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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.
| Sunday, 11 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 11 January 2026 |
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More X
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
It's now been over 2 weeks since I updated Hugin and lost the fast panorama preview. I've more or less given up trying to fix the continual breakage: I have an 8 year old version on eureka that works. Problem: Hugin doesn't understand the X protocols, and it only works on a local display. So I need to start X on eureka again.
How hard can it be? I have the configuration files. But it took over an hour. I tripped over my unified configuration files. For example, eureka runs fvwm2, and it's likely to stay that way. But I hadn't copied the configuration files. And then there was a difference in hardware configuration: in the Good Old Days eureka had 4 displays. Now it only has one. Much messing around, in the process running into an old “friend”:
Maximum number of clients reachedError: Can't open display: :0
On that occasion I gave up, but today I found at least one explanation: the startup script is overly flaky. It restarts all the processes if one stops. Originally I had, somewhat simplified,
$FVWM -display $DISPLAY -f $X/.fvwm/fvwm2rc-$me$DISPLAY.0 &
$FVWM -display $DISPLAY.1 -f $X/.fvwm/fvwm3rc-$me$DISPLAY.1 &
$FVWM -display $DISPLAY.2 -f $X/.fvwm/fvwm3rc-$me$DISPLAY.2 &
$FVWM -display $DISPLAY.3 -f $X/.fvwm/fvwm3rc-$me$DISPLAY.3 &
DISPLAY=$DISPLAY xclock -digital -strftime "%A, %e %B %Y, %T" -geometry 400x29+1220-14 -update 1 &
DISPLAY=$DISPLAY.1 xclock -digital -strftime "%A, %e %B %Y, %T" -geometry 400x29+1220-14 -update 1
Now I only have display 0, so most of those lines can go:
$FVWM -display $DISPLAY -f $X/.fvwm/fvwm2rc-$me$DISPLAY.0 &
$FVWM -display $DISPLAY.1 -f $X/.fvwm/fvwm3rc-$me$DISPLAY.1 &
$FVWM -display $DISPLAY.2 -f $X/.fvwm/fvwm3rc-$me$DISPLAY.2 &
$FVWM -display $DISPLAY.3 -f $X/.fvwm/fvwm3rc-$me$DISPLAY.3 &
DISPLAY=$DISPLAY xclock -digital -strftime "%A, %e %B %Y, %T" -geometry 400x29+1220-14 -update 1 &
DISPLAY=$DISPLAY.1 xclock -digital -strftime "%A, %e %B %Y, %T" -geometry 400x29+1220-14 -update 1
Looks fine, but it caused the problem. The & at the end of the line must be omitted for the last line, but only for the last line. And here it was no longer the case, so the script continued in the loop, restarting all the processes. Removing the last & was enough. But first I had to find it.
And does Hugin work now? Yes, but the monitor is so far out of my field of view that I need to find a way to rearrange the screens to prevent a cricked neck.
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Vic: Emergency?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
While visiting Sandi Bowman yesterday, we heard one of her neighbours mowing the lawn. Not the sort of thing you should do on a day of total fire ban. Was it? We checked later (interesting that none of us knew for sure): yes, was a total fire ban.
Today another message from VicEmergency: total fire ban. What, today? The weather's cool, and not much is happening. Followed up on the message:
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That green background, undocumented in this environment, suggests that all is well. In particular, no fires to be seen, only 8 “Incidents”. OK, click on that. Four of them go away, and the others aren't “Incidents” at all, just information, two of which don't apply to us, despite the headings:
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But yes, if you look close enough, today was a day of total fire ban. I missed it the first time round because of the noise.
Gradually, though, it's become clear that we were very lucky. In particular, the map we received of the Streatham (Skipton) fire was the current state, and it hadn't been contained. Here the map yesterday at 10:58, and today at 22:07:
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And none of this compares to the fires north of Melbourne, where one person died, 300 properties were destroyed, and 3,900 km² were burnt. Is it contained? They're too polite to say, probably for privacy reasons, but at least it's now “watch and act”, another term that is hard to interpret.
Hopefully that's the lot for this summer, but it's early days yet.
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More free software
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Another free photo software offer! Who can say no? Not I. ON1, which I gave up on a couple of months ago, has offered “ON1 Effects” for free, as long as I do it by 12 January in some unspecified time zone that's bound to be behind mine.
OK, I can try that. Went through a surprisingly broken method to download it, and then followed up on one of their videos which showed much of what was needed to take a reasonabl looking photo and apply strange presets to make it look worse. OK, that's a matter of taste (or lack of same), and possibly it is useful, but to find out I'm going to have to start with my photos all over again.
| Monday, 12 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 12 January 2026 |
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How about a cellar?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
The fires are still an issue, even if we have been spared for the time being. My biggest issue isn't my personal safety, nor that of Yvonne or our animals, but the household possessions. If the house is gone, they are too, as has happened to far too many people.
How do you protect such a large amount of stuff? You can't evacuate it. But in Germany we would have had a solution: put it in the cellar, underground. The house may get burnt down, but the cellar and its roof would almost certainly survive.
So why don't Australian houses have cellars? An obvious issue is the cost. I did consider having a cellar dug when we built the Stones Road house, but my main concern was finding a builder who understood. And in retrospect we would have had a lot of issues with moisture: the ground water is only about 1 m under the surface. But maybe it would have been a good idea just for the sake of peace of mind. And why isn't a thing that is easier to get?
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Weather forecasts
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Topic: general, language, opinion | Link here |
What information do you need during times of bushfire danger? One would be a good weather forecast. But where can you get them? The Bureau of Meteorlogy proved its incompetence by sending me this forecast:
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I think that the blotches in the middle are supposed to indicate some kind of cloud cover, but until today I had't been able to find an interpretation. Now I discover that they mean “Hazy.” (note that full stop), whatever that may imply. The OED tells me that it refers to the presence of haze, which is:
A fog or thick mist, or something resembling this; esp. (in later use) a phenomenon consisting of a body of dust or other minute particles suspended in the atmosphere at or near the ground so as to limit visibility in a way similar to fog or mist; such particles viewed collectively as a substance or medium.In meteorology, haze is typically distinguished from fog and mist in being caused by solid particles rather than droplets of water.
So in this case, it has nothing to do with clouds, maybe the smoke from the bushfires? That would be plausible, but I have seen the symbol too often for it to mean that. Why can't they describe things better?
Don't like that forecast? Never mind, scroll down and we'll try again:
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And yes, this was on the same display! I presume that the fried egg symbol means “uninterrupted sunshine”.
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Old photos revisited
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been over 17 years since my 60th birthday, and 5 years ago I revisited the photos I had taken at the time, and how I had improved them.
But there's more. My “best” image of one shot was the first image below, and today I reprocessed it (second image) (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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Yes, there's a slight improvement, but not as much as I had expected.
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Bruno forces our hand
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Topic: animals | Link here |
We've been wondering what to do with Bruno for some time today. Today Jane Ashhurst sent Yvonne some ideas for commercial versions of the poly pipe on a rope that Sandy Bowman mentioned on Saturday. Not cheap, not available here, despite incorrect claims by Google Gemini. And will they work? They probably would on these two sides:
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But what about the other two sides?
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To get anything done there, we would probably have to remove or at least severely cut back the foliage, even though Bruno apparently can't get through. While I was taking these photos, he wanted to get into the dog run, but couldn't:
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He preempted the discussion later in the evening, while we were eating dinner. In full view he caught a sparrow and carried it off to the verandah. I was able to save it, and it later flew off, but once again Yvonne wants to get rid of him. Can I bear to part with him?
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The house forest again
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Walking the dogs today, I wanted to go to the house forest, the wooded west end of our property. Yvonne did not: too many kangaroos. But today was one of the few days where there were no horses, and the dogs could run free.
Or so I hoped. Yvonne was right: we found at least 3 kangaroos, so we had to keep the dogs on the lead the whole time. Doubtless the lack of dogs was one of the reasons we now have so many kangaroos.
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The horses return
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Chris Bahlo along in the evening with Samba and Esperanza, this time both to remain here.
| Tuesday, 13 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 13 January 2026 |
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Rats!
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
Woken round 4:00 this morning by loud squeaking, and a little later by deep growling. Out to find this:
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I can only assume that Bruno killed the rat, a great improvement on sparrows and fairy-wrens. And though I couldn't identify any wounds, it was clear that the rat was dead. Broken its neck? But why was Bruno sitting at that distance?
I put the rat on a plate, and both cats approached it, sniffed at it and went away again:
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And from their point of view, that was that. I assume that this is a Rattus rattus, and it was relatively heavy at 203 g:
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I took a number of photos of it before discarding it. The paws are interesting, as is the tail:
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Give it to the dogs to eat? We decided against: I'm relatively sure that this rat wasn't poisoned, but the next one they find might be.
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Still more flash pain
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I took the photos of the rat with flash, my mecablitz 58 AF II. I had forgotten that it could cut off the bottom of the image when close, like here:
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But then it completely overexposed this image, the only one I got of Mona sniffing at the rat.
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That's after attempted repair; the original looked much worse (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
Can't find dimensions for 'Rat-6-orig.jpeg'
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Sixty years and counting.
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Maggi Tom Yum again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Finished off the last pack of Maggi instant Tom Yum today. Based on my experience last time, cooked the noodles and separated them as much as possible. Then fried them crispy. Some of the noodles stuck to the pan, but in principle it worked quite well:
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How was it? The crispy noodles are certainly an advantage, but not enough to make up for the rest of the dish. I certainly won't buy another pack for further experiments. I wonder if it will work for other noodles as well.
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Information services, yet again
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Another look at the Bureau of Meteorlogy weather forecast again today. They have outdone themselves:
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My guess is that this is the result of some bug not updating the forecasts. It doesn't directly explain yesterday's discrepancy, but that could have been caused by the usual difference in forecast from one day to the next. After all, what's the difference between 20° and 26° between friends?
Not to be outdone, VicEmergency sent me a notification about an incident in my watch area. Made the mistake of removing it before following it. Yes, the Mount Mercer-Shelford road bushfire, only 13 hours after the event:
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But I made the mistake of leaving the display. When I returned, within the minute, I saw:
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Gone! And the incident count had dropped to zero.
When will they get their act together?
| Wednesday, 14 January 2026 | Dereel | |
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Nasi goreng: the secret ingredient
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Nasi goreng for breakfast today, not for the first time: it's one of the first dishes I ever cooked, nearly 60 years ago. But lately I've been finding it boring.
One difference today: kecap manis (Indonesian sweet dark soya sauce) instead of Chinese dark soya sauce. And it made all the difference! I had never realised how different the two sauces are. I wonder if I will ever finish the Chinese sauce.
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Catchup day
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Topic: general | Link here |
Spent most of the day catching up with things that have accumulated over Christmastide. I now have almost all the leftovers accounted for. And I'm gradually getting my email backlog sorted out. These days aren't worth reporting except for the fact that they happened, but they're necessary.
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Reactive politics
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
The Bondi Beach shooting last year left a lot of people shocked. Antisemitism! That word! But yes, this time it was very clearly a case directed against Jews (but not semitic Muslims). Something must be done! Limit guns further, make “hate speech” illegal. All good ideas, but are they enough? I'm still concerned by the word “antisemitism”. Why should that be special? Should antisemitism be treated differently from other racial vilification? That's discrimination in its clearest form. Yes, positive discrimination, but all discrimination has its negative side. It should be removed from any legal text without extremely good reason to keep it. And I don't see that here. Don't kill Jews. Don't kill “Blacks”. But then don't kill anybody else, either.
The real issue, though, is: is this the correct approach? Why do people attack the Jews? In this case, the Israeli genocide in Gaza might be a (misguided) reason, and there's not very much that the Australian government can do about that. But a bit of education would go a long way.
| Thursday, 15 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 15 January 2026 |
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BoM forecast of the day
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Topic: rant, technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I really should stop ranting about the Bureau of Meteorlogy, but they got me again today:
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The actual high and low temperatures were 20° and 14.6°. At 11:30, the time of the
“forecast”, it was 16.4°. And today proved to be important for forecasts: in Wye River they
had 167 177 180 mm of rain in 4 hours, causing severe flooding.
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Yet another instant mi
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another attempt at “LuckyMe” Pancit Canton today. It's really amazingly boring. This is what it looks like when cooked as recommended:
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I added other stuff to it as well, and apart from tasting rather strange this time, it's basically just noodles and a full 8.8 g of flavouring ingredients, not including even dried vegetables. I think my experiments are now concluded. Should I keep the noodles as normal noodle portions? This time it was 56 g, about right. I can just discard the flavouring.
| Friday, 16 January 2026 | Dereel → Sebastopol → Dereel | Images for 16 January 2026 |
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How to expand a haircut
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Into Sebastopol this afternoon for a haircut. It's a long way to go for just that, but in the end it proved to have been quite an experience.
First, I was very low on petrol. Last time I looked it claimed “60 km until empty”. That's fine: the petrol station is 28 km away. But when I started the car, it showed 41 km, and counted down until in Napoleons, 18 km away, it showed 1 km.
Should I believe it? Almost certainly not. But do I want to risk it? Probably not. So I bought $20 worth of petrol at the general store and arrived, surprisingly, only 4 minutes late.
On to ALDI, where once again I had trouble paying. For silly reasons they want 0.5% surcharge on credit cards:
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My bank card is a debit card. Will they want a surcharge? Put in the card as instructed and waited for a response. Nothing:
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Pressed “Help”. Oh, no help, call somebody to take a look. And while he was attending to something else, a customer came by and told me that the card reader won't respond until you press Card/Contactless/Mobile. And then I had the option to access my account. But somehow that's not intuitive.
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Car accident
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
On the way home, was one of the first to arrive on the scene of an accident where one (white) car was knocked around on the west side of the junction of Ballarat-Colac road and Dereel-Mount Mercer road. It took a while to find the second car:
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It could have only happened a minute or so before. The passengers in the red car emerged
from the gully with only scratches, while the driver of the other car removed his broken
bumper and drove off. My impression was that it was to the east, where the road is closed.
The red car proved to have been a recent present from the man to his wife, who was
distraught but uninjured. Surprisingly, nobody had called the police. I did so, after
remembering what the number was (reminder: 110, the first number I called, is correct for
German police, but not for most of the world; 112 is fire and ambulance in Germany, but all
three services in the rest of the world). Then it occurred to me: 000. Called up, and the first
question was “What state are you in?”. I've had that before, 20 years ago, and I thought it stupid at
the time. Nowadays it's really stupid; even without the inexplicable inablility to relay
GPS data automatically, they should have access to the cell data, which would pinpoint me
quite closely.
The police were quite efficient, asking questions that seemed appropriate, and I was able to give the registration number of the white car before it left. No fire or ambulance needed. And while I was talking to Colin Elford, who had also stopped, the fire brigade showed up. OK, they're just down the road, so it made a certain sense. I wonder where the police came from, but I didn't stay around long enough to find out.
So what happened? The driver of the red car told me that they were coming down the main road, the same was as I had done, when the white car pulled out of the side road in front of them. They swerved to miss him, apparently removing his rear bumper in the process, and then skidded on the unpaved side verge before falling into the gully. If that's right, they have quite a claim, especially since the other driver drove off before the police arrived.
| Saturday, 17 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 17 January 2026 |
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House photos redefined
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Topic: photography, technology, general, opinion | Link here |
House photos again today, as every Saturday. And once again I have this issue that the current version of Hugin is broken.
Or is it? Lately I've been seeing messages like this:
NVRM: API mismatch: the client 'mpv' (pid 71130)
NVRM: has the version 580.119.02, but this kernel module has
NVRM: the version 580.82.07. Please make sure that this
NVRM: kernel module and all NVIDIA driver components
NVRM: have the same version.
That's mpv, of course, not Hugin, but it could have the same background: I upgraded my ports, but the kernel still has the old version of the nvidia module. Time to reboot? Apart from the fact that I hate to reboot, I'm seriously concerned that I would have difficulty getting the machine up and running the way I like it. Still, this could be an indication that it's not Hugin's fault—this time.
So back to eureka. And there I ran into a different issue: my auxiliary script H runs differently! Somehow I keep running into path name issues, and this time it put all my .pto files in the subdirectory C/. Still, with some effort, managed to get the photos processed.
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Can? Cannot? May? May not?
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
A report in the Ukraine Daily today interested me:
Ex-Prime Minister Yuliia Tymoshenko is also obliged to appear in court when summoned and cannot leave Kyiv Oblast.
Apart from the fact that it wasn't that long ago that Tymoshenko was considered one of the Good Guys, why can't she leave Kyiv Oblast? Reading the details, it seems that she may not leave. So why don't they say so?
The difference between can and may is complicated, though. In French, there's no distinction. So I put the following three statements through Google Translate in three languages:
Original
Minister Yuliia Tymoshenko cannot leave Kyiv Oblast.Minister Yuliia Tymoshenko may not leave Kyiv Oblast.Minister Yuliia Tymoshenko is not allowed to leave Kyiv Oblast.
German
Ministerin Julija Timoschenko kann die Oblast Kiew nicht verlassen.Ministerin Julia Timoschenko darf die Oblast Kiew nicht verlassen.Ministerin Julia Timoschenko darf die Oblast Kiew nicht verlassen.
Here there's a clear distinction: „darf ... nicht“, implying that she is not allowed to (the second and third statements differ from the first).
French
La ministre Ioulia Timochenko ne peut pas quitter la région de Kyiv.La ministre Ioulia Timochenko ne peut pas quitter la région de Kyiv.La ministre Ioulia Timochenko n'est pas autorisée à quitter la région de Kyiv.
And here the first and second are the same (« pouvior », to be able to), while the third shows that she is not authorized. So the statements in French and German are incompatible.
The obvious one is Ukrainian, of course:
Ukrainian
Міністр Юлія Тимошенко не може покинути Київську область.Міністр Юлія Тимошенко не може залишити Київську область.Міністра Юлію Тимошенко не випускають з Київської області.
And here, for the first time, all three statements differ. Google Translate translates the first two back into English as “cannot”. What do the words mean? “не може” means cannot, and Google Translate translates both “покинути” and “залишити” as “leave”, though I suspect that there's more to it than that. In any case, it's clear that she's not allowed to leave, so the third is more obvious in any language. Why not use it?
In passing: how do you transliterate “Юлія”? It seems English has chosen “Yulia”, German has chosen „Julija“, and French has choisen « Ioulia ». The English and French versions seem wrong: the last two letters are an і and a я. The і transliterates closely to i, but я tranliterates to something like ya. So there should be an ii or iy. German does it roughly correctly with ij (the j is pronounced like a y in English). But somehow Ukrainian transliteration is particularly difficult to understand. The jury still seems to be out as to whether Зеленський (note that й at the end) is spelt Zelensky or Zelenskyy.
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Closing a Kiev
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Topic: photography | Link here |
Photography? Ukraine? How about both? Watching a video on YouTube today:
OK, I have a Kiev 4. Let's play along.
Oh, not a Kiev 4, a Kiev 3A. Still, they're almost identical, except that the one in the clip is 18 years newer. Got as far as removing the back (also identical). But then I couldn't replace it. Why not? Once it's off, it's easy to turn the tabs, so the back won't go back on again:
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The last two show the clips in the closed and open positions respectively. And the takeup spool is loose, so it doesn't close easily. At least I know which way to turn now.
| Sunday, 18 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 18 January 2026 |
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Bruno: too much?
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
This morning Yvonne found a dead crimson rosella just outside the house. No difficulty in guessing who did it. And as if to prove the point, Bruno arrived in the evening with a live sparrow in his mouth. I was able to rescue it, but Yvonne was—once again—horrified. The cat must go!
The problem is, cats do this sort of thing. Looking back through the ages, I see:
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There were many more, I'm sure. In Wantadilla the cats were outside all the time, so many of them never got discovered. These were rabbits on two separate occasions nearly 4 years apart. Now the dogs have chased rabbits away from this property, and maybe there are more birds here, not to mention many mice and the rat that Bruno caught recently:
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I'm not happy about the situation, but what can we do? For the time being, at least, we'll try keeping him inside, though I don't have much hope.
| Monday, 19 January 2026 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 19 January 2026 |
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Emergency Plus: why?
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
After Friday's accident and my initial difficulties remembering the emergency number (hint: it's 112 on mobile phones anywhere in the world), somebody suggested Emergency Plus, which can call the emergency services for you.
I can do that by myself. What else can it do? Ah, they're not telling. It clearly enables the GPS system:
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But does it send this information to the emergency services? A clue might be in this stupid “what3words” at the bottom, which also constantly change (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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I haven't seen any reason given for why this should exist at all—clearly geographical coordinates are the obvious way to go—but I've heard anecdotally that many people find it easier to pronounce a word like “estuary” than read out “143.75”. I won't enter that argument, but it seems much easier and more reliable still to have the phone send the coordinates to the emergency services. So the mere existence of this nonsense suggests that it doesn't.
It took me until I wrote this to discern any advantage at all in Emergency Plus. At least it displays the location. But wouldn't it be nice to have a description somewhere. The web site must be one of the most broken I have ever seen:
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It doesn't seem to link anywhere except to the download page, which also has almost no documentation. And this claims to be from the Australian Government. That's a new low.
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New Bridge Mall
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Off to Ballarat to have my
regular eye test. They have completed the d^Hrestructuring of Bridge Mall into a street again:
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And with a 10 km/h speed limit, it seems completely pointless. The foliage is nice, but why traffic at all? There are parallel streets and large car parks only 70 m to the north and south; I took the south. And why so much traffic? I thought they were looking for parking places, but there seem to be enough. Are they restricted somehow?
While taking my photos, somebody stopped me and asked me if I were Terry Leigh. No, of course. Strange, he said, he's an OM-D man as well.
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New glasses?
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Topic: health | Link here |
My eye test worked as expected: minimal change (experimental error?). But I could have new glasses for almost nothing. It had occurred to me a little too late last time that I could have had a free pair of close-up or reading glasses (+6 and +2.5 dioptre respectively), and that was my intent today. But somehow things didn't work out quite like that. The computer system refused to give more than +5 dioptres. I thought that that should be at the discretion of the optician, but Tamara, the optician, seemed to think it was acceptable.
And then the choice of glasses. Went through several iterations of cheap glasses, but somehow Bupa has a non-linear algorithm that always wants me to pay something. After 5 iterations or so we got it down to $6.50, by which time I was feeling sorry for the salesgirl, so I took that.
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Tauge prices
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Off to the Fruit Shack after that, and once again they have rebuilt. Every time I go there things look different. Found almost everything I was looking for, just not petis udang. I buy my tauge loose, because it's cheaper that way. But today it was extreme:
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Packed tauge costs 5.7 times as much as loose tauge!
| Tuesday, 20 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 20 January 2026 |
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Keeping cats indoors
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Somewhat to my surprise, Bruno has handled being locked into the house relatively well. By evening it had been two days, and though he definitely wants to go outside, it's bearable. I let them into the garage for a while, expecting them to hunt for rodents, but they didn't seem to find any. Instead they relaxed. Here on the roof of my car:
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More dead kangaroos
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Larissa is coming on 5 years old now, but she still likes picking up sticks, especially if they were once alive:
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It was clearly only a matter of time before the longer part of the leg fell off. To our surprise, Elena picked it up:
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She didn't take it very far, though.
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GPS problems
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday's photos in Ballarat uncovered a problem: my GPS coordinates were wrong. Why?
I save the coordinates to my phone and apply them to the photos in postprocessing. An obvious reason for incorrect locations would be if the time on the phone (clearly correct from GPS) and the time on the camera were different. And so it was today: the camera was 1 minute, 35 seconds fast. Never mind, I can correct that, and I did. But the coordinates were still wrong. Then I discovered that the camera (OM System OM-1 Mark II) has a time zone setting as well, and it was set to “Sydney (UTC+10:00)”. That's incorrect for two reasons: firstly, we're in the Melbourne time zone, and secondly it's currently summer, so the offset is UTC+11:00.
OK, correct again, which was visible in the popups. But the locations were still wrong. Looking through the particularly hard-to-read GPS log, it seems that it never registered this location:
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That's currently set to -37.562656, 143.861767, but that's inside Specsavers. The correct location is -37.562667, 143.863779, 177 m away. But when I look at the GPS log, I find nothing that comes close to that location. And at the currently specified time, 13:30:42 (an hour too early, when I was still at home), the GPS log has a hole of 33 minutes, probably because this horrible Android system had decided to stop it. But the log shows, correctly,
<trkpt lat="-37.79971833333333" lon="143.75076166666668"><ele>364.6</ele><time>2026-01-19T02:13:37.000Z</time><course>315.58</course><speed>0.0</speed><geoidheight>-6.4</geoidheight><src>gps</src><sat>5</sat><hdop>7.35</hdop><vdop>0.96</vdop><pdop>7.41</pdop></trkpt>
<trkpt lat="-37.80010666666667" lon="143.75115333333332"><ele>364.20000000000005</ele><time>2026-01-19T02:49:53.372Z</time><course>315.2</course><speed>0.3031714</speed><geoidheight>-6.4</geoidheight><src>gps</src><sat>4</sat><hdop>3.49</hdop><vdop>0.97</vdop><pdop>3.62</pdop></trkpt>
And at the correct time, pretty much 14:30:42, I have:
<trkpt lat="-37.562641666666664" lon="143.86372666666665"><ele>413.90000000000003</ele><time>2026-01-19T03:30:43.000Z</time><course>144.22</course><speed>0.0</speed><geoidheight>-5.4</geoidheight><src>gps</src><sat>38</sat><hdop>0.45</hdop><vdop>0.55</vdop><pdop>0.71</pdop></trkpt>
And that seems close enough to the real address. So where is the error occurring? Another exiftool bug? And what a pain this is. Oh for a program that can map these things.
| Wednesday, 21 January 2026 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 21 January 2026 |
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Off to Ballarat again
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Topic: health | Link here |
Today Yvonne had an appointment with Rodney Reddy, the cardiologist. She was concerned that he was going to recommend further surgery, though on the whole her results have been relatively good. But under the circumstances I thought it appropriate to come too, the third time in Ballarat in 6 days.
We needn't have worried. Rod was happy with the situation and put off the next appointment until 12 months' time.
I also showed him the results from Yvonne's KardiaMobile 6L. He told me that the “Unclassified” readings were due to measurement problems. He didn't explain why they normally happen in the morning. And for real measurements, he recommends a “Smart” watch, something that's a non-starter for Yvonne.
About the only thing that we forgot to ask was about Yvonne's low blood pressure. While it's always a little lower than the reference 120/80, systolic is always over 100. Not today: the nurse measured a systolic under 100, something like 95/60.
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Garden flowers in mid-summer
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
A month after the equinox, time for the monthly garden photos. Or is it? Maybe it's time to stop. When I started this over 15 years ago, there was something new to see every month. Now at least in part it's to document what has died or is just not making it, like maybe this oak sapling, or this 10 year old Gingko biloba:
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To be fair, it's not all death and destruction. Our Grevillea robusta has recovered well from horse attacks. Here last year and now:
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And the Strelitzia nicolai is flowering as never before:
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Those must be a total of about 8 or 10 flowers.
The Buddleja × weyeriana are also doing well, as expected.
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I'm also happy with the pure white lilies:
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I'm still waiting for the Corymbia ficifolia to flower. Here last year and today:
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But that could be due to the dry weather we have had. I no longer worry about it dying.
Strangely, the compost heap is doing well:
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There's even a Gladiolus in there trying to get out, in a summer where we haven't seen many.
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More car problems
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Topic: general | Link here |
After I returned home, Yvonne continued shopping. And at 14:12 she called: she was in Sebastopol, and her car wouldn't start. Sounded like a failed battery.
What to do? She was at a petrol station, but they weren't able to help her. Called Leigh of Sovereign City Service Centre, conveniently just 1.4 km away, and they sent somebody off to get the car started. And he managed that by 14:33. But it's clear that the battery had had it; I just hadn't expected it to fail so suddenly. Leigh had a new battery, so we got him to install that. The next I heard was from Yvonne at 14:58, by which time the new battery was in and she had driven on to ALDI.
All done in ¾ hour! Under the circumstances the price of $238, including labour, seemed more than reasonable. I checked prices later: $63 for rescue and changing battery, $175 for the battery itself. To my surprise, the battery was in the lower price range: Autobarn charge between $159.99 and 279.99, so I could have ended up paying more there and still have to change it myself, something that Yvonne told me had been particularly difficult. A Brownie point to Sovereign City.
| Thursday, 22 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 22 January 2026 |
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Phat si-io again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Phat si-io for breakfast today, a dish with which I have always had problems: the noodles stick to the pan during preparation.
Today was different. I keep the noodles deep frozen in individual portions and thaw them out as needed, today in the cold oven. But when I looked at them ½ hour later they had a number of spots on them. Here after I had removed most of them:
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What are they? They look for all the world like some kind of insect, but how could something like that survive in the oven? And though the last one looks like a beetle, it looks like it could have decomposed. In the noodles themselves, maybe?
The other surprise was frying the noodles. They're supposed to be fried at great heat and slightly charred. In the past that had always caused them to stick to the wok. But not this time. Well, hardly:
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Is that maybe related to the way I thawed them out? In the past I have thawed them in the microwave oven, which probably left them moister. Still, a welcome improvement.
In the past I have used a mixture of light and dark soya sauce (10 and 15 g respectively). Now that I have kecap manis, I put some of that in, so I had 5 g kecap manis and 5 g of dark soya sauce. There's no obvious difference:
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Soya sauce names
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Topic: food and drink, language, opinion | Link here |
Kecap manis? Kicap manis? Somewhere in the back of my head I have the term “Kicap benteng (manis)”. What's that? A web search shows nothing of interest, except that the name “benteng” might be a person or place that can't be identified.
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Alternate emergency calls
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
On Monday I grumbled about the uselessness of the Emergency Plus app. Now I have found an alternative, sort of:
On 25 August 2021, the Australian Government announced the completion of the rollout of Advanced Mobile Location (AML) technology for the Triple Zero Emergency Call Service.
AML is a technology built into the operating system of Apple and Android telephones which will provide greater location accuracy to Triple Zero during an emergency call from a mobile telephone. It has the potential to save lives and improve outcomes for mobile callers in Australia, as it is doing in the countries in which it has already been deployed.
Once the device’s location is calculated, the smartphone automatically sends an SMS with the estimated location to the Triple Zero Emergency Call Service. This SMS is sent in the background while the caller speaks with the Emergency Service Organisation, and the caller is not required to do anything to enable the location information to be sent.
Now isn't that exactly what I have been asking for? Well, almost. The idea of sending the inforation out of band with an SMS suggests a basic limitation that, I think, doesn't exist elsewhere. Still, it looks like a reasonable workaround.
But: why didn't it work for me last Friday? The emergency services didn't even know what state I was in! And this system should have been in place for nearly 5 years! In that time they could have required the mobile telephone operators to relay the location information automatically.
| Friday, 23 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 23 January 2026 |
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Brassica oleracea?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Over the last few years I have found more and more interesting Brassica cultivars, including many well-known vegetables such as cabbage (Brassica oleracea, Capitata group), mustard (Brassica juncea), broccoli (Brassica oleracea, var. italica), Brussels sprouts (Brassica oleracea, gemmifera group) and choi sam (Brassica rapa var. parachinensis). There's also a group like turnips (Brassica rapa var. rapa). More recently, I have discovered gai lan (Brassica oleracea, alboglabra group). It took some time to discover that, despite very similar appearances, choi sam and gai lan are not in the same species: choi sam is more closely related to turnips, and gai lan is more related to to cabbage and broccoli (thus the name “Chinese broccoli”).
But there's more still, of course. What about Western cultivars that look like gai lan? I recall vaguely Kale (Brassica rapa, Acephala group) and Savoy cabbage (Brassica oleracea, capitata group). A query with Google Gemini confirms that kale can be used in some places instead of gai lan. So yesterday Yvonne brought some.
I had never taken a closer look at the vegetable. It certainly doesn't look much like gai lan (first image; both images from Wikipedia):
What the kale photo doesn't show are the stems, which look quite like gai lan stems. And yes, they are tough and fibrous. Cut them off, give them to the chooks:
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The recommendation was to blanch first for about a minute. In that time gai lan would have been completely cooked and collapsed into almost nothing. The kale kept its form, though it did go a nice bright green colour:
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I had derived the experimental recipe I was cooking from cabbage fried rice noodles, which wants 200 g of cabbage per serving. Others want 100 g of gai lan. But for kale, that's ridiculous. Here are 100 g:
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To be fair, 100 g of gai lan would have been about 65 g stalks and 35 g leaves. Here I had only leaves. In the end I put in 25 g:
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I only used the part on the chopping board. I froze the rest. That proved to be not enough. But the result wasn't too bad:
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It didn't taste too bad, but I would have been happier with gai lan. What do I do with the rest? To be determined.
In passing, there's a distinct difference in terminology between the species. I have the information from Wikipedia, which refers to the oleracea cultivars as belonging to “groups”, while the rapa cultivars are “var.”. Where can I find definitive naming practices?
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Next kitchen problem
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
What do you serve with experimental kale noodles? Something I haven't used in a while, which proved to be the Beijing noodles that I bought years ago and hardly ate. They proved to have their own problems: they stick when cooking, both to themselves and the pot, despite frequent stirring:
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It took me a long time to remove the burnt residues. The noodles taste OK, but not so good that I'd do that to myself again.
| Saturday, 24 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 24 January 2026 |
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More kale experiments
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Continuing with yesterday's experiments, tried replacing the gai lan in curry laksa with kale, this time 30 g:
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Where is it? It was this much:
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But it's there at top left, only now discoloured after boiling. And once again it didn't improve things. I'll find something to do with the rest—after all, it's only about another 4 servings—but that will be the end.
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Vegetable prices
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
How much do kale and gai lan cost? I had been rather surprised at the price of gai lan this week, $5.99 for a single bunch. So I compared the weights and prices, adding in the Christmas ham for comparison:
| Foodstuff | Weight | Usable | Price | Price/kg | Price/usable | |||||
| Gai lan | 418 g | 100% | $5.99 | $14.33 | $14.33 | |||||
| Kale | 360 g | 50% | $3.90 | $10.83 | $21.67 | |||||
| Ham | 1000 g | 100% | $9.00 | $9.00 | $9.00 |
That's really surprising. Kale costs over twice as much as ham! Yet another reason why it's not popular.
| Sunday, 25 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 25 January 2026 |
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Still more breakfast experiments
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another attempt at pork and dòufu for breakfast today. The original recipe wanted white pepper, like almost all dishes from The Woks of Life. Like all things that appear in multiple recipes (Shaoxing wine and Sodium bicarbonate also come to mind), I ignore them.
Today, though, I tried some white pepper. And how about that, it makes a big difference! How Chinese cooking has changed since I started with recipe books over 50 years ago!
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IBM Ozlabs: end of an era?
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Topic: history, technology, opinion | Link here |
A message on LinkedIn a couple of days ago: IBM Ozlabs is no more.
It's been a while. I joined Ozlabs in March 2000, and after the change to IBM, left again in September 2002. And that's an indication: the history started before IBM, and it continues. But somehow it's an indication that the market is changing.
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Olympus E-1 firmware after all?
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Topic: photography, technology, history, opinion | Link here |
Why are old cameras so popular? I collect those models that I see as pivotal in some way or another, including my personal experience—that's why I bought a Diaxette a few years back: it was my first real camera. But people want to take photos with these old cameras. Why? I did buy a couple of films over 5 years ago, and I put one in my Nikon FM2, but I still haven't got round to finishing the roll.
And then I found this video clip:
I have one of them too, an Olympus E-1: it was the first camera designed from ground up as a digital camera. I took a couple of photos with it and marvelled how quickly technology improved over the following 10 years. But Robin doesn't just want to collect it: he wants to use it because of its colour rendition. He's not alone: somehow modern cameras are so easy to use that they're becoming boring.
Still, it gave me a chance to follow up on one thing that irritated me: I can't upgrade the firmware on my camera, because Olympus have stopped distributing the updates. Much investigation, coming up with this recommendation from Google Gemini. Looks excellent. Only one problem: it's wrong.
More searching, and came up with this official site, which states:
For detailed instructions on applying these firmware updates, go to the following webpage
And that link is broken. Bravo, Olympus!
Other links include this discussion, this page (“This online resource is under construction, last update Feb. 2nd, 2012”), linking to a defunct user group, but I couldn't find any indication of where the firmware file might be. How much effort do I want to expend?
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Annoying cats
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Bruno has been confined to the house for a week now, and though he really wants to go outside, he seems to be coming to terms with the situation. We're considering ways of restricting his movements outside, but it's not clear that he would be happy with that, nor whether it would even work.
Still, he's finding ways. Cat toilet? Why not my struggling Thai basil pot? Not even chicken wire can stop him:
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Or he knows that I don't like Mona sitting in front of the TV. He can do that too:
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| Monday, 26 January 2026 | Dereel | Images for 26 January 2026 |
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Riding is fun
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Topic: animals | Link here |
It was warm today, so Yvonne went riding early. She has been teaching Samba the Spanish walk:
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Stopping Bruno
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Bruno's antics yesterday require a solution. This one seems to have worked:
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