Lots of rain overnight. Well, not that much, only about 10 mm, but it's enough to lie
around, in particular in the holes for the footings for the riding arena:
So starting at 0:00 UTC (10:00 here) I'm a member of the FreeBSD Core Team again. It
didn't start slowly. I sent out a message asking for suggestions on how to organize things,
especially since we're spread round the world (Li-Wen Hsu and I way ahead of UTC, John
Baldwin 8 hours behind, Ed Maste 5 hours behind, and the rest in a surprisingly small area
in France, Germany and Switzerland). The previous core teams have placed importance on
video meetings, but the biggest time difference between members is 8 hours, currently (in
the northern summer) between John Baldwin and me. In the northern winter it will be 7 hours
between Li-Wen Hsu and the European contingent. Video meetings aren't going to work
effectively.
This was updated a year later. What I had written before didn't make sense.
But in the meantime we ended up with another issue, currently sensitive enough that I can't
mention it. And that gave rise to round 20 email messages to deal with, and a surprising
number of mail delivery failures. Hopefully things will calm down.
I contacted the insurance, and quickly discovered that I could receive e-mail from them, but they
couldn't receive from me. This forced me to deal with them via Gmail.
Since then I've discovered that I can't send e-mail from home to my boss at the IRS (irs.gov),
something I normally do when I'm ill and can't come to work. Back to Gmail to report that I was ill
with COVID. Apparently both the insurance company and the IRS are blocking messages from
dunham.org. I don't send spam, so I'm left wonderring why and what to do about it.
Somehow that's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm running into the same problem, and I had
bounces from two members of the FreeBSD Core Team as well.
[OAUTH2] is a major step on the way to an Internet where the only players are large
corporations, serving their own interests in the name of profit and power.
It seems that there's no space left for people running their own mail servers any more,
something that I've been doing for over 30 years now.
There seem to be two main issues. Strangely, OAUTH2 isn't one of them (yet). My
email via POP3 continues to come
in. What doesn't seem to work is:
SPF. That's nothing new: I've
had issues with SPF for years. The problem is with forwarded messages, like the ones to
the FreeBSD core team. One of the members uses Gmail, and messages forwarded via
FreeBSD.org are rejected:
Received: from mx2.freebsd.org (mx2.freebsd.org. [96.47.72.81])
by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id r24-20020ac85e98000000b002f3d85aad2bsi144191qtx.540.2022.05.31.17.00.14
(version=TLS1_3 cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 bits=256/256); Tue, 31 May 2022 17:00:15 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: fail (google.com: domain of groggyhimself@lemis.com does not designate 96.47.72.81 as permitted sender) client-ip=96.47.72.81;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
spf=fail (google.com: domain of groggyhimself@lemis.com does not designate 96.47.72.81 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=groggyhimself@lemis.com
The indentation may be incorrect; this was reported by a gmail client. But the message
rejects my message because it comes from 96.47.72.81, mx2.freebsd.org.
The other issue is even more complicated. Various companies around the Net take it upon
themselves to determine the “goodness” of a domain. And some decide
against lemis.com, which has been round longer than they have without ever
sending malicious mail,
What do I do there? The most obvious thing was to modify my SPF record to allow mail from
Aussie Broadband's mail servers, and
send things via them. Will Aussie even accept mail from lemis.com? Yes, they do,
and it works. But it doesn't address the wider SPF issue.
But we're not done. Are my DNS records correct? That depends on which of the large
corporations you ask. Looking at some headers (of messages that passed), I see:
DMARC_BAD_POLICY(0.00)[lemis.com : Multiple policies defined in DNS];
What does that mean? Ask the experts, in this case redsift.com
DMARC policy record check
fail The DMARC Policy has the following syntax error:
pass The policy on your DNS conforms with the DMARC specification.
Now you see it, now you don't. Clearly something's wrong, but they can't see it, and
various tests have passed for months. But in fact I did have two DMARC records, and
that can't be right:
_dmarc.lemis.com text = "v=DMARC1;p=none;rua=mailto:dmarc@lemis.com,mailto:ff87498b6a@rua.easydmarc.com;ruf=mailto:ff87498b6a@ruf.easydmarc.com;fo=1"
_dmarc.lemis.com text = "v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@lemis.com"
That's easy enough to fix, but it does highlight how flaky this whole framework is.
It's still not clear that I can even send mail to all of the FreeBSD Core Team members, and
the basic breakage with SPF remains.
Probably the most reliable way to solve the problem would be to give up running my own mail
server. What, after 30 years? That hurts.
But I'm not the only person who suffers from the problem. What do other FreeBSD project members do? Mail to the
FreeBSD postmaster team got a reply from Baptiste Daroussin, coincidentally one of the new
core team. He pointed me at this page, not
classified but only usable by people with a FreeBSD login. There are two ways: either from
the (unspecified) MUA or via
Postfix (software) configuration, which—again—requires an amazing amount of configuration.
The easy part is setting up Kerberos passwords, described here. That
worked as advertised, I think:
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) ~ 1 -> ssh kpasswd.freebsd.org FreeBSD 12.2-STABLE (CLUSTER) #0 stable/12-n233232-db3515d03dd: Wed Jun 2 05:08:40 UTC 2021
Unauthorized access is strictly prohibited.
role=kpasswd build=amd64_12@n233232-db3515d03dd
Hi there, grog..
Sanity checking..
Creating initial instance for grog/mail
===================================================================
Generating strong, evil random passwords...
===================================================================
Your new, ready to forget, password: Uive3a(X
Your new, ready to forget, mail password: wieC?3ze7iHga7foi]xei[ghi}i
Evil random passwords? Do I want to know? But the postfix configuration is backed
up behind other issues I have with postfix. For the moment I have the alternative of just
writing my email on freefall.freebsd.org.
Apart from my own problems with mail being accepted, there are questions like digital
signatures. Today, as FreeBSD Core Team member, I got a message from the FreeBSD doc team announcing a couple of new committers.
Digitally signed. With an expired key.
Told the submitter, who created a new key and uploaded it. I downloaded the key—still the
old one! But he pointed me at a list of keys for all project members, which somehow was not expired. It also saves
me a lot of individual loads.
Yvonne into town today for treating some skin ailment, the
name of which they didn't tell her; I suspect actinic keratosis. It's a pretty
aggressive treatment. Here she is afterwards:
Troy Addicoat was due to be here round 10:00 this morning to do the concreting for the
footings for the arena. Based on prior experience, called to remind him just before 9:00.
No, he wouldn't be there. The concreters had postponed until 15:00, and he would be there
at 14:30.
Came 14:30. No Troy. Watched anxiously every minute and so, and finally, at 14:58,
somebody showed up: the concrete. Called up Troy, couldn't reach him. The driver was
clearly upset that he had to be working so late, blaming it on Troy. He looked dubiously at
the soil, stamped around on it a bit, decided that it would probably hold the weight of the
truck.
About 10 minutes later a couple of workmen arrived, but not Troy, in a van that looks like a
service vehicle for door systems:
Troy arrived about 30 minutes later, complaining that the whole thing had been put off until
the afternoon, blaming it on the concreters. He was going to put in a formal complaint. A
lot of good that will do, as I told him.
To my surprise, they poured the concrete in with wheelbarrows:
But they got through it in less than an hour, discovering that they were short by about 1 m³
of concrete. That arrived later, and despite everything, they were done in 2 hours. In the
process we discovered that the site isn't nearly as level as Warrick had thought:
At normal temperatures, the rings lose a lot of moisture, and the result resembles rubber.
