do I do? Install on the current hardware, I think. I may end up installing a new
graphics card, but for the time being I could try to get x2x to run with it and the
old eureka.
While investigating network coverage at the Bahlo/Papenfuss property in Rocklyn, looked at the current iteration of
the NBN rollout map. All
of Victoria is
covered! And the technology is fixed wireless.
Do I believe that? Reading an oversized disclaimer doesn't help:
While most premises in the purple “Service available area” can connect to services over
the nbn™ network, some premises may require additional work to be completed first. On rare
occasions, some premises cannot be connected. Check your address above and contact a
provider to find out if the nbn™ network is available at your home or business.
So I checked Chris Bahlo's current address. Yes, “ready to connect”. Planned technology:
nbn™ Satellite. So the colours on the map are Just Plain Lies. All the better that I
confirmed yesterday that the neighbours in Rocklyn have NBN Fixed Wireless.
Bacon and eggs today. Normally I bake beans in the “hair dryer” “air fryer”, but today I tried it in the “bath tub”.
Not an unqualified success. I started at 230° dial setting, corresponding to the way that I
do it with the hair dryer. And after 10 minutes it had hardly browned. Increase to 250°
for another 10 minutes, and I had this:
That's acceptable, but somehow it's moister. That could be a coincidence, but it seems that
the dial settings on the bathtub are somewhat optimistic. So far I have no reason to prefer
it to the hair dryer, especially as it's fiddlier to use (where do you put the hot lid when
you open it?).
Call from Bernada at the Royal Melbourne Hospital this morning: Mr. Peter Turner, the surgeon, has examined the X-ray taken last week, and it found favour with him. Yvonne has
been “discharged”, which I interpret as meaning that they won't want any further
investigations. As Bernada said, “I hope we don't hear from you again”. She did, however,
suggest that she might be able to ride horses in a couple of months, something that still
worries me.
Larissa has an irritating habit of
pulling on her leash when we're walking and something catches her attention. I had thought
of reintroducing the chain collars, but Yvonne found an old
halter and tried it out:
Somehow my results with Luminar haven't
been as satisfactory as I had hoped. Last time was particularly frustrating—I couldn't even find the Power Line Removal
tool. Today I tried again and found the tool hidden under the Erase tool. I applied
it first, and how about that. It did an almost perfect job.
That in itself is frustrating. Why did I get significantly different results in the three
times I tried to process the same photo? I still don't know.
Still, move on. Remove the fenceposts. How accurately do I need to mark them? This time I
marked them generously. It worked up to a point, but I ended up with a second segment of
tail (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its
neighbour):
At least that gives some insight into how the objects are removed. But it's a “once only”
thing. I wasn't able to remove the spurious tail section; I had to start again.
But that was a different photo. Back to my number 47. Remove the lines, remove the posts
more carefully, and I got:
That doesn't look that bad. I even removed some of the larger dung heaps. But it's still
not perfect. Looking carefully, one white fence line wasn't completely removed, and
removing the one that went past the horses left a distinct mark:
That's not bad for a first attempt. But the problem is that that's all you get. It would
be really nice to be able to tune things.
So: do I return the product or not? It does quite a good job of removing the fenceposts and
dung heaps. But it's not the only game in town. FRANZIS offers CutOut 10. How does that
work? Spent some time trying to find out, in the process coming to the conclusion that the
product suffers from significant lack of love. When I tried to install it, a popup
suggested that I might have trouble, and indeed I did. It seems that the package doesn't
adhere to the standard Microsoft conventions, and I need to use unzip to do anything
with it. I recall something like this with previous versions, but today I didn't get around
to looking for the solution. Still, I should investigate before my “30 days money back”
period for Luminar expires.
The display showed E11. Damn, what's that? Called Paul Kinna of Ballarat Plumbing Services (0418 527
576), who sold me the machine three years ago, but I only got voice mail.
Left a message and considered alternatives. Power cycling didn't help. Where's the
instruction manual? On the web, of course. And on page 48 I read:
E11
Fault in the fan
Leak in refrigerant circuit
Fault in the compressor
Fault in the expansion valve
Fault in the dry filter
Sounds like a catch-all to me. OK, how do I “reset the system”? More searching and found a
reference to page 39, but there was nothing there. Finally found it on page 41: hold the OK
button for 3 s. It doesn't make it clear whether this is a simple reset, factory reset, nor
whether there's any difference. But yes, the E11 went away and was replaced by:
What's that? LE6? No, more searching of the manual tells me that I can't read, and
it's LEG, short for Legionnaire's disease. It's
normal under those circumstances: it heats to at least 60°, and until it's done it
alternates with the current water temperature:
Powercor had planned
an outage today, from 9:00 to
15:00. For once I got adequate information, via phone, email and dead trees, not once, but
twice. So come morning I had the battery charged to 96% (why not 100%? I don't know, but
I'm superstitious). And how about that, the power went out while I was checking the status
of the hot water system.
So did the air conditioner! The power went away altogether for about 30 seconds! Clearly
there's something wrong with the inverter—I suspect it doesn't like overvoltage, and it got
a surge when the power went away. It came back, of course, and there was enough sunlight
for the battery charge to increase rather than decrease; we didn't drop back to 96% again
until 19:45. But the damage was done, and it took 45 minutes to get the computers back up
and running again. Somehow there's too much pain with domestic devices.
Off for our weekly shopping today, this time with Yvonne driving, for the first time in well over 2 months. It was clearly an effort, and halfway
through she handed over to me. Once again fun at Woolworths. Once
again their toilets are out of order:
Trying to find things in Woolworths is always an adventure. Here's German black bread,
hidden between completely unrelated items (though I did find where they have hidden
their white beans):
I was also looking for veal schnitzel, and had to ask. The assistant came and showed them
to me, in the “pork” section. She replied to my comment “I'd never have looked for it
there” with something that I forget, but which suggests that she agreed: you have to know
where to look.
Yvonne had a hairdresser's appointment, during which we
discovered that the premises had been sold:
Nearly 60 years ago I wandered round KL taking photos with my Diaxette, some of
the earliest photos I ever took. Fairly normal stuff. But these two in particular have
elicited great interest:
Why? Because almost nobody has published similar photos.
So while Yvonne was having her hair done, I wandered around Sebastopol, specifically the
junction of Victoria and Albert Streets. Presumably this was once intended to be the centre
of the village, but nowadays much of the action is further north. And in the 15 years since we've been here, things have changed a lot. Shops have
opened and closed again, and there are still premises that are unoccupied. I trust that
Brooke got a good price as a result.
OK, time to get a view of what it's like now. Here a couple of views:
This is Albert Street north of Victoria Street, looking west. The blue shop at the south
end was once a pizzeria with the bizarre name “Rio Bravo”, but it seems to have been closed
for some time. Next to it is the new Central Asian Kitchen, which has apparently replaced the “Indian Heritage Restaurant”
that was also not there for very long:
Finally got a call from Paul Kinna of Ballarat Plumbing Services (0418 527 576) today. It seems that he has had little to
do with the Bosch water heaters, and he suggests I contact Bosch. Somehow this reminds me
of the issues with the air conditioner 3 years ago. The difference is that the heater is now working again, so I put it on
the tuit queue.
Calling Paul wasn't easy. My phone claimed no signal.
Is that real? Off to compare with Yvonne's phone. Not much
of a signal either, but there was one. My phone still didn't want to know.
Rebooted, and it was back to normal. I've seen this before. Is this a sign that it's beginning to fail? After all, it's
nearly 2 years old, which seems to be an eternity in the mobile phone world.
Call from Zoe at Ballarat Allied
Health (5334 1113), today, to help me make an appointment with Kym Ellis, a
podiatrist.
Huh? Spam? No, it seems that Paul Smith sent them a referral, because I'm diabetic (or,
more to the point, because he has finally accepted it). But do I need foot care? I had
something similar 10 years ago, where we agreed that there was nothing wrong with my feet, and there's
nothing that I can see that has changed.
But why not err on the side of safety? It costs $70, of which Medicare will only refund $56.
I should talk to Paul about it first.
Processing yesterday's photos posed an interesting issue: power lines. And that's exactly the
reason I bought Luminar. OK, how well
does it work?
Quite well, it seems. It removed all of the power lines I presented it, leaving only bare
power poles. Here a “before and after” of one of them (run the
cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
The lines were no particular issue, but the power poles were, particularly the big one. But
Luminar managed to remove even that and fake the butcher's sign that was partially
obscured (again, run the cursor over an image to compare it with its
neighbour):
It's not perfect, of course: there's an ice-cream cone behind the leftmost power pole, and
Luminar couldn't guess that, but the results are surprisingly good, better than I had
expected. Is that enough of a reason to keep the product?
Anke Hawke arrived today for the next horse clinic, a little different now that Yvonne is not able to ride. She arrived just in time for breakfast, and
the radishes that Yvonne had finally found (they've been out of stock for weeks) found
Anke's favour:
Mi udang for breakfast, rather more than
Anke normally eats. Surprisingly, she also doesn't like papaya (nor water melon, for that
matter). To be noted for next time.
After Wednesday's outage, I have a couple of issues that I hadn't expected. tiwi
interprets the Alt key bindings correctly, but for some reason eureka doesn't.
Probably I forgot to update a config file, but each case requires research to find out why.
Another issue is probably older:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/12) /spool/Series/Großstadtrevier/35 5 -> ttml2srt Die_schlafende_Unschuld_481.de.ttml Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/local/bin/ttml2srt.py", line 12, in <module>
for elem in root.getiterator():
AttributeError: 'xml.etree.ElementTree.Element' object has no attribute 'getiterator'
Fired up teevee to compare, and it works fine there, so once again it's presumably a
configuration problem that I need to research. At least I have references in this diary...
That was after a lot of rain, and I expected it to pick up from there. What went wrong
there? My best guess is that, despite the amazing amount of rain we have had recently, the
ground has dried out. The roses are on irrigation circuit 2, which we haven't checked yet.
Over to Chris Bahlo's to borrow a sprinkler, and I'll look at it... tomorrow.
There was a slight difference, though: this one was “bacon wrapped”. What do the cooking
instructions say? 140°! And 45-50 minutes in per 500 g. Why 500 g? That's only a
fraction of the weight. Has it been translated out of ancient units? And
in particular, a long tube of meat doesn't require cooking times proportional to its weight.
So I'd put 100 minutes at the high end of the range.
Surprise, surprise! It's not the same kind as in previous years. It's round!
OK, how do you calculate that? Double the weight and you double the volume. Forced
convection provides enough heat that you can't consider that a bottleneck. One approach
would be to consider the time to be proportional to the cube root of the weight. But this thing
doesn't weigh the same (1 kg) as the others either: It weighs 2 kg. So that would mean
about 1.6 times as much, 64 to 80 minutes.
Looking at this a year later, it makes no sense. ³√2 is about 1.26, and for a fixed
shape that's the factor by which the volume increases if you double the weight.
That seems too low. But that's what meat thermometers are for. It finally took 135
minutes, considerably less than the 180 to 200 minutes that the instructions suggested, but
also more than my guess. Where does the surface area come into play?
Somehow I didn't find it as good as the ones from previous years. Less flavour, somewhat
lacking in texture:
The HP Z800 is a very
different kind of machine from the ones I have had before, and I've spent some time
examining it. Just about everything seems to be accessible without tools, and there are few
loose cables:
Problem: how do you connect an SSD? Probably you buy an adapter from HP. But of course you
can plug the SSD into the connectors too, and the tray at least holds it in place so that
there's no strain on the connector:
In fact, it fits so well that I couldn't get it out again! Is there some kind of lock in
there? Maybe those two metallic clips in the sockets are intended to hold the device in
place?
It's been over 10 years since I first tried to find a simplified way of staying up to date
with FreeBSD. I still haven't succeeded. It's becoming an issue again: teevee is running
relatively well, but the installation is about 18 months old, and it's running firefox
6.0. Not that much of a problem, but for reasons I don't understand it now pops up an
additional “Please upgrade” tab every time I open a new tab. I can't upgrade from their
site, because they don't have versions for FreeBSD, and I can't upgrade to the latest and
greatest because I'd get caught in a dependency nightmare.
Some things never get done. And somehow it's always firefox that forces my hand.
The federal government has called on the seven Western states that rely on Colorado River
water to cut usage by 2 to 4 million acre-feet
Acre-feet? What kind of unit is that? A quick Google search tells me
that it's 1233.48 m³. But what pain! I suppose it makes sense to irrigators: they want to
know how deep they can irrigate on their land.
It's been six months some time since we've had friends round for dinner. Wednesday had been Chris Bahlo's birthday, and of course Anke was here,
so we had a celebratory dinner with a subset of the people who were here last time. I
suppose it's a sign of the times that I didn't take any photos.
One new thing: Yvonne wanted some baked potatoes. Well,
baked potatoes. Half-baked potatoes? Either way, trying out new dishes on guests is a
no-no. We decided to do them in an “air fryer”, and once again the only one that was big enough was the bath tub. Despite my concerns,
the recipes I found on the web seem to have had things correct: 30 minutes at “392° F”. Why
392? It's exactly 200° C.
Anke Hawke off again today. It took her all day to get home: car to Ballarat, coach to Tullamarine, flight to Newcastle, car back
home. She left round 10:30 and didn't get home until after dark, round 21:00. Yes, it's a
fair distance, but it still seems excessive.
The very first impression was that it was something burning, but clearly it's a reflection.
But where does it come from? The sun was over my left shoulder, and there's nothing much
for it to reflect from. One of the antennas? Kept an eye on things for a while, and noted
that, as expected, the reflections moved to the east, opposing the direction of the sun.
About the only things that could reflect would be the TV and radio antennas; the
diamond-shaped National Broadband Network antenna at top left was too far back to be visible from the surface of the panels.
Finally got round to installing FreeBSD on hydra.lemis.com, formerly epsplex.bde.org. It wasn't easy.
First, do I have an install image? Lately I've been installing from SD cards, and I found one (unmarked, of
course) lying on top of dereel. What is it?
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 12 -> ls /dev/da0* da0 da0s1 da0s2 da0s2a
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 12 -> fdisk da0 The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 239 (0xef),(EFI System Partition)
start 1, size 66584 (32 Meg), flag 0
beg: cyl 1023/ head 255/ sector 63;
end: cyl 1023/ head 255/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
start 66585, size 2184848 (1066 Meg), flag 80 (active)
beg: cyl 1023/ head 255/ sector 63;
end: cyl 1023/ head 255/ sector 63
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
<UNUSED>
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 13 -> mount /dev/da0s2 /mnt mount: /dev/da0s2: Invalid fstype: Invalid argument
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 14 -> gpart show da0 => 1 15523839 da0 MBR (7.4G)
1 66584 1 efi (33M)
66585 2184848 2 freebsd [active] (1.0G)
2251433 13272407 - free - (6.3G)
So what is it? The obvious thing would be to try to boot from it. OK, connect up a
monitor. Which of the two DVI outputs? Maybe it will choose. Connected it up to the spare monitor to the left of my desk
and booted. It did something, but the display stayed stubbornly on the D-Sub input, and I couldn't find any way of
telling it to do anything else. Why are monitors so hard to configure? In the end,
disconnected the D-Sub connector, and how about that, there was hydra telling me that
it had forgotten its date. And then it tried to net boot.
So: learn Yet Another BIOS interface. That worked, up to a point, but the bloody thing insists on trying to net boot
every time, even when I have set a different boot order. Boot from USB worked fine,
confirming that it's a FreeBSD boot image. Install as usual. Which Ethernet interface
should I configure? The thing has three of them: two on the motherboard, and a third on a
separate board. Why? They're all bge interfaces. Connected an Ethernet cable to
one of the on-board and configured bge0. No carrier. Much messing around,
configuring all three, and finally I discovered that bge0 was right, but it was the
PCIe board. What's the
background there?
And finally I found what was on the SD card: FreeBSD 14-CURRENT. Not what I wanted.
Reinstall 13.1-RELEASE, in the process running into a bug: you can't just overwrite the
contents of an existing partition; the install program has somehow linked to it and can't
let go. So you need to remove and recreate the partitions.
Finally it was done. Next step: configure. That's easy, or it would be if I weren't trying
to build an automatic update system. Now I need to go back and see what I have done
with bde (the laptop) over the last few months, and clear up the mess that I know I
have made there. But it's a first step.
It's fairly clear that I won't find the ANZ ATM card that I lost 2 months ago. Why haven't I called ANZ and to ask for a new one?
Oh, no, it's not that easy. Voice recognition system that tells me to please call from a
mobile phone. If you really have to call on a normal phone, please enter your
multi-digit Customer Registration Number.
Sorry, no. Give me a human. “This is going to take a while. Did you know that you can
order a replacement card from the ANZ App or on the Internet?”. No, I didn't. Off to take
a look. No indication where, help points me to the fact that I can get a
replacement credit card like that, but not an ATM card.
Dammit, maybe they'll be more responsive in the early morning.
Yvonne has been having trouble with the electric fence.
That's not surprising: even on a small property like ours, it's about 3 km in total, and
there's always somewhere that's causing a short. But today she drew a blank. Out to take a
look: the “energiser” is dead.
That's not the first time. The previous one lasted not quite 4 years. It seems that that's
the life span. The maker is JVA, an abbreviation that means “prison” in German, and on
eBay they proudly announce “Over 800 sold
World Wide!”. Time to replace it with something more reliable.
tiwi is now working relatively well, but there are still a couple of loose ends, like
the subtitle problem on Friday:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/12) /spool/Series/Großstadtrevier/35 5 -> ttml2srt Die_schlafende_Unschuld_481.de.ttml Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/local/bin/ttml2srt.py", line 12, in <module>
for elem in root.getiterator():
AttributeError: 'xml.etree.ElementTree.Element' object has no attribute 'getiterator'
Time to find out what the problem is. ttml2srt is written in
python, something that
seems to delight in having hundreds of sub-ports:
That's the number of python ports. teevee has 33 more than tiwi. How do I
solve the problem? The github pages showed no dependencies. Ran it on teevee
with the intention to see which libraries were used, but ran into trouble with the disk
errors.
But I've seen this error before. How did I get around it? I forgot to say. OK, Google
search. And that came up with this page, which tells me:
The error occurs when pandas is used in python3.9+ because the
code xml.etree.ElementTree.Element.getiterator() which had been
deprecated with a warning previously, has now been removed.
And how about that, I also have python 3.8 on tiwi. And it works with that,
producing the advertised warning:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/12) /spool/Series/Vier-Frauen-und-ein-Todesfall/08 117 -> ttml2srt 08-05-Wahnwitz-14583890.de-AT.ttml /home/local/bin/ttml2srt.py:12: DeprecationWarning: This method will be removed in future versions. Use 'tree.iter()' or 'list(tree.iter())' instead.
for elem in root.getiterator():
But why is it so difficult to find these things, and why do languages keep changing?
After installing a system from the installation medium, the next step is to set up the
configuration files in /etc. The FreeBSD does some of this, such as setting up file systems, basic network access and users. But
that's only scratching the surface. What do we need? Here's a first cut of Yet Another
attempt to understand things. It's important to know that this is a trusted network, so
there's little attention to security.
Preparation
For the moment I have a series of half-prepared scripts and data files in the
hierarchy eureka:/home/Sysconfig/Install. I'll refer to these as I go.
Resolver
Assuming we're not running named, the system installation does the resolver
installation (/etc/resolv.conf) well enough. But if not, it's easy to have
a make target to do it.
File systems
In a network (mine, anyway), lots of important files are on other systems. So the system
needs to be set up to mount them:
Create the mount points. This can be done as a make target.
Export all local file systems: /etc/exports. This could be a script that takes
the names from /etc/fstab.
Set up /etc/fstab to mount the file systems.
How do I set up /etc/fstab? In principle it knows about the local file systems after
installation, so all I need are the NFS mount points. I maintain a
network-wide file eureka:/home/Sysconfig/Install/fstab.nfs which can be concatenated
to /etc/fstab.
Disadvantages:
Many of the file systems aren't needed and should be set to noauto.
Concatenation should be done once only, and it's not easy for a script to see when it
has been done. On the other hand, doing it multiple times does no particular harm.
Symlinks
Once the NFS file systems have been mounted, I need a number of symbolic links to
hierarchies on other systems. An obvious one is eureka:/home/Sysconfig, which gets
linked to local /home/Sysconfig. This can be done with a make target. This
is also a chicken and egg issue: the scripts are on the net, but I can't access them until I
have done this step. So I need to do some of this manually.
Users
The installation sets up at least root, and you can add other users if you want.
But the passwords are an issue. It's easier to throw out the installed version and
copy /etc/master.passwd and /etc/group from /home/Sysinstall/Install,
or maybe directly from eureka:/etc. This is still untidy, but then I have “users” on
my system who go back 25 years. But that's an issue to look at in a second pass.
And where are the user home directories? They could be new local ones, or symlinks to the
home directories on other systems. The latter has the problem that systems can tread on
each others' feet. So I think the best thing to do here is for each user to have a
“homekit”, like I had when working for MySQL, which includes configuration files and things, but with symlinks to things
like ~/Mail and ~/public_html.
Ports
Ports are a can of worms, of course:
Which ports? I can keep a list, but many ports change their names with each release.
How do I even keep a list? It would make it very cumbersome to install a port for
testing, for example.
What about configuration files? Some can be quite arcane. How do I keep the install
base up to date?
My best guess here is to have a Makefile that maps a base port name to the name of
the port that pkg recognizes. In the case where config files are needed, I need a
specific target that also installs the config files. And I'm expecting a number of issues
in this area.
As planned, called up ANZ relatively early this morning. It didn't help much. I was still put on hold for 15
minutes, and just as somebody replied, the battery in my phone gave out.
Damn! Got another phone with (hopefully) a better battery and tried again. Now I'm getting
used to the dialogues, so I was prepared:
Bot: So that I can direct your call, can you tell me the purpose of your call?
Me: I need a replacement ATM card for an existing account.
Bot: Now is this for a new account?
Another 15 minutes and was connected to Geil, who spells his name “Kyle”. And the usual
couple of repetitions and questions: “Can you give me the email address and mobile number
associated with this account?”.
Yes, of course I can, but first I have to check what email address I gave them. Did that,
and he said “and your mobile number is (correct number), right?”. Maybe I should
have given him the number and asked for my email address.
So yes, he will have a new card sent to me. All done? No, lots of mail from ANZ:
Dear GREGORY,
We recently had a conversation about the ANZ card you reported lost or stolen. Your
security is important so we have taken some immediate steps to protect your account.
We understand the inconvenience this may cause you, but we can make replacing your card as
simple as possible.
What happens next:
Your card has been stopped
You should no longer use the card.
Your new card is on its way
Well, better late than never, I suppose. Doesn't it give you the feeling that the message
has been tailored to your situation? I reported the card missing 2 months ago.
After one of these automatic updates from Microsoft, I endured:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/4) ~ 4 -> /home/local/bin/dordesktop distress 1870x1030+0 ATTENTION! The server uses and invalid security certificate which can not be trusted for
the following identified reasons(s);
1. Certificate issuer is not trusted by this system.
Issuer: CN=distress
Review the following certificate info before you trust it to be added as an exception.
If you do not trust the certificate the connection atempt will be aborted:
Subject: CN=distress
Issuer: CN=distress
Valid From: Tue Aug 2 10:42:25 2022
To: Wed Feb 1 11:42:25 2023
Do you trust this certificate (yes/no)? yes Core(error): tcp_tls_connect(), TLS handshake failed. GnuTLS error: The operation timed out
Failed to connect, SSL required by server.
Disconnected from distress, status 76
Connecting to distress
Core(warning): Certificate received from server is NOT trusted by this system, an exception has been added by the user to trust this specific certificate.
Connection established using SSL.
Clipboard(error): xclip_handle_SelectionNotify(), unable to find a textual target to satisfy RDP clipboard text request
Protocol(warning): process_pdu_logon(), Unhandled login infotype 1
Where does that come from? Is it even a Microsoftism?
Lots of noise from the laundry during the night. That's where Piccola sleeps, and it sounded like she was vomiting.
That's nothing unusual—I'm reminded that in German there's only one letter difference
between „Katze“ (cat) and „Kotze“ (puke). But today seemed worse than usual, and we've
noticed considerable loss of weight in the last week or so:
In addition, it was clear that she wasn't feeling well, producing a sad “meow” from time to
time, probably indicative of some pain. Yvonne contacted
Pene Kirk via Facebook, and Pene suggested that
it might be end stage kidney disease. She could put her down, but to know for sure we'd
need blood tests.
After some discussion, decided that blood tests didn't make much sense. We don't want to
know the exact cause, just whether we can do anything about it. With Pene's consent (she,
too, is still recovering from severe spinal injury) took a loudly meowing Piccola to
Cape Clear, where
Pene diagnosed shrunken kidneys, one half the normal size, the other two thirds. It seems
that kidney failure is the main cause of death in cats. But Piccola wasn't ready for that
yet, though it's clear that her days are numbered. Different diet for her: raw meat, milk
(yes, milk!), cheese and eggs. No dry food, no canned food, which contains too much sodium.
Yvonne was in town, so I got her to pick up some stuff.
Back home, checked the cat food we had been feeding her:
BADALDI! The way
they sell it, you'd think it was intended for daily consumption. And it's only this kind.
They also have another one which is not intended for occasional feeding:
And that one has only 0.8% sodium, still 2.2% salt. Has ALDI caused the problems? Probably
not, but it's not impossible. And that kind of missing warning borders on the criminal.
Should I take some kind of action? Does anybody care?
Yvonne back with some chicken mince, which Piccola looked at and ultimately ate. But it's
clear that we have an invalid on our hands for the rest of her life, which may not be very
long.
The Washington Post has
published an article titled “22 good things that happened in 2022”. Clearly that's a tall order, and some of the
good things looked like mitigation of bad things, like “The world (mostly) averted a global
food crisis” (due to the Ukraine conflict). But one item caught my eye:
Lizzo played THAT flute. Musician extraordinaire Lizzo went viral for playing James Madison’s 1813 crystal flute. First she performed with
it at the Library of Congress (at the library’s request). Then she tooted it briefly
onstage at her D.C. concert in front of thousands of fans. Lizzo, a classically trained
flutist, instantly reminded us of the magic of in-person events and the treasures of
U.S. history.
I had seen that report when it came, but it hadn't interested me that much. I had never
heard of Lizzo, and I had to look
her up to discover that she's primarily a singer, apparently quite well known. Still, since
it was a Good Thing, I took a look. What's special about the flute? It was made from
crystal in 1813 by Claude Laurent of Paris. And there are surprisingly few clear images of
it. About the best I can find is:
Not many keys. There's an E♭ key, of course, and also clearly a cross F key and a G♯ key.
And I'm pretty sure there's a B♭ key for the left thumb. And that's about all. Only 4
keys, at a time when (according to Baines) flutes typically had 8 keys.
Yes, of course it's boxwood, but it only has 4 keys. In particular, I've found the lack of
a C key to be a real problem. The other three missing keys (long F, low C♯ and C) aren't
anything like as important. I wonder how she fingered C.
Searching for "Simiot
Tabard" produced only 7 results, the first two of which are on this site. But there
was also this
page, which is surprisingly interesting, though I wish they would improve the
presentation. But one of the illustrations is:
And the interesting thing about it are the dates: 1812 to 1815. That's the only time that
Simiot and Tabard built instruments together. And it's a good match for the 1813 Madison
crystal flute.
Somehow I never have enough time to complete my computer upgrade work. That's the situation
once again. But I've discovered two things about hydra: firstly, it's noisy. I
don't know if I can improve that by cleaning the fan, but it's worth a try. And then the
power consumption: I turned it off until I have time to look at it. And my power
consumption display dropped by 250 W!
If that's true (and I need to confirm), that's 6 kWh per day, nearly $2. Over $700 a year.
For that I might be able to buy a faster, more economical machine. But it'll do the job for
the moment.
Summer solstice, time for the monthly garden flower photos. The garden is
still recovering (if that's the word) from a spectacularly cold and wet spring, and it
shows. Since the beginning of October we have had both some of the coldest nights and 518
mm of rain, close to an average year's rain. And it shows. The Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” isn't dead, but it's taking its time recovering:
They seem to be multiplying, and the Ornithogalum seem to seed outside their immediate
vicinity.
The Abutilons that I cloned
two years ago have suffered surprisingly different fates. The one I planted in the
ground grew profusely, but for a few months now it looks almost dead:
One plant that has been in that category forever is this one. I think it was a Jasminum, though I have forgotten. But
despite its sickly appearance, it's flowering, sort of:
Those make me wonder if there's something wrong with the soil here, like some kind of
contamination. Maybe that's the reason why the limes aren't growing well too, though at
least there we have both flowers and fruit:
Down to the south of our property there's a forest reserve with a large tree which we call
the „Große Linde“ (“big linden tree”), though it's really a conifer. On the path there
there are a number of wildflowers, most of which we have already missed. But here's a
couple that we found today:
