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| Greg's diary |
| March 2025 |
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| Saturday, 1 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 1 March 2025 |
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Birthday dishes
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne's birthday today, and she had asked for sweet and sour fish for dinner. And while we're at it, why not asparagus and prawns?
Sweet and sour fish used to be a really difficult dish for me, but it has got so much easier. So much, in fact, that I underestimated the time it takes, and I started at least 20 minutes too late. I should really give myself an hour for the dish. This time I cut the fish into larger pieces, battered them more than usual and deep fried them. And I used some newly found Chinkiang vinegar, which I thought came from Xinjiang, but in fact comes from Zhenjiang. That, too, seems to have improved it. Yvonne found the dish as a whole better than previously.
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More Android pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been using computers of some form or another in the kitchen for well over a quarter of a century, but lately I've been using my Android mobile phone. It's not a good substitute. Today I had two recipes, and it was beyond me to switch between the two. And basically a phone is just too small. I should use the TV in the lounge room instead.
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No mail!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Today I managed to cut down the contents of my mail inbox to only 5 messages, probably the least I have had in years.
But it stayed that way for hours on end. Before going to bed, checked what was going on on the external server, and found:
Feb 28 18:33:12 lax named[13618]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.19#53 resolving corvus.UNITELECOM.COM.BR/AAAA: empty question section
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: resolver.c:1958: INSIST(((fctx->validators).head == ((void *)0))) failed, back trace
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #0 0x2bc830 in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #1 0x498aea in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #2 0x3ef8da in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #3 0x3ed71b in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #4 0x3eef55 in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #5 0x4b54ad in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #6 0x800a61776 in ??
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: exiting (due to assertion failure)
Feb 28 18:33:26 lax kernel: pid 13618 (named), uid 53: exited on signal 6
The name server had died! I've never seen that before. And it had taken me nearly 18 hours to find out! After I restarted it, things came back to normal again, but why did it die?
| Sunday, 2 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 2 March 2025 |
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Mona
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Topic: animals | Link here |
For reasons I don't understand, Mona likes to chew on towels:
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That one has been destroyed, so we're leaving it for her for further use.
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Another dead named!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
named on www.lemis.com has crashed again! The backtrace is the same, but this time I noticed lots of this:
Mar 2 01:16:32 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving ORION.UNITELECOM.COM.BR/AAAA: empty question section
Mar 2 01:16:34 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving corvus.unitelecom.com.br/AAAA: empty question section
Mar 2 01:16:36 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving orion.unitelecom.com.br/AAAA: empty question section
They were there yesterday too. Is this some kind of attack? It's always from 189.36.144.18 or 189.36.144.19, and the request is also always one of very few invalid requests. What should I do? Block them? Fix my named?
Sometimes I wonder if it's worth the trouble running my own server.
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A historic moment?
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
What's going on in the world? The USA and Israel are destroying what's left of Gaza, Donald Trump is trying to buy what's left of Ukraine, and his naive vice-president tries to lecture Zelensky about diplomacy. It seems that they're not listening to each other:
More and more conspiracy theories are popping up about Trump being a Soviet or Russian “asset”. That's not surprising, though if there's anything of that nature, my money would be on Putain having compromising material about Trump. But what's the truth? And where do we go from here?
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The right roast chicken?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Roast chicken for dinner tonight, something that I've found difficult to do right. Today it seemed to work: 1.6 kg chicken at room temperature (18°), oven at 180°, start with foil on the breast. At 50° (after 46 minutes) remove the foil. At 60° (after 55 minutes) spread oil and paprika powder on the skin. Finished after 75 minutes (47 minutes per kilogram):
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| Monday, 3 March 2025 | Dereel → Melbourne → Dereel | Images for 3 March 2025 |
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Melbourne again
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Topic: health, general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Off to Melbourne this morning to take Yvonne for her next ablation. How I hate Melbourne, especially the traffic. Finally got there—it looks very different from the Melbourne Private Hospital, a real entrance, including drop-off parking spaces.
From there I had planned to go on to the Jade Kingdom for some KL Hokkien Mee. But Google Maps told me that they “may” be closed today. And so they are. They only open from Thursday to Sunday, and only for a total of 6 hours a day. I've never seen a restaurant that was open for such a short period of time. So I turned around and went back home.