The only solution is to cook them very hot (in a pan at round 350°, with lots of heat
to maintain the temperature). The result is good, but the side effects are not:
The whole house fills with smoke (thanks, Australian architects, for eliminating kitchens
from houses). But there's a solution, the old portable induction cooker:
It only barely does the job: part of the issue is the strong heat needed. The kitchen
induction cooker can deliver up to 3.7 kW, while the portable one is limited by the power
cord to 2.4 kW. Maybe next time I should use a thicker pan that doesn't cool down as
quickly.
The webs are amazingly difficult to see: they're only visible in bright sunlight. And I
didn't see any mites at all. But my guess is that the brown spots on the stem in the last
photo are mites on their way.
They always go for new growth, so the simple way to combat them, apart from Pyrethrum, is to cut off
harvest the parts with the webs.
Watching a new film series on TV this evening, Sisi, a modern retelling of the story of
Elisabeth in Bavaria, Empress of Austria. It's certainly different from the classic film with Romy Schneider: it starts off with a
scene of her masturbating.
It's more interesting for other reasons. Firstly, though it was made in Germany and
Austria, and I keep a careful eye on programmes from those countries, I found out about it
from the Australian SBS. And it has some
of the most extreme examples of pincushion distortion I have ever seen. For the fun of it,
I tried correcting the distortion of a couple of screen shots with DxO PhotoLab, but even at 100% the verticals
weren't straight (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its
neighbour):
It's been two months since I bought a couple of cameras in Ukraine. The second one, a FED 1, had an estimated delivery date between 2 May and 13 May.
That's optimistic, but it also causes a problem: if it doesn't arrive by a month after the
latter date, and if I do nothing, I can't get my money back. eBay wants me to report it by then.
So I asked for my money back, and got a very quick response from an unhappy seller who
pointed me to updated tracking information (tracking number RH063075495UA):
30 May 2022 Контейнер з Вашим поштовим відправленням оброблюється в аеропорту
7:16pm
Time to speak to a human at eBay, which is really difficult. Finally got a callback from
somebody called Bari, whose name later proved to be spelt “Ahmad”. I did the right thing by
asking for my money back, even if it upset the innocent seller. He can postpone
indefinitely 10 days at a time. So I did that, and it seems that I need to ask them to
extend the postponement every 10 days, starting (why?) on 10 June. He also promised to send
me information about how to request a callback without going through dozens of twisty little
web pages.
In the process, I discovered that eBay is now too polite to send email regarding returns. I
found no less than four messages from sellers whom I had assumed had not replied.
Ultimately it doesn't make any difference to the result, but it's annoying that I didn't
know about it. And now I need to poll my eBay messages at least once a day. You'd think
that they were trying to make life difficult.
Yesterday I had to trim the curry tree, so I was left with a lot of leaves. What can I do with them? I don't
use them as much as I used to, though when I do it's quite a quantity. Off looking at
this page, which had interested me some time ago, but didn't find anything that
reached out and grabbed me. OK, how about alu
masala?
Off to compare recipes. To my surprise, there's very little variation. Some omit the
tamarind, which I think is a mistake. And none include peas, which seem a good idea to me.
So I put them in anyway:
And the result? The curry leaves were a little insipid, something I hadn't noticed before.
But apart from that and the excessive amount of work needed for a single serving, the result
was not bad. In particular, I think that the peas are right.
OK, what's that URL? The first thing that hits me is that it's the wrong host name. I
really must update my web server config so that incorrect host names don't bleed into
the lemis.com web site.
But that doesn't matter. ns2.narrawin.com ceased to exist on 13 November 2021. And
the article? A single line: “Another grid power failure at 01:51:58, again only one
second.”. Now what does that have to do with video software? It's on the same page as
this article, which I suppose is related. It reminds me of Google Image Search,
which used to include various images of my house when doing an image search for Fastrand.
OK, and the article? She wrote it under the pen name Cecilia Hwung, and arguably it's
worth reading. The part that I like least is that they tested it only on Microsoft and
Apple. But my guess is that most of them will run on Linux, and at least half of her top 8 are in
the Ports Collection. Many of the others are not interesting anyway.
So, Aunty Cecilia, you have what you asked for: a mention in my diary. Is it what you
wanted?
It claims to have everything for the meal, but of course it lies. It has the broth and the
noodles, but not the additional ingredients that it recommends:
Still, it claims to be Singapore Laksa, something that I haven't been able to clearly
identify this century. So today I tried it.
The quantities are strange: It doesn't say how many portions they're aiming for, but they
want 500 ml of water, making about a total of 550 ml of liquid. I've established that most
sources recommend about 350 to 400 ml per portion, and that corresponds with my appetite, so
this is about 1½ portions. The same goes for the noodles. Normal single portion uncooked
noodles weigh round 60 g; these weigh 90 g:
The white powder appears to be dried coconut cream. And they want the noodles cooked (for 7
minutes) in the sauce! OK, humour them, also add some fishy stuff:
But it feels completely different. Even more important than the surface is the fact that
the cushioning in the old one has collapsed, making it much harder.
The instructions for setting up Postfix to deliver mail directly
to freebsd.org are complicated enough that I put them off to my more general revision
of my postfix configuration.
But there are other methods too. mutt has a configuration
parameter smtp_url where it can be told to send mail directly to an MTA instead of
local sendmail. What happens if I set it
to smtp_url=smtp://mx1.freebsd.org? Tried that, and within limits it Just Worked.
Sending mail to myself at FreeBSD.org gave a header:
Received: from eureka.lemis.com (121-200-11-253.79c80b.mel.nbn.aussiebb.net [121.200.11.253])
(using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits))
(Client did not present a certificate)
by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 4LGcfm0x44z3Jmm
And the limits? Send only to people at FreeBSD.org, and use your FreeBSD.org login.
That at least eliminates abuse.
Replied to the seller of my FED
(camera) today, reassuring him that I would give every chance for delivery, even if it
took a long time. And a new surprise:
05-Jun-22 15:25
Seller's message: "hi, the package arrived in australia today. thanks for supporting my country"
Amazing! That's the second time he has responded almost immediately, and the second time
that the tracking has been updated. I reported the problem at 14:57 on 3 June, and got a
reply, including updated tracking, at 15:11. And this time it didn't take long either,
though I can't say how long, since eBay is
too polite to keep that kind of information. That's so unusual that it almost sounds
suspicious. If it has already arrived in Australia, it should be here this week some time.
And what if the screen shot is forged? No, it isn't. By the time I saw it, I had already
checked on the Ukrposhta web
site. It doesn't seem to be possible to provide it with the tracking number directly
(RH063075495UA), but it shows:
That answers the question I had a couple of days ago: how could the seller know that the
container was in Turkey? It says so in Ukrainian: “ТЕРМIНАЛ Турція”, but not in English:
Will Tatnell showed up this morning to look at the work we're planning. He decided that it
was too wet, but it seemed that he had an appointment with his mate Brendan to consider
removing the remaining ferns from the House Forest at the west of the property. He didn't
take long; I followed them and barely caught up with them by the time they were finished.
Estimate: 1 day to do the simple bits, another day to remove the smaller saplings and give
space for the horses to move around. $300 an hour, so we'd be looking at between $2,500 and
$5,000. I think we can decide against that.
Clearly we needed more broth, but what? With a bit of searching, found a container of
Maggifumet de crustacés
(crustacean stock), and used some of that. It's better than water.
Now that I have tried this dish twice, it's worth summing up. On the positive side, it
tastes quite good.
On the negative side:
It's expensive. I paid $16 for 4 sachets of barely 2 portions each; 1½ would be better.
That's $2.67 per portion just for the paste, coconut powder and noodles. That's
marginally more than a package of Teans curry laksa, which makes 4 or 5 (or, as they put
it, 6-8) servings. Yes, I still need the coconut cream, but together a portion would
cost about $1.40.
