First day of summer today, but you'd have to know it. The maximum temperature was 13.3° in
a month where temperatures regularly exceed 40°. As the ABC news put
it:
Phở bò for breakfast today. I have two different
jars of paste from Por Kwan, and for the fun of it I chose the other one. I thought. It
seems that they make no less than three different pastes, all with labels that don't say
very much in English:
“Vietnamese Beef Flavor Paste, “Instant Beef Flavour Paste”, “Spicy Beef
Flavour Paste”. Not much difference in English, since they're all Vietnamese, “instant” and
“spicy”. The one I got was the third one. Not much help from Google Translate:
Finally braved RIPE's login
procedures to set up a reverse domain for 192.109.197.0/24. The good news: login
worked. The bad news: it was only the first step. I received a mail
Two-factor authentication (2FA) is mandatory on RIPE NCC Access. To set up 2FA on your
RIPE NCC Access account, please copy and paste the below link in your browser.
More information on how to set up two-factor authentication can be found in the link
below.
Following the link gives me two choices: one of three Authenticatorapplicationapp or a passkey. I had never heard of either, and the instructions are vague: “Then, either
scan the QR-code on the set up screen or enter the secret key manually”. Wha setup screen?
How do I scan it? I need a mobile telephone for security? But it seems
that's becoming more and more a requirement: if you don't have a mobile phone, you don't
exist.
Spent much of the afternoon trying to understand how this fits together. It's worth taking
a step back and considering what they're trying to achieve. For a horrible moment I feared
that they would want me to perform the operations on my phone instead of a Real Computer.
But that doesn't make sense: for any reasonable 2FA you need at least
two devices. I have already ranted about the stupidity of performing 2FA on the same device
(typically phone) from which the request came. But they don't know my phone number, and
even if they did, would they really send me a message round the world? How do they
communicate with the device? I could use hirse.lemis.com, my old Xiaomi Redmi 9T that no longer
works with Australian mobile phone networks, but only if it uses IP (as one would expect from
RIPE).
So what kind of authentication makes sense? What I see is a six digit code. Is that more
secure than a random password? What does make sense is something like face or
fingerprint authentication. That can also be circuvented, but it's an order of magnitude
more secure than silly things like dates of birth.
The real issue is just understanding what they want, especially since they say that once
chosen, the method can't be changed. What if it doesn't work? They allow only three
authenticators: Google
Authenticator, Microsoft and FreeOTP (which they spell as “FREEOTP”).
Then there are the passkeys. OK, a number of sites accept them, so I can use one of them in
case something goes wrong. Spent some time trying to set it up on my computer for
Amazon, but failed. At
one point I got this message:
I'm getting to hate these silly values with lots of *** in them. OK, enter the (6
digit) number. It didn't like it for some reason, and it took me several attempts and lots
of deliberate delays to finally authenticate. But then I got:
What's the Security key? I know the Any key. Have they added another key to the Microsoft
keyboard? Much searching shows that it's a piece of hardware such as the dongles following
FIDO2. And that
makes sense: they're one thing that mobile phones have that Real Computers don't. I need to
follow up on that. What software support do they need? Will they even work on a FreeBSD machine?
It looks like lack of fertilizer, though I have spread some not so long ago. Try again with
much more fertilizer; hopefully new growth will look better.
The batteries in my bathroom scales are low. On changing them, I discovered that they were
nickel-zinc batteries, and only one was low. That's typical for NiZn batteries, and one of the reasons
I no longer use them much. But on replacing them with normal NiMH batteries, the display was too dim, probably the reason why I put in the NiZn batteries.
Apart from that, the result wasn't what I expected. I had just weighed myself with clothes
and registered 90.8 kg. But now it showed 92.6! A few months back I had similar problems with brand new scales, but this time it was
diffeent. A comparison with Yvonne's scales showed that the
90.8 kg were correct. But when I weighed myself again on my scales, they too showed 90.8
kg.
OK, it seems that the scales don't like the voltage of the NiMH batteries. Replace them
with NiZn. 93.4 kg! A bit later they had reconsidered, and were now showing 91.3 kg. And
much later they again showed 90.8 kg.
What's going on here? Do the scales somehow self-calibrate? It's certainly different from
my last investigations, where the scales were consistently wrong.
Bruno has been transformed by being let
out when he wants, and I think he's still finding out when he wants to be inside and when he
wants to be outside. But to be on the safe side we don't allow him into the Great Outdoors
after sunset. Instead we put him in the “dog run” outside Yvonne's bedroom, where he can't get out.
Until tonight. While watching TV, he appeared on the window ledge and wanted to get in.
And he had a dead superb
fairywren in his mouth! How did that happen?
It proved that he dug under the fence in the dog run. But what was the fairywren doing out
alone at night? Still, it was his first bird in nearly 10 months. Hopefully they'll keep away from him from now on.
Where are all these failure messages coming from? On the face of it it could be a bug in my
PHP code. But the only plausible
place for a bug would be in responding to a 404 error, and they didn't happen. The best I
can do is to just not report errors that have a referrer http://www.lemis.com.
But today I got a whole lot of other errors:
1304 N + 03-12-2025 To groggyhimself@ World Wide Web Owner ( 78) N + Broken link: /grog/Photos/20160213/small/Radioactive.png <- http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-feb2016.php?dirdate=20160205
1305 N * 03-12-2025 To groggyhimself@ World Wide Web Owner ( 78) N * Broken link: /grog/Photos/20160213/small/Confusion-symbol.png <- http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-feb2016.php?dirdate=20160205
1306 N * 03-12-2025 To groggyhimself@ World Wide Web Owner ( 78) N * Broken link: /grog/Photos/20160213/small/Mining-symbol.png <- http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-feb2016.php?dirdate=20160205
1307 N * 03-12-2025 To groggyhimself@ World Wide Web Owner ( 78) N * Broken link: /grog/Photos/20160213/small/Information-symbol.png <- http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-feb2016.php?dirdate=20160205
1308 N * 03-12-2025 To groggyhimself@ World Wide Web Owner ( 78) N * Broken link: /grog/Photos/20160213/small/Extruder-symbol.png <- http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-feb2016.php?dirdate=20160205
...
recognize fire symbols. Then there is confusion (represented by the <?php oneimage
("/grog/Photos/20160213/small/Confusion-symbol.png", "confusion symbol", 40, 42, 1); ?>
symbol), radioactive waste (represented by the <?php oneimage
("/grog/Photos/20160213/small/Radioactive.png", "radioactive waste symbol", 50, 48, 1); ?>),
mining (represented by the <?php oneimage ("/grog/Photos/20160213/small/Mining-symbol.png",
"mining symbol", 45, 44, 1); ?>), information (represented by the <?php oneimage
("/grog/Photos/20160213/small/Information-symbol.png", "information symbol", 50, 41, 1); ?>
symbol) and extruders (represented by the <?php oneimage
("/grog/Photos/20160213/small/Extruder-symbol.png", "extruder symbol", 44, 41, 1); ?>
symbol). What do they really mean? Running the cursor over them gives you insight: the web
...
Oh. When I moved my images to DigitalOcean I had to rewrite my already convoluted showphoto ()
function to point to DigitalOcean when the
subdirectories Photos/*/big/, Photos/*/small/ or Photos/*/tiny/ were
referenced on the external web sites. But I didn't do it for oneimage ().
More pain!
In fact, it was simpler than it should have been. Just
prepend https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/ to the URL for local images.
Looking back, that shouldn't have worked: it should already have
had http://www.lemis.com/ there. But so far it seems to have worked, though I went
through a lot of pain relearning PHP in the process.
I've made phat si-io a number of times, but
it's still not perfect. This morning, since I still have a cabbage, I tried with that
instead of gai lan, and also
tried a number of different changes.
The problem: wok hei. That's a
flavour nuance that I haven't quite understood, but it's related to cooking over high heat
in a wok. Google Translate is completely useless. It translates the term into simplified
Chinese as 我开黑 (I play with friends), or into traditional Chinese as 我看黑 (I see
black). Wikipedia wrote it
“wohkhei”, and claims that it is a Cantonese word meaning
“the breath of the wok”. It also gives the spellings 镬气 (simplified), which Google
Translate translates as “gas", and 鑊氣 (traditional), which it doesn't translate. And then
MARION has a page on
the subject.
But this is Thai. Google Translate tells me that it is กระทะ เฮ้ (kratha ḥê). Is it right?
At least it translates it the same way from simplified and traditional Chinese. In English,
I get “gas” or “wok hei”, neither very useful.
So how do I get my กระทะ เฮ้, when I don't even know what it is? My best bet is that it's
something that's slightly charred, thus the continual recommendations to cook the noodles
very hot and by themselves. But you can char cabbage too, so that's what I did:
And then there are the noodles. I freeze them and then thaw them when I need them, and
they're a little moist. So I left them to dry out for 40 minutes before frying:
But they still stuck. There's something basically wrong in the recipes that I have: fry the
noodles with the sauce in a very hot wok. But that doesn't work: “very hot” should mean
200° or more, but the sauce boils at round 110°. So I fried the noodles in oil first and
then added the sauce. They still stuck, and left a lot of residue:
That's probably because of the lack of green (gai lan) and yellow (egg yolks).
The other issue that is probably more interesting is that the steel pan in which I made them
is slightly convex, so any oil drains to the sides. That's the exact opposite of what a wok
would do. So next time I'll at least use a wok.
Bratwurst for dinner today.
Normally I fry them, but why? Despite the name („Brat“ could be taken to mean “fry”), they
should be grilled. Just what we want for the hair dryer.
OK, off to YouTube and looked for some clips,
coming up with this one. Slit the sausages like Laugenstangen to avoid having them burst, then grill for 10 minutes at 160°. Turn
and grill further for another 3 minutes at 180°. And while you're at it, grill some
potatoes in a second “air fryer” for 10 minutes at 180°.
OK, we can do that. Slit and grill for 10 minutes. Here before and after:
What a lot of work! And of course I should have read my diary, which told me 14 minutes at 210°. And apart from that, I now have two dirty
“air fryers”, so that'll be another dishwasher full.
Like Bruno, Mona typically comes into the house via a specific
lounge room window. But today she looked different: something sticking out of her mouth.
On closer examination it proved to be the bottom half of a lizard. Off to get my camera,
but when I got back there was only this to be seen:
Yesterday the temperature reached 34.1°, and today it was 32.1° (or 26°, as the BoM predicted). Gradually it's beginning to look like
spring.
Strangely, some things are looking better than I recall. The Anigozanthos that Diane gave us
over 10 years ago has struggled for a while, but it's now looking as good as I
recall:
I know that (but not its name). It's a rather pretty weed, with flowers about 1 cm across.
But this is the first time that I have seen so many in one place.
And somehow the white irises are everywhere, even in front of the front door:
The last of the Cyber week special offers expired today, notably PhotoWorks from AMS Software. I've given up on trying to denoise
photos, but what about background removal? But before downloading Yet Another software
package, how about checking my existing packages, notably Gemstone 12. I got it free, but
it's from ACDSee, which I tested
last month without being impressed. Was that Gemstone 15? The product structure is
confusing enough that I can't be sure. I was negatively impressed both by the
performance and the user interface. Surprisingly, though, Gemstone 12 seemed almost normal.
It wanted to put me in the “folder” P:\2-grog, probably because I used it there before. But my current test photos
are in P:\1-Skylum (hysterical raisins, and no longer appropriate). OK, set the
directory and try to load a file. It still tried to load from P:\2-grog! OK,
set the “folder” there too, load the file. What I had from DxO PhotoLab (here original and DxO version)
was:
That's seriously suboptimal, and I started playing around first with the noise in the shadow
area. The results were very different from other software: it crashed, repeatedly. And the
first couple of times it forgot all the settings that I had made. I needed to stop
normally, and then it recalled the settings. Probably there's a way to save them without
stopping, but the program abounds with strange icons, and I didn't want to investigate yet.
A bit more playing round suggested that the recovery of the original image could be better
then DxO, but I didn't have a comparison. And then it occurred to me: before expending too
much time with last year's model, how about Affinity? I have the latest version
there, and they've promised free updates. But that will have to wait for another day.
And PhotoWorks? Not necessarily its forte. They claim “Intelligent photo editor with a
content-aware AI. Batch process multiple photos, boost colors and retouch portraits
automatically, remove unwanted objects, change background, etc.”. Is that enough? Not
today, anyway, so the last special offer is over and done with. I'll look again next year.
OK, I know what to do: load the images individually and join them one at a time. But it
didn't work! Firstly, it didn't find the images (specified on the command line). So I had
to climb trees to find the files. And when I loaded the first two and aligned them, I ended
up with this display:
OK, add my own. It didn't work! I couldn't position the cursor where I wanted it. It kept
moving somewhere else. Somehow the whole display is messed up.
OK, what happens with the old version on eureka? Off there and ran my script (which
runs pto_gen to generate the .pto file), and it worked perfectly. What's the
difference in output? I should take a look. The difference between the .pto files
may give me a clue.
And, of course, whose fault is this? Does this only affect the FreeBSD version, or is it a general
problem? My guess is that the not loading the files is general (“passing parameters on the
command line is evil"), but if other people had had so many problems with the fast panorama
preview, I think we
Jesse Walsh along today to do mainly weeding, but he also brought a “new” lattice to replace
the one that was falling apart (and which I forgot to photograph). Here's the new one:
Choucroute garni for dinner this evening.
I've been cooking it occasionally for over
23 years, and I continually find that the recipes have too much meat and too little
Sauerkraut. My first attempt
23 years ago had a ratio of 9 parts meat to 10 parts Sauerkraut. I had reduced
the quantities last year, and today I put in even less (1 part meat, 2 parts Sauerkraut), but
there's still too much meat. 40% maybe?
Is that really a result of the fertilizer? At first I thought only old leaves had fallen,
but this image comparison (with Monday) clearly shows that new growth is affected too:
Can an AI bot help? Google Gemini says
“no”, but points to iNaturalist and PictureThis. Well, no, it's too
polite to pointlink. I had to search for myself. And they're both mobile
phone applications! Well, iNaturalist is much more, but I had to install the app, take
the photo and then describe it on a glass keyboard. Not my thing.
And PictureThis? Full of spam when I started it, and when I finally got past that, it
wanted a credit card number. Another non-starter. About the most interesting thing
is part of its home page, which shows:
That's all that is shown. Why a text describing Frangipani (top right) along with a much
larger image of a Hibiscus rosa-sinensis? There may be a good reason, but on their home
page it's just plain misleading.
What about other bots? Claude. I couldn't move the image to its input field. OK, give it the URL of the
publicly accessible version. “Can't access file”. Why?
You're right to question that! Let me try fetching it again - sometimes the initial
attempt fails but a retry works...
I'm getting the same error - "Image content is not supported". This is a limitation of the
web_fetch tool I'm using, which appears to not support directly fetching image files from
URLs, even when they're publicly accessible. The tool is designed primarily for fetching
HTML pages and text content.
However, if you upload the image directly to our conversation using the attachment
feature, I'll be able to view and analyze it for you. That would let me tell you what's in
the photo, identify the plant if it's indeed a weed, and provide any other information
you're looking for.
How do I attach the image? Use the paper clip. No paper clip on my screen. At some point
it divulged that it could also be a + symbol. Aren't these interfaces inutitive? That worked, and I got some useful
information:
This appears to be Scarlet Pimpernel (Anagallis arvensis), also
sometimes called Poor Man's Weatherglass. The key identifying features I can see are:
Small, delicate 5-petaled flowers in a peachy-salmon/orange color
Purple or reddish center in each flower
The flowers appear to be about 1/4 to 1/2 inch across
Growing low to the ground among other vegetation
Small, opposite leaves visible on the stems
Scarlet Pimpernel is actually considered a weed in many areas, though it has quite pretty
flowers. It's called "weatherglass" because the flowers close up in cloudy weather or
before rain.
How about that! I had heard of Scarlet Pimpernel, of course, but
I didn't know that it was the name of a flower. And it's not even scarlet! And I had
thought that this would be some kind of Australian native.
VicRoads have sent me email. Not the
promised email confirming the registration of Yvonne's car,
but the information that they have a new and improved web site.
It certainly looks different. But it's still hard to navigate, and it has managed to forget
my password: I had to reset it. It looks as if passwords will go away soon anyway: now it
would prefer a passkey, which I
really must investigate.
And the site itself? It still doesn't supply information that I need, such as whether my
concession has been applied or not. Doubtless another ridiculously expensive upgrade that
does nothing useful.
Not quite 60 years ago I got my first
camera with electronics, an Asahi
Pentax“Spotmatic”. I
still have it. It looks exactly like the image in Wikipedia, down to the lens serial number:
As I commented at the time, the rearmost lens element protruded. This was what came to be
called the 8 element 50 mm f/1.4
Super-Takumar lens, and somehow the protruding element irritated me. When my father
also bought a Spotmatic 9 months later for the Asia
Trip, I discovered that the lens looked different, so I swapped it. That's the lens
in the image above, here from above:
This lens has seven elements, and the rear one (I think) contains Thorium, making it mildly radioactive.
I've just been watching a video about the various versions of this lens. I had thought that
the way to distinguish the models from outside was because it didn't have a click stop for
f/1.7, and also no marking on the aperture ring for f/2. But not all 7 element lenses have
that peculiarity. A more reliable way is where the infrared correction mark is on the
depth-of-field scale. The 7 element version has it between f/4 and f/5.6 on the scale, like
here, while the 8 element version has it to the right of the f/4 mark. It seems that the
change was made mainly for financial reasons, and the 8 element version was marginally
better. That's potentially borne out by the infrared correction. A pity I changed it.
Off to Cape Clear today for Pene Kirk to examine Larissa and give her an injection. She agrees that her condition is deteriorating, but that we
can keep her feeling well for some time to come, if necessary with more medication.
Also a discussion about what she saw a few days ago, for the first time in her career: a
male tortoiseshell cat. “There's no such thing”. And maybe that's correct: the tortoiseshell pattern comes
from X chromosome
inactivation, and for that the cat needs two X chromosomes—the hallmark of a
female. Pene agrees that it's probably an XXY genome.
I'm sure that I had a second package, and that I've eaten it already, but I don't seem to
have written anything about it. It doesn't help that greps for Pro bring up thousands
of false positives. OK, today's the day. The quantities are irritating, one cube for 500
ml. Normally I take between 300 and 340 ml. I reduced the water to 400 ml, which made the
broth rather too salty, but still not overly tasty. I think that's the last time.
Little technical pains
Topic: general, food and drink, technology, opinion
The batteries in Yvonne's salt grinder are weak and need
changing. Not a problem: we have dozens of NiMH batteries.
But getting the batteries out of the compartment proved to be a pain: they were in so tight
that I needed to use a screwdriver to lever them out. But that was nothing compared to
putting them back in: in one case it just didn't work.
Why? Clearly I have done this before. I bought the mills (a matched pair for pepper and
salt) in June, but it seems that I didn't mention it here; presumably I was too preoccupied
with the new dishwasher. They're somehow typical of their kind: one takes four batteries,
the other six. This one was the four battery version:
The compartments are so tight that I just couldn't get the last battery in. Why? I tried
other (non-rechargeable) batteries and couldn't get them in either, so it must be something
to do with the compartment. But it doens't look damaged. In the end I had to get a pipe
wrench to force it in. I wonder how long this device will last, and also what the
tolerances are for these things. They must be considerably less than 1 mm.
And while I was at it, there were a couple of minor things to do with the car: fill the
windscreen washer reservoir and check the tyre pressures. And they, too, were
a pain! First, the cover of the reservoir was stuck on, and I couldn't pull it off.
And to add injury to insult, the pneumatic bonnet lift support is old and worn out and kept
closing on me. Score one for the old prop rod method, which I simulated with a part for a
shelf. Bruno wanted to know all about
it, of course:
And a good thing I still had the pipe wrench handy.
And then there was the tyre pressure. The air pump is at the end of the garage, and I had
never got round to putting on the wheels. How hard can it be? A wheel, a rod and a nut.
So I tried. The nut is a locking nut, requiring some pressure to insert the threaded rod,
requiring some pressure, and it's in an inconvenient place. In the end I gave up:
And the tyre pressures? Yes, there's something wrong with the front right wheel, which
showed almost no pressure. I'll have to keep an eye on that one.
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.