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More Google Maps fun
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
How long does it take to get from here to Cabrini Health in Malvern to arrive at 11:15? That depends on whom you ask. Ask Google Maps and it will tell you 2 hours. Or ask the mobile phone version and it will tell you something else.
In the end we left at 8:53, mainly because we were ready. and were rewarded with an estimated arrival time of 10:53. But that gradually changed as we went through some of the worst traffic I've been in in a while, and finally we arrived at 11:03, a total of 2 hours, 10 minutes, still a couple of minutes ahead of Google's final estimate.
Going back home was almost exactly the reverse. Suddenly the traffic had cleared up, and where we had crawled on the way to the hospital, I was able to drive at up to 40 km/h. In the end I got back at 13:55, only 1 hours and 40 minutes, and only 4 hours and 2 minutes after leaving.
Part of this might have been due to another re-routing on the way home. Instead of going through the outskirts of Geelong, I was taken cross country, just like last time. Why only on the way home? The route appeared to be the same, but this time I was given an alternative route with “about the same arrival time”. Took that, and to my surprise arrived on the Midland Highway just south of Bannockburn. Last time I had recognized the road without thinking about it. This time I was surprised to find where I was after having driven several kilometres down the well-known road south of Bannockburn.
Of course, things might have been even faster if I hadn't ended up behind somebody moving house:
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No hope of getting past that, and I followed him from Teesdale to Shelford, after which he mercifully turned off the main road.
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After the “procedure”
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
For some reason I was filled with dread this afternoon about the possibility that Yvonne would not survive her ablation. Fortunately she did, and she called me at 19:18 after what appeared to have been a particularly gruelling operation. The positive impression that Cabrini Health had made didn't last long. They had not arranged for a room for her, and she ended up in a 4 patient room with people who didn't stop talking the whole time she was there, a nurse tried four times to put in a catheter before getting a head nurse to do it, and somebody had cut her lip during the operation. But the operation was a success, so she'll be back tomorrow.
| Tuesday, 4 March 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 4 March 2025 |
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Power outage
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Topic: general | Link here |
Another planned grid power outage today, from 9:04 to 14:38. The warning made it almost a non-event: I had prepared by charging the battery, and the sun was shining. The computers all managed to survive the power transition, and the battery state of charge didn't drop below 92%.
Only two devices failed: the bedside clocks in our bedrooms. Why? I've seen this again and again.
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Yvonne returns
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Topic: health | Link here |
Yvonne was discharged from hospital this morning and returned
at midday. The taxi to Spencer Street
Southern Cross Station cost $50! And that after Google Gemini had estimated $25, going to some detail.
Bad Gemini!
She was dismissed by Professor Peter Kistler, who didn't have time to talk to me on the phone, but promised a summary by email. It seems that he had found two further trigger sources for atrial fibrillation, but had only ablated one. Under those circumstances I would have asked why, but Yvonne didn't. He is relatively confident that it won't flare up, but she is to take 25 mg of flecainide twice a day at least until her next appointment in June. Somehow I have a lot of questions that need answering.
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Bank Australia pain
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
It's hay time again, and Yvonne wants to collect a large sum (far too large!) of cash to pay for it. We're in the process of moving all our local banking to Bank Australia, so I called up to ask if they would have that much money available at the branch. So, once I finally found the number, I called up the phone enquiries at +61-3-9854-4666 and asked.
Simple question, right? And nothing that would raise any security concerns (it wasn't that much money, so there's no concern that I might be planning a bank robbery). It took me 30 minutes! They wanted my account number (why?) and password (how? It's designed to be pasted into a web form).
That was bad enough, but there was no way past it. Read it out, and on the third attempt Daniel (a woman, I think) got it almost right. But it contains special characters, and she wasn't able to enter them (why not?). No way past it, perform a full identity check. Full name, date of birth, address, the usual things. And then driver license number. But not just the number, the tiny, illegible number on the back that I didn't even know about. And it was really illegible. Instead I had to give her the Medicare card number, the one that ends in a 6 or maybe a b. And after I gave all that, she called me back on my mobile phone, refusing to tell me the number of the one they had recorded (which proved to be correct).
Then she did a thing that she called Equifax to establish my identity by asking me multiple choice questions:
So: four questions, two of each had the same answer. One of them was ambiguous. All could be answered from my web site.
So, finally I was able to get my phone password, which reflected my feeling after going through this ordeal. They also stored a voice imprint, which might make more sense. And yes, the Ballarat branch could arrange the money.
“Arrange”? What does that mean? I go into the branch, and they tell me to come back in a week? No, after pointed asking, she confirmed that I could pick up the cash when I went there. I just needed to tell her what I needed the money for (why?).
What a pain! Did I make a mistake by choosing Bank Australia? At the very least we have these problems:
On the positive side, I gave them a password to use with phone calls, and she registered it without surprise.
So: do I stay with Bank Australia? I have had pain with the other two banks I have had. How could they could improve things?
| Wednesday, 5 March 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 5 March 2025 |
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Thai Basil!
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Topic: gardening, food and drink | Link here |
The Thai basil that I planted in mid-December didn't exactly flourish:
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So last week I planted some more. The results are already visible:
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That's more like what I had expected, but clearly I had planted too many seeds. I'll have to see if I can separate them. But it's interesting to look more carefully: there are seedlings on the left and the top right, but not bottom right. Why? Three different kinds of seeds. The ones on the left are a new packet that I received a couple of weeks ago, and on the right there are the remains of the packet that I received in December, and also of some which are about 5 years old. Only one of these batches has germinated. But which?
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Shopping
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Topic: general | Link here |
Yvonne is recovering well from her latest ablation, but she's not allowed to drive a car for a few days, so I had to do the shopping today. Surprisingly, everything seemed to work, and I was done relatively quickly.
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Bank Australia: the other shoe
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Topic: general, technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
Into Bank Australia branch to pick up my cash, as painfully prepared yesterday. The preparation had one good thing: I was asked for my password! If I hadn't done it yesterday, I would have had to go through the whole rigmarole in the branch. And if it's necessary, why didn't they set one up when I signed up? Interestingly, the person at the other teller was being subjected to the same silly Equifax questions. I wonder if this is some new measure that they have imposed on their customers.
Amanda, the teller, also asked me—again!—about the purpose of the withdrawal. When asked, she explained that it was to help prevent scams. I suppose that's a good intention, though I don't know how successful it would be. Just by chance last night we watched “A little faith”, an episode of “Blue Heelers”, about a scam. While it was fiction, it gave cause for thought. People being scammed seldom admit it even to friends.
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In a BIND
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
For a couple of days I've been trying to get rid of these broken DNS requests on www.lemis.com:
Mar 2 01:16:32 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving ORION.UNITELECOM.COM.BR/AAAA: empty question section
Mar 2 01:16:34 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving corvus.unitelecom.com.br/AAAA: empty question section
Asking Google Gemini came up with an overly complicated update to named.conf, and it also didn't work: it blocked all requests. Later John Marshall on IRC came up with what seems to be correct:
--- named.conf 2021/12/14 04:01:45 1.8
+++ named.conf 2025/03/05 00:56:06
@@ -7,15 +7,22 @@
unix "/var/run/ndc" perm 0600 owner 0 group 0; // the default
};
+acl blocked_ips {
+ 189.36.144.18;
+ 189.36.144.19;
+};
+
options {
directory "/usr/local/etc/namedb";
resolver-query-timeout 30;
+ allow-query { !blocked_ips; any; };
};
The difference was the keyword any. But somehow it didn't work, at least not at first. Set logging? By that time it had stopped, though I suspect it had just gone into hiding. Mañana.
| Thursday, 6 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 6 March 2025 |
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Cats and dogs
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Topic: animals | Link here |
It seems that Mona and Bruno have made friends with Priscilla, the stuffed dog:
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Fried eggs benedict
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
A slight lapse of attention today led to this:
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The egg should have been poached, of course. Put on the “Benedict” sauce anyway?
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No, it doesn't really work.
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Processing old photos
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
While looking for a photo recently I discovered that some were missing. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Made lists of the photo directories (Photo1) and the web directories (Photo2) and discovered:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/7) ~ 700 -> wc -l /var/tmp/Photo?
6723 /var/tmp/Photo1
6494 /var/tmp/Photo2
229 missing directories on the web! Today I did a bit of searching and found that a lot were not real photo directories, and some, especially the ones from the last millennium, contained duplicates: I had created a directory with a random date, put the photos in there, and then moved them to a directory with a more plausible date as I entered my diaries of the time.
Still, I did find a number of photos that I had never entered before, in particular of Yvonne taken some time in 1970, and a number of pages on the east coast of Australia in January 1978. And then this page, taken in June 1997. Where was it? Clearly there are photos from Beijing, but also from Hong Kong. Many are easy to identify, but not all. How can I tell them apart? Simple: in Beijing traffic is on the right, in Hong Kong on the left.
But it's a lot of work, and I have a feeling I'm still missing something. And I only made it (roughly) until the turn of the millennium.
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The echidna returns
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Walking the dogs today, found an echidna at the house gate, in exactly the same place as we found one last month.
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Presumably it's the same animal, and it lives nearby.
| Friday, 7 March 2025 | Dereel | |
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A new deep fryer?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
We have two deep fryers. The larger one, from Breville, is for relatively fresh fat, and the smaller el-cheapo one is for fat that has passed its prime but is still useful for food that dirties the fat.
But the el-cheapo fryer has an el-cheapo thermostat, one that is maybe deteriorating. The result is that I can't rely on the temperature within 30°, and as a result the fat is sometimes too cool and sometimes overheats and deteriorates very quickly. The lack of a temperature display doesn't help.
OK, what does a new fryer cost? Preferably one with a digital thermostat, like the Breville device. Off looking and discovered to my surprise that they're quite expensive—clearly “air fryers” are all the rage now—and the only model with a digital thermostat is the “SmartFryer” (their italics) from Breville, clearly a newer version of the one I already have. And they cost round $250! Cheaper ones are available starting round $60, but not the quality I'm looking for. The Breville does have some advantages: compatible components, so presumably I can move the fat in the basin from one device to the other, and of course basket compatibility. But do I want to spend $250 on that?
OK, read the instructions. Where? Go to https://www.breville.com/, work around the intrusive exhortation to a “quiz” for baristas, search for “deep fryer”. No hits, 4 “inspirations”, all neither relevant nor inspiring. After a reasonable amount of searching, I decided that Breville must be ashamed of the device.
Following from a sales page I found the link https://breville-aem-assets.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/PROD/Breville/Instruction+Manuals/BDF500_ANZ_IB_2021.pdf, which gave me:
<Error>
<Code>NoSuchBucket</Code>
<Message>The specified bucket does not exist</Message>
<BucketName>breville-aem-assets</BucketName>
<RequestId>TQBD5BQFDAF2Y26F</RequestId>
<HostId>
ThWhFjK4vDwFVMaGaT0FbmbEGmBk/M0Skhsw5Kgm6KhrpLllh4xfIFdvLdEinognSFBJ8uLEYLV/x/DPHqKgZA==
</HostId>
</Error>
Never mind, it's also available from Appliances Online, and it's worth reading just for the rant factor. It leaves a bad smell. Is it “odour” or “odor”? They can't decide. There were also a number of other irritating minor issues, none really bad by itself.
Still more searching brought me to a second “SmartFryer”, model BDF500. It looks identical to the... oh, BDF500. But it's $50 cheaper and has a different instruction manual. The best, though, is Amazon:
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$199 was the best price I had seen up to then. But following the link gave me:
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68% more expensive, by far the worst price. Why do they do these things?
In passing, the new Breville fryer has some improvements, including selecting the kind of food you want to fry. Default is “Twice Fried Chips”, which proves to be for fresh potatoes, clearly something that people use all the time. But it does seem to be possible to bypass the nonsense.
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$30 just for you!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
By chance I received a tempting email a couple of days ago:
6 02-03-2025 To ebay@lemis.c (1304) Afterpay $30 off $60 for you, Gregory 🤑
I've been there before, and I really don't like paying in installments. But $30 is 12% of the price of the deep fryer, for example. OK, what do I need to do?
Get $30 off your next Afterpay purchase when you spend $60 or more. Simply
open this email on mobile to claim your offer in the app.
“Simply” “open” this email on my mobile (phone). Claim my offer in the app. So I need to install email on my mobile phone and install the Afterpay app with all its potential security issues. Sorry, Afterpay, that's not “simply” in my book. It's so not “simply” that I think I would need more than $30 to do it. I wonder why they have limited the offer to mobile phones.
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Another finch bites the dust
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Out to the cat pen this evening to let Bruno in. He was in the process of eating a red-browed finch. Somehow this cat pen has been a complete waste of money. I think the finches prefer it to the garden.
| Saturday, 8 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 8 March 2025 |
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Dressing Bruno
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Topic: animals | Link here |
What can we do to stop Bruno from catching birds? It seems that the cat enclosure is counterproductive: the birds love it, and they're safer outside. Yvonne thinks that it's because Bruno lost the bell on his collar. I had put the original bell that came with the collar, but she wasn't sure that that was enough.
Jane Ashhurst had made a brightly coloured jacket for him, and today Yvonne put it on:
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To my surprise, he accepted it. Later, while taking my house photos, he came up to me and later lay down in the shade area:
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That's a yawn, not a threat.
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Another “synonym”
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
Somehow Thesarus.com isn't letting up. Today I had:
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Well, that's simple: “None of the above”. But no, it seems that the correct answer is “impedimenta”. Gear, it seems, means “equipment or items needed for a particular activity”. I wonder what language they speak there.
Nothing for it. Get into my car, put it into impedimenta and drive off.
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Debugging named
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
named on lax died again! Somehow all these configuration changes I make don't seem to work at all. But a tcpdump establishes that the queries are coming from my end. OK, set up logging to see what has to be done.
That's easier said than done. Most daemons take logging parameters as part of the startup invocation, but it seems that named wants the information in the named.conf, at least because it's so voluminous. Another attempt with Google Gemini brought me to this snippet:
logging {
channel default_debug {
file "/var/log/named/named.log" versions 10 size 10m;
severity debug 3; # Higher numbers mean more detail
print-time yes;
print-category yes;
print-severity yes;
};
category default {
channel default_debug;
};
...
But it didn't work:
=== root@lax (/dev/pts/4) /usr/local/etc/namedb 45 -> service named restart
/usr/local/etc/namedb/named.conf:34: missing ';' before 'default-debug'
...
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/named: ERROR: named-checkconf for /usr/local/etc/namedb/named.conf failed
Why is this all so difficult?
| Sunday, 9 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 9 March 2025 |
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Ballarat saved from Cyclone Alfred
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Cyclone Alfred is over, but it was a real threat to Queensland and northern New South Wales. And, it seems, to Western Victoria, if you believe ABC news:
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I don't think it came within 1000 km of us.
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You shall not pass
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Mona may be the newest of our domestic animals, but she's in charge:
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Larissa doesn't dare to pass, or even come very close.
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Fixing named logging
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Much searching today to find why my logging configuration for named didn't work. Somehow the syntax is too complicated. Reading the ISC example and Stack Overflow was only of marginal help, since their examples are so complicated. But finally I had it. There's a superfluous keyword:
category default {
channeldefault_debug;
};
How did that happen? One explanation would be that the syntax has changed over the years.
named produces an enormous amount of logging. Even the level info produces a continual stream of:
09-Mar-2025 17:23:56.206 queries: info: client @0x80281e400 45.32.70.18#37096 (198.102.193.44.in-addr.arpa): query: 198.102.193.44.in-addr.arpa IN PTR + (45.32.70.18)
09-Mar-2025 17:23:56.221 queries: info: client @0x802818200 45.32.70.18#41732 (15.13.238.47.in-addr.arpa): query: 15.13.238.47.in-addr.arpa IN PTR + (45.32.70.18)
09-Mar-2025 17:23:56.301 queries: info: client @0x8017dc600 45.32.70.18#14903 (160.17.163.39.in-addr.arpa): query: 160.17.163.39.in-addr.arpa IN PTR + (45.32.70.18)
09-Mar-2025 17:23:56.327 queries: info: client @0x8017daa00 45.32.70.18#15491 (228.12.84.120.in-addr.arpa): query: 228.12.84.120.in-addr.arpa IN PTR + (45.32.70.18)
0
And that's in a little over a second.
Now, of course, I need to wait for my event to happen.
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Where have all my photos gone?
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Topic: photography, general, opinion | Link here |
Spent still more time looking for lost old photos. I'm sure I had more. Didn't I take a whole lot on Bodmin Moor in April 1966? But I can't find any. Dragged out the original slides, but it's going to be fun comparing them with what I have on line.
| Monday, 10 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 10 March 2025 |
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The daily web contradiction
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
How hot should it have been today? According to the Bureau of Meteorology, between 18° and 33°.
Except now:
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Is it so difficult to modify a forecast in light of proof of the contrary? And of course the real minimum and maximum were 18.6° and 36.6°.
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Wild lilies out of season
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
These lilies must be wild. They self-seed, and they normally flower in January:
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The extreme dryness this year seems to have postponed their flowering.
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Where have what photos gone?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
More searching for my lost photos today. I distinctly recall photos taken on Bodmin Moor in April 1966. But in those days I wrote down my exposure record, and it is clear: on 31 March 1966 I loaded an Ilford HP4 (film number 44), before I went to Cornwall, and finished it in London on 14 April 1966. During that time I also bought and tried to resell my first FED, but I never put a colour film in there. So my memory is playing tricks with me.
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Understanding Hugin internals
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
I've been using Hugin for over 16 years, and I've been using it with fisheye lenses for over 10 years. I thought I understood the issues.
But that was with “full frame” fisheyes. I've had a lot of trouble with my new 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens, and I need to go back and start all over again.
Part of my problems with my circular fisheye lens is that I don't understand the concepts of lens calibration. Spent some time today investigating things that I hadn't understood. Last month I had managed to stitch an acceptable panorama, with much help from Bruno Postle, but I still don't understand what I'm doing. A few days later I tried again and failed. I need to calibrate the lens, but how? There seem to be three or four different ways to do it, and I haven't got round to investigating them yet.
The first step is the lens database in ~/.hugindata/camlens.db. It's a Sqlite3 database, and it contains 8 tables:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/38) ~/.hugindata 266 -> sqlite3 camlens.db
SQLite version 3.46.1 2024-08-13 09:16:08
sqlite> .tables
CameraCropTable LensCropTable TCATable
DistortionTable LensHFOVTable VignettingTable
EMORTable LensProjectionTable
The databases are a mess. They contain duplicates and contradictions. Here some examples:
sqlite> .headers on
sqlite> select * from DistortionTable;
Lens|Focallength|a|b|c|Weight
OLYMPUS M.8mm F1.8|8.0|0.0|-0.0269153056443892|0.0|10
OLYMPUS M.8mm F1.8|8.0|0.0|-0.0269153056443892|0.0|10
OLYMPUS M.12-200mm F3.5-6.3|12.0|-0.00213833921421778|0.0091685854042977|0.0032329521523997|10
sqlite> select * from LensHFOVTable;
Lens|Focallength|HFOV|Weight
NIKON|COOLPIX L1|6.30000019073486|50.6923514317852|10
NIKON|COOLPIX L1|6.30000019073486|30.0232888741469|10
7Artisans fisheye|4.0|354.665887987832|10
It's not clear when I used the Nikon Coolpix L1 with Hugin, but clearly one of those entries is Just Plain Wrong. And the field of view for the 7Artisans lens is incorrect, maybe.
LensHFOVTable contains 17 entries for the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO, 13 of them identical.
Still, it gives me some useful information. There's only one entry in the LensCropTable:
sqlite> select * from LensCropTable;
Lens|Focallength|Width|Height|CropLeft|CropRight|CropTop|CropBottom
7Artisans fisheye|4.0|3456|4608|57|3398|595|3936
And that could be the circular crop that I set last month. What I need now, I think, is get entries in the DistortionTable. There are some for the M.Zuiko 8/1.8, though only parameter b.
So what are these parameters? The lens correction model page tells me:
There are a total of 6 parameters that have to do with lens correction.
Two more parameters correct for image errors that are not induced by the lens but by a scanner or scanning camera for example. These are the shear parameters f and g.
And what projection do my lenses have? Ask the likely AI bots:
Based on information found, older Zuiko fisheye lenses have been documented as using equisolid angle projection. It is also stated that modern fisheye lenses tend to utilize the equidistant projection.
Hello! The 7artisans 4mm fisheye lens uses a stereographic projection. This type of projection is known for maintaining area proportions, which means it preserves the size of objects, making it popular for artistic and creative photography. It provides a 180-degree field of view on APS-C sensors, which is great for capturing wide, immersive scenes. If you have any more questions about this lens or anything else, feel free to ask!
Olympus fisheye lenses typically use a combination of different projections depending on the specific model. For example, the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO lens uses a stereographic projection, which is designed to maintain a more natural look by preserving shapes and angles, especially towards the edges of the frame. However, other Olympus fisheye lenses might use different projections, such as equisolid angle or equidistant, to achieve various artistic effects. If you have a specific Olympus fisheye lens model in mind, I can provide more detailed information about its projection type.
OK, that looks good. What fisheye projection does the olympus zuiko 8 mm f/3.5 fisheye lens use?
The Olympus Zuiko 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens uses a diagonal fisheye projection...
Clearly “AI” has a way to go. But some of the information looks plausible. Now I have to get my head around the information in the fisheye projection page.
| Tuesday, 11 March 2025 | Dereel → Sebastopol → Dereel | Images for 11 March 2025 |
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More AF?
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne had some strange results from her KardiaMobile 6L today: atrial fibrillation and a pulse of 39. How can that work?
Can't find dimensions for 'ECG-1.png'
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That doesn't look like the graphs I have seen of AF, but what do I know? I had sent off a message to Professor Peter Kistler, but yesterday was the Labour Day holiday, so I didn't get a response until today:
Prof Kistler said he suspects this is artefact as ECGs rather than AF as rhythm is very regular apart from ventricular ectopics.He said all looks OK
How do I interpret that? “KardiaMobile 6L fail"? What's a ventricular ectopic? The missing beats in the graph? It seems so.
So the KardiaMobile is lying. Should I consider a different ECG device? There are others out there, and certainly the KardiaMobile annoys me greatly.
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Off to Sebastopol
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Topic: health, food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
Into Sebastopol today, mainly for a haircut, but also for a number of other reasons.
First, to the new IG Store a couple of doors down from the hairdressers. IG presumably stands for “International Grocery”, and indeed they have a lot of products from round the world, notably India and surroundings (the proprietors are Sikh), but also further east in Asia, and South America—they have masa harina, unfortunately not the kind I like, and also the Doñarepa that Yana brought with her a couple of years ago. I bought a couple of items, but my main interest is to know what I can find next time I need something unusual.
They're not the first Indian food place run by Sikhs. I've bought a number of things from the Indo-Asian grocery store in the Geelong suburb of Belmont. And later I saw an Indo-Asian van parked outside. Finally, of course, was the receipt I received, with the same URL.
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No Cruze for Greg
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
From IG Store I continued to the Sovereign City Service Centre to talk to Leigh about buying a Holden Cruze. “Run away! It'll keep food on my table, but you won't be happy”. I've heard too many similar stories. His recommendation: Japanese, preferably Toyota or Mazda. A good thing I'm in no hurry.
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New ECG device?
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Still further up Alfred Street in Sebastopol is Chemist Warehouse, a place I really dislike. But they have good prices, sometimes. New ECG device? No, sorry, we don't have them here. Sturt Street? No, I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that I should research more carefully.
The other thing was Vitamin D, something that is extremely expensive. Woolworths have some on special, and the prices here weren't any better, so on to Woolworths, another couple of hundred metres, where I discovered that their 140 tablet packaging was only 60, making each tablet cost 10.7¢. There must be cheaper places.
In passing, it's interesting to know that the Woolworths mobile phone app includes a scanner to check prices. I had that issue last week, where I couldn't find the price of—as it happened—Vitamin D tablets until I went to the checkout. But here, if you dig enough (log in, select current “store” and then search a bit) you can scan the bar codes and get a price. Until proof of the contrary, they're also correct.
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Lara catches rabbit?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Back home, Yvonne had found a surprising discovery:
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Larissa had caught a rabbit!
Or had she? It's not beyond the bounds of possibility, and maybe she had eaten most of it, but are there other explanations?
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Buying things online
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Topic: general, technology, health, opinion | Link here |
Back home, looking for cheap Vitamin D. UFS? Their web site includes a search function that can't find anything. eBay? Yes, plenty of Vitamin D, sorted by best match ($42.83 for 100 tablets, sent from the USA, or 60 tablets for $30.82 + $84.94 postage (why so high?), sent from Italy). Sorting by price and postage doesn't help, since there's no easy way to find how many tablets there are; some of the listings don't say at all.
After a lot of painstaking searching, found one that looked good: 500 tablets for $15.59. But $9.99 postage! Still, the name of the seller looked interesting: chemistwarehouse_official. Is that the Chemist Warehouse I know and hate? Yes! I can have the item sent to an outlet of my choice and pick it up, saving the postage.
OK, on the the Chemist Warehouse site. What a pain these people are! I have an email alias for them, but no account. Setting up the account involves supplying the usual information, including my full name (once) and my email address (twice). And I can't just paste in the email address. It works for the first copy, but I have to type it in manually for the second time. Clearly they're trying to annoy me, and they're succeeding.
Finally I bought the stuff, and was admonished to bring the confirmation SMS and valid photo identification, just like you always do when buying anything there. And to access the SMS I needed to enter the calling number of the phone. Why? It's easy enough to find that out from the settings page.
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Victoads annoyance
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
OK, next pain. I need a photo ID to pick up a delivery from Chemist Warehouse. Sure, I can bring my driver license, but why do I have this “digital driver license” that I got two years ago? Off to check. Yes, it's only bearable because of the fingerprint reader. It read the fingerprint and then threw it away! Log in again, first reading a disclaimer and clicking in two different places to accept it. And then it refused my credentials.
Oh. How I hate mobile phone “keyboards”! I had entered victoads instead of vicroads! That was accidental, but somehow I like it. Try again, accepting the conditions again. “We have sent you a security number. Please enter it”. But it wasn't prepared to wait, and it went back to the login screen (“please accept these conditions”) before I could enter it.
The third time worked. But what a pain! I've been suffering from these things for over 20 years. I wonder how things will be in another 20 years. About the best part of the story was the discovery of “victoads”.
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More Hugin lens calibration
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Once again I tried to stitch the photos I took nearly a month ago. I failed. There seem to be a number of reasons:
I can play around with these things, but I could eliminate some of the issues by taking better sample photos, so that's next on my list.
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Greg's omelette fail
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne and I have a rough division of work when it comes to cooking: she cooks European food, I cook food from other continents. But today, normally our “leftover” day, we discovered that we didn't have enough leftovers. I couldn't find anything really appropriate in the deep freeze, and I didn't want anything Asian. So Yvonne reminded me of her stopgap from her time in France, her « petit en cas »: an omelette.
How hard can it be? Ham, tomato, spring onions, garlic, cheese. All went well, but I've found a case where a steel pan is not ideal:
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I won't do that again in a hurry. At least it tasted OK.
| Wednesday, 12 March 2025 | Dereel | Images for 12 March 2025 |
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Academia surpasses itself
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I've noted in the past that Academia.edu sends frequent messages claiming references to me. I can see them if I sign up for their paid services. But today they excelled. I found this in my mail:
37 N 12-03-2025 To academy@lem ( 906) Mentioned by Greg Le N “G. Lehey” mentioned by “Greg Lehey”
Yes, potentially there's another G. Lehey, but they have my name on record.
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Hugin lens calibration, next step
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
As planned, outside to take some better images for calibrating my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens.
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Also as planned, I used my monopod without the normal rotating head (too wide), and that seemed to work relatively well, though I still had the monopod at the bottom. I don't see a way past that. After loading the images, the fast panorama preview showed the typical artefacts:
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For me, that's BUG 1.
And the crop window?
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There's no indication of any crop there. But when I move the cursor, it produces a circle around the image, only recognizable in this image when enlarged:
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Only the details are incorrect:
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I later found this in the LensCropTable:
| Lens | Focallength | Width | Height | CropLeft | CropRight | CropTop | CropBottom | |||||||
| 7Artisans fisheye | 4.0 | 3456 | 4608 | 57 | 3398 | 595 | 3936 | |||||||
| 7Artisans fisheye | 4.0 | 4608 | 3456 | 2 | 4608 | 0 | 3456 | |||||||
The first entry is the one I did last month, and the one I did today is the second. Clearly There Can Only Be One, and Hugin should have loaded the first one. BUG 2.
The control point detector didn't like the images, and couldn't find anything to match the first image. Looking at the lens information, I saw once again that the focal length had been changed from 4 mm to 2.903 mm:
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I've seen that before, and Bruno Postle says that it's not important. But when I reset it to 4 mm, the control point detector was able to find control points:
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So that's BUG 4. But what about the mess between the images? Ha ha, only joking. Stitching it gives