The idea of the “La mian” is supposed to be that it's easier to make, but if anything it
seems to be the opposite. Part of that is cooking the noodles in the broth, part of it
is the inappropriate serving size.
Despite the treatment we've had so far, it's clear that Larissa still has problems with her left rear
leg. Off to see Pene Kirk, who examined her at some length and decided that it
probably wasn't a hip issue, but something further down the leg. She has a
considerable loss of muscle on that leg, greater than 25%. She gave her another shot of
cartrophen,
and we'll see how that helps.
« Délayez 6 petites cuillerées par 1/2 litre de liquide » : “mix 6 small spoons per ½ litre
of liquid”. That's the first time I've seen spoons mentioned outside the USA, and in this
case it was almost always 6 of them. No mention anywhere of the weight, or the size of the
spoon. Yvonne guesses that they mean coffee spoons, smaller
than teaspoons
In the end I guessed at the typical 16 g/l of other stock powders, and it certainly didn't
look too light:
Ten years ago today I bought my first Android tablet. It
wasn't love at first sight—if there be love, it is yet to come—but some things haven't
changed. As I wrote,
The most obvious thing missing on a tablet is the thing that I find most important: a
fast, versatile way to communicate with it—in other words, a keyboard. How do you
communicate effectively with a computer without one? Yes, it has a touch screen with a
simulated keyboard, like my GPS navigator does, but apart from my aversion to making
smears on any shiny surface, the lack of tactile feedback means that you have to look at
the thing, and it slows me down to about a tenth of the normal typing speed. Clearly a
poor substitute, and on the GPS I have taken to putting in jottings with the toy keyboard
and fixing them online with a real keyboard later.
That's a crimson rosella on the stand where the tomatoes were growing, about 3 m from my armchair. I had seen (the
same?) one yesterday, where it spent some time enjoying a small green tomato, but I wasn't
able to get a photo. Hopefully there will be better ones.
In fact, it was completely clean a week ago. The accumulated dirt (or whatever it is) is
the result of drip water from the toothbrush. I rinse the toothbrush every time I use it,
but of course some water drips onto the charger. But how can it give rise to so much dirt?
It must be some kind of bacteria.
Will Tatnell was due to arrive today with soil and equipment to transform the garden and
install a drinking trough in the middle paddock. No sign of him. It's not urgent, but
surprising that we didn't hear from him.
It's been 2 weeks since Luke Parry of Effective Electrical promised to get back with an answer on the same day. He didn't.
So far, despite email reminder, I hadn't heard from him.
But today he called. COVID-19 to blame, credibly. He's still trying to get his head round what happened
last month, and he's talking to Ingeteam support in Spain. But he wanted to know why I had this sawtooth pattern in
the battery charge:
Simple: that's what Fyodor set up, and there seemed no reason to change it. But there is:
clearly it's inefficient to store energy and then convert it back again; just keeping a
constant charge level is much more sensible. And that's what he did, without telling me:
So tomorrow evening we're having a FreeBSD core handover meeting, where members of the previous FreeBSD Core Team give us
information that should probably better be done in writing.
Did I say tomorrow evening? No, it's really Saturday morning. The meeting starts at
24:00/0:00 for me, and I'm jumping for joy about the fact. But video conferences are fun!
OK, let's ensure that things work well. We're using Google Meet, and I already had a two person conference with Warner Losh yesterday.
But that was on a mobile phone! It seems that you can run it on a normal web browser
even if it doesn't have a microphone or camera (“companion mode”). That would be good: use
the phone as a camera and the TV to display the meeting.
Tried that out without any other participants. Didn't work: it promised me all sorts of
things, but didn't display anything resembling a matrix of faces. OK, maybe that's because
there's nothing to choose from. Contacted one of the team members and set up a “meeting”.
Not good: first, I didn't get anything useful on the browser screen, and secondly the audio
was terrible—some kind of feedback loop. Gave it up and considered the options, discussed
at length on IRC. To my surprise, many other members thought that it would be OK on The
Night. No testing required. I'm flabbergasted. Should I stay up 2 hours after my bedtime
to risk a wasted meeting?
What was the audio issue with my Google Meet yesterday? Put that in the “too hard” shelf and tried the other thing, the one I really
wanted to test: “Companion mode”. The obvious thing was to add Yvonne: after all, she didn't need to do anything, just have the phone on. And while
I was messing around, Ed Maste appeared on IRC, so I asked him in too. Three people.
Worked fine, audio too. And “companion mode”? It seems that it can't do what I want. It
just adds other functionality, like automatically generated subtitles and out-of-band
written comments. That could be useful, but it doesn't help me with my intention to display
the meeting on the TV. The “help” didn't help much either, full of incomplete information and broken links.
OK, move on. It seems that most people use some kind of Bluetooth headset. Can I do that too? I
have an old headset lying around, and I even found it and discovered that the battery has
charge. How do I pair it? I recall some secret handshake to get it into pairing mode. My
phone detected a QC150 device, and tried to pair with it. Did it succeed? It didn't say
that it didn't. But I couldn't use it.
Was it even in pairing mode? Off searching and found this document, which tells me:
Long press the power on/off key for 3 seconds. The blue and red LED indicators will flash
Just too impatient! Yes, long press. After 5 seconds the blue LED flashes. Keep holding.
After another 5 seconds, it alternates with red. Not quite the 3 seconds that the
instructions said. But that was the only success. I still couldn't communicate with it.
Was I even looking at the correct device? Yes: when it was powered on, it tried for a long
time to pair. When it was powered off, it failed automatically. So it's definitely the
QC150 device.
OK, is the thing maybe paired with something else in the room? How about going to Yvonne's
office and pairing with her phone. And yes, how about that, it worked almost out of the
box. But it wasn't a QC150, it was a BH-M20!
Back to my office. I couldn't find a way to delete the QC150, but at some point the phone
did it by itself. And then it was prepared to recognize the BH-M20 and connect to it.
So now I have a functional Bluetooth headset; hopefully it will stay that way for a while.
But what a pain these things are!
Into town today, primarily for a haircut. But how do I get there? There are still
roadworks all over the place, and I had just got to the main road when I saw an 80 km/h
sign.
OK, maybe it's not that bad, but I'm not taking the chance. Turned off to Mount Mercer and took the road to
Buninyong. Certainly less
traffic: until the outskirts of Buninyong (30 km), I saw about 3 cars. But it's nearly 40
km, 12 km longer than the direct road, and I only just made my appointment.
Sad news from the hairdresser: I knew that my old barber, Kerry, has now closed down. He
must have been over 80, so that in itself is not surprising. But it seems that shortly
before my last haircut there he had accidentally mixed up the gears in his car, and instead
of heading forward, he reversed into his wife and killed her.
From the barbers to Specsavers in town
to order a new pair of glasses for Yvonne—fortunately she had
had an eye test only a couple of weeks ago—and then via the butchers to Bunnings, looking for things they didn't have, like
general purpose grease in tubes. Maybe “general purpose” is now an old, worn-out magic
word.
And how do I get home again? Normally I'd take Cherry Flat Road, but Helen Miller told me
that it is now blocked. OK, Google, take me home. Cherry Flat Road! Does it know
something I don't, or do I know something it doesn't? Off east and then taken down Webb
Road, a parallel road to Cherry Flat Road. It made it almost to Bells Road, where I wanted
to go, but then turned left. A dirt road (Schreenan's Road) lay ahead. I've been down
there before, but it looks as if it is better now, so I followed it.
That doesn't look too bad, but that was taken in the summer, when it was dry. Now it has
been raining for a week, and the indicator showed about 20 to 25 cm of water. Should I risk
it? I've got stuck in fords before, but
this one was short, and I should make it.
So through. Car covered in water, but I made it. In retrospect I shouldn't have even
tried.
Back via Napoleons and Enfield. The road
works have finished; all that's left are a couple of 80 km/h signs that they apparently
forgot.
The mixer tap in the kitchen has been giving us pain since we moved in 7 years ago. They weren't
able to install it at the time, and when I later found a plumber to install it, he made such
a mess of it that it broke some time later. So last November we found somebody to install a new one—badly. He didn't tighten it up
sufficiently, and in the course of time it got looser and looser.
Finally we have found a new plumber, Adrian Breen, who came along today and fixed the thing.
At least it's now firm, and the hose runs as smoothly as is possible (the sink gets in the
way). What a relief! He also took a look at the sprinkler solenoid, and it looks as if he
has fixed that. That's a couple of loads off my mind.
Where's my FED 1 camera? I've been asking that for over a week, having first had a false alarm 4 weeks ago. Today the next step: “You have mail” in the letter box, this time with
a plausible rendition of the tracking number.
OK, I've been there before. Call up the post office to confirm. No, not there. Sure you
have the right name? LEHEY. Yes, it's here.
Off to pick it up, noting once again the spurious road signs where there are no road works:
Interesting that the sender address is given as “Geroev Sevastopolya 36a, Kyiv”. Firstly,
the transliteration seems to be a bit outdated (or Russian): Google Maps finds a Heroiv Sevastopolya St, 36, suggesting the alternation between Russian Г (G) and
Ukrainian Г (H). But clearly Sevastopol/Sebastopol is in the name. And secondly, the package came from Nikopol, not Kyiv, as the tracking information shows.
Back home and took a look. Nice case, probably the best I have seen in an old camera:
But I've know that for well over 50 years.
In fact, compared to the 5 cm f/2 Summar that I got with the last FED, it is at least coated, though it's
interesting that the closest focusing distance appears to be about 1.2 m. Still, looking at
it again, it's surprisingly primitive. Yes, this is a 90 year old design, but my example
probably dates from the mid-1950s.
As was to be expected for a document of those times, it's in Russian, not Ukrainian. I
still need to decipher it. The first column must be film sensitivity, but the heading is so
fuzzy that I can't decipher it. But the second column (full sun, seaside) gives 1/100 s at
f/8 for sensitivity 32, and 1/100 s at f/16 for sensitivity 65, suggesting that that's 2
stops more sensitive. That's neither linear nor logarithmic. To be investigated further.
Today was the day for the handover meeting for the new FreeBSD Core Team. That's
difficult for a number of reasons, the least of which is that I don't think much of
teleconferences anyway. One of the worst things is that there's just no good time for the
meeting. Finally somebody (core secretary) decided on a time: 14:00 to 15:00 UTC. That's
7:00 for people in California, 16:00 for the majority of new core in Europe, 22:00 for
Li-Wen Hsu in Taipei,
and 24:00 for me here in Dereel. And normally I go to bed at about 22:30.
OK, used the waiting time to set up my phone with the Bluetooth headset. I had already found
instructions of a kind for the real BH-M20 headset, so thorough that they didn't
explain how to charge it, just “Please cut connection between charger and headset when not
charging”. Clearly the micro-USB jack is intended for charging, and by observation I
noticed that the LED shows red while charging, and then goes out.
OK, come 23:50 and I connected, with Warner Losh again helping me set things up. Yes, the
headset works. No, it's not usable: there was so much echoing that I gave up and used
hands-free. I wonder if that's related to that or other issues.
One other issue that I still need to check is the way I connected to the meeting, with the
Android app.
And it behaves differently from however the others connect. In particular, I couldn't get
it to display more than 8 participants (there were up to 14 of us, though one was in a train
and kept going offline). If we end up doing this again, I need to consider alternative
interfaces.
And how useful was the meeting? For me, the focus on interpersonal relationships and
various gripes was an eye-opener.
Apart from that, I had hoped for a video transcript. No, no, that requires permission of
everybody on the meeting. Is there anybody who would object? Wrong question.
Everybody should explicitly agree. Strangely, there was no such objection to an audio
transcript.
But that's moot: I discovered that the faces didn't really add to the meeting. The real
issue was the audio, and that was so hard to understand that I completely missed the point
of one agenda item. Yes, there was a point or two of interest, but it seems to be an
expensive waste of 14 hours of people's lives. And I've forgotten much of it already. I
stand by my assertion that the whole concept is a waste of time.
Only: all sorts of people use this kind of service. Why? I need to think about that.
During this morning's Google meet meeting, a
couple of popups occurred. I read the last one before it disappeared again: “Your
ALDImobile PAYG credit is fully depleted”.
And yes, I had used up all my credit. Why did it appear then? This morning I took a look
at my usage. Normally I charge with ALDImobile's $15 plan, which lasts up to a year before expiry. Since using features
like Google Maps tracking, a charge only
lasts typically 2 to 3 months. But this time it only lasted 2 weeks!
Checking further shows (eliminating sums below $0.20):
Destination
Duration/Data
Charge
Date
mdata.net.au
77.93MB
$3.9100
Sun, 5 Jun - 12:13pm
mdata.net.au
4.59MB
$0.2302
Mon, 6 Jun - 12:59pm
mdata.net.au
109.36MB
$5.4871
Wed, 8 Jun - 03:52pm
mdata.net.au
11.01MB
$0.5525
Thu, 9 Jun - 12:33pm
mdata.net.au
100.84MB
$5.0599
Fri, 10 Jun - 11:53pm
Those three entries amount to $14.46 out of my $15 recharge. All of them occurred
when I was at home, when adequate Internet bandwidth was available. I can't associate the
first with anything in particular, but the second seems to have been when I was testing the
app with Ed Maste, and the third was the core hangover meeting.
So what's wrong here? Why is Google Meet even messing with routing? That's an obscene
layering violation. And it's completely unnecessary: when my credit ran out this morning,
things continued without a hitch using WiFi.
The workaround is clear: turn off mobile data when I'm at home.
We stopped taking the dogs for a walk when Larissa had her problems three months ago. But since Pene looked at her on Monday, it seems that there's no particular reason for her not to move relatively
slowly. So off for a walk, this time only as far as Spearys Road, but the dogs really
wanted to go further. Hopefully we won't have any more trouble.
I can try with Google Lens on my phone, but it's such a pain. There must be an easier way.
And there is! But only, it seems, if you use a newer version of Google Chrome. Then you can
right-click on an image and apply Lens. And with a bit of clicking and pulling, I get:
We're still not there, though. In particular, it doesn't really explain the leftmost
column. “Feelings” probably really means “sensitivity”, but the word below is almost
illegible, and it fails with more easily recognizable words like СУША. Time to involve a
Russian speaker.
And the camera? I came across this summary, which suggests that my camera is a type 13 or 14, made between 1953 and
1955. So far I haven't been able to identify anything more accurately based on the serial
number, and the link to the photographer is broken.
The Zaporizhian Host, in order to leave the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, sought a
treaty of protection with Russia in 1654.
How important is that? Hard to say.
As if that wasn't enough, we watched episode 15 of Servant of the People this evening, where
President Goloborodko waxes eloquent on the term Хохол (Khokhol). The programme itself is
in Ukrainian,
In fact, I think that most of it is in Russian, which was widely spoken in Ukraine at
the time. But at least the credits are in Ukrainian, and it's possible that significant
spoken parts are in Ukrainian.
and we can only understand it because of the subtitles, which are completely inadequate in
this case. The only information I get is again from Wikipedia, which states:
The word "Khokhol" with the meaning of "unconscious Ukrainian" refers to the person who
renounced their independence, individuality and allegiance to Russia, and instead began
using Turkisms (words derived from Turkic languages) that were incorporated into the
Ukrainian language
“Renounce independence and allegiance to Russia”? That sounds contradictory. But none of
it fits the context of the episode.
It claims to be ready in 3 minutes, but as usual it lies: 6 minutes is closer to the truth.
And an amazing quantity stuck to the bottom of the saucepan:
First problem: they're one of these 1½ portion things. I had established that a portion of
phở requires about 300 ml of water, but the instructions want 500 ml per cube, 1.67 times as
much. OK, I can keep some over for next time. Mix it in water and bring to the boil as
instructed. It tastes of nothing! Well, maybe a little salty. But compared to the paste
it's very insipid.
In the end I diluted to 600 ml and added 20 g of phở paste. It wasn't enough.
And I have another 6 of these cubes! What should I do with them? I hate throwing things
away.
The experience with the core team handover meeting on Friday made it clear to me that a mobile phone is not
an appropriate device for participating in such meetings, and not just because of the
excessive data costs. I need a laptop.
Yes, of course I have a laptop, euroa.lemis.com, running Microsoft “Windows” 7. But I should really be using FreeBSD, at least for core team teleconferences.
Never mind, I have three other laptops from Bruce Evans. They once ran FreeBSD until Peter
Jeremy vandalized them. I just need to reinstall the software.
But how? Nowadays I install from USB sticks, but for some reason none of these laptops can
boot from USB. The newest, an HP EliteBook 8570p, can at least boot from DVD, while the older EliteBook 8460p has a damaged DVD
drive. Where do I have a DVD? Found one with FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE, now nearly 5 years old.
Install. Reboot. HP setup hell, trying to do a net boot. What a strange “BIOS”! I couldn't get into setup because it
wanted a password, but at some point it told me that there was no operating system on the
disk.
Boot from DVD again, go into a shell. All data nicely there in the root partition. Did it
forget boot blocks? Put them in again and tried rebooting. Still no operating system.
Dammit, is this computer so old that it only uses MBR partitioning? Went through
the whole install again with MBR, and how about that, it worked!
But MBR is ancient, and GPT has been around for much longer than the laptop. Maybe it's a BIOS configuration
thing that I couldn't get to.
So now I have a 5 year old system on the laptop, which I decided to
call bde.lemis.com in honour of Bruce. He had called it iotaplex.bde.org
(fake domain name), but I couldn't bring myself to call it that. Next I need a newer
system. OK, buildworld and kernel. During the usual eternity building llvm, the build broke. Trying to jump too
many releases at once? But by then it was evening. Mañana.
We don't eat much lamb, mainly because Yvonne has decided
that she doesn't like it any more. But today was the day, and I had the issue of cooking
this nice-looking piece, once part of a lamb that strayed onto Chris Bahlo's property, and
which didn't seem to have an owner:
780 g. Cook at 180° for how long? My notes say “until 63°”, and suggest 55 minutes per kg.
So that would be about 43 minutes.
In fact it took about 53 minutes. And it was overcooked! That's not really surprising; I
would have expected a meat temperature of round 55°. Next time.
If I can't build a new world on bde, my HP EliteBook 8570p, how about building it elsewhere and then just installing it
on bde? That required cloning Yet Another source tree and building, which took half
the day. Then mount eureka:/home on bde, bend a couple of symlinks, and install.
C library problem: some version mismatch. That's what I get for trying to upgrade so old a
system. I'm sure that there are various ways of recovering, but for me the simplest was to
download a new DVD image of 13.1-RELEASE. And yes, that worked fine, once I recalled how to
burn a DVD in this decade (cdrecord -r image), and after I discarded the coaster,
uncompressed the image and tried again.
OK, now set up the new system. That's a separate issue, one that I haven't come to terms
with in over 20 years. But then I had a brainwave: make! All I need to do is come
up with a Makefile that will enable me to set up individual aspects of a running
system. I had already done the vestiges of this approach when working for MySQL: I had a homekit, a collection
of the files that I needed to install on a new system to feel at home with. That approach
could be extended to include basic system functionality on machines to which I have complete
access.
It's been over 5 years since I started trying to upgrade eureka. Will this help, or
just help me procrastinate?
On a different note: why can't I access the BIOS on the machine? The manual I have doesn't
even mention the BIOS, just all sorts of stuff that doesn't seem overly relevant. Off to
search the web site for more appropriate documentation, without any success. Finally asked
the “HP Virtual Agent” lurking in the wings, which came up with some very unexpected
misunderstandings before pointing me at a document so obscure that I can't find it any more,
since I forgot to save the URL. But there I found:
A forgotten BIOS password cannot be reset by HP. HP is committed to the security and
privacy of our customers. To resolve a forgotten BIOS password issue, a system board
replacement is required, and additional customer costs apply.
So the BIOS stays the way it is. I suppose I can't blame Peter Jeremy for this one.
When I was a lad, I was taught that there were five continents: Africa, America, Asia, Australia and Europe. But that proved to be at least
partially because of where I learnt. Even for a 6-year-old it was clear to me that Asia and
Europe had no clear boundary, while North and South America were clearly defined (and, of
course, really separated by the Panama Canal).
But now, at least in English, the term America has developed a new meaning: the name of that
nameless country, the United States of America. And that's why my link to America above leads to the
country, not the continent. That's not the case in other countries: On Wikipedia, French
Amérique, German
Amerika, Italian America and Spanish América all describe the (double)
continent.
So what's an American? For me, it has always been an inhabitant of America. But now the
meaning has changed, as the Oxford English
Dictionary states:
America, the name of a land mass of the Western hemisphere, consisting of the two
continents of North and South America, joined by the Isthmus of Panama; frequently used
also as the name of the United States of America;
American Originally: a native or inhabitant of America, esp. of the British
colonies in North America, of European descent (now historical). Now chiefly: a native or
citizen of the United States.
Now admittedly the USA has a problem that it has no real distinctive name. I've already
mentioned the ambiguity of “America”. And “United States”? They're not even the only set
of United States in North America! Directly to the south are the United Mexican States
(officially Estados
Unidos Mexicanos). So there is a problem, and I follow the German usage of referring
to the inhabitants of the country as US Americans. In Spanish they have their own
terminology: estadounidense,
according to the Diccionario de la lengua española of the Real Academia Española.
Are you a US American? Then throw it away. Otherwise it should be fine.
Why the difference? Beats me, but ask any US American and they’ll tell you to throw it
away.
That was years ago, but today an RW Smythe, by implication a said US American, took offence
to my use of “US American”. Why? It's a standard term. And somehow he got Quora to delete
a comment because it constituted “hate speech”.
What should I do? In no way did I intend any “hate”, but Quora is a little silly in that
respect. What it does suggest, though, is that RW Smythe reported it.
I know why I don't want anything more to do with Quora.
As expected, Troy Addicoat didn't show yesterday. Called him up and discovered that he's on
a big job that will take several days, but we're next on his list, so we can expect him to
be here round Wednesday next week. He'll contact me on Tuesday to let me know more. I'll
believe it when it happens.
The one at the back is in a pot 1.2 m high, and it's not clear how we can transport it, if
at all. The other one, apparently a “Chantilly lace” cultivar (but presumably not “whipped
cream”) looks like a possibility. I'll take a look tomorrow.
We're planning a choucroute garnie (Sauerkraut dish) for the weekend. It needs different kinds of preserved meat. From the
current recipe:
quantity
ingredient
step
100 g
smoked pork fat (without meat), in 5mm slices
1
250 g
Kassler
1
300 g
Smoked sausage, such as Debreziner or Rookwurst
1
250 g
smoked pork belly
1
200 g
Grilling sausage
1
3
“Leverknepfle”
1
The pork fat and Leverknepfle are OK: we have them already in the freezer. And the others?
Yvonne was able to find Rookwurst in town (not a foregone
conclusion), and also pork belly. Kassler? Hasn't been seen in these parts for years. How about thick slices of
bacon? Yes, found some, but only 50/50 with thin slices. Grilling sausage? Only with
gravy (huh?) and fennel.
OK, a search in the freezer brought some thick bacon slices to light; maybe I should keep a
larger stockpile. And the sausages? What's the problem here? Finally she found some
alleged Cumberland
sausages “generously seasoned with sage, pepper and nutmeg”, and about the same form
factor as our Bratwurst. OK, that would
be interesting to try, so she brought some back, and we ate them this evening. Basically,
they're bratwurst with different seasoning, and at least they have natural gut casings, but
somehow they brown differently:
The meat composition must also be quite different, and there seems to be a fair amount of
egg in them too: they're much firmer, almost unpleasantly so. They won't do as a substitute
for bratwurst, but in fact they could be just what we're looking for for the choucroute.
Phone call from Wayne from Barclays this morning just as I was getting out of
the shower. Only got noise, apparently a race condition between answering and him being
diverted to my voice mail. He wanted the model number of the freezer, something that I
hadn't been able to find last month. But with his guidance, I found it:
He showed up an hour or so later and took a look at the freezer. Contrary to my
expectations, he didn't need to move it. The whole defrosting mechanism is on the inside of
the freezer, behind a cover that I hadn't paid attention to before:
He wasn't sure that that was the right place, but it appears to have been like that since it
was made. We could, of course, have compared with one of the other freezers, but that would
have been a lot of effort.
In the end he couldn't find anything wrong. Could it just have been the bags? A simple
solution to what ended up costing $276, one of the highest domestic equipment bills I have
ever had. Left the freezer running all day with a thermometer in the top shelf, but it
didn't have any recording ability. So far all looks good, and the thing no longer beeps
when we open the door.
Not the best in the world. The door prevented me from getting a photo from directly in
front of the label, but like any digital photo, I can reprocess it. And like I am, I also
took a photo with a Real Camera. Here the results. First, the out-of-camera images:
It should be clear which column is the phone and which is the camera. And yes, for
identification purposes the phone is more than satisfactory.
Of course, processing is only half the story. Then I needed to send it to Wayne. And once
again I had difficulties. Off to Google for android send photo and came up
with millions of hits. Google's favourit was Android: Send
Picture in Email or Text Message, which seemed idea. But it wants a + icon.
There was none.
tap and hold on the Photo that you would like to send. You will see a check mark appearing
on the photo.
Nope. No check mark.
Clearly Google is no help. Much messing around and found that if I just tap (and don't
hold), it is reduced in size and a number of symbols appears below it:
What do they mean? I recognize the heart and the cooking pot. The one on the left could be
an exploding pressure cooker, the one on the right a Swiss power point. By trial and error
I found that if I select the exploding pressure cooker, I got another display with a
too-wide row of icons.
What are they for? Too polite to say, of course: after all, this isAndroid. But selecting
“Messages” finally allowed me to send it.
What's wrong with this picture (apart from groggy being obtuse, of course)? The user
interface is completely obscure, it has clearly changed since the web pages I found were
written, and the only way to navigate it is by trial and error. Is no effort being made to
unify the interfaces?
ALDI had Bluetooth “TRUE WIRELESS” earbuds (the
mind boggles) on special yesterday, and by chance Yvonne was
able to find some, which bore no resemblance in appearance to the advertisements. Tried
them out today. Good news: they work, and the sound quality appears OK, though I haven't
tried speaking to them. The bad news: I can't get them to stay in my ears, and every time I
try to adjust them, I end up turning off the sound source. I hadn't expected that.
And of course the instructions were inaccurate and vague. Sadly, I had expected
that.
Into town today, mainly for an eye test, but first dropped in and picked up one of the
maples that Yvonne looked at yesterday, the “Chantilly lace”.
Here it is after unloading from the car:
To Specsavers today for an eye test,
though I only had one 18 months ago. Special treatment for diabetics.
And an ear test. I've had one of those before too, and it seems completely useless. Sit in
front of an iPad and press a green
surface when you hear a tone. Four frequencies (as it proved, 500 Hz, 1 kHz, 2 kHz and 4
kHz), three warbling tones with descending volume, and of course one set for each ear.
How do they estimate the relative levels? And why is my left ear worse than my right ear?
I heard all the tones. The person who performed the test (Amy) didn't know either. She
couldn't even tell me what the frequencies were.
The eye test confirmed that nothing had changed since last time. Nothing to be done, not even a free set of reading glasses.
Got back from town just in time to be able to cook the shepherd's pie that I had already put off once.
But all sorts of things were against me. My carefully recorded quantities were all over the
place. I had written:
I've decided that there should be 1.2 g and 1.5 g of meat per cm² of dish, so for the 300
g in the recipe I would need a dish between 200 cm² and 250 cm² in size.
OK, I had 360 g of meat (1.2×), so that corresponded to 240 to 320 cm². Quickly calculate
the area of an ellipse and decide that the red oval one would have 276 cm², just what I was
looking for. But it was far too little! In the end I took a larger pot (31 × 21 cm, 511
cm²), and it was about right. That's up to double what I wrote!
Then the question of gravy. I had some left over, and I had written “80% of the weight of
the meat”, in this case 288 g. So I carefully prepared the rest. And it was far too
little! More gravy, and I ended up using 535 g, close enough to 1.5× as much as the meat!
And then the mashed potato. 160% of the meat, 650 g. How do I make that? It's this
horrible Deb stuff, about which I have
ranted at length last year. The instructions don't give quantities—in fact, the packaging doesn't
even state the weight of its contents. What we have is this table, which isn't even
consistent with itself:
In the end I decided to weigh the contents (appear to be 360 g, after subtracting a guess of
the weight of the packaging which proved to be close enough; the weight of the packaging is
9 g) and extrapolate from the “4 serves” and use 140 g, with 510 g of water for a total of
650 g of mash. That proved wrong; the correct value would have been about 735 g. But no
matter; it was still far too little. So my own miscalculations ganged up with Deb's
inaccuracies, and we ended up with about 35% to 50% too little mash:
Why do I keep this diary? On occasion, such as today, I spend just about the whole day
writing it, and even then I didn't get round to updating the recipes.
And that's not really what this diary is about. Should I be less verbose in keeping my
diary? I've considered it, but I don't think so.
The Swifts next door have two new puppies, Denzel and Mandy. They're both tiny, Mandy even
smaller than Denzel, not only because they're puppies (after all, ours are also only 15
months old), but they get on well with Larissa and Lena:
We don't seem to eat as much Sauerkraut as we once did. We've had a little over 1.5 kg of it in the pantry for I
don't know how long. Time for a choucroute
garnie.
The oldest package was from Leuchtenberg (whose insecure URL suggests that they're an association, not a company):
In any case, one of the jars I also have expired in 2020 (they don't bother to put a date),
and my guess is that this stuff expired 5 years or more ago, something confirmed when I
opened it:
The jar behind the pot is one of the other Sauerkrauts. The colour of this one was so
different that I tasted it to be sure that it was still good. It's not the colour itself:
the Sauerkraut darkens considerably during cooking, so that by the time I was done it looked
like this:
And how was it? It tasted good, but I'm still considering. The Sauerkraut (but not the
meat) gets cooked for a total of about 3 hours, and it was almost falling apart. And I
think it needed more potato (something that I have incorporated in the recipe).
What does that mean? The last column (W1, grid power) gives the clue: we were using
up to 12.3 kW, more than the rating of the inverter (11.5 kW), which is coincidentally also
the rating of the grid power connection. So it seems that the inverter pulled the safety
cord and waited until the usage dropped below maximum and stayed that way for 15 s. It's a
good thing we didn't trip the main switch in that time.
It's been 4 days since Wayne came to repair the freezer and couldn't find anything except for a
plastic bag blocking the entry to the cooling coil. And since then it has worked fine. So
clearly it was the plastic bag. I won't make that mistake again. Today I finally moved all
the stuff back from the spare freezer.
June solstice today, time for the monthly garden photos.
There's nothing special to note in the winter, except that autumn meets spring. On the
autumn side we still have a number of roses, though they still need more attention:
On the other hand, spring flowers are still barely recognizable. The first couple of
snowflakes are barely
flowering, so little that I didn't see them the first time round:
The trees in the east garden are not doing spectacularly well, but they don't seem to be
dying. I was concerned about the long-suffering Ginkgo biloba, which we transplanted
a few months back. It's not looking good, but it is producing buds:
I've been suspecting for some time that the problem isn't the cold, but the wetness. That
could also apply to the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max”. Here this time last year (first two images), in
October and now (last two images)::
The lid of the pit is visible about halfway down on the left, next to the Arum. Much would trickle back, but with
enough effort we might keep things dryer.
The lime tree is bearing more and more fruit, and it's still flowering, but it's clearly not
happy:
It might be suffering from the same problem. In this case, though, there is already an
extraction pump right next to it. And since it doesn't look very happy in the summer
either, this might be a different problem.
Troy Addicoat was due to erect the shed today, and to call me by yesterday if he couldn't
make it. Neither happened.
Called him in the morning, and he said that he would call back in 5 minutes. He didn't.
Over the course of the day I tried several times, only getting voice mail. Finally I sent
him an SMS threatening—once again—legal action
Yvonne back from shopping and wanted to know why her phone no
longer knew who I was. Instead of displaying my name and image, it just showed the phone
number.
Further investigation showed that almost, but not quite, all of her contacts had
disappeared. Checked on a real computer and discovered the same thing: somehow they were
just plain gone.
How can that happen? Yes, of course it's possible to delete contacts, but Yvonne doesn't
know how to do that, and I can't see her accidentally deleting 50 or so contacts. Went into
settings and discovered that it's possible to restore older versions of the contacts list,
and yesterday's seem to be OK. But what causes that?
To be safe, got her to change her Google password, though I don't really think that it was a
breakin.
And there was an answer that had been downvoted, pointing to this page. It seems
that there were dozens of still cameras using 35 mm film in the early part of the last
century. I need to spend more time looking at it.
What a useless site Quora has become! Why can people just downvote useful information like
that?
Finished off Sunday's choucroute today. Yes, definitely too little potato. Also too little
sauerkraut. And I already used much less than any recipe recommends. More modifications to
the recipe.
I am sorry but were we are working has not got A lot of service and can't Cole I will call
you tomorrow morning
Where's the email copy? I didn't see one. Yet another reliability issue with these
damned Android “devices”. Called him up, and it he tells me that the weather has not been in his
favour, and now it looks like it'll be the end of next week at the earliest before he can do
our job. He didn't take me up on the offer of equipment hire. I suppose that's a good
sign, though I'm reasonably sure that he's quoting an overly optimistic time. Still, the
real deadline was for the Anke Hawke clinic, which, barring further catastrophes, will start
tomorrow. Since he can't make that, a few more days won't make much difference.
While walking the dogs, Larissa found
a severed lamb leg in Spearys Road. Not quite the cut of meat you associate with roast
lamb, but still a lamb leg. She dropped it, Lena grabbed it and took it home with her:
“You have mail” slip from Australia Post in the letter box today. Finally the Kiev 3a has arrived
from, well, Kyiv. Off to the post
office to pick it up and unpacked it.
It's really in good condition, particularly the case:
And that proved to be more of an issue than I thought. I had difficulty getting it to
focus, and I wasn't able to find the shutter dial without a Google search. And even then,
it seems that there are no instruction manuals for this model to be found on the web. I
found an instruction manual for the Zeiss Contax IIIa, which seems to
be very different from the Zeiss/Kiev III, which were both almost identical to my camera.
And strangely the Zeiss Contax IIIa has a considerably smaller rangefinder base. This photo
is from the page above, but they make it almost impossible to link to it:
The shutter is set from the wind knob (and yes, it winds in the same direction as every
other 35 mm camera except the Exakta, from left to right). But unlike most other cameras, there's no separate shutter speed
dial: it's under the wind knob, barely visible:
To set the speed, you lift the knob and turn it so that the dot matches the fixed shutter
speed dial below.
And for some reason there's a lock for the lens, keeping focus at infinity. There's also a
wheel near the shutter release for focusing. A whole lot of interesting ideas that somehow
didn't survive.
Apart from that, it's interesting to compare the cameras. It looks bulky, and to an extent
it is. But what surprises me is the size of the lens. It's a Юпитер-8 (Jupiter-8) 5 cm f/2 lens,
basically a rebadged Sonnar, but
it's so small. Here next to the 5 cm f/3.5 Fed on the Fed:
One of the interesting things about this camera is the extremely wide rangefinder base. And
it makes itself felt. Compared to the Fed/Leica, focusing is much more precise. It's
strange that the Zeiss Contax IIIa reduced the base. I wonder why.
And the exposure meter? It seems to work. Here with the cover closed and then open:
But in bright sunlight it goes off the scale. Is there some range switch somewhere? And
how do you interpret the indication? The rewind button has something like a calculator on
it:
“ГОСТ” (GOST) is the old
Soviet film speed measurement system, and clearly there are apertures and shutter speeds
underneath. They can be turned relative to each other, but I don't see any relationship
with the meter readings. None of this is made any easier by the very small markings on a
reflective background.
Still, it's interesting to see the amount of technological innovation that went into this
camera. Yes, it was made in 1957 (the first 2 digits of the serial number show that), but
the design goes back to the 1936 Contax III; the only significant difference is the flash
synchronization (1/25 s!).
I've changed the pathname for obvious reasons, but it was really that simple. That's so
different from all the pain I've had with git in the past. Of course, it wasn't all
that simple. I've already established that for a normal commit to a repository I need two
steps, first commit, then push. But in this case, I also needed an add, though the file
already existed. I wish I understood this program.
We've been planning a horse clinic with Anke Hawke for over a year, but COVID-19 and other
catastrophes kept postponing it. Last time (Friday, 13 May 2022) Anke was on the way to the airport when she heard
that the flight had been canceled. This weekend it should finally happen. And then
Yvonne got a Facebook message: flight delayed. Only 1½ hours, and then she really did arrive.
But as she put it on arrival, she understands why I haven't flown for 16 years.
And why the delay? This news item makes it clear that it's nation-wide, because of the school holidays
and higher passenger numbers, something that clearly nobody expected.
Last month Leitz (now called Leica camera) held an auction of
old cameras. They expected to get a lot of money for this camera:
It's not much of a camera. No rangefinder, very limited range of shutter speeds, fixed 50
mm f/3.5 lens. But it was Oskar
Barnack's personal camera, and they expected to get round € 3 million for it.
It sold for € 14.4 million:
Yes, was the camera responsible for the quality of the photos? No, of course not. It was
Chris. With the same camera I wouldn't have achieved anything of note. But I was left
wondering: why Leica M6? What does it have that the more legendary Leica M3 doesn't have? In fact, what does
it have that my Kiev 3a or my Nikon FM2 don't have?
Camera
Contax III
Leica M3
Nikon FM2
Leica M6
Introduced
1936
1954
1982
1984
Shutter
metal,
cloth,
metal,
cloth,
vertical
horizontal
vertical
horizontal
Top shutter speed
1/1250
1/1000
1/4000
1/1000
Standard lens
f/1.5
f/2
f/1.4
f/2
Flash sync (s)
none (1/25)
1/50
1/250
1/50
Meter
uncoupled
none
coupled
coupled
So the Leicas have worse specs than the Nikon, and even mainly worse than the 1936 Contax
III. The only obvious advantage of the M6 over the M3 is the presence of a light meter.
But a quick search of eBay shows that the
cheapest used M6 and f/2 Summicron is on offer for US $4,300, while you can get a Nikon FM2 with f/1.4 lens
for $300. I really don't understand.
Contax or Kiev? There's not much difference except the year of manufacture. The biggest
difference is the flash sync on the Kiev 3a, but I preferred to mention how old the design
is.
More fun with Yvonne's mobile telephone today. Since
Wednesday location tracking no longer worked. Why? On checking, discovered that the
Mendhak GPS logger also didn't receive any data.
Much messing around, including getting Yvonne to log in to Google again, since she had
changed her password on Wednesday. It took her hardly more than five minutes: isn't it helpful to display
the password while you're typing it in?
But that didn't help either. Then the Microsoft solution occurred to me: reboot! And how
about that, that did it. But while I was messing around, I discovered that a software
(“security”) update was available. OK, install. And of course it was available for all
three phones. Well over 1 GB for each. A good thing that the data price has dropped.
Then the actual update. “Don't try to reboot now. It won't work, ever again”. And it
started counting up by percent, with two digits after the decimal point. And then it hung
at 4.99%! What do I do? I can't reboot. So I waited. After several minutes, it suddenly
jumped to something like 69.23% and then continued. The behaviour was the same on all three
phones, always hanging at 4.99%. Why do they even bother with the percentages if their
reporting is so sloppy?
Security upgrade? Maybe. But they've changed the user interface, even some backgrounds.
But then, I suppose that's modern. I just need to get used to the bloody thing all over
again.
77 ND 24-06-2022 To acade@lem ( 961) Academia.edu ND People in 2 countries have read your papers
Two whole countries! Doubtless Paraguay and Uzbekistan. Given that I communicate on a daily basis with people in at least 10 countries, what
kind of incentive can that be? And it rather points to the mindset of people who write this
kind of nonsense.
Yvonne and Anke up at the crack of dawn for a riding lesson,
while I tried to sleep on. Finally I had to give up as Larissa made a grunting noise outside my
bedroom.
But she was nowhere to be seen. Yvonne had left the laundry door a crack open, and Lara had
managed to slip in:
Like Leonid before her, she had managed to
bite so hard into her morning bone that it got stuck in her jaw. I had to dislodge it and
give it back to finish eating it.
Camera collection: from the sublime to the ridiculous
I'm rather pleased with my last two camera acquisitions, particularly the Kiev 3a. But there's
more. Yesterday I received notification of the arrival of a the Diaxette that I had
bought on eBay over the weekend, so off to
Napoleons to pick it
up.
The very first camera model I ever used was a Diaxette, made by
Voss in Ulm. I must have received
it some time in 1963, but I didn't note it in my diary. The first photos I took with it
were in April 1964:
It differs in a number of ways from the other cameras in my collection. It is the only one
with a leaf shutter, the only one with a fixed lens, and the only one with no focus
assistance whatsoever. It's really a bare-bones camera: lens, aperture, shutter. About the
only thing it has that some of my others don't is flash sync. And yet I took some good
photos with it in the 16 months I used it, including these photos that have been very
popular:
It has a Pronto shutter with speeds of only 1/25, 1/50, 1/100 and 1/200, and a 45 mm f/2.8
Steinheil Cassar lens, one of
the worst I know: it's only a triplet, and at full aperture it's very soft in the corners:
Until I bought this camera, I used a photo by Cees-Jan de Hoog on my camera collection page:
And how about that, the (lens?) serial numbers are almost the same: 900139 and 900142,
though Cees-Jan's camera has a Prontor-S shutter with 1/300 s top shutter speed.
Lens serial numbers? Maybe they're the camera serial number, which is pretty much the same
for a fixed-lens camera. Certainly I can't find any other serial number on the camera.
While messing around with Yvonne's phone, checked details of
the mendhak GPS Logger. The author is not happy with Google:
Just yesterday GPSLogger has again been unpublished from the Play Store (for the nth time,
as usual without warning)...
In the past I've spent effort in getting the app reinstated, however I can't do that any
longer; I no longer have the motivation and energy to support GPSLogger development and to
deal with the Play Store's moving goalposts...
The core of the issue (why it gets removed) has been that GPSLogger supports a lot of
older devices and frameworks, whereas the Play Store is always trying to get everyone onto
the latest versions.
My sympathies are with mendhak. But somehow there are too many people complaining about
Google lately.
Today was the last day of the Anke Hawke clinic. Somehow it was lower-key than usual. In
the past Yvonne spent most of her time there (at Chris
Bahlo's place), but this time she hardly went there at all, though she did find time to take
83 photos, but even that's a far cry from the hundreds she used to take. The weather didn't
help: she had wanted Anke to give her lessons at our place (so as not to float Carlotta),
but it rained most of the day.
As usual we had a dinner at our place, once again paella valenciana. That found many friends.
I had expected to have about half the paellera left over, but in fact there was just enough left to dispel the concern that I hadn't cooked
enough:
That also gives an indication of how to adjust the proportions next time: fewer chicken
thighs, more seafood.
Table discussion was interesting: we had a good collection of people from related
disciplines sitting next to each other: Anke (horsewoman), Pene Kirk (vet) and Chris' sister
Melanie (geneticist), and
they had quite a lively discussion, which for some reason included supernumary ribs. Melanie
mentioned a gene with a name so long that I have forgotten it, and there seem to be no
references to it on the web.
Unfortunately both Yvonne and I were tired. I faded round 21:00, and Yvonne threw the
guests out round 22:00. I fear that was too early for all of them. Maybe we're getting too
old for this sort of thing.
Since the “security updates” that I performed last week I've had nothing but trouble with my phones. Well, it seems to go back
further than that; on WednesdayYvonne's contacts disappeared.
A lot of the issues seem related to GPS: online tracking no longer works. Still more messing around with fossil, Yvonne's
phone. When I started Google Maps, it presented a message that I hadn't seen before, and of
which it was obviously so ashamed that it refused the screenshot. Something like “Tracking
is broken. Fix?”. OK, fix. And how about that, then it worked! But why was it broken?
How was it broken? How I hate Android!
As if that wasn't enough, I was misled by this message, which has appeared a couple of
times:
But on searching, I discovered that the phone has 64 GB of memory, and only 27 GB (close
enough, I suppose) are in use. What's the message about? Ha ha, only joking. It's an
advertisement for maintenance software. Ugh!
Walking down Grassy Gully Road, I noted that the gate for the state road going north was
open. It's been a while (in fact, I think it has been almost exactly five years) since we went down that way.
But by then we were half-way through, so we found another way out, over a barbed wire fence
over which we had to lift the dogs. Here from the “before” and “after” sides:
How far did we walk today? Yvonne thought that it was about
5 km, but I knew that it was 2.4 km because we've been there before. But I had my phone
with me, so I checked my Google timeline:
