Call at 9:00 this morning from A at Aussie Broadband, to tell me yes,
indeed, 180.150.2.214 was a Google cache server on their network.
And that was all. Never mind that I had asked whether it was the correct server for my IP
address; he still couldn't answer that. And once again he went off
about DNS issues. I pointed
him to the traces I had sent. Ah, they hadn't looked at that. And he wanted to run
a traceroute to find out what was going on; the Aussie support people seem to
confuse traceroute and packet traces.
Sorry, Aussie, this isn't good enough. As I had reported yesterday, 180.150.2.214
appears no longer to be a cache server; I have two different addresses instead. And yes, I
know that at the moment it looks as if the fault is here at my end (which I ultimately told
him), but I've gone through a lot of trouble to document the issue, and not only can't they
answer my quite simple questions, they don't even look at the evidence that I've provided.
This is really worth a complaint to Aussie management.
Of course! xl0 is an Ethernet
interface, so it expects to be able to talk to it directly
uses ARP to establish
the Ethernet address. Clearly it fails. If I change the net mask to /24, it works, since
then the destination address is no longer in the network range.
OK, next: where does this address come from? I had already established that it cropped up
in the firewall rules, but where else? A clue presented itself quite quickly: after
deleting the alias, I could no longer access the local web server (wwww.lemis.com;
count those “w”s). What's up?
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~ 108 -> host wwww wwww.lemis.com is an alias for aussie-gw.lemis.com.
aussie-gw.lemis.com has address 180.150.55.199
Huh? Once upon a time that must have been the address, but when? I couldn't find any
reference to it in the DNS
configuration. But the next clue presented itself when I “fixed” the address. This diary
contains details that are only accessible locally, like the real names of the Aussie
Broadband consultants. But I could no longer see that.
OK, UTSL. This is
in ~/public_html/php/includes/header.php. And there I saw:
Where did that come from? Surprise, surprise, it's ancient. It was introduced in revision
1.376 on 30 August 2017, for reasons that I didn't bother to record:
So where did the address come from? Have I been kludging that ever since? Time to drag out
some old log files and take a look.
That leaves me with the third issue: why was it intermittent? That also offered itself in
conjunction with a different issue. I had wondered what DNS lookups taskumatti made,
and came across this exchange:
14:12:09.764725 IP 192.109.197.239.1574 > 192.109.197.137.53: Flags [P.], seq 1:32, ack 1, win 343, options [nop,nop,TS val 8986854 ecr 2241263770], length 3110199+ A? i.ytimg.com. (29)
14:12:09.764877 IP 192.109.197.137.53 > 192.109.197.239.1574: Flags [P.], seq 1:1125, ack 32, win 12573, options [nop,nop,TS val 2241263774 ecr 8986854], length 112410199 17/13/26 CNAME ytimg-edge-static.l.google.com., A 180.150.1.47, A 180.150.2.187, A 180.150.1.58, A 180.150.1.43, A 180.150.2.152, A 180.150.2.156, A 180.150.2.148, A 180.150.1.28, A 180.150.1.51, A 180.150.1.55, A 180.150.2.160, A 180.150.1.32, A 180.150.1.40, A 180.150.2.176, A 180.150.2.180, A 180.150.1.17 (1122)
That's not overly clear in tcpdump output, but it's a DNS lookup
for i.ytimg.com. Tried manually, it returns:
Look at the number of servers! It claims (repeatedly, and removed from this list) that the
reverse lookup for each address is ytimg-edge-static.l.google.com, but it lies. All
the ones I have tried resolve to what I've already seen, cache.google.com.
All of these addresses are in the block 180.150.0.0/16, but they don't need to be.
My guess is that this particular lookup related to a YouTube update, and that potentially other lookups could also return cache servers
outside that range, thus explaining the seemingly random successes.
So: almost finished. I just don't understand why this old IP address was still hanging
around long after it had outlived its usefulness.
While chasing down my routing problems, my phone went “Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!” a couple
of times. What's that? Ah, that's VicEmergency's way of saying “we have a report of a bushfire”. Where? Ah, you're
going to have to find the emergency app and work it out for yourself. If you can guess what
the 4 beeps mean, you should be able to make it. And yes, there's a certain logic in that.
But given the effort Android puts into speech recognition, why do no apps use voice output? It would be
so much more helpful.
But I'm trying to fill the frame. That's difficult: firstly, the flowers are too small.
The biggest magnification I can get is about 1.43 with the M.Zuiko Digital ED 60 mm
f/2.8 Macro and extension tubes (about 12 mm across). Theoretically I should be able
to get 2.1 magnification (8.2 mm across) with the M.Zuiko
Digital ED 30 mm f/3.5 Macro, but that requires the images to be almost touching the
lens, as I discovered a year
ago:
And of course at those distances focus stacking is absolutely essential. So I have more
issues: how do I position the camera and viewfinder, and how many shots do I take?
Unlike the photos taken two months ago, these flowers are in the full sun (in fact, the
orange ones require full sun to open), and that makes the viewfinder an issue. One
possibility that occurred to me was goggles that connect to
the HDMI output of the camera. There are
some on the market, but who knows whether they work? The other possibility is the one that
I have had since the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I five years ago: use a mobile phone. But the experiments I made at the time
suggested that it was pretty useless:
Admittedly, that's a detail, and there were ways to marginally improve it, but it was still
not usable. But I now have the successor model. Is it any better? Yes! Or at least,
that's the first impression, though it still insists on giving me
a JPEG image that I don't want and which
messes up my workflow. But at the very least I need to investigate further.
And the number of shots? That still requires investigation. A year ago I took a large
number of photos to try to understand how the focus system worked, but analysis was
complicated, and I never got it finished. I probably need to do something about that.
Spent most of the day trying to read in old log files from the beginning of December, the
date of my last level 0 dump. I failed. Part of the issue was that the dump (in fact, a
compressed tarball) was so big that it took hours of CPU time just to untar it, and I think
during that time the daily dump ran and then umounted the backup disk from underneath
it. Another day to wait...
An example: when setting the table for breakfast, she used to put the coffee cup on the
table. That makes sense until you realize that it has to be filled from the coffee machine
behind me, and that I don't usually drink coffee until after breakfast. So now she puts it
in the coffee machine.
What's a Mojo? Nothing obvious. It does occur in the Malay Wikipedia, but not in a culinary context. And
it seems that there's a district in
Java with that name. That would match the “Karé”, which is clearly Indonesian. But
I did find a reference in the OED:
A sauce or marinade of Cuban origin, containing garlic, olive oil, sour oranges and
(frequently) other citrus fruits.
Not quite the composition of laksa, but potentially similar. And Cuba is about as far from
Mojo as you can get on this Earth, as
the Great Circle Mapper
says:
Still, the makeup of the paste seems good enough, and it was worth trying. But before
preparing it, I discovered this:
Tomato Sardine? I suppose that means sardines in tomato sauce. What sacrilege! And yes,
of course I don't have to use that. But then it wants 400 g of tamarind juice! Not quite
what the front of the package said:
More to the point, 400 g is double the weight of the paste. All the pastes I've had so far
have tamarind concentrate in them, so presumably this is not intended as concentrate. But
how much concentrate? This is too hard, so I used the Richmond concentrate. It'll take a
while to get this to work.
It's looking much better, but he's still licking at it, and we're afraid that he will tear
it apart again. So another couple of weeks of shirts, I fear.
I've put working out the number of steps for my wildflower macros into the “too hard”
basket. Dammit, at this rate they'll finish flowering before I try anything.
So out into the garden with my rig. Turned on the remote viewfinder and... got a playback
image of the last photo that I had taken, confusingly close to what I was looking at:
Nothing I could do would change the display to a viewfinder. Dammit, is this some
pessimization caused by the last firmware update?
OK, let's see how it works with taskumatti, my mobile phone. About as bad as I had
feared. Despite maximum display brightness (how do you set that on the fly?), I
could barely see anything, and of course holding the thing didn't make adjusting it any
easier. It was a sheer coincidence that I got this photo, almost acceptable, though clearly
not focus stacked:
The whole thing was such a mess that I gave up. Back to check on firmware updates. No, I
haven't updated the firmware since two months ago. I have updated some settings on the camera, and one of them
must have broken the display. Now the long, painful search for the correct settings.
Donald Trump is currently
somewhat embattled at home, something that will hopefully lead to his demise. And he's not
exactly popular abroad. About his biggest fans are the Israelis.
What can you do about that? Annoy your friends! It has worked before. So this article in the Times of Israel should have come as no surprise:
US President Donald Trump on Wednesday gave Iran free rein to further entrench itself in
Syria
Is that quotation correct? I haven't seen it elsewhere, though world traveller Trump did
refer to Syria as “sand and death”. What is he trying to achieve?
It was very hot today—the temperature reached 41.5°—and it was quite windy, so of course we
were on alert for bushfires. And sure enough, round 9:16 my phone went beep-beep-beep-beep.
OK, VicEmergency, where's the fire?
None! So I dragged out my camera (why aren't I taking screen shots? Every Android release seems to
have a different way, and I haven't found this one yet, though I really should look), and
took a photo. Nothing in my area:
I managed to cut the time off the display, but
the Exif data for the photo show that it was
taken at 9:19:43. Ah, the Other Fire. What the hell is that? After dismissing the
message, I saw:
Nothing again. Of course, half the tiny screen was taken up with irrelevant information.
When I finally got it I got a map location (which I didn't need) and no further information
beyond the fact that the incident was reported 3 minutes after VicEmergency beeped at me:
What about that ZOOM at bottom left? No idea. It didn't respond. And while I was trying
to find out what it was, it went away again, as if it had never occurred.
Should I growl at VicEmergency again? It's repetitive, and maybe they think it's funny,
maybe a preparation for the tenth anniversary of
the Black Saturday
bushfires, to show how little they have learnt.
I've had a few strange responses from one of my external backup disks. It's not the newest,
and possibly it's an indication that it's dying. But since getting my new video backup disk
last month, I have a 4 TB
disk sitting around doing nothing. OK, use that.
And the newfs parameters? I always agonize about them. But in this case I can take
the parameters from the old backup disk with the help of dumpfs. Or should I take
the parameters from /videobackup, the new disk?
OK, but what's that device name? /dev/da0p1? It's /dev/da4p1! What went
wrong there? It got it right for /backups. Yet another thing to chase down.
In the end I took essentially the parameters for /videobackups; trying to reduce the
inode count further seems to hit some internal limit (which, of course, might be yet another
strangeness in newfs). And yes, in this case /dev/da0s1 is correct. That's
the disk I wanted to build the file system on:
In passing, it occurs to me that that disk had last been mounted on /videobackups: it
was the old backup disk. Did that maybe confuse dumpfs?
Then to copy the data across. Only a little over 2 TB, so less than a day at data rates
round 30 MB/s (apparently limited by the USB interface). It's interesting to compare that
with the IBM 3330 class disks that we used in the 1970s and early 1980s. Ours
(Tandem Computers) were made
by Ampex and stored 300 MB, with a maximum
transfer rate of 840 kB/s. That means that we could (theoretically) copy the entire disk
contents in 6 minutes. Now we can copy the same amount of data in 6 seconds, but it still
would take over 11 hours at 100 MB/s to copy the 4 TB disk.
Also in passing, after copying the data I checked how much storage I have directly connected
to eureka. It's amazing—32 TB:
Today was another of those days where we had a sudden plummet of temperature in
mid-afternoon:
mysql> SELECT time, outside_temp FROM observations WHERE date = "2019-1-4" AND time > "14:52" AND time > "14:59"; +----------+--------------+
| time | outside_temp |
+----------+--------------+
| 14:52:42 | 41.2 |
| 14:53:44 | 40.7 |
| 14:54:45 | 38.8 |
| 14:55:47 | 37.9 |
| 14:56:48 | 37.1 |
| 14:57:50 | 36 |
| 14:58:51 | 35.8 |
+----------+--------------+
In the 61 seconds between 14:53:44 and 14:54:45 the temperature dropped by 1.9°. A record?
No, this time last year I
measured 2.2° in the same time frame.
I've been dragging my feet on taking screen shots of my Android display,
preferring to take photos instead. That's not an improvement: it means a lot of work,
including straightening:
Or aren't they? On this occasion, showing typical behaviour of the VicEmergency app, I managed to get an image with
very little of the almost
omnipresent Moiré, and the gradation looks
considerably better (second image):
Still, it's not worth the work. But what's the magic gesture (a term that reminds me of the
old “V sign”, not the one for victory) for
taking a screen shot? Google to my aid. How to take a screenshot on your android phone sounded the right one.
It starts off with:
Every Android phone is different, and so is taking screenshots with them... We're here to
help: Just find your Android phone on the list below to learn the various ways to snap,
share, and save a screenshot.
Press the "Volume Down" button and the "Lock" button at the same time. You can find those
buttons on the right side of your phone. You will hear camera shutter sounds that indicate
your screenshot has been successfully taken.
What's the “Lock” button? What I have always called the “Power” button. Why Lock? Who
knows? Still, that's exactly what the old way was. And it's fussy. The instructions tell
me that I can then view the screenshot by “swiping” downwards. No, I can't. No reaction.
Still, I don't want to view it: I want to copy it to a Real Computer, something that Android
doesn't really think important. But I can do it with WiFi File Transfer—if I know where the files are. I already have a location
for photos taken with the phone: http://taskumatti.lemis.com:1234/storage/emulated/0/DCIM/Camera/. So it must be
somewhere round there, right?
So why does my Olympus
OM-D E-M1 Mark II no longer transfer viewfinder information to the HDMI monitor? A
bit of trial and error (fortunately not too much) gave me the answer: menu
D4/HDMI/HDMI control needs to be set to “off”. Possibly that even makes sense. Out to
take a look at the flowers, but the weather is cooler, it was late in the day, and the ones
I wanted weren't open. Mañana?
Chris Bahlo over this evening, and she and Yvonne took a look
at Nikolai's wound. Chris decided that it
the lump on top was just matted hair, and without even telling me the ladies removed it,
showing a much smaller wound than we had thought.
From abuse@lemis.com Thu Jan 6 16:25:09 2019
Return-Path: <abuse@lemis.com>
X-Original-To: abuse@lemis.com
Delivered-To: groggyhimself@lemis.com
Received: from cpc1-newt39-2-0-cust128.19-3.cable.virginm.net (cpc1-newt39-2-0-cust128.19-3.cable.virginm.net
[77.101.118.129])
by www.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 21BB71B72837
for <abuse@lemis.com>; Thu, 6 Jan 2019 05:23:16 +0000 (UTC)
Date: 6 Jan 2019 03:53:10 -0100
From: abuse@lemis.com
To: abuse@lemis.com
Subject: abuse@lemis.com was under attack! Change your access data!
X-Mailer: Microsoft Windows Live Mail 15.4.3508.1109
Message-ID: <70FBA92AD1227852D98B08F3005A70FB@07XR3N843>
Hello!
As you may have noticed, I sent you an email from your account.
This means that I have full access to your account.
The fact is that you were infected with malware through an adult site that you visited.
Trojan Virus gives me full access and control over a computer or other device.
This means that I can see everything on your screen, turn on the camera and microphone, but you do not know about it.
I also have access to all your contacts and all your correspondence.
Why your antivirus did not detect malware?
Answer: My malware uses the driver, I update its signatures every 4 hours so that your antivirus is silent.
I made a video showing how you satisfy yourself in the left half of the screen, and in the right half you see the video that you watched.
With one click of the mouse, I can send this video to all your emails and contacts on social networks. I can also post access to all your e-mail correspondence and messengers that you use.
If you want to prevent this, transfer the amount of $550 to my bitcoin address (if you do not know how to do this, write to Google: "Buy Bitcoin").
My bitcoin address (BTC Wallet) is: 1DrCbXWfTqJbaiak2wjGUQiEo1WBzCBnof
Yes, we've seen all this before, and the sender MUA address and Bitcoin Wallet are correct.
The part that I find so funny is that this scammer has chosen to send his nonsense
to abuse@lemis.com.
It seems that his son reshaped the front on the day he bought it, but it still works fine.
He brought it because our own mower is still in need of repair, and finally mowed the lawn,
probably a month too late.
And it occurred to him that my diagnosis of the problem had to be wrong: there was no
cable to come unstuck. He took a look underneath and found a disconnected belt. I had
suspected that too, but also taken a look and found that the belt was still connected. Only
there are two belts. So even before finishing his lunch, he had fixed it.
That's not the end of the story, of course. The belt was disconnected because it was worn
and needs replacement. But Mick has a solution for that, too, at a fraction of the cost.
Win, win.
<petz> is there some kind of channel greet doodad we can do? do we want to?
<groggyhimself> "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"?
That quote from Inferno should be
familiar to players
of Adventure, but of
course I wanted it in the original (something that I'm not sure I have achieved).
Clearly others will want it in English. How
about Google
Translate?
Rather to my surprise I found a ripe tomato under one of the tomato plants in the garden.
It had fallen off, normally a sign of some insect attack, but it was in perfect condition.
Only it looks nothing like the sweet bite early maturing tomatoes that I had been promised on the label: wrong shape (I'll get a photo
next time) and far too big.
And boring. Neither sweet nor aromatic. I don't need to plant tomatoes like that. I can
buy them for next to nothing in the supermarkets. Hopefully the others will have more
flavour.
Pene Kirk is planning to ride again, and today she went out for an early morning ride with
Chris Bahlo and Yvonne. Back in time for breakfast, after
which she took a look at Nikolai—again nobody
called me—and pronounced him well on the way to recovery, but of course I got no photos
again.
I suspected lack of watering, and planned to put in a dripper. First, though, remove lots
of Carpobrotus that had infringed on
the plant. And there was a dripper! It was in the wrong place, but it's not clear whether
that was due to my removing the Carpobrotus. To be observed.
To me, that's Cirrus. But she called it
„Föhnfahne“ (Föhn flag). Clearly it's not a
Föhn; that only occurs in alpine areas. But what is a Föhnfahne? Off looking
online, with no useful explanations. It seems that it could be related to one of these
photos (from Wikipedia):
They don't look very similar, but it's still not clear what the characteristic appearance of
a Föhnfahne is.
After writing the article, Yvonne told me that she had made up the name as a
description of the cloud formation. We've agreed that it was probably incorrect.
This particular motive poses a couple of questions. First, how do you focus on clouds?
They're all a bit nebulous. Autofocus gave up altogether, and for the first one I focused
by hand. Clearly that wasn't good enough. For the second one I focused on the trees; at
f/10 the depth of field would go far beyond ∞ (in fact to -8 m).
And then: how much sharpness do you need? That affects depth of field as well. The sharper
the image needs to be, the smaller the circle of confusion, and thus the smaller the depth
of field. In this example, I'd guess that the trees were 50 m away. For a normal circle of
confusion of 8 μm that would give me a depth of field from 6.29 m to ∞, but reducing the
circle of confusion to 4 μm would bring the near distances up to 11.18 m. In this case,
that's still plenty, but what about at f/2? Then the depth of field would be 21 m to ∞ with
a circle of confusion of 8 μm, but only 30 m to 164 m for a circle of confusion of 4 μm.
On the other hand, none of this makes any difference if you're just looking at the image
from a normal angle of view. So we seem to have two different definitions of “depth of
field”.
Why is it that some days I do so much, and on others hardly anything? Today was another of
the latter. I sometimes feel that if I lump days two at a time, I'll come out with a good
balance.
What's going on in the world? The President of the USA is holding his
country to ransom, promising to keep his government shut down until he gets his toy. At
what point can his actions be cause for impeachment? It's interesting, though, to look at
the magnitude of the illegal immigration problem. I wonder what a good, humanitarian
solution would be.
And in Europe, it seems that Great
Britain is cutting off its nose to spite its face
regarding Brexit. What would the result
of a renewed referendum be? The most interesting thing about the whole affair is how
difficult it is to unravel agreements. I don't really see a good alternative solution to
scrapping the whole effort and remaining in
the European Union. Yes, that
would cost political careers. Watch people care.
There's an interesting dichotomy between dentists and toothbrush manufacturers when it comes
to cleaning teeth: my dentists say “twice a day, clean all teeth, duration doesn't matter”.
The latter (Oral-B for example. This is the only page I could find; their web site is too polite
to show a corresponding page for their main source of income, electric toothbrushes) say
“two minutes, twice a day”, interestingly backed up by the Australian Dental Association.
And how much toothpaste? There's very little information
there. Colgate, the
protector of dental cavities, shows this image on instructions carefully designed not to be
legible at one glance:
But that's far too much. You can't fit that much on an electric toothbrush head, and even
on a manual toothbrush, most of it would just fall off and be lost. So I've been weighing
what I can get on the toothbrush head and use. The result: round ⅓ g (350 mg). Even 450 mg
results in wastage.
Like most people, I have a number of digital devices in the household that have replaced
older analogue devices, notably scales and thermometers. The digital display makes them
much easier to use, and they're more accurate.
Or are they? Decades ago I built a temperature controller using Dallas 1820 temperature probes. From memory, they
have a granularity of 0.07°. But how accurate are they? Recently I had mechanical issues
with an infrared thermometer, so I replaced it. But the old one still works, sort of: at
room temperature it displays about 20° too high.
That's clearly incorrect. But what would happen if it displayed 1° too high or low? It
would still be better than the Bureau of
Meteorology, which claims to know temperatures
in Dereel that are out by up to 3°. But
what kind of defect can result in a digital thermometer being so inaccurate? Or just
slightly inaccurate? We just don't know how they're built.
Then there are scales. A few
months ago I bought some digital scales with a 1 mg resolution. Just what I need to
weigh my toothpaste.
But the scales wouldn't stand still. They drifted upwards continually. They didn't do that
when I got them. Why?
At first I thought it was a temperature issue; in the past there seemed to be some
relationship. So I checked the temperature: 20.0°. You can't get closer to normal
conditions than that. And sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn't.
OK, batteries? No, they're freshly recharged rechargeables. Change the batteries; no
improvement. Use fresh, non-rechargeable batteries? Yes, that seems to work. And
interestingly the weight of the toothpaste tube had suddenly doubled; previously, on one of
the few occasions where it stood relatively still, it was exactly 28.000 g (doesn't that
look suspicious?), afterwards round 55 g.
So: what kludges do scale builders make? You'd expect them to have some kind of voltage
regulation, but potentially 1.27 V is too low. There are clearly others: if you take just
about any scale, out a container on it, tare it, weigh something, pour out the weighed
substance and replace the empty container, it will almost invariably not return to
zero—immediately. After a couple of seconds, if the offset is less than a certain threshold
(0.3 g, for example), it will reset to 0. What else do they do? How important is the
temperature? How linear are they? These are all things that we didn't have to worry about
in the Analogue Age.
Since discovering the
German mediatheques, we've found a
large number of TV films and series, some of them well worth watching. But which? And how?
There are a number of issues: the web sites are very little help. ARD, in particular, had a very bad layout. But they've
changed that: they've made it even worse, to the point where it's barely usable. They've
taken the mobile phone workaround for lack of proper screen navigation and used it to break
display on normal devices:
Why is the display truncated? Because it's modern. When it feels like it, it'll
overlay the last half-image (it always seems to be a half image) with a > to
indicate that you have to click on it to see only the next of a very large number of images,
each (poorly) representing a programme.
As a result, it's really difficult to find out what is worth watching. No useful overview.
Is this the kind of brain damage that mobile phones and “smart” TVs have brought us?
So we have taken the easy way out, and we watch mainly TV series. That way we have a
reasonable idea in advance of what awaits us. But we still have the issue of finding the
series.
Recently we discovered a new series, Großstadtrevier (roughly translatable as “Big city precinct”, using the US meaning of
“precinct” as “a division of a police
department in a large city (either to the neighborhood patrolled or to the police station
itself)”. The police area in question is
in St. Pauli
in Hamburg. And the series is new to us,
but otherwise anything but new: it's in its 32nd year.
Wait a while, we already have Notruf
Hafenkante (“Emergency call on the edge of the harbour”), about the police in St.
Pauli, only 12 years old. Same series? Predecessor? No, it seems that they're parallel
series covering the same topic in the same geographical area. I wonder if the people ever
bump into each other.
So: how do we watch Großstadtrevier? It's on the web, of course, but for how long? I
decided to download what's available (which proved to be a little over 70 GB), and
discovered that we had 58 episodes spread over 12 different years. And some of the ones on
the list weren't really there. So it makes sense to download them, number them and wait
until the (many) holes are filled in.
Why is it so difficult to find this content? It's not a legal issue as far as I can see;
everything I'm doing is legal. But why should it be necessary?
Walking the dogs today, they really wanted to go down Grassy Gully Road, which we
normally avoid because of the traffic. Today only one car came by, a Claire
from Linton who was so taken by
the dogs that she wanted me to take some photos of her with them. Did that, and only at the
end realized that I hadn't taken any with my own camera.
On to the first driveway, where we had seen some signs about wine tasting some while back.
Yes, indeed, found a somewhat hidden sign:
Interesting statistic from Statista today. Australia is now the world's
seventh-largest tourist destination:
Only seventh? Look at the others: four of them are right next to each other, and all very
interesting places. And Australia is literally at the end of the world.
The other thing to note is what we already noticed at the Twelve Apostlesin November: there are many
more tourists, and most of them are Chinese. Clearly the world is changing, even without
Donald Trump's help.
Is that legal? Good question. It's not clear that my copy is legal. As noted five years agp, I found it
on alt.folklore.computers about 25 years ago,
in uuencode format, with the title
“Leo's Notes”. It was sent anonymously (in those days old Unix sources were tabu) by Warren
Toomey. Since then the licensing conditions have changed. I subsequently published it on
my web site, though I didn't note when, and that's what the Wikipedia article points at.
So what is there to stop Andrew Kanner (is
that his real name) from taking the sources? It certainly doesn't offend my (non-existent)
copyright. But wouldn't it have been nice for him to at least tell me? As it is, I can't
even find contact information.
Talking to CJ Ellis on the phone today. He has a problem: a historic car on some special
license plates, and he needs photos of it today to renew the license.
That's a historical car? A Mazda
929 from 1988. That's the sort of car I drive normally. Maybe I should investigate
cheaper registration. His is clearly very cheap:
They wanted photos from all sides, and also of the dashboard and engine and chassis number.
Where are the numbers? The engine compartment is much fuller than I recall from really old
cars:
CJ thought on the side of the engine block, under the distributor (remember them)? We
couldn't see anything, but I managed to squeeze a camera down there with a wide-angle lens.
It couldn't see anything useful either:
On November 30, 2018, we emailed you regarding a small percentage of Spaces Objects that became inaccessible as a result of a hardware problem that occurred during an emergency in our NYC3 datacenter. Since then, our Engineering Team has focused its efforts on restoring availability to the impacted Objects.
Unfortunately despite those efforts, there are 3 Object/s that cannot be restored to your account.
It goes on to talk about how the problem happened (hardware failure) and how they plan to
ensure that it never happens again. What didn't they mention? What the objects are! I can
restore them relatively trivially, but without knowing which they are, it's a shotgun
approach. Do they really not know which they are?
I sent CJ's photos off yesterday evening, but when I came in this morning I had a reply
waiting for me:
The photos have to have to have the date in the picture frame, normally
printed on the bottom,each photo, so the photos are no good to me.
Include the date and would be perfect, if you have an iphone you can
download an app to do this, got no idea what Exif data is.
Sigh. I suppose he's going to print out the photos too. The original instructions
specifically required a digital camera (implicitly excluding analogue cameras, many of which
could have automatically added the date he wanted). So why does he talk
about iPhones? And if he wants photo
data, he should be aware of the Exif data.
And of course if you mark up a photo, you can write anything you like.
Sniffing around in the various photo software on dischord, discovered that Zoner Photo Studio 18 could do it relatively easily, if not
very flexibly, so I sent him photos which met with his approval, with a clear date at the
bottom:
How do I fix that? The first attempt would be to screw the two halves together, but will
that work?
By chance, Yvonne was in town today and bought a masonry
drill bit and wall plugs for some work that CJ and I are going to do on Monday. Instead of
going to Bunnings, which she hates (not
without reason), she went to Mitre 10,
which I hate, also not without reason. I could have got her to buy some screws, but she had
been through two different assistants and two phone calls to me just to be sure what kind of
bit and what size plugs; they seem to be completely incapable. I didn't want to put her
through the pain of buying screws as well.
A couple of times over the last 2½ years I have wondered whether Donald Trump is maybe not as stupid as
he appears to be, and that his candidacy for the US presidency was not some kind of
practical joke or a dare, just to see how far he could go. Certainly I got the impression
that he was surprised that he had won, and recently I've been made aware that his behaviour
so exactly matches the Mayo Clinic's description of narcissistic personality disorder that you'd think you would have to be trying to get
this close:
Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance
Have a sense of entitlement and require constant, excessive admiration
Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
Exaggerate achievements and talents
Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the
perfect mate
Believe they are superior and can only associate with equally special people
Monopolize conversations and belittle or look down on people they perceive as inferior
Expect special favors and unquestioning compliance with their expectations
Take advantage of others to get what they want
Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
Be envious of others and believe others envy them
Behave in an arrogant or haughty manner, coming across as conceited, boastful and
pretentious
Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office
At the same time, people with narcissistic personality disorder have trouble handling
anything they perceive as criticism, and they can:
Become impatient or angry when they don't receive special treatment
Have significant interpersonal problems and easily feel slighted
React with rage or contempt and try to belittle the other person to make themselves
appear superior
Have difficulty regulating emotions and behavior
Experience major problems dealing with stress and adapting to change
I've left out a couple of items that can't easily be verified.
And then somebody came up with a video clip from the
1950s, from this episode (series 1, number 30)
of Trackdown:
A fraud by the name of Walter Trump comes to a town and tells them that they are doomed
unless they pay money to him to build a protective wall around the town. That sounds so
eerily relevant at the moment that it would be easy to think that Donald Trump is
reinterpreting the episode. The comments on
the Wikipedia
page come to similar conclusions.
Recently I've been running low on disk space on eureka:/home. OK, that can happen,
and I'm planning to move to a bigger disk. But in the short term I should remove some
non-essential stuff, including hundreds of gigabytes of old stuff in ~/Downloads.
But while searching I found this:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/3) ~ 208 -> du -sc /src/Videos/teevee-overflow/* 227645 /src/Videos/teevee-overflow/Air-crash-investigation
302366 /src/Videos/teevee-overflow/Cooking
530010 total
Those numbers are in megabytes: over half a terabyte of old videos. OK, now I have
space on teevee, and I was able to move them back there:
In the process noted that nothing is removed from the source directory until everything is
copied. At the end, the entire directory is deleted at once.
How times have changed! Idly thought back to the first big computer centre I worked in,
where Karstadt had two IBM 3330 cabinets, each storing a whopping 1.6 billion bytes:
Those things were big. I can't find exact dimensions, but they used 14 inch disk
packs, and based on the storage positions for the disk packs on top, I'd guess that the
individual bays were about 45" wide, for a total width of 180" or about 4.5 m. I
know that they were so high that I couldn't see on top (at least 1.8 m), so possibly 5 m
would be a better estimate of the length. And to store the images that I copied today, I
would have needed 332 of these things!
House photo day today, with a change of
equipment. After my accident two
months ago I discovered that one of the focusing rails was marginally damaged: the
adjusting screw that came off one rail seemed to have damaged a retaining ring, and though
it still worked, it kept falling off, usually in places where it was hard to find again.
They're quite cheap, so I ordered another one, and it arrived yesterday, after only two
months.
But the devil is in the detail. First, I had drilled a hole in the old one to position the
upper rail where I wanted it, a little to the left of the slide area:
Did I take that into account when calculating the positions along the rail? I almost doubt
it. In any case, I know that for the Olympus M.Zuiko
Digital ED 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO the rail should be set at 87 mm. So what's
that with the new one? Where's 0, anyway?
Surprise, surprise. I couldn't set the new rail on 0; 2 mm was about the least I could get.
And in principle it should be on 0 when the upper mount (for the camera) is directly above
the lower mount (for the tripod). That makes perfect sense, but it doesn't match reality.
The rails in the image above were positioned at “0”. Here first the old one, then the new
one:
The offset is due to parallax. But the scale read about 1.5 mm on the old rail and fully 6
mm on the new one! On top of that I had to add in the difference in the position of the
camera on the new rail (at the left end of the slide), and came up with a difference of
fully 13 mm, only barely still on the scale. On the positive side, it meant that less of
the rail projects into the image.
While looking through my system, found another 157 GB of videos that I had moved
to eureka. That's a total of 687 GB, or
430 IBM
3330s. When will I ever have time to look at them?
Margaret Swan is back in town for the first time since her accident in October. She's looking as good as
ever, but it seems that she won't be able to ride a horse for at least another month, making
the accident significantly worse than Yvonne'sthis time last year, at least on that
metric.
Husfrusill for dinner, to which
Margaret insisted on drinking the (very good) red wine which she had brought with her.
Problem: the ceiling isn't strong enough. So we decided to put a rod between the house wall
and the column in the corner. CJ along today with some brackets to be screwed against the
column and wall:
I'd had difficulties with this column a few years ago, one of the reasons I
bought a new drill bit last
week. But this time the drill went in like butter:
That was with CJ's hammer drill. Would it be better with the drill I bought specially for
this job last time? Not
until I find it. But maybe it's the bit. Yet another problem deferred by a poor workman.
What kind of error message is that? No details, no way to find any details.
This stupidity really gets on my nerves. I'm beginning to regret that I
installed Ubuntu on his machine.
Went looking on the web, with surprisingly little information, much of it out of date.
Where do I go from here? CJ will want to take his computer back.
Does it maybe also not work on my machine? Yes! So at least he can have his machine back
and I can investigate on my own.
What does it do under Microsoft? Tried on dischord: exactly the same problem. So we
have a relatively general problem that nobody seems to find interesting, and which Google is
too polite to report. What kind of world are we living in? At least this problem has
nothing to do with Ubuntu.
Marvellous. What's that? I couldn't get rid of it; close the tab and start it again, and I
still get the error. I had to clear cookies (why can't I do that on a per-site basis?) to
get rid of the problem.
Further messing around. About all I could establish was that if I press
the Download button, it downloads
correctly.
Once this heat is over (yesterday and today we had a maximum of 40°), I should transplant
them to the front of the house, where the soil is better and they have less sun—if there's
anything left of the first one to transplant.
Later we saw a particularly unhappy
looking Hebe in the driveway. Time
to run the sprinkler again? Did so and discovered that the dripper for that plant, and a
number of others, including the first hellebore, was clogged. Changed them and left it run
for a while. Even apart from the clogged drippers, it seems that the plants need more water
in this summer heat. Increased the automatic sprinkler time per circuit from 40 to 60
minutes.
Was that the only problem with the hellebores? No, the other one was getting water, but
still looks unhappy.
Last night I went to bed wondering, as so many others, by what
margin Theresa
May'sBrexit bill would be rejected by
the House of Commons. 40 votes?
Even 200 votes? That was the range that the commentators were expecting.
This morning I woke to find that their worst fears (if that's the word) had been exceeded:
the bill was rejected by 230 votes (432 to 202, apparently the largest defeat for a sitting
UK government in history).
And now? They're running out of time. Maybe it's time for the British to realize that
they're no longer living in the times of Queen Victoria, that they no longer rule the waves,
that they're just another country in Europe that happens to have the slight advantage
of lingua franca. They'd be a whole lot better off accepting the fact, toeing the
line and staying in the union.
What would a second referendum bring? The first was only borderline in favour, and that was
before anybody understood how difficult and expensive the whole thing would be.
One of the things that I discovered only slightly before these photos was that I wasn't
watering the garden enough. I had a similar problem last year, but I didn't recognize the
magnitude. I had had the sprinkler to run for 20 minutes per circuit, increasing to 30 in
hot weather. But now I'm up to an hour per circuit, and though it isn't obvious from the
photos, I think it's improving things.
Some things are just dead, though:
the Acer negundo that we coddled
this time last year, and one of the birches. The birch is trying to come back, but given
that it died in early spring when it was neither too cold, too hot nor too dry, I don't have
much hope. Even this time last year it was playing autumn:
The Paulownia kawakamii, on
the other hand, seems to be benefiting from the additional fertilizer, and it now growing a
little (though still far from the 3-5 m that it should be by this time). Here last year and
this year:
But the ones to the left of the big one have all died. This time lack of water can't be the
issue. They're in the overflow area from the tanks, so they may have been drowned. I don't
see any point in replacing them.
Last month's Kniphofia flower has
finished flowering and is in the process of maturing hundreds of seeds, but in its place no
less than 5 new flowers have popped up. Here four of them:
The Hibiscus rosa-sinensis
that I got from my uncle Max, and of which I have cloned many times, is currently not
flowering. It does that from time to time, and I'm not overly worried. The one that I
planted outside two months ago has recovered from the shock and now looks about as good again as it did when I planted
it. Then and now:
Some of the flowers in the shade area are doing well. While we lost one of
the fuchsias that we bought two months
ago (proved not to be getting any water), the other one is looking quite happy, and compared
to this time last year the tree fern is also doing well:
An out of sequence dinner tonight: it was Margaret Swan's birthday, a significant one. So
we had a birthday dinner for her, with gratin dauphinois, apparently one of her favourites. Also a cheese soufflée,
this time with Parmesan cheese, not quite how we expected it to turn out, but after greasing
the form it at least didn't stick. And for a birthday present, of course yet
another Hibiscus
rosa-sinensis clone.
Pene Kirk along this morning to go riding with Yvonne; it
looks as if this might be a more regular thing. After the (relatively short) ride, Yvonne
made her version of Eggs Benedict,
with a special sauce mayonnaise
instead of the more normal sauce
hollandaise. On the other hand, for the first time ever, we ate them on
“English” muffins (I suspect that
“English” implies an US American background). Pene said that she liked it.
While she was here, Pene took a look at Nikolai and decided that the wound had healed enough to be able to take his shirt off. I
suspected that he would then remove the (1 cm wide) scab, but that doesn't seem to be
serious. Certainly he looked happier enough.
A question on Quora today: “How can anyone
educated actually believe this Al Jazeera propaganda history about Israel?”.
OK, that's worth looking at. The “propaganda” was in fact an apparently well-documented
overview with the somewhat inflammatory title Israel's settlements: 50 years of land theft explained. And clearly it has to be
wrong, because it comes from “anti-semites”, a term that more and more Jewish people,
particularly those with extreme views, are applying to anybody who disagrees with them.
So it was here. There were answers were like “The key word is educated. Al Jazeera’s
audience is not educated at all”, and “I believe that it starts with a deep seated bias
against Jews. There after it helps to be generally ignorant of history, religion, and
gullible enough to believe anything that helps reinforce a person's worldview.”. Nothing to
back up these claims, no argument refuting the points made in the article, both suggesting
belief rather than proof. I wonder how prevalent these views are in Israel.
Into town today for a six-monthly blood test, forgetting to take my breakfast with me.
Yvonne called me on my phone, twice, but I didn't hear it
either time,
Why not? It was in my shirt pocket the whole time, and it was set to vibrate. But I had my
sunglasses in the pocket too, between phone and chest, and the ring tone is not as loud as
it should be. Clearly next time I should put the phone against my chest, and also fix the
loudness of my ring tone; in the meantime I've chosen one of the horrible standard tones,
which at least gets my attention.
One of our fridges is getting on my nerves. It's a combined fridge/freezer, and the freezer
compartment has open shelves and doesn't have any pull-out baskets, so frequently we have to
dig out the entire contents of the shelf to get at anything. And the lack of any kind of
barrier at the front means that we can't fill the shelves as much as we wanted to:
We knew all that when we bought it, of course, so we can only partially blame the
manufacturer. But lately it has been running most of the time, and I recently discovered
that it was completely ignoring the “digital” settings for the thermostat, and the main
reason I bought the thing:
In fact the measured temperatures in the freezer were round -23°, and round 1° in the fridge
compartment. This appears to be a combination of failed thermostat—after only five years!—and a digital display that
lies about being a temperature setting mechanism.
In passing, what earthly use is a clock in the fridge? I only noticed it again when
I took the photo, and of course the time is wrong.
OK, a new fridge? We could at least sell this one. But what should it look like? In
principle the fridge/freezer combination that we bought 20 years ago are still probably the
best, and in fact we have bought two new freezers since then. But we don't really need a
third freezer or a second fridge: we need a combination.
While in town today, dropped in at The Good
Guys and took a look at what they had to offer. It must say something about their web
site—which I visit frequently—that in the metal things made a completely different
impression. They had a Samsung SRF625BLS unit, a little shop-soiled, that made a reasonable impression:
That's a set of drawers that pull out over each other. I still can't remove them, but at
least they're relatively accessible without things falling out of them.
In passing, what's the volume of the combination? Both the Good Guys and Samsung tell me
635 l. But the model number SRF625BLS appears to be trying to tell me 10 l less.
The other thing that the salesperson told me was that it was unusually deep at 95 cm. That
proved to be a drop-dead criterion: it would have stuck out of the alcove by 25 cm.
Then there was the LG
GF-B590PL, another device whose model number disagrees with the claimed volume of 594
l. It has more visible drawers which are individually accessible:
But the upper ones, for some reason, aren't closed all the way to the top? Why not? We
could fix that, of course, but I'm left wondering why these designs exist at all.
Both of these units—and they're the cheapest—are significantly more expensive than the $1169
we paid for the Westinghouse unit 5 years ago. The Westinghouse has a lower claimed
capacity (606 l), and even accounting for that and an average 2% annual rise in consumer
prices, we're looking at $2.15 per litre for the Westinghouse, compared to $2.75/l for the
Samsung and $3.27/l for the LG. Can't we do better?
Somehow I've decided that Kelvinator/Westinghouse/Electrolux/ (the American brands that
Donald Trump wants to export
more of) are just not up to international standards. In the meantime I've reset the fridge
to 8°/-14° (the highest settings possible), and it's still cooling below 5°/-18°. Digital
indeed!
The British have apparently planned a commemoration coin for Brexit. And of course the current
situation has inspired satirists, who have come up with this obverse side:
Yvonne wanted me to take some video of her today. Just the
situation to use my (not so) new microphones. In to look for the myriad bits and pieces.
And I couldn't find one of them, in principle the least difficult to replace: a 3.5 mm
male-to-male stereo plug to connect the receiver to my camera. After half an hour of
searching, I ran out of easy options and ordered a new one. Possibly it will show up, like
a lost lens cap did this morning: I had lost it a month ago after taking photos at the
Ballarat Pump Shop. And it was in my handbag all the time.
About the only conclusion from the matter—apart from the fact that it's high time they
repaired the pump—is that I should tidy up my office. Who knows what else I might find?
Woken up this morning by the sound a fan running continuously. Damn, can't Yvonne turn the extractor off when she's finished showering? But no, it
proved to be coming from lagoon, Yvonne's computer. It had rebooted round 7:56, and
she tells me that there had been a power failure round that time. teevee had also
rebooted, but was not making any noise. Both machines seemed to be running normally.
First question: what power failure? Nothing else had reported a failure. The ones that did
were on the external UPS. And in the course of the morning it experienced many hiccoughs,
causing my office UPS (one of the clients) to beep annoyingly, sometimes more than once a
minute. Somehow this UPS was a bad purchase. My guess is that the hiccoughs are caused by
mains power fluctuations that don't interest any other consumers, but cause it to interrupt
briefly. Maybe there was a particular sequence at 7:53 or so that caused it to interrupt
the supply long enough for teevee, lagoon and Yvonne's clock to lose power.
That doesn't explain the fan, of course. How do I stop it? Shut down and reboot? Did
that, and the fan started all over again. OK, power down, pull the power plug and wait a
while, then try again? That made a difference. It didn't power up again, though it made
some kind of a noise through the sound output: click-click every 5 seconds or so.
OK, time for a replacement for lagoon. Took the disk and put it in my only remaining
test box, and had almost no issues getting it up and running: I had expected at least some
problems with the display card parameters. The only issue was one that I have seen before,
that the network card didn't come up in time for
the NFS mounts, so I had to
retry them in multi-user mode.
So what's the issue with the old lagoon? It's
a ThinkCentre M 6073. Any help on
the web? Yes, indeed. A Google search thinkcentre loud fan brought a number of hits, some, like this one with specific instructions on how to fix it, even down to the motherboard
layout. Only that's a different motherboard, and on mine I couldn't find the CMOS jumper
mentioned. OK, tuit queue: for the moment Yvonne has a computer.
As if that wasn't bad enough, got a call from CJ Ellis: he had run into the dreaded
corrupted content
error bug. Put him off to the afternoon, by which time he had solved it: one of the
connectors to his ATA was not seated correctly, and after he put it back in, the problem had
gone away.
Yvonne into the office while I was researching solutions to
the ThinkCentre problem, to report
that Piccola had caught
a sparrow and left it in the laundry.
Chris Bahlo along this afternoon to go riding in full armour. Yvonne asked me to take some photos of her once she had girded her up. OK, I can do
that.
Half an hour later she still hadn't called me. Out to find them still hard at it:
I still can't get my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II to autofocus reliably for video. Most of today's clips
were OK, but one was spectacularly bad:
Yes, it's trying to tell me to clean the dust off the lens. But why does it get so
completely confused, and what can I do about it? It started off in focus and just wandered
off into nirvana. If the upcoming E-M1X model is better, I might even forgive it for its
ridiculous size.
I've been paying particular attention to mites on
my curry tree, and it seems to be
paying off: it's looking a lot happier. But today, while drawing the curtains, I saw a
tell-tale web on one of the healthy shoots. Out with the fly spray, and discovered that
there were many such webs. Here they are after spraying:
Took a lot of photos today. The videos accounted for 7.4 GB, an amazing amount for the 15
minutes or so that I took. And while reading in from my 32 GB SD card, I ran an mdir
-s to show all files. The summary was interesting:
So what's wrong with lagoon? The obvious thing to do is to try to repair it. But
these second-hand ThinkCentres hardly
cost anything, and maybe it will make more sense to buy a “new” one.
Off looking on eBay, running into the same
problems as on previous
occasions: how do I know how fast the thing is? Some of the advertised systems don't
even specify what the processor is. The ones that do don't give any idea of the relative
performance, and not even the price is an indication.
What I found today was:
Model
CPU
Price+shipping
CPUMark
Comment
M71e
i5-2400
150+30
5962
M92p
i5-3470
165+24
3717
M81 FAST
CORE DUAL G620
189
2028
M81 FAST
CORE DUAL G6320
2377
Core 2 duo (e7500)
1875
i5-4590
7310
only tiny
M73
i5-4570
225
7131
4570t? (2.9 GHz)
6794?
Yes, it's incomplete, but it might help. One issue is that the more powerful processors are
in smaller cases, and they will probably not take a display card. I might just go for the
i5-2400 again, the same one as in dischord.
My fridge investigations on
Friday were limited to The Good Guys;
clearly I need to find prices from others. Tried Appliances Online and came up with a better
(if not good) overview, showing a significantly lower price for “side by side” fridges than
the “French door” fridges that I had been looking at. For example, I can currently get a
Haier HSBS628AW 629 l Side By Side Fridge for $1,069, but the cheapest “French door”
fridge is the Hisense
HR6FDFF630S with 630 l for $1,376.
Still, even that is significantly cheaper than what I have been looking at. What does the
freezer compartment look like? Surprise, surprise! They're not telling! There are four
images, none of which show what's in the freezer compartment:
Where are the other photos? One is the left half of this photo, another the right half, and
the third (only on some pages) is the right half without content. No idea what the freezer
compartment is like. You'd really think that they don't want to sell the things.
Still, it's becoming clear that our search isn't over yet.
Recently on IRC somebody had come up with a really cheap 75" smart TV, something like
$1,200. That compares to the $1,699 that I paid for a “dumb” 75" ALDI TV a year ago. Not that I want a “smart”
TV: I returned one because I couldn't find any use for it, but the price was interesting.
Is that all due to continual price drop? Today I found this
article, which is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the claim:
Geeks often ask for dumb TVs.
They don't say why, but others on IRC confirmed. And the rest of the article goes into the
way smart TVs try to get money out of your pocket, and also potentially spy on you.
So the question: what happens if you buy a smart TV because of the price, and don't connect
it to the Internet? Ah, it can do that itself. Can it? It could potentially do so here,
because I'm out in the sticks where things like WPA are more a nuisance than a protection. But to keep the TV from
spying on me, it might be worthwhile.
Since Saturday's failure I've had the old lagoon,
a ThinkCentre M 6073, waiting for
reconfiguration. The documentation I found showed another board, so I first needed to find
a layout for my motherboard, which looks like this:
Not only a bloody CAPTCHA, but one that
wants specific web browsers! Damn Lenovo!
Well, no, this proved to be a different third-party operation that somehow got its Google
rank lifted.
OK, try the Lenovo page for this machine, which was overflowing with documentation. No less than
5 Hardware Replacement Guides, with no further explanation of the differences.
After downloading the first two, it was clear what the difference was: despite the title to
the page, they're for completely different systems. I struck lucky with the third page,
which gave me this diagram of the motherboard:
That doesn't look much like my motherboard, but that's because it's on its side. It seems
that they have chosen orientations at random in their documentation; others show the
motherboard rotated by 180° relative to this one. Still, it shows where the CMOS jumper is,
and that's all that I really needed. Now back to the instructions:
Clear CMOS jumper in item #17
Remove battery in item #25
Hold power button for 5 seconds
Replace power cord (power cable from PSU to AC)
Power On then hold Power again to Power off
Connect CMOS jumper back on Pin 1 & 2
Replace the battery in item #25
Power up (system beep twice)
OK, how do I get the battery out of its holder? Simple, right? But I've never done it
before, and it's not immediately clear in which direction. Still, there must be good stuff
on the web. The first was Replace the Battery in your
PC. Lots of nice photos showing every step. And then the critical one: how do you
get the battery out?
Remove old battery with fingernail or use non-conductive screwdriver
Now isn't that helpful? It doesn't even show the battery housing. Fingernail? I had just
cut them, as it happened. But the idea of a non-conductive lever sounds good. Only where do
you find one? In the end I found a plastic toothpick which proved not up to the job.
The two black pieces at the bottom in this orientation hold the battery in place. Pull it
out there and you'll damage the housing. And the piece at the top is a spring clip, so you
just need to push it away from the battery and lever the thing out. All done in barely 10
minutes.
Then follow the instructions, and how about that, the thing came up. Two beeps?
Two series of agonized beeps, followed by the fan going on full as before.
OK, let's power it down, connect a monitor and see if it's trying to tell me something. Did
that, turned back on and... nothing. Back to square 2. I'm getting the feeling that this
thing is really defective, but I'd like to be sure. One thing that is not mentioned
anywhere is the function of the CMOS jumper:
It's a simple bridge jumper, but the header has three pins. How should I replace it? It
wasn't until some time later that I read, from the instructions above,
Connect CMOS jumper back on Pin 1 & 2
OK, which are pins 1 and 2? They're not documented anywhere, not even on the motherboard!
The Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day
today was “queen of the night”, which for me immediately brings associations
of Die Zauberflöte. But no, it
seems that it's
Chiefly poet. and lit. (A name given to) the moon.
That wouldn't work in German, where the moon is masculine. But it was clearly chosen to
match today's lunar eclipse (not visible here) and
the super moon that followed. By
chance it was very clear at moonrise, and I got a few photos that are probably best seen as
practice for better ones:
That took about 80 minutes, from 8:32 to 9:48. In passing, it's interesting to note that I
should have expected that the flower would increase in size and started with a wider angle.
It wasn't done with that. Though it was open, it continued to change shape for another 45
minutes:
