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February 2025
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Saturday, 1 February 2025 Dereel Images for 1 February 2025
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Vitamin B₆ again
Topic: health, opinion Link here

My investigations into Vitamin B₆ have been interesting. While I don't think that there is any cause for concern, do I really need the magnesium supplement in the first place? My recollection was that I started taking it after the results of my DEXA test 2 years ago. And since then I have been feeling less active. One of the symptoms described here is “lack of muscle control...”. Is that what I had two years ago, only slightly later? Could it be related? But the Mayo Clinic article goes on to mention ataxia, definitely not what I have.

Just to confuse the issue, it seems that I was taking magnesium supplements 7½ years ago. I'm pretty sure that I stopped in between, but I don't recall any issues then.


Trump causes heart problems
Topic: health, politics, opinion Link here

Today Yvonne pointed me at this video, on Facebook of course. It shows signs of having been published elsewhere, but I can't find it. <conspiracy-theory>Could it have been removed?</conspiracy-theory> It's quite interesting: it was published just after the US elections, but it describes almost exactly what Donald Trump is now doing to establish power and become a dictator. Once again I'm wondering how resilient the US democracy is, and whether some important US government building will be seriously damaged in about 3 weeks' time.

But it worries Yvonne. For the first time in nearly 3 weeks she has tachycardia again. Bloody Trump! As if he hadn't done enough other damage.


Wikipedia Library
Topic: technology, general Link here

Tidying up my notifications on Wikipedia, I found a 3 year old note: “Congratulations! You are now eligible for The Wikipedia Library".

What's that? “an open research hub, a place for active Wikipedia editors to gain access to the vital reliable sources that they need to do their work and to be supported in using those resources to improve the encyclopedia”. That sounds interesting, but I'll have to put it off until I can investigate in more detail.


Tailor-made spam
Topic: technology Link here

Yet Another scam email today trying to steal my email password (what's that?). But this one was tailored to an address that should never have seen the light of day:

    <div>
        <div><p style="font-size: larger;"><span style="font-weight:300;font-style: italic;">Hydra</span><span style="font-weight: 600;">Mail</span></p>
            <p>Hi Grog</p>
            <p>Please note grog@hydra.lemis.com authentication expires 01 February, 2025.</p>
            <p><table><tr><td style="background-color: cornflowerblue;color: white;padding:5px 7px;border-radius: 3px;"><a style="color:white;text-decoration: none;" href="https://ipfs.io/ipfs/Qma8kStn7DAiwSWLoPeQRBU1GBEWSUDSLQbKkVb16TJoDd/#grog@hydra.lemis.com">Continue</a></td></tr></table></p>
            <p>Please continue to keep or change your password.</p>
<p></p>
Regards,<br>
Hydra Mail        </div>
    </div>
</div>

I like the “Hydra Mail”. Not so https://ipfs.io/ipfs.


More fisheye fun
Topic: photography, technology, opinion Link here

Spent some time today investigating the panoramas that I took yesterday with the 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. There were surprises. The project files that I created with my mkpto script were completely broken, presumably because of incorrect assumptions that it makes. In particular, it didn't know the focal length of the lens: it has no electronics, and the other fisheyes report the length.

OK, use the Hugin GUI. Here the three images that it had to merge:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250131/big/Library-4-0.jpeg
Image title: Library 4 0          Dimensions:          3456 x 4608, 900 kB
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https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250131/big/Library-4-1.jpeg
Image title: Library 4 1          Dimensions:          3456 x 4608, 834 kB
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https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250131/big/Library-4-2.jpeg
Image title: Library 4 2          Dimensions:          3456 x 4608, 825 kB
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When I loaded them into the GUI, I got:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250201/big/Hugin-3.jpeg
Image title: Hugin 3          Dimensions:          3840 x 2160, 689 kB
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What's that? It was consistent: the second image had this fleur-de-lis crop. It didn't matter which image it was, just the second to be loaded. I could add the image again, and it would work, but I wasn't able to come close to stitching a panorama.

OK, try de-fishing. I had done this before with sample images, and the results are acceptable if not good. Today I did some playing around with the first images I took:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250131/big/Fisheye-test-1.jpeg
Image title: Fisheye test 1          Dimensions:          5184 x 3888, 3073 kB
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https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250131/big/Fisheye-test-1-Fisheye-test-1.jpeg
Image title: Fisheye test 1 Fisheye test 1          Dimensions:          3000 x 1500, 551 kB
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https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250131/big/Fisheye-test-2.jpeg
Image title: Fisheye test 2          Dimensions:          5184 x 3888, 2566 kB
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https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250131/big/Fisheye-test-2-Fisheye-test-2.jpeg
Image title: Fisheye test 2 Fisheye test 2          Dimensions:          3000 x 1500, 312 kB
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That's better, but nowhere close to good. I need to follow up on other defishers.

In passing, came across this strangeness:

 
https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250201/big/Hugin-d.jpeg
Image title: Hugin d
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Where does it get that angle of view from? According to my field of view program, a 4 mm fisheye lens has a (theoretical) horizontal field of view of 247.8°. It can't be assuming rectilinear; then it would be 130.4°. So where did it get the value from? Could that be part of the problem?

While pondering that, I saw this:

 
https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250201/big/Hugin-c.jpeg
Image title: Hugin c
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That's correct! Well, close enough. But that's the same lens, and the supplied parameters are the same. Could it be that I have messed up the Exif data?


Sunday, 2 February 2025 Dereel Images for 2 February 2025
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Still more fisheye fun
Topic: photography, technology Link here

Spent some more time trying to stitch the panoramas I shot with my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. I failed.

After some consideration, it seems that the problem lies with the incorrect angle of view calculation that I saw yesterday. And the Exif data causes the problem: images that don't contain a focal length result in a popup that asks for the focal length and may calculate the angle of view correctly as a result. If the focal length is in the Exif data, it doesn't need to, but it seems to calculate the incorrect angle of view. It also assumes a rectilinear lens.

How can I fix that? I could change the lens type, but I couldn't find anything that would allow me to specify the field of view. Where is it stored? I recall something about a lens database. There!

=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20250131 3014 -> l ~/.hugindata/
-rw-r--r--  1 grog  lemis  94.208 19 Jan. 13:21 camlens.db
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20250131 3016 -> sqlite3 ~/.hugindata/camlens.db
sqlite> .tables
CameraCropTable      LensCropTable        TCATable
DistortionTable      LensHFOVTable        VignettingTable
EMORTable            LensProjectionTable
sqlite> select * from LensProjectionTable;
OLYMPUS M.8mm F1.8|2
OLYMPUS M.12-200mm F3.5-6.3|0
Pixel 8 Pro back camera 18.0mm f/2.8|2
LUMIX G 20/F1.7|0
NIKON|COOLPIX L1|0
sqlite>

No mention of the 7Artisans lens. But of course not: it was last modified on 19 January. But what a lot of other junk in there! Nikon Coolpix L1. “Pixel 8 Pro”. Where did that come from? And the copy on eureka contained hundreds of duplicates. Still, not what I'm looking for. I really don't know what I am looking for. Time to ask for help.


Stuffed capsicum and courgettes
Topic: food and drink, opinion Link here

It's been nearly 9 years since we last cooked “filled vegetables”, typically aubergine, capsicum and courgettes. Somehow the filling wasn't as tasty as I liked, and today I made significant improvements, mainly more herbs:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250202/big/Pepper-and-courgette-stuffing-21.jpeg
Image title: Pepper and courgette stuffing 21          Dimensions:          3681 x 4763, 4329 kB
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Kangaroos
Topic: animals Link here

We've seen evidence of a lot of kangaroos in the garden, but we don't see many animals. Today Yvonne saw a couple, only 10 m from the verandah door:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250202/big/Kangaroos-1.jpeg
Image title: Kangaroos 1          Dimensions:          2133 x 1589, 1653 kB
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https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250202/big/Kangaroos-3.jpeg
Image title: Kangaroos 3          Dimensions:          865 x 775, 485 kB
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https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250202/big/Kangaroos-5.jpeg
Image title: Kangaroos 5          Dimensions:          2241 x 2096, 1580 kB
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Monday, 3 February 2025 Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel Images for 3 February 2025
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Evil Bill Gates!
Topic: politics, general, opinion Link here

This morning Yvonne showed me an article on Facebook: 11 years Bill Gates recommended vaccinations to reduce world population. Bad Bill Gates!

Huh? That doesn't make sense. But she believed it. All the post showed was somebody holding a newspaper clipping with some similar claim. Where's the backup information? Off to check and came up with many results, in particular a screenshot of the article, with this quote:

 
https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250203/big/Bill-Gates.jpeg
Image title: Bill Gates
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According to the image, the article appeared in the 4th edition of the “Sovereign Independent”, a publication so obscure that Google can't find it. But it has a domain name: sovereignindependent.com. And that currently belongs to a domain squatter. So not surprisingly, it's a hoax. But it's sad that Yvonne believed it.


Corymbia ficifolia in flower
Topic: gardening Link here

I've been keeping an eye on my Corymbia ficifolia, which should be flowering now. It's been a dry start to the year, no rain at all for the last 3 weeks, but last night we got 9 mm rain. And bang! the buds flowered:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250203/big/Corymbia-ficifolia-1.jpeg
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https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250203/big/Corymbia-ficifolia-2.jpeg
Image title: Corymbia ficifolia 2          Dimensions:          5184 x 3888, 3992 kB
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The dry lawn in the first image show how bad things are.


More cardiology
Topic: health Link here

Unexpected phone call for Yvonne today at 10:00: Can you be at St John of God at 12:00 to speak with Professor Peter Kistler?

She originally had had an appointment with him tomorrow, but that had been postponed until next week. But given the experience of the past couple of days, it was welcome. Only: 2 hours, including breakfast and travel. Can we do it later? Yes, 13:30 would do too, so we took that.

Took along the KardiaMobile 6L and phone with the readings in the hope that the ECG nurse would help explain things to me. But no, she knew of them, but had apparently never seen one, and she was also not able to help interpret the readings, though she did uncover a history function that made viewing the ECGs marginally easier. “Show it to Peter, he likes that sort of thing”.

And so it was. I said “here's our toy ECG device”, and he replied “I like that kind of toy”, and spent some time looking at the results of the weekend. Only he wasn't able to help me understand the ECGs. It seems that the only use is to show them to specialists.

He confirmed that the recovery from November's ablation was not what he had hoped—in some cases it can take up to 6 weeks for symptoms to decline, but the New Year was the latest for that scenario. It seems that up to 20% of such ablations require further treatment. So she'll need another ablation, of a different kind. I forgot to note the term, but it could be pulsed field ablation. And that will happen Real Soon Now, probably later this month. And there, too, there's a 10% risk that it won't be the last.

One interesting insight is what the long-term effects of atrial fibrillation are. As long as it's not continuous, it doesn't have an overly dangerous effect on the heart; the real danger is a stroke. But the apixaban prevents that. Me: “Does it prevent them completely or mainly?”. Peter: ”For you, I would say mainly”. I think he has recognized me.


Tuesday, 4 February 2025 Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel Images for 4 February 2025
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Dentist again
Topic: health Link here

Into town to see Mario Cordioli, the dentist, today. As I feared, it looks as if he will need to remove the Bernd Doroschan monument, the bridge that has caused so much trouble over the years. That will happen next month.


A new car?
Topic: general Link here

While in town, took a look at a used car lot that Leigh had recommended. Not encouraging. Apart from the fact that he had nothing that I would consider, the prices were astronomical. Eleven years ago I bought my current Hyundai Elantra for $4,750. It was built in 2002 and now has 187,000 km on the clock. Chris offered a Mazda that looked similar in size for $8,000 (before negotiation). But it was built in 2005 and had 175,000 on the clock! It's barely better than what I want to replace!

That's only one yard, of course, but Leigh tells me that people have bought there and were satisfied. Hopefully that's not an indication of what's in store.


Blue camera
Topic: general, photography Link here

Found on the back seat of my car when I got home:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250204/big/Blue-camera-2.jpeg
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What happened? An ALDI carrier bag is disintegrating for some reason. Fortunately it was easy to wipe off.


Still more fisheye experiments
Topic: photography, opinion Link here

I've been trying to stitch my office panorama for 3 days now, and I'm no closer. Time for a message to the Hugin group. And how about that, I got a reply from Bruno Postle, who was able to stitch the panorama:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250131/big/Office-Bruno.jpeg
Image title: Fisheye test 2 Fisheye test 2          Dimensions:          3000 x 1500, 312 kB
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Yes, it's not perfect, but nobody expected that. In particular the camera wasn't mounted in the correct position, so there's parallax. But somehow the answer raised more questions than it answered, and I need to think about it. We're still not out of the woods.


Wednesday, 5 February 2025 Dereel
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Trump, the ethnic cleanser
Topic: politics, opinion Link here

It has been 16 days since Donald Trump was sworn in as the President of the United States of America. In that time he has done more damage than most presidents have ever done. The only comparison I can think of was Adolf Hitler, though I don't think that even Hitler came close. I've been trying to get my head around it, but he keeps coming out with more atrocities. Close down whole government departments, leave international organizations, repeal environmental protection legislation. I don't understand how, under US law, he can get away with it. Hitler needed the Ermächtigungsgesetz to do what Trump is doing.

But today took the cake. Standing next to Bibi, he announced that the USA would take over Gaza and send the population to Egypt and Jordan—neither of which, of course, were aware of his intentions. Instead he would turn it into a tourist destination.

That's almost the definition of ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity even in the USA and Israel. Under the circumstances, the international protest took longer than I had expected, but it came.

I can agree with some of his arguments: Gaza is a ruin. Never mind that that's the combined fault of the USA and (especially) Israel; it needs to be rebuilt, and that would be easier if what's left of the population (about 97%) were not there. But they could move the people out of the north to the south (for the umpteenth time) and rebuild the north, then move all north and rebuild the south. But one way or another there's no space for tourist resorts: the strip has a population density of 6,000 per km². Still, who believes what Trump says? I hope it wasn't serious.


A new car?
Topic: general, opinion Link here

For some reason Yvonne has taken up the challenge of finding me a new car—on Facebook! She found one that had been advertised for $3000, and which was now being offered for free. That's interesting, but of course there's no way to select cars based on my preferences.

Off to ask Google Gemini, which pointed me to a couple of sites. Discovered that they're all not very well sorted. On one site, after selecting “Victoria only”, the first hit I had was in New South Wales. But gradually I whittled things down to what I'm looking for: Front Wheel Drive, manual gearbox, price $5000 to $8000. And to my surprise almost all the hits were Holdens! One caught my eye: a 2014 Holden Cruze, 91,000 km, 3 year warranty(!), for only $6,990:

http://www.lemis.com/grog/Day/20250205/2014_holden_cruze_Used_1.jpg

That's a far cry from what I saw yesterday. But I recognize that place. Yesterday my car was parked exactly where the front of this car is in the image. It's the same place. So why didn't he tell me about it, when it ticks all the boxes? My guess is because it has long since been sold. And somehow a 3 year warranty on a car of this age seems completely implausible. Sent a message and received no reply—not what I would expect of a used car salesman.


A new lagoon
Topic: technology Link here

It's time for more systems upgrades. Not only is Yvonne's machine, lagoon.lemis.com, way down-rev, it also doesn't have enough memory to satisfy firefox, and I recently saw disk errors.

So: start again with a new machine and one of the many SSDs that I have lying around. How do I do it? Upgrade, in principle, starting with the current disk contents. Boot from SD card, enter shell, partition the disk (thoughtfully wiped by Peter Jeremy) in the same way as the one on lagoon, copy, boot.

Well, a couple of issues. First I needed mount points, and the SD card is read-only. It didn't occur to me that there's probably a /mnt directory exactly for this purpose: instead I used the second UFS partition (later to become /home), and mounted the root file system there.

On booting, it couldn't find the kernel. I don't yet understand why, but for some reason it tried to boot from /dev/ada0p4, the /home file system. Why? I don't know. After changing loader parameters, I got it to work, but it paniced during boot and was far too polite to display the trace for even a fraction of a second.

Next attempt: installed a real system from the SD card onto /dev/ada0p4 and told it to boot from ada0p2 (which is to become the real root file system). That worked, at least for the kernel, but I still ended up with the root file system on /dev/ada0p4.

This is all because of the strange way I chose to set up the system, but it should have the advantage that upgrading will be easier. More fun tomorrow.


Gardening!
Topic: gardening Link here

I've done almost nothing in the garden for years, and it shows. But the Fuchsia in the hanging baskets in front of the house entrance were on their last legs, so I've finally repotted them and one of the ferns:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250206/big/Hanging-baskets.jpeg
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Thursday, 6 February 2025 Dereel Images for 6 February 2025
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Upgrading lagoon
Topic: technology, opinion Link here

So why did I end up booting dereel (the current name for the new lagoon) from the wrong partition, /dev/ada0p4 instead of /dev/ada0p2? Simple: that's what was in /boot/loader.conf from lagoon. Fix that and it booted fine, though of course I managed to forget the network configuration and had to disconnect and reconfigure on the fly. That had the interesting result that rwhod still claimed to be lagoon, so the ruptime display for lagoon alternated between 244 days and 7 hours.

OK, build a new FreeBSD 14 world. After some hours,

stable/14/amd64.amd64/tmp/obj-tools/lib/libz -lz -L/usr/obj/hydra/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable/14/amd64.amd64/tmp/obj-tools/lib/libthr -lpthread  -legacy
ld: error: undefined symbol: pthread_getname_np
>>> referenced by assert.c:136 (/hydra/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable/14/sys/contrib/openzfs/lib/libspl/assert.c:136)
>>>               assert.o:(libspl_assertf) in archive /usr/obj/hydra/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable/14/amd64.amd64/tmp/obj-tools/cddl/lib/libspl/libspl.a
cc: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
*** [ctfconvert.full] Error code 1

One of these days things will happen without problems. But I was trying to upgrade from release 12-1. What happens if I try to install release 13 on the way? At least a long delay, of course, so I didn't manage anything further today.


Bruno catches another bird
Topic: animals, opinion Link here

Yvonne into my office today with a sad object: a dead estrilid finch, brought in from the enclosure by Bruno. The enclosure may keep him in, but it doesn't keep birds out. So far $500 expenditure and he's still killing birds. I suppose we're going to have to cover it from above as well.


No Cruze for Groggy
Topic: general, opinion Link here

Call back from Chris Polkinghorne of Ballarat Auto Group today: yes, as expected, the Holden Cruze that I was looking at yesterday has been sold, but he hadn't got round to updating his listings. But the interesting thing is that it really did have a 3 year warranty: up to $1000 on any repair, and up to the sale value of the car. If he offers that on other cars, it might be worthwhile. And I'm in no hurry.


Friday, 7 February 2025 Dereel Images for 7 February 2025
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More lagoon update
Topic: technology Link here

Yesterday's upgrade to lagoon, from 12.2 to 13.5-PRERELEASE, worked as is intended. And the upgrade to 14.2-STABLE? Just as easy! The only issue was that I managed to set the same address on two network interfaces: for some reason, this machine has three of them.

Now for the hard part: upgrading ports. And of course it didn't work out of the box. As always, it removed Emacs (why?), but also most of the other things needed. And in the second or third iteration I found:

pkg: libglvnd-1.7.0 conflicts with mesa-libs-18.3.2_3 (installs files into the same place).  Problematic file: /usr/local/include/EGL/egl.h

What do I do there? I don't know either of them. Remove one of the, I suppose, but which? It proved that only mesa-libs-18.3.2_3 was installed. Removing that removed about everything else, or at least 142 packages. But in the end it was done, and some ports were still there. To my surprise, emacs, firefox and Chromium all installed easily and almost instantaneously, in less than a second—what problems are hiding there? But that's as far as I got today.


More migraine
Topic: health, opinion Link here

I don't get migraine very often, and when I do it doesn't last long. But it doesn't seem to be that long since the last attack, and today it hit me round 15:00 and just wouldn't go away. In the end I went to bed early, round 20:30, not before measuring a systolic blood pressure of 160. Hopefully that will go away.


Saturday, 8 February 2025 Dereel Images for 8 February 2025
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Back to normal again
Topic: health Link here

Up this morning feeling relatively normal, though still with a bit of cotton wool in my head, but that dissipated by midday, and my blood pressure dropped to normal.

This isn't the first time I've had an episode like this. I thought it was the most severe, but I'm not even sure of that—I had something similar in Schellnhausen decades ago. Probably the biggest difference is that I'm paying more attention now.


A new kind of exploit?
Topic: technology, opinion Link here

Seen in my mail today:

   5 N + 28-01-2025 To groggy@lemis (  21) Lemis Cloud          N + Audio recording REC#282025-284656056.wav Transcript

“Lemis Cloud” indeed. Clearly it's some kind of exploit. But what kind? Mutt tells me:

A     2 38seconds__AudioRecording__lemis__REF213       [image/svg+xml, base64, 0.6K]

Is that an appropriate format for audio? I wouldn't think so, but svg+xml confuses me. And the entire content was:

<svg height="100" width="1500" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <a href="http://www.acutenet.co.jp/cgi-bin/lcount/lcounter.cgi?link=https://pub-a5c97ae7527f4347b0e2c5dd533728fd.r2.dev/Voice5.html?folder=zooG4sMlQ#groggy@lemis.com" target="_blank">
    <text x="50%" y="50%" fill="blue" font-family="Arial" font-size="30" text-anchor="middle" alignment-baseline="middle">
      Click here to play to Audio note
    </text>
  </a>
</svg>

How dangerous is that?


More fisheye fun
Topic: photography, technology, opinion Link here

House photo day again today. It went as smoothly as I had known it, but in the process I decided to try the 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens again. And that was interesting.

The first issue is, as ever: how do I mount it? Traditionally you mount the camera on a slide that can move it backwards and forwards to get the entrance pupil over the axis of rotation of the tripod. Where is the entrance pupil? The general consensus is that there is no clearly defined entrance pupil for a fisheye lens. But it seems to be reasonable to guess that it's somewhere near the back of the front element.

OK, mount on a rail. Oh. There's no way to position the camera on a rail in a way that the rail doesn't get in the way of the field of view. Fake it with a long mounting plate?


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250208/big/7Artisans-test-4.jpeg
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That doesn't really work either: the lens is too far forward, and it's offset to the right. But maybe it will do for the next set of experiments. In the process, discovered another issue. The aperture lever goes below the camera and fouls the plate:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250208/big/7Artisans-test-5.jpeg
Image title: 7Artisans test 5          Dimensions:          5184 x 3888, 2910 kB
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Removed that, off and took my photos. It seems that the mounting plates were the least of my concerns:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250208/big/house-from-entrance-4mm-0.jpeg
Image title: house from entrance 4mm 0          Dimensions:          4608 x 3456, 1150 kB
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https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250208/big/house-from-entrance-4mm-0-detail.jpeg
Image title: house from entrance 4mm 0 detail          Dimensions:          1631 x 562, 144 kB
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The black areas at the bottom of the image are part of the mounting shoe at the very bottom, and then the rotator. And there's no way to get rid of them on a normal tripod.

Effectively there's no way to fix this for this kind of panorama. But then I didn't want to, and I don't need to: I already have the Olympus m.Zuiko 8 mm f/1.8 fisheye PRO. Still, it would be interesting to see how well it stitches.

This time I tried a different approach to specifying the angle of view. Previously I have had three different ways of setting the field of view:

  1. Enter the focal length in the popup: 4 mm, “crop factor” 2. Hugin calculates an angle of view of 185.64°.
  2. Enter the focal length in the popup: 4 mm, “crop factor” 2. Hugin calculates an angle of view of 247.52°. Yes, this is the same as before. Apart from the fact that I chose a different image from the same lens, “I didn't change anything”.
  3. Provide an image with the focal length specified in the Exif data. It looks at the 4 mm and raises me 2.903 mm, a claimed horizontal angle of 256.18°. This is the one that Bruno Postle used.

But there are other possibilities. Why not just tell the popup the angle of view directly, 225°? Sure, no problem, that's a focal length of 0.08 mm. Oh, sorry, did you mean circular fisheye? In that case your 0.08 mm are 13130.89 degrees. Oh, you really want 225°? That's 4.4 mm.

And that aligned with a relatively satisfactory 8.4 pixel maximum error. But once again I got these strange artefacts, though this time they looked less like a fleur-de-lis:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250208/big/e-from-house-4mm-try1.jpeg
Image title: e from house 4mm try1          Dimensions:          6731 x 3348, 4785 kB
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Should I continue? I will probably never use this lens for panoramas, but somehow the bug hunter in me makes me try to find a solution.


Historical accuracy in film
Topic: multimedia, history, opinion Link here

The fourth and (mercifully) final season of Sisi is out. In the first episode, Max in Bayern, Sisi's father, dies, clearly showing us that we're in 1888. Sisi can't be there, because she had had a severe riding accident in Corfu, where she first settled in 1890, though she never had a serious riding accident.

All sorts of people came to Maxens funeral, including his nephew Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, who, like Sisi's mother in law Princess Sophie of Bavaria, had risen from the grave to be at the event after having been dead for 2½ and 16 years respectively.

This is a series praised for its historical accuracy? It makes “The Crown” look like the word of God.


Sunday, 9 February 2025 Dereel Images for 9 February 2025
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How to delete 7 TB of important data
Topic: technology, opinion Link here

There's a funny noise coming from eureka, a “chunk-a-ka-chunk” about every 2 seconds. What is it? It's really difficult to establish, but I was sure that it was coming from a disk. Gradually it became clear that it was /Photos, the 8 TB disk with all my photos on it.

OK, I was half expecting this since August last year, and I have a new 16 TB disk just waiting to be installed. But the copy is a little out of date. So I installed it in dereel, currently my test box, and brought it up to date:

=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /Photos 31 -> cd /Photos && mailme rsync -Havx --delete-after  . /newphotos 2>>/tmp/foo

That ran its time, and at the end I had:

=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /Photos 28 -> df /newphotos
Filesystem          1048576-blocks      Used      Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ada1p1             15,257,008       903 15,103,534     0%    /newphotos

Aaargh! Empty! The 903 MB (!) are the soft updates journal. I didn't have eureka:/Photos mounted on /Photos: it was on /eureka/Photos! 60 years' worth of photos gone!

Well, of course not, though some people on IRC thought so. Apart from the slightly flaky copy on eureka, there are also two backups. So I started the copy again, this time with tar. The disk confirmed that it was causing the “chunk-a-ka-chunk” by modifying it while copying. And that took its time. For reasons I didn't understand, it only copied about 40 or 50 MB/s, sometimes dropping way below that.

Is this because of the flaky disk? Mounted one backup disk on dereel and restored /Photos/grog (not yet reached by the other one) directly. Yes, up to 160 MB/s (nearly the capacity of an IBM 3330-11 pack in a second!). But that's still an overnight job.


Five years of Corymbia
Topic: gardening, opinion Link here

Five years ago I bought a Corymbia ficifolia to replace one that had died. And I've been keeping a careful eye on it ever since.

The good news: it's growing, and it's in flower, as it was when we got it. But these two photos, taken 5 years ago and now, show the difference mainly because of the background trees:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20200209/big/Corymbia-ficifolia-5.jpeg
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https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250210/big/Corymbia-ficifolia-5.jpeg
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It must be 50% bigger than it was when we got it.


ZDF pain
Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion Link here

ZDF seems to be having trouble this weekend. Apart from (surprisingly short) timeouts, I ended up with messages like

Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "http://www.zdf.de/" on this server.

Reference #18.50981002.1739068938.96225329
https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.50981002.1739068938.96225329

What's that? The URL (not a link) led to nothing useful. I found that I could access it via a proxy in Germany, but in principle it should be accessible anywhere in the world. Have they picked on me for downloading too much content? That, too, should be allowed. For the time being I'll put it down to blunders on their part.


Steak and kidney again
Topic: food and drink, opinion Link here

We eat steak and kidney “pie” from time to time, but I don't know when we last made the filling: I make enough for multiple times, and today was the day. The recipe was unchanged, but the filling looked particularly dry:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250209/big/Steak-and-kidney.jpeg
Image title: Steak and kidney          Dimensions:          5185 x 3888, 3700 kB
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That's what was in the recipe, but I decided that it wasn't enough. Liquid to just below the surface of the mixture? On the positive side, the meat (chuck steak) was tender enough after only a little over an hour's cooking, something that I hadn't been sure about.

The other thing is the serving quantities. I've been dropping them over the years, but now even our smallest portion seems far too big, and only ate half the portions. I think we'll have to reduce them further by up to 50%.


Monday, 10 February 2025 Dereel Images for 10 February 2025
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Completing the photo restore
Topic: technology, opinion Link here

The restore of my photo disk completed shortly after I came into the office this morning. It wasn't completely successful:

x grog/19640401/pass2/Untitled-Scanned-19.psf
tar: (null)
x grog/19640401/orig/Untitled-Scanned-02.jpg
tar: (null)
...

I've never seen that message before. What does it mean? Do I care enough to UTSL? It's not serious in itself, since the tar run was just to read in the first 99.5% of the files, to be followed up with an rsync from the dying disk. But yes, if this is on the backup disk, I should follow up. And in this particular case, there was nothing wrong with the copy on disk. So what does it mean?

The subsequent rsync also had its surprises:


could not make way for new symlink: grog/www/forsalad/Pano/embed
could not make way for new symlink: grog/www/forsalad/Pano/gimp
...
cannot delete non-empty directory: grog/www/forsalad/Pano/embed

What's that? An old, worn-out directory, for one. It relies on the now-obsolete Adobe Flash. But why is rsync complaining? Comparing my three copies (old (dying) disk, backup and new disk) I have:

=== grog@dereel (/dev/pts/6) ~ 7 -> ls -l /eureka/Photos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/ /mnt/Photos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/ /newphotos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/
/eureka/Photos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/:
lrwxr-xr-x  1 grog lemis  58 31 Mar  2013 embed -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/embed
lrwxr-xr-x  1 grog lemis  63 31 Mar  2013 index.html -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/index.html
lrwxr-xr-x  1 grog lemis  73 31 Mar  2013 SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf

/mnt/Photos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/:
drwxr-xr-x   2 grog lemis   512  5 Feb  2012 embed
-rw-r--r--   1 grog lemis   859 29 May  2012 index.html
-rw-r--r--   1 grog lemis 52405  5 Feb  2012 SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf

/newphotos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/:
drwxr-xr-x   2 grog lemis 512  5 Feb  2012 embed
lrwxr-xr-x   1 grog lemis  63 31 Mar  2013 index.html -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/index.html
lrwxr-xr-x   1 grog lemis  73 31 Mar  2013 SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf

Each disk has different contents in the directory! Why? I need to check more carefully, but it seems only to happen in these (multiple) Pano directories. And in each case, the original symlink has been replaced by a real file, so no data is lost—quite the contrary.

Still, I now have a complete copy of the /Photos disk. Time to replace the disk in eureka? So far it's not broke, eureka is the central machine in our network, and I like to have lots of time for reboots in case something goes wrong, so I'll do it on Wednesday when Yvonne is in town.


Hamas starves Israeli hostages!
Topic: politics, opinion Link here

Seen in my mail today:

14 N   08-02-2025 To Reader  (2689) Times of Israel Dail N   3 hostages freed suffering serious malnutrition; outrage in Israel at their condition

Outrage! Because of three hungry hostages! Why didn't Hamas give them enough to eat? Why didn't Hamas feed its own starving people? Excuses that they had no food? Who would believe that?

I'm disgusted, particularly because it seems that the average Israeli can't see what's going on. It's all the stranger because Hamas really did “mistreat” the hostages by making them recite pre-prepared statements about how well they had been treated.


Ermächtigungsgesetz: done?
Topic: politics, opinion Link here

The other horror that has been unfolding for the past few weeks is Donald Trump. I've been continually comparing his behaviour to that of Adolf Hitler 92 years ago, which led me to predict significant damage to an important public building in the next week or two, leading to his empowerment (Ermächtigungsgesetz).

But I have missed something important. Hitler needed the Ermächtigungsgesetz to rise above the law. Trump already has it: Trump v. United States (2024). Yes, Congress should keep him in check, but they're not doing their job.

What next? Concentration camps? Yes, they're on their way, in a place that former president George W. Bush referred to as a tropical Gulag. Tents! Even the Nazis put their inmates in real buildings! The parallels are terrifying.


PHP programming again
Topic: technology, photography Link here

I have a PHP script (createexif.php) to update the Exif data in my photos. It's currently useful to add information about my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. But the interface is via the Makejpeg file that I use to do the photo name mapping (one line per image), and that's inconvenient. For example, I would have to update the Makejpeg file like this, run createexif.php and select the output lines:

=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Photos/20250131 976 -> cat Makejpeg
A1310643_DxO Fisheye-test-1 l 48 f 4
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Photos/20250131 978 -> createexif.php  -c
,,,
exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile Fisheye-test-1.jpeg '-all>all' -title=Fisheye-test-1 -author='Greg Lehey' -copyright='Greg Lehey' -fnumber=4 -lensmodel='7Artisans fisheye' -lensserialnumber='43035' -focallength=4  Fisheye-test-1.jpeg
...

OK, fix the interface, so that I can write:

=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Photos/20250131 980 -> createexif.php -f Fisheye-test-1 l 48 f 4
exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile Fisheye-test-1.jpeg '-all>all' -title=Fisheye-test-1 -author='Greg Lehey' -copyright='Greg Lehey' -fnumber=4 -lensmodel='7Artisans fisheye' -lensserialnumber='43035' -focallength=4  Fisheye-test-1.jpeg

Straightforward, right? It turns out that the best way to do that is to pass the parameters in an array. Clearly here they're in argv [3] to argv [6]. With the file name it starts at argv [2]. In C that's trivial: pass &argv [2]. But PHP doesn't have an & operator. And my PHP-fu is not very good, and I haven't seen Rasmus on IRC for years.

Ask Google Gemini. Simple! Use the & operator. I hear H. L. Mencken laughing in the background. But with a reformulated question (“how do i create an array in php that contains the last n elements of another array?”) I got a different answer: use array_slice. And that did the trick. Shades of LISP.


CSIRAC lives
Topic: technology, history Link here

It's been over 20 years since I visited CSIRAC, but I was greatly impressed, and I was left wanting to know more. Today, while looking for something completely different, I came across this page, which includes much more detail, including something like a manual and an emulator. Now I just need time to read it all.


Tuesday, 11 February 2025 Dereel Images for 11 February 2025
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Garden work?
Topic: gardening Link here

Paul Donaghy around today to do some work in the garden. For once, it was only stuff for Yvonne, so I wasn't much involved.


More induction cooker insights
Topic: food and drink, opinion Link here

Cooking frijoles de la olla today, requiring long simmering. In this case, it took a particularly long time, but after about 6 hours I heard a piercing beep. It sounded like a grid power failure, but no, we still had power. Only the cooktop was unhappy, displaying a sequence H F 8 sequentially on the display for the cook field. The H presumably meant “hot”, like it normally does. And the F8? Off to look at the manual, which I appear to never have finished reading.

If a hotplate operates for an extended period and no settings are changed, the automatic safety shut-off is activated.

The hotplate stops heating. F, 8 and the residual heat indicator h or H flash alternately in the hotplate display.

OK, that confirms my expectation, and it makes sense up to a point: we don't want to set fire to something. But it's irritating. There are also a number of configuration parameters. c5 sets the “time until automatic switch-off” in unspecified units from 01 to 99. Are they (presumably) hours? Should I turn it off? No, that's the default, so it's not clear what good it is. And it seems that there's nothing to disable their choice of maximum cooking time.


A new rug for Yvonne
Topic: general Link here

For reasons I don't really understand, Yvonne likes to have a rug over her legs when she watches TV, even if the surrounding temperatures are high. So she got Julie Donaghy to make a rug for her, with which she is well pleased:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250211/big/Yvonnes-new-rug-2.jpeg
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https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250211/big/Yvonnes-new-rug-4.jpeg
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hubble down!
Topic: history, technology, opinion Link here

I haven't heard from carneous (on IRC) for some time. He had a machine called hubble which was last booted on 2 March 2010. The last time I heard, two years ago, it had been up for a little over 13 years. Is it still up? Today he showed up, only carn nowadays, and gave the sad news: some time between mid-2023 and May 2024 the power supply died—clearly a machine that got a lot of attention. It would have reached 5000 days uptime on 9 November 2023. Did it? Carn is going to salvage the disks and take a look.


Wednesday, 12 February 2025 Dereel Images for 12 February 2025
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eureka disk swap
Topic: technology, general, opinion Link here

As planned, swapped over disk drives in eureka today: a newer SSD for swap to replace the older, failing one, and the new 16 TB photo drive for not only the old 8 TB drive, but also the even older, no longer used 4 TB drive before that.

All went well modulo my connecting the SSD to a non-functional power cable, requiring a change to a different cable. But somehow I get so stressed doing this kind of work. Somehow “keep it up” is becoming too much of a concern.

How old was the old disk? I put the 4 TB drive in on 31 January 2014, but I didn't clearly note when I installed the 8 TB drive. But with any luck this one will keep me going for a few years yet.


A name for Trump's country
Topic: politics, opinion Link here

One of the sillier but less dangerous things that Donald Trump has done was to name the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America”, presumably in the mistaken impression that that was the name of his country, and not of the continent around it, and possibly also the mistaken impression that the gulf was named after the country México, founded some centuries later.

But that highlights a deeper (and also not dangerous) problem: his country has no name. Officially it's the United States of America, but that's just a description of the form of government and the location, and even Wikipedia drops the location. It's not even the only United States in North America: directly to the south are the United Mexican States. This confusion results in the current text in that page:

Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in North America. It borders the United States to the north,...

Of course, it's silly to rename the Gulf of Mexico. But neighbours can also be insulted, and recently Claudia Sheinbaum, the President of the United States, presented an extract from a map of the world made in 1607:

http://www.lemis.com/grog/Day/20250212/472958232_1241532830276948_351393713733091989_n.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GgxsB2nbQAAFKee?format=jpg&name=large

“America Méxicana” was the area now called the United States of America. Should they change the name? No, that would just cause much more confusion.

In passing, until Texas seceded from México in 1836, the shores of the Gulf of Mexico really did belong almost only to México.


4 mm panorama: done!
Topic: photography, technology Link here

It's been nearly two weeks since I got my new 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens, and I still haven't been able to stitch a proper panorama. There are a number of strangenesses that I haven't got my head around, including how Hugin measures focal length. Bruno Postle has sent some helpful emails, but I still don't understand what I'm doing wrong. There are a number of potential options. Today I set to comparing each approach, in each case with these three images:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250208/big/house-from-entrance-4mm-0-part.jpeg
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  1. First, load the three files without Exif data and set the angle of view to 225°. This time Hugin chose a focal length of 4.4 mm. Align with the fast panorama preview, getting an average error of 3.5 pixels and a maximum of 7.9 pixels:


    https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250208/big/house-from-entrance-4mm-1.jpeg
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  2. Load the three files as before without Exif data and set the focal length to 4 mm. This time Hugin chose an angle of view of 247.52°. Align with the fast panorama preview, getting an average error of 2.9 pixels and a maximum of 9.8 pixels:


    https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250208/big/house-from-entrance-4mm-2.jpeg
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    It's not clear why the colour changed on the right in this version.

  3. Set the focal length (4 mm) in the Exif data. Load the three files as before. Hugin changed the focal length to 2.903 mm; I don't know how to find its guess at the angle of view. Align with the fast panorama preview, getting an average error of 363 pixels and a maximum of 452.8 pixels:


    https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250208/big/house-from-entrance-4mm-3.jpeg
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  4. At this point I went back to Bruno's email:

    > The photos are circular fisheye, so you need to check that there is
    >> a circular crop on each of the photos,
    >
    > How do I do that?  You've seen what the images look like; should
    > anything else be done?
    >

    In the mask/crop tab, make sure there is a visible 'crop circle' for each
    image, there is also a checkbox used to link the crop for all images.

    This was completely new, but yes, under the Mask tab there's a second sub-tab Crop, which implicitly sets circular crops—exactly what I needed:


    https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250212/big/crop-1.jpeg
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    https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250212/big/crop-1-detail.jpeg
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    I was able to increase and decrease the crop with the mouse, though I think I'm still missing some detail. But the crop circle was off to the right of the image, and I couldn't pull it back. Still, with otherwise the same parameters in the previous image, things looked better, with an average error of 5.0 pixels and a maximum of 20.0 pixels:


    https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250208/big/house-from-entrance-4mm-4.jpeg
    Image title: house from entrance 4mm 4          Dimensions:          4566 x 2283, 1913 kB
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  5. Then I found the tick box “Always center crop on d, e”. Untick that and I was able to move the crop to where I wanted it, though it didn't make any difference to the pixel errors, and no obvious difference to the appearance of the panorama.

  6. Finally I was on home ground. Mask out the junk at the bottom, move to centre on the front post of the hay shed, and I had a useful panorama:


    https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250208/big/house-from-entrance-4mm-6.jpeg
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    That compares with my normal house photo series panorama:


    https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250208/big/house-from-entrance.jpeg
    Image title: house from entrance          Dimensions:          10582 x 3765, 18410 kB
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    It's interesting how much higher the 4 mm version is, but also how much is missing at the bottom. Potentially I could mount the camera on a monopod and get better results.


New garage door opener
Topic: general, technology, opinion Link here

Our garage door opener remote control is here. Two packages (one inside, from China, and one outside with an Australia Post sticker), and no instructions whatsoever as to how to pair it to the garage door. Out to take a look at the opener, which didn't help much. OK, there's a button “Door Code”. Press that. No travel, no response. Press a button on the remote control, which causes an LED next to the button to flash. Wait for a while. Flashing stopped.

Done? No, the thing still doesn't respond. The web to the rescue, which brought me to these instructions, which I saved as ~/Documentation/Household/Garage-door-opener/ATA-160037_00_GDO-11V1_Home_Owners_Manual_hires_nobleeds.pdf. It calls the operation “Coding Transmitters”. You need to press and hold “Door Code” until it beeps and the LED goes on. Then you press the remote control button for 2 seconds, release for 2 seconds, press for 2 seconds again, then release both buttons.

Problem: no beep from “Door Code”. After much examination, discovered that there was still a protective film over the buttons. Even after removing that, nothing much happened until I pressed really firmly. And then the “2 seconds” were made easier by a change in the LED display after each step. But without the manual I would have been lost.


Thursday, 13 February 2025 Dereel Images for 13 February 2025
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More cockatoos?
Topic: animals Link here

The sulphur-crested cockatoo is one of the most numerous and most recognizable birds round our way. Here again today round the horse trough:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250213/big/Cockatoos-and-corellas-11.jpeg
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Except that it's not a mob of cockatoos. Looking more carefully, I can only see one, along with a mob of long-billed corellas:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250213/big/Cockatoos-and-corellas-5-detail.jpeg
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Deformed papaya
Topic: food and drink, opinion Link here

I eat a slice of papaya for breakfast most days. But today, for the second time recently, I have had one which appears to be deformed:


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There seemed to be nothing wrong with the flesh, but it was a nuisance to extract the seeds.


Trump chairs the Kennedy Center?
Topic: politics, opinion Link here

One of the less horrifying news items from the USA today was that Donald Trump has become the chairman of the Kennedy Center, whatever that may be.

It proves to be a cultural institution. What does that have to do with Trump, as the US media also pondered.

A hollow voice intones „Entartete Kunst“.


Time for new computers?
Topic: technology, opinion Link here

I have dozens of computers, including at least 8 ThinkCentres. Of those 8, four are in use, one is probably dead, two are in service to hold up my monitors number 0 and 3, and one has been moved into the shed. These last three are either also dead, or so old that it's not worth running them.

Now it's time to upgrade lagoon, Yvonne's computer. Fine, we don't really need both computers in the lounge room (teevee and tiwi). tiwi can go as soon as I migrate the weather application, which shouldn't be difficult. But on checking, it seems that tiwi is a model M58p, old and slow. I can't give that to Yvonne. The others are significantly faster M93ps. Where are they? lagoon, of course, teevee, distress (running Microsoft “Windows” 10) and... must have been dischord, running “Windows” 8 or so. But dischord died spectacularly a few months ago, and I want a reasonably fast Microsoft box, so I can't use distress. I could upgrade lagoon, but it's more comfortable to have a second machine to replace lagoon.

What do I do? Use the old tiwi after all? Move distress to a virtual machine, as originally planned but thwarted by bugs in VirtualBox? Maybe it's time to clean out and give away all these old computers. “Windows” 11 is here, and I don't have a machine to run it on. So how about Yet Another ThinkCentre with “Windows” 11? Then I can give the old distress to Yvonne. Ordered one, a model M710e. We already have a name for it: disdain.

Did I say that dischord was an M93p? Yes, but that was without looking at it. No, it was a much older and slower M71e. Somehow I'm missing an M93p. It's only in one of my two machine lists, and all I have left is a serial number: PC0240PE. I wonder where it went. But that's a clear indication that it's time to clean things out.


Friday, 14 February 2025 Dereel
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Mid-February: Late summer cleaning?
Topic: history, technology, opinion Link here

So I'm starting my next tidy-out of my old computer hardware, though I still haven't found my ThinkCentre serial number PC0240PE. But looking back through my old diaries, it seems to be the time of year to do this. Twenty years ago today I started planning a giveaway of old computer stuff, and ten years ago I gave away a lot of old computer stuff and also my old HP field service oscilloscope.


More circular panoramas
Topic: photography, technology, opinion Link here

Now that I have my circular panorama stitched, time to reply to the message on the subject. But I didn't even manage that!

Bruno Postle had had more to say than I needed for this particular panorama:

When you do calibrate this lens, using four photos and rotating around the no-parallax point, you can ensure there are control points in the periphery, and you will get an accurate angle of view.

Also, when you calibrate the lens, there are other input fisheye types that might be a better fit for this lens, try them and see.

What's that? I've been using Hugin for over 16 years, and I had never heard of calibrating lenses, let alone setting other fisheye types. Off to look for information and came up with this tutorial, written by Terry Duell in 2008 and updated for Hugin 2013.0.0, which cheerfully announces that it is no longer needed, and the program calibrate_lens_gui would do the job. And yes, that is on my systems, and there's a man page that says that I should read the brief description online. There's also documentation for the lens correction model. Interestingly, Google Gemini came up with a relatively useful description that it kept secure just for me.

More fun ahead.


Saturday, 15 February 2025 Dereel Images for 15 February 2025
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Calibrating lenses for Hugin
Topic: photography, technology, opinion Link here

Spent much of today following up on yesterday's discovery of lens calibration procedures for Hugin, without coming to a conclusion.

First I tried the most promising approach, calibrate_lens_gui. Where are the instructions? There's a bare-bones description online, but it doesn't match what Bruno Postle wrote:

When you do calibrate this lens, using four photos and rotating around the no-parallax point,...

But the instructions for calibrate_lens_gui, like Terry Duell's tutorial, only talks about one image. Never mind: I can take four and try both approaches. Here the photos:


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The GUI is really bare-bones. This is what I get when I start it:


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Where do I go from here? First, of course, tell it what it can't know, that it's a circular fisheye lens with focal length 4 mm and maximum aperture (is that what it's asking for?) of f/2.8. To do anything more I need to select Add and discover that it doesn't respect the working directory from which I started it. After climbing the directory tree and selecting my images, select Find lines. That comes up with the information “Finished”. But it lies. It didn't find any lines, but it's too polite to say so. Not until I select Optimize do I see:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250215/big/Calibrate-2.jpeg
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OK, I'll bite. Which parameters? How should I change them? After messing around a bit, discovered that I had to drastically reduce the line length, from 0.3 to 0.05 (of the image width). Then I got barrel distortion (parameter b to which Bruno referred), but not the others:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250215/big/Calibrate-3.jpeg
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Oh, you want them all? Then say so. Select the boxes, changing barrel distortion in the process:


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That looks better. Save the “lens”. How about in /var/tmp? More tree climbing, and I had a description file that seemed to make sense, though it didn't mention the name of the lens. Save to database? Sure:

 
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Image title: Calibrate 5
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Well, I can save the distortion, but not the vignetting. No worries. But Now the name of the lens is there! And it saves the information to the DistortionTable in the database (here a .dump):

CREATE TABLE LensProjectionTable (Lens TEXT PRIMARY KEY, Projection INTEGER);
INSERT INTO LensProjectionTable VALUES('7Artisans fisheye',2);

CREATE TABLE LensHFOVTable (Lens TEXT, Focallength REAL, HFOV REAL, Weight INTEGER)
INSERT INTO LensHFOVTable VALUES('7Artisans fisheye',4.0,354.665887987831695,10);

CREATE TABLE LensCropTable (Lens TEXT, Focallength REAL, Width INTEGER, Height INTEGER, CropLeft INTEGER, Crop Right INTEGER, CropTop INTEGER, CropBottom INTEGER, PRIMARY KEY (Lens, Focallength, Width, Height));
INSERT INTO LensCropTable VALUES('7Artisans fisheye',4.0,3456,4608,57,3398,595,3936);

CREATE TABLE VignettingTable (Lens TEXT, Focallength REAL, Aperture REAL, Distance REAL, Vb REAL, Vc REAL, Vd REAL, Weight INTEGER);
INSERT INTO VignettingTable VALUES('7Artisans fisheye',4.0,2.79999995231628417,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,10);
INSERT INTO VignettingTable VALUES('7Artisans fisheye',4.0,5.59999990463256835,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,10);

Some of that makes sense. But:

Started trying to run the calibration according to Terry Duell's tutorial, but it wanted to select control points manually, something that's almost impossible with this lens.

So where are we? We seem to have at least three different ways to calibrate a lens, all incomplete:

  1. Terry Duell's version, now out of date.
  2. Optimize via the Mask/Crop tab, which only sets the crop.
  3. Run calibrate_lens_gui, which doesn't even agree with itself.
  4. Maybe Bruno's version is different from all of these. It promises the choice of different kinds of fisheye projections. Potentially that's hidden in the Hugin menus, and that's what I'll try tomorrow.

Panorama damage
Topic: photography Link here

After taking my Olympus E-PM2 off the tripod, some pieces came off:


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Further investigation showed that it was from round the tripod mount:


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I had never expected that tightening the tripod screw could do that. It's not clear when this happened: the tripod plate has been on the camera for months, maybe years.


Bloody Bruno!
Topic: animals, opinion Link here

Bruno Postle isn't the only Bruno in town, of course. Our cat Bruno crowned himself in glory today by catching another superb fairywren.

What can we do with him?


More possibilities with VirtualBox
Topic: technology, opinion Link here

A discussion about virtualization on IRC today. I mentioned that the only way I have got VirtualBox networking to work was with a bridged adapter. Callum Gibson uses some form of NAT, something that has never worked for me. It seems that I need a dedicated adapter for that: not a problem, since the machine has two adapters. I'll get details from Callum when he's back at work.

In the process, fired up despise for the first time in 9 months. Once again network problems, but they only started after the VM was up and running. Maybe that's a clue.


Sunday, 16 February 2025 Dereel Images for 16 February 2025
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Snow in summer
Topic: general, opinion Link here

It hasn't been an overly hot summer, but tonight was definitely cool. The news media reported it: in Melbourne they recorded the lowest February temperature ever, 9.9°. But we outdid them by a significant margin with a lowest temperature of 2.8°.

Click to see larger image

Yes, that's not as low as some locations in the hills mountains, where they had snow, but we're only 350 m above sea level. But it's 0.9° lower than the minimum measured in Ballarat, which is usually cooler.

Of course, why should anybody tell the truth? The Bureau of Meteorology can't make up its mind, reporting a temperature that is not only wrong, but also out of their own forecast range:

 
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And the lowest February temperature on record in Ballarat was -1.4°, on 03 February 1986, and in Melbourne the lowest temperature was 4.5° on 24 February 1924. But why should the media go to trouble to find out the real details?


What use a rice cooker?
Topic: food and drink, opinion Link here

I've had this rice cooker from ALDI for nearly a month, and I haven't needed to cook rice. Today was finally the day. Previously I had noted that the scales on the cooking pot didn't make any sense, but of course I don't need to use them: 1.8 parts water to 1 part rice. So I put in 750 g of rice and 1.35 l of water:


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That barely submerged line represents 1.35 L, whatever that's supposed to mean. Yes, it's close to the volume of the water, but what about the rice? And I had already established that a “cup” holds 150 g, so that would also include 5 “cups”. But I had guessed (maybe with some backup) that the “cups” are “ALDI's guess at how much water you need to cook a “cup” of rice”. In that case, they could be correct. But basically these scales are useless at best, and also misleading.

OK, turn the thing on. It went through a surprising number of steps, including “stewed rice”, something that I wouldn't consider a recommendation:


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It produced a surprising amount of vapour:


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And at the end, the rice was cooked:


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It took 45 minutes! Mine would have been done in about half that time. Was it any better than mine? One issue I have is that the rice up against the pot tends to stick together. What about here?


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No, not much of an improvement.

When putting the rice into containers, I only managed about 10½ pots, more exactly 1.908 kg. That's about 92.7% of the weight of the ingredients. My own rice comes out round 98%, representing a weight difference of 111 g. Doubtless that's due to the extreme level of cooking evidenced by the steam coming out of the device.

Now the rice is cooked, how do I clean it? Yes, the pot comes out and can go in the dishwasher (I think), but what about the moisture in the device itself? Moisture accumulates in the lid, and also in the internal vents. The instruction manual includes 2 pages with 7 steps of how to clean it, including removing the plate above and also a steam vent, neither of which can be put in the dishwasher. That also seems to apply to the cooking pot itself, though I greatly doubt that that would be a problem. I'll certainly try it.

So, in summary:

Conventional cooking

Advantages

Disadvantages

Rice cooker

Advantages

Disadvantages

It goes back, of course. But looking at that list, I wonder why anybody uses the things. Clearly I'm missing something.


What do we do with Bruno?
Topic: animals, opinion Link here

We're not overly happy with Bruno. We just spent $500 to give him an outside area where he could keep away from birds, only to have the birds not keep their side of the bargain. He has now caught three superb fairywrens and what we think was an elstrid finch.

And though he now spends extended periods outside, he still runs around like a chicken with his head chopped off. What can we do? I'm gradually running out of ideas.


Monday, 17 February 2025 Dereel Images for 17 February 2025
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More VirtualBox fun
Topic: technology Link here

As planned, Callum Gibson contacted me today with information about VirtualBox configuration. Ultimately it didn't help much: as he said, he uses NAT, and it had occurred to me that that really isn't appropriate in my home network: I want to be able to wake and connect to the VMs from outside.

But I did some more playing around. The last two times I tried to run despise (25 June 2024, 19 November 2024), I had the same problem. The VM talked on the network interface, but it wasn't listening. I got continuous repeats of:

12:15:37.799085 ARP, Request who-has eureka.lemis.com tell despise.lemis.com, length 46
12:15:37.799087 ARP, Request who-has eureka.lemis.com tell despise.lemis.com, length 28
12:15:37.799213 ARP, Reply eureka.lemis.com is-at bc:5f:f4:c9:9b:bf (oui Unknown), length 46

That also means that a ping won't work. But yesterday I found that I had had some ping responses, only they stopped after some time. Tried it again today, with the typical “not listening” response. I thought that it might be related to my logging in. So I hoped against hope that the Microsoft network “troubleshooter” might point to something. No, as usual it came up with a blank. “Give feedback”? For the fun of it I said yes, and it merrily tried to send a message across the network link that it had just found to be dead. And the window wouldn't go away!

OK, reboot the VM. The network link works! Log in as myself. It carried on working, but I couldn't enter anything. It seemed that the keyboard had given up. It wasn't this strange “VM grabs keyboard”: I couldn't use the keyboard at all, neither in nor outside the VM. After some concern, discovered that I had two instances of VBox running on two different displays. Stop them and all was well. But by this time I had decided that whatever my problem might be, it wasn't straightforward, and it would make sense to upgrade my system. I've had hydra for nearly 1½ years now, and I haven't done any updates in that time. So I'll create an updated version on my test box and test there first.

At some point I received a surprising email message:

We received your request for a single-use code to use with your Microsoft account.

Your single-use code is: 222340

Only enter this code on an official website or app. Don't share it with anyone. We'll never ask for it outside an official platform.

Thanks,
The Microsoft account team

That must have been the response to my feedback request, the one that didn't get out. I can only assume that it was sent after reboot.


SSD speed improvements
Topic: technology, opinion Link here

One of the few programs that runs on eureka and uses a lot of resources is MediathekView, a Java application. When I come into the office in the morning it's swapped out, and it takes a couple of seconds to come to life.

But lately it has been really slow to wake up. Why? After a bit of searching, found:

=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) ~ 36 -> dd if=/dev/ada2p3 of=/dev/null count=65536
33554432 bytes transferred in 155.345170 secs (215999 bytes/sec)
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) ~ 37 -> dd if=/dev/ada2p3 of=/dev/null bs=16k count=65536
1073741824 bytes transferred in 32.405464 secs (33134592 bytes/sec)

That's the swap SSD. 215 kB/s? That's closer to the speed of a floppy disk. This is the SSD that I put in to replace the one that was failing. It seems that this one has already failed. Another reboot to change disks!


Bad language in video subtitles
Topic: language, multimedia, opinion Link here

I usually enable subtitles where possible when watching TV. It saves a lot of guesswork when people mumble. And it brings out the proofreader in me: it's amazing how inaccurate or badly written so many of them. So far McLeod's Daughters has taken the cake: it was clearly subtitled by a US American bot that can't understand much of the mumbling either, and it comes up with sometimes hilarious mistakes.

But today we saw a recent episode of „Watzmann ermittelt“, a German series, where we saw:


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This is in a brewery, and Google translate translates it as “I left the house at 5 because the apple orchard was broken”. That's wrong too, of course, though it's not clear how to translate „Apfelanlage“. It does better with „Ich bin um 5 schon aus dem Haus, weil die Abfüllanlage war kaputt“ („Abfüllanlage“, “bottling plant” instead of „Apfelanlage“). My guess is that this, too, is a sound recognition system that comes from outside the German language space: the last two words are way they would be in English, but that's wrong in German.


Tuesday, 18 February 2025 Dereel
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Real Sichuan pepper
Topic: food and drink, opinion Link here

Beijing “fried sauce” noodles for breakfast today. My old jar of Sichuan pepper ran out, and I started the bag I bought a couple of months ago:


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What a difference! I don't know how old the old ones were—Yvonne had written the label, without a date, suggesting that they could have been decades old—but the new ones bit my tongue off. I don't think I have ever experienced that particular spiciness before, and in that concentration (2.5 g) it was quite unpleasant. I'll have to tread carefully next time. 0.5 g to start with?


Upgrading hydra
Topic: technology, opinion Link here

I've had hydra, my still-almost-new main computer, for nearly 1½ years, and I haven't updated the system software in that time. Time to do so. This time I'll create a new system on different physical hardware, and when it's done I'll just copy the disk image. Started on that, and how about that, it almost just worked.

Symlinks continue to be an issue. What I need here is:

Some of this will require undoing before being transferred to hydra:

And after rebooting, all was well. I've seldom had such a smooth update. Even upgrading ports went smoothly, all 696 that it identified. It did want to remove ports as always, seven of them, but for a change nothing that I had installed, and presumably nothing that would do any harm. Left it downloading 689 ports, 6 GB in total.


Your credit card has expired!
Topic: technology, general, opinion Link here

Email purporting to come from BUPA today:

From: BUPA <noreply@updates.bupa.com.au>
Subject: Mr Lehey, our records show your credit card is expired.

Your credit card is expired

Our records show that your credit card ending in 4352 is expired.

This credit card is used to make premium payments for your Bupa Health Insurance policy. To stay covered with us and be able to keep claiming after 26 February 2025 which is when your policy is currently paid to please update your credit card details today.

Spam? My credit card expires in May 2026. But the mail headers suggested that the message really does come from BUPA. My best bet is that they have messed something up. Never mind, I wanted to cancel that card anyway. But I should ring them and find out what's going on.

What a pain! You can't do anything without a mobile phone nowadays, and to add insult to injury they made me click on CAPTCHAs as well as typing in numbers received on the phone—just to make a phone call! In the end, they told me that I was in for a 25 minute wait, and would I like a call back? This number, or another? Given my problems with Aussie Broadband VoIP, it sounded like a better idea to give them my mobile phone number. Sorry, phone number is invalid.

Idiots! That's the one that they insist on sending PINs to! OK, leave it with the VoIP number. I didn't hear back.

Somehow communication with “service desks” is getting worse all the time.


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