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| Greg's diary |
| January 2026 |
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| Thursday, 1 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 1 January 2026 |
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Keeping Mona away from the TV
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Mona has an irritating habit of sitting in front of the TV, obscuring subtitles and icons. Pene Kirk, who is a veterinarian, had a solution: put a sheet of aluminium foil there. She told us, but she didn't tell Mona:
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Note how she sits exactly on the foil, while there's plenty of space on the side.
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Christmas is over when the food is finished
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Our Christmas entertaining is over, and things are quietening down. But we still have lots of food left over, and once again I had two dishwashers full. And of course we're still eating the leftovers. There are so many that I think I will have to freeze some.
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New Year's letter
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
On 1 January every day, as close to midnight UTC as I can manage, I send our annual New Year's letter. This year I didn't have as much time to address it, and it shows.
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/4) ~/Mail 164 -> find . -mtime -3 -size +40000 | xargs du -sc
22368 total=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/4) ~/Mail 165 -> find . -mtime -3 -size +40000 | wc -l
233
That's 22 GB, and to fix it I need to go through 233 files!
Not directly a fault on my part, but it seems that Postfix (MTA) has some internal limit on the size of the data it can handle, and I had to run sendmail -q several times to look at the queue again, of course adding to the time it took to send the messages.
Should I omit the PDF next year and just offer it to people who can't access the web? Once I thought of people in planes, but I suspect that even they can access the web nowadays. And the fact that nobody commented suggests that not many people looked at it.
| Friday, 2 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 2 January 2026 |
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Guilin noodles
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Fake Phat Thai for breakfast today. For the fun of it, tried the Guilin vermicelli that I bought last month. They're too long for a small pot, but in this case I can't see what else they could have done. They're also off-white and flat, stick-like:
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The instructions are confusing: put in cold water, bring to the boil, boil for 2 minutes then “simmer” for 8 minutes. Why the distinction? And bringing to the boil from cold water implies a time needed to do so, and that depends on the heat applied. I forgot that step, but with a fast induction cooker it wouldn't have made much difference. And after their ten minutes they were really firm. I carried on simmering a little more forcefully (cooker setting 5 instead of 4), and after 23 minutes they were cooked. Would it have been faster if I had followed the instructions more carefully? That depends on the definition of “simmer” and the language chosen. In Chinese, it reads “Place rice noodles in a pot of cold water, bring to a boil, continue cooking for 2 minutes while stirring, then turn off the heat and let it sit for 8 minutes until soft” (my italics, Google Translate's translation). So no, just bad instructions.
They taste quite good, though. They started out with a rectangular cross-section that became completely rounded after cooking:
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But they don't absorb much liquid, so they're inappropriate for this dish, which should be dry:
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Olympus E-30 revisited
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I stopped using my Olympus E-30 some time ago. I bought it for an analemma series that I haven't completed, but I think I have enough photos for the time being. And two years ago I discovered that it was no longer storing the time. I didn't follow up at the time, so now seemed to be a good idea.
It had forgotten all time settings, of course, but the menu allowed me to select years starting in 20, including 2026. But yes, when I took a test photo, the Exif showed:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/18) ~/Photos/20260101 2028 -> exiftool orig/5101309*F | grep Date
Modify Date : 0000:00:00 00:00:00
Date/Time Original : 0000:00:00 00:00:00
Create Date : 0000:00:00 00:00:00
It knows the date—it used it to create the file names containing 5101309—but it doesn't seem to have stored it in the Exif.
Or that's what I thought. After processing the image, I found:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/24) ~/Photos/20260102 987 -> exifx Leucadendron.jpeg
File Leucadendron.jpeg
Date taken: Friday, 2 January 2026, 13:31:14
...
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/24) ~/Photos/20260102 990 -> exiftool orig/51023100.ORF | grep Date
Modify Date : 2026:01:02 13:31:14
Date/Time Original : 2026:01:02 13:31:14
Create Date : 2026:01:02 13:31:14
...
Where did that come from? Did I change it? No, I downloaded the file from the SD card again, and the date was there. So what's going on?
Oh. The files on 1 January are old. How old? No idea; they have no date information beyond the fact that they were taken on 1 January some year. And the one I took was on 2 January, and it's normal. So whatever the problem was, it has gone away or into hiding. A good thing I have the date in the prompt, and that I save the original output in this diary.
| Saturday, 3 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 3 January 2026 |
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Don't cook any more?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yana brought a whole lot of food with her last week, including a number of chilis: ancho, guajillo and pasilla. What can I cook with them? Off to look in my ancient Time-Life book „Die Küch in Lateinamerika“, where I found old favourites: Manchamanteles, Pollo in adobo, El Seco de Chivo. They tasted good. Why didn't I write the recipes in my recipes? Why are there no Latin American recipes there?
Oh, yes, there are: pollo in adobo and a couple of others. It seems that I last cooked pollo en adobo fourteen years ago, and that for the first time in 3 years. Why did I stop?
Looking in my pantry, I see
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All that stuff on the right are herbs and spices, many of them expired, including almost everything that I need for these dishes. The pasilla chili expired in 2009. So it's not lack of ingredients. The real issue is that Yvonne won't eat the stuff. And that's really sad.
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More old camera investigations
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
It took me a while to realize that the new images taken on the Olympus E-30 did have correct Exif time stamps. Off to investigate even older cameras, this time the Olympus E-330, now 20 years old. Yes, it also has correct dates, and the “Internal Serial Number” (4016612002861005) is also in the Exif data, showing that it was made in “612” (Serial number [4:6], December 2006).
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Software update hell
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday I noted that I couldn't get Chromium to translate text in images. Why? It's a couple of versions down-rev, but that might have made the difference. So I started an upgrade.
This morning I didn't even have to try it to find the effect.
ld-elf.so.1: /usr/local/lib/libpcre2-8.so.0: version PCRE2_10.47 required by /usr/local/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 not defined
That wasn't even with Chromium. What went wrong? A quick web search brought me this exchange, where Martin Cracauer wrote:
Make sure every pkg is updated. Something is out of sync.
That sounds like good advice for working around a broken ports infrastructure. So off to do that. 500 packages to download, 5 GB in size! And then it hung downloading texlive-docs. Interrupted the downloads, checked but found nothing—until I restarted the download. Then I saw:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/5) ~/public_html 74 -> l /var/cache/pkg/texlive*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2,470,392,532 22 Dec 2023 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-docs-20230313.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2,470,392,532 22 Dec 2023 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-docs-20230313~a04fa95659.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2,663,681,904 30 Jan 2025 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-docs-20240312.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2,665,492,032 6 Jul 2024 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-docs-20240312~40db6f3fea.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2,663,681,904 30 Jan 2025 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-docs-20240312~6e260262d9.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3,042,806,849 20 Dec 20:43 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-docs-20250308.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3,042,806,849 20 Dec 20:43 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-docs-20250308~c66ba95f61.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1,209,708,684 21 Dec 2023 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-texmf-20230313.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1,209,708,684 21 Dec 2023 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-texmf-20230313~03f3aeb72e.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1,346,173,712 4 Jul 2024 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-texmf-20240312.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1,386,057,519 30 Jan 2025 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-texmf-20240312_1.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1,386,057,519 30 Jan 2025 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-texmf-20240312_1~b4c2481327.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1,346,173,712 4 Jul 2024 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-texmf-20240312~a64e1b3fb0.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1,386,461,130 20 Dec 12:38 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-texmf-20250308_1.pkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1,386,461,130 20 Dec 12:38 /var/cache/pkg/texlive-texmf-20250308_1~919a1124b0.pkg
Look at those sizes! Not only is texlive-docs currently over 3 GB in size, the old ones didn't get deleted, and it appears that each file is copied with a different name, instead of linking. But it's not quite that bad: for some strange reason they're symlinked. Still, the result is:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/5) ~/public_html 75 -> du -sc /var/cache/pkg/texlive*
15452 total
That's just the documentation that nobody reads. And even texlive-texmf is over 1.3 GB in size. Together these two packages account for 4.4 out of the 5 GB total for over 500 packages!
Finally it was done. Dare I try it? Yes! It works.
Well, the browsers and their communication work. But I had also updated Hugin, in this case to version 2025.0.1. The good news: now the GLEW error message no longer appears when I select the fast panorama preview. But neither does the image! It's completely broken, and during my attempts to investigate the problem,
What do I do? Raise a bug report. Except that bugs.freebsd.org has forgotten my password, and I can't find a way to reinstate it. OK, message to fuz, the maintainer. In the meantime, try building from source. Same problem. Try rebuilding from last year's version? No, the build fails.
I've been using Hugin for over 17 years, and somehow in the past few years it seems to be getting worse and worse. A good thing that I still have eureka with its 2018 version of Hugin.
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More camera strap woes
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
About to go to walk the dogs, my camera suddenly parted company with its strap. I've seen this too many times, but I thought that it was over and done with when I got my new metal clips.
But no, this was a different kind of failure:
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I have more clips. Will they, too, fail? Why doesn't anybody make something more robust?
| Sunday, 4 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 4 January 2026 |
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Monitor problems?
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Into the office this morning to find that my newest monitor (the LG 27UP850-W that I bought 1½ years ago) was stuck in a loop displaying various colours, including the typical blue that HDMI displays used to do years ago. No reaction to the configuration joystick, but power cycling worked.
What happened? Is it going to happen again? Presumably the monitor is still under warranty, but I don't want to have to go looking.
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Blood!
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
Found some blood stains on the tiles in the bathroom this morning. They weren't there a couple of hours before, and I'm sure that they're not mine. Cats? I took a look, but I couldn't find anything. I don't expect that it's serious.
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Blissful car wrecks
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Walking down Bliss Road with the dogs this afternoon, found another car wreck in a front yard. That must be at least the fifth, all in Bliss Road. I didn't find it worth photographing, but on the way back I saw this:
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That's the first wreck, which must have been there for a couple of years. But it looks to me like the wrecking is continuing: I can't recall the roof being that badly damaged before. What's the purpose of these cars?
| Monday, 5 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 5 January 2026 |
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Bleeding cats?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
More blood on the toilet floor this morning!
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It's much less than yesterday. Could Bruno have injured his mouth catching a bird two days ago? We didn't see any blood elsewhere.
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Egg white omelette
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne makes lots of mayonnaise, requiring egg yolks but not the whites. In the past she gave the whites to the dogs, but recently I've been trying to use them in cooking, in places where the yolks aren't so important.
How about an egg white omelette? OK, Google Gemini, how should I make a Chinese omelette for breakfast using egg white instead of whole eggs? The answer didn't look bad, so off to find my interpretation, which included chicken and prawns.
For reasons I don't understand, I did this in a “non-stick” frying pan. The pan didn't want to know. It stuck really well:
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The result was more like scrambled egg white:
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And this was one of the pans that worked so amazingly well four years ago:
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Do I have more hope in a real steel frying pan? Or should I accept the twins' warning that egg white sticks even more firmly than beaten egg, and make scrambled egg whites?
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firefox gives up search
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Topic: technology | Link here |
While doing something with firefox this afternoon, pressed c-f to initiate a search. Nothing happened. How do I check the current key bindings? It seems that you need an app for that, one so complicated that I gave up. Instead I shot firefox down and restarted it. That worked.
Why are things so unreliable after decades of mainstream?
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Multiple hardware fail!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
At 16:41 there was another beep, this time very short, but lagune, Yvonne's computer, failed despite UPS. Why?
Rebooted it, and things came up relatively normally. But then she came to me and told me that nothing worked. All her mail had gone away, and her beloved Facebook was down.
The mail was simple: once again it went looking for /usr/mail/yvonne instead of /var/mail/yvonne. Dammit, no time to look. Put in a symlink and work around the issue.
And Facebook? Routing issue? No, a bit of checking showed that the net link was down, and the NTD showed no ODU LED. Power cycled, checked the normal things, but no, no ODU. Had the power spike damaged the NTD? The ODU (antenna) doesn't have a separate power supply, does it. No, it's fed via the Cat 6 network cable. And none of the circuit breakers had tripped.
Damn. If we need a new NTD or ODU, we could be off the net for days. How do I contact Aussie Broadband? I still have something like Internet via the phone. Try the app. Oops, there was an unknown error. You have been logged out due to inactivity, this less than 5 seconds after starting. Enter PIN:
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Huh? I have thumbprint recognition for this app. But no, it didn't want to know. What about the PIN? I didn't have one. OK, log in with the saved password on this horrible glass keyboard. Wrong password. All this has the hallmarks of an unreported change in authentication. Nothing for it: brave the waiting times and call Aussie on 1300 880 905. “You are number 45 in the queue”. But nothing for it: I had to report, and there was no other way.
It took 20 minutes to be connected to Frank, during which I completely disconnected all cables to the NTD and left them there as instructed. Surprise, surprise: when I reconnected them, things were still dead. But while I explained the problem to Frank, who seems a lot better than the “consultants” with which I had to deal last year, I checked again just to be on the safe side. And there, just to make a fool of me, the NTD was showing normal status, modulo slightly less signal strength. We were off the net until 17:29, over 47 minutes. And the (mobile) phone call lasted over 29 minutes and cost $4.50. It would be really nice if they were to reinstate their callback service.
What happened? Did the tower fail? Would that explain the missing ODU status? Yvonne sent out a message to the local Facebook community and discovered that there had been a widespread outage. That puts a very different face on the matter. Was the spike really so strong to take out the National Broadband Network tower? My understanding was that it had its own emergency power, and the fact that it came back online over half an hour before the grid confirms this.
Gradually other things came into the picture. I received an alarm from Ingeteam at 17:54 telling me that the voltage had been out of range for over an hour. And how about that, yes, it showed no power since 16:40. Later my daily cron jobs told me of a grid power failure until 18:08, a total of 1 hour, 27 minutes. That's the longest outage in nearly 2 years, and I didn't even notice until later.
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MyAussie app bugs
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I have never had useful results with the MyAussie app, and today was no exception. Although I had it set up for thumbprint recognition, it ignored that, brought up multiple “Oops, there was an unknown error” and told me, less than 5 seconds after I had started it, that it had timed out.
No thumbprint recognition. It didn't even recognize my password!
Today Frank suggested that the issue might be with my phone. Certainly it's a possibility, but in this case it isn't the answer: I tried it on two different phones, and the biometric authentication works fine with other apps. And without any further intervention it started recognizing my thumbprint again.
That's not the first time. I had almost exactly the same issues on 1 May 2024, 7 May 2024 and 15 July 2024. Since then I have given up trying. But on every occasion it had forgotten my password! Why? And why is Aussie telling me that no problems are known?
| Tuesday, 6 January 2026 | Dereel | |
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How to drum up sympathy for Maduro
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Nicolás Maduro is a nasty man. I've been hoping for years that he would go away.
Now he's gone from Venezuela. Good. But he was kidnapped by an even nastier man, Donald Trump, in violation of international law. Bad. I'm horrified about the fact that he can do that, and that nobody in the USA is stopping him. A large proportion of his electorate even approve. Ugh.
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Time for Bruno to go?
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Bruno hasn't always been an easy cat to live with, and in the past Yvonne has wanted to give him away. Never! My perfect cat!
Well, he wasn't as perfect as I had hoped. I was thinking of other male cats who were very friendly. Bruno's friendly too, but he wants to spend most of his time outside since we first let him out over a year ago. And today he gave us a shock: Yvonne found him lying in the middle of the road in front of our property. How better to get run over, our main concern?
So: who lives far from a road, wants Bruno and can let him in and out at his will? It's a sad decision, but I think we'll have to part with him.
| Wednesday, 7 January 2026 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 7 January 2026 |
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Health Assessment
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Into Ballarat today for an “annual” “health assessment”, an operation so important that the Government department has removed the information previously at https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/mbsprimarycare_mbsitem_75andolder. I have been feeling less active than in the past, and it seemed to be a good idea to count my marbles. The “health assessment” is intended for old people (over 75 years unless you're Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, in which case the limit is 55 (why?)). The last “annual” test was two years ago, and it showed nothing of interest. This one seemed pretty much the same. “Remember these words: apple, table, penny" was one, exactly the same words as last time. About the most interesting thing was a power failure in mid-assessment, losing all of the copious text that Jude, the nurse, had entered. Took a look after reboot and established that the program will save data with c-s, and showed it to her, but I'm not sure she used it.
Somehow the assessment is aimed at people much more debilitated than I. Where are we? What is today's date? What town are we in? Dereel. No, Ballarat. That was a genuine mistake, caught immediately. What country are we in? Venezuela. A silly response, but she took it as intended. And then I had to copy an image of two overlapping pentagons. Not pretty, but she was happy—until I pointed out, to my dismay, that one of the pentagons had six sides. No perfect score! Grrr!. But I've had issues like that for over 70 years.
And why don't they have a UPS? They have two for the refrigerators, presumably things that can handle a long outage. Here they just need something that will keep the machine running until it can be shut down. Paul was surprised when I mentioned a price of round $100.
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More beer
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Topic: food and drink, technology, opinion | Link here |
While in town, picked up some beer from Dan Murphy's. I had bought it online, and the instructions were simple:
How pick up: direct to boot works
How do I open it?
What kind of ID? And what if there's only one person, as promised above?
In the same manner as I open the SMS?
Apart from the somewhat strange formulations, it's fairly clear. Only one problem: I had placed two orders, received email confirmation and the inevitable 2FA, but no SMS to “open”. Into the shop, almost deserted in this heat, and found a very efficient Alexandra, who went out of her way to find my order and bring it to me. When I suggested that there might be issues with their web server, I got a knowing smile. All went smoothly except for step 4: no team, so no ID.
| Thursday, 8 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 8 January 2026 |
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Instant miso soup
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Not feeling very hungry today, so I decided to try the instant Miso soup sachets that I bought last month:
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To my surprise, the sachets are good for only 160 ml of soup. OK, use two. And ask Google Gemini for suggestions as to how to improve it. In the end came up with this combination:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 2 sachets | Miso paste | 1 | ||
| 320 g | water | 1 | ||
| 50 g | firm dòufu | 1 | ||
| 20 g | fish dòufu | 1 | ||
| finely chopped spring onions | 1 | |||
| 5 ml | sesame oil | 1 |
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How did it taste? Edible, but boring. I should have been warned by the suggestion of serving with Sriracha or soya sauce. And yes, it needed the latter.
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Animal disasters: no hope
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Yvonne into my office this morning: “I have bad news”. We had thought that some people we know would be able to take Bruno, but it turns out they live pretty much on the main road. Yes, they have had “only” one cat run over in the last many years, but that's enough, and Bruno has the potential to be the second. So we'll have to come up with alternatives. He helped: he stayed in the house most of the day. I think that the magpies in the garden may have helped.
But Yvonne had more news: Esperanza, who was in foal and had thus returned to Chris Bahlo's, has foaled, a colt. But the colt was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Dead. No hope.
And as if that wasn't enough, a little later she came in with the news that Ramirez, one of her stallions whom we know pretty well, had had another fight with another stallion a couple of nights ago, and he's so badly wounded that he will have to be put down. Somehow that's particularly sad, since we have had more to do with him than most of Chris' horses, including at least one other injury over 10 years ago.
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ALDI bathroom scales, again
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
I gave my bathroom scales to Yana last month, with intention to buy one on offer at ALDI. Based on past experience, Yvonne picked up four of them: you can return them if you don't like them, and I intended to return at least three of them.
First insight: they come with a CR2032 Lithium battery, and as usual you have to remove an insulating strip. But this one was so firmly clamped into place that it tore, and I had to remove the battery first:
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I started comparing the first one yesterday, and it showed a ridiculously high weight the first time round. But I saw that on the scales I gave to Yana, after changing the battery. And then it recovered and showed a sensible weight, probably round 150 g lower than Yvonne's scales, which I suspected of being correct. But which is right?
That was before my health assessment, so I weighed myself there too. Two insights (apart from Jude's surprise that I predicted my weight exactly, not exactly unexpected): firstly, yes, Yvonne's scales (the one we kept) are accurate, and secondly, much more important: the first time I got onto their scales, it displayed “STEP DOWN” alternately. I didn't quite understand, but yes, it wanted me to get off the scales and then on immediately. That must be some standard issue with scales calibration, and presumably it's the reason why ours display ridiculous values the first time, and only the first time, after a battery has been replaced. Do they mention this in the instructions? Of course not. There's no space after the extensive safety instructions, not even after the section on replacing the battery, which is half empty.
So: how accurate are they? The good news: better than last time. Off by about -350 g, -150 g and +400 g. Yvonne had expressed an interest in taking the scales, because she liked the colour—also the reason I didn't test the fourth one, which is grey—so I asked her if she still wanted it. The obvious choice was -150 g, but she chose -350 g: makes her look lighter. If that's what she wants...
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Dan Murphy queries
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Mail from Dan Murphy's asking about my my recent pickup. OK, I have feedback, and I gave it, including a lament about their poor choice of drink. And then I was asked whether I wanted to join "Gather”, whatever that is. I didn't save any URL, and I can no longer find it. It seems to be a group for doing product reviews. Filled out their forms and was rewarded with the encouraging
We thank you for your time spent completing this survey. If you are eligible to join Gather, you will be added to panel within the next few weeks.
Now doesn't that motivate people?
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A use for telephone books
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Telephone directories went out with the last millennium. Nowadays there's the web. Off to check somebody's address today at Whitepages.
Oh:
On 1-November-2025 Thryv who manage White Pages directories, have removed Residential listing from the White Pages website.
To search for a residential listing your options are:
I can understand the issues, but is this the way to solve them?
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Latest clever scam
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Seen in my mail today. Multiple messages like this one:
135 N + 07-01-2026 To groggyhimself@l Nteflix ( 94) N + 1/7/2026 7:53:55 p.m. Account Update Required & Please Update Your Account Information (@Netflix)Quick Account Check | Action Needed: Account Security E-mail:groggyhimself@lemis.com NO:2321159-46403
If they can't even spell, it's clear that they can't check: I have never had anything to do with Nteflix.
| Friday, 9 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 9 January 2026 |
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More noodle experiments
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Noodles for breakfast today, also to use up scraps lying around. How about the bún bò Huế noodles that I bought on 15 December 2025. I had thought that they would be similar to the Heaven Dragon noodles, since they both call themselves “Bún bò Húê” (a Vietnamese name meaning “Húe rice noodles”). The Heaven Dragon needed to be cooked for 18 minutes, pretty much a record. These ones wanted to be soaked for 6 hours and then cooked for 2 minutes. OK, I can just try cooking the noodles longer.
And longer it was. 75 minutes! I think it could have been 90. Even after this time, they were still quite al dente. They swelled to the dimensions of an Udon noodle:
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And despite the cooking time, the water was relatively clear, a significant difference from the “Heaven Dragon” (first image):
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And somehow I think that there are better dishes for these noodles than what I made:
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Maybe I should look for Udon recipes.
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Emergency! Go! Stay!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Today the weather was extreme, temperatures over 40°, strong winds: perfect bushfire weather. And once again VicEmergency showed themselves from their worst side. How do you find VicEmergency? It's in the link above, of course, but it used to be https://www.vicemergency.com.au/. That's too obvious, so they changed it to https://emergency.vic.gov.au, without leaving a redirect, leaving people already panicking to try to find them.
Back to emergency.vic: in the morning I got a whole lot of messages both on my phone and by email telling me what I didn't need to know:
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What does that mean? It's difficult to find out, but the best news is the grey circle in the middle of the first image: that's our watch area, and it's clear.
That was in the morning, and things change. I was bombarded by information, including useless things like this:
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That's telling me about danger hundreds of kilometres away. Ah, fool, can't you scroll down? There's information there for you, hidden behind the useless information that we present. That's what the black diamond in the middle of the map is trying to make you guess. It's a grass fire on the Mount Mercer-Shelford road, only 10 km away and going in the other direction.
Things still looked bad, and when Chris Bahlo came to pick up Chica, as scheduled, Yvonne gave her Samba as well to take until the danger has passed: she's (marginally) less susceptible to bushfires than we are.
Things got worse, of course. Not one, but three grass fires started in Yalla-Y-Poora Road, Streatham, 60 km away:
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This map, received at 17:35, referred to the third, which despite the address started roughly 30 km away from the origin.
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And its closest geometrical edge was 10 km away. Should we be worried? Yvonne was. I was concerned, and we kept a careful eye on “progress” during the afternoon and evening. Should we have left early? After the last, much more serious issue, the answer was clearly “no”.
The nonsense continued. They no longer broadcast things like size or a map of current extent. That didn't arrive until the following day:
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The dark area is where the fire actually burnt, fortunately missing the town of Skipton, but going only just a little further east. It only happened in the south-west of the three designated fire zones.
But in the meantime, I received two email messages at the same time, both dated Fri, 9 Jan 2026 08:33:12 +0000 (a format that most people wouldn't understand, 19:33 local time), and received 2 seconds later. Apart from the interminable boilerplate, two things stood out. In one,
There is a grassfire travelling from Skipton in a easterly direction towards Pitfield that is not yet under control. People in the warning area should leave immediately.
Leaving immediately is the safest option, before conditions become too dangerous.
In the other, I read:
There is a grassfire at Yalla-Y-Poora Rd, Streatham that is not yet under control. Firefighters have been unable to stop the spread of fire and it has reached the Skipton township. The fire has crossed Mount Bute Road and continues in an easterly direction towards Pitfield.
You are in danger, act now to protect yourself. It is too late to leave. The safest option is to take shelter indoors immediately. Do not get in the car and drive. It is safer to stay where you are.
It's hard to believe that both these messages are referring to the same fire. Why the contradictory recommendation? It's not a misinterpretation of the location: both start with “Emergency Warning for Grass Fire in your watch zone: Dereel”. And the one recommending evacutation is closer to the fire! Why should we, not even in the fire zone, not be able to evacuate? And of course, the real fire didn't come closer than 34 km from here.
As I have said so many times before, this is really a matter of life or death. Why can't they get their act together? Should I try to find a list of recommendations about what to do? Yes, I should, but will I? What use would it have?
| Saturday, 10 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 10 January 2026 |
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Disaster: the morning after the night before
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Woke up this morning, the first time that I have kept my mobile phone on the bedside table. It didn't ring once: I had put it on “silence” at some point. But there was nothing to report. The fire round Skipton was under control, the fire to the east round the Mount Mercer—Shelford road was not, but it had consumed mainly bushland, and not too much of that. Today was much cooler, an average of 17.2° instead of yesterday's 27.6°, but it remained windy, and things are coming back to normal. Still, things are looking much worse in the east of the state, and a state of disaster was declared for the whole state. Yvonne tells me that a friend of hers has lost everything in an unspecified fire.
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Netting Bruno in?
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
Bruno has been inside much more lately, but we're still trying to find a way to limit his movements. One possibilty is to put a net over the roof of the dog run, and Sandi Bowman, a horsy friend, offered us some bird netting. Over to take a look, braving the results of the windy weather:
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The netting is dangerous for birds, and we more or less decided against it, but Sandi came up with another set of ideas: hang a poly pipe horizontally on baling twine. It will turn when the cat touches it, so he can't get past it. At least that's the hope. Now to consider how he will outsmart us.
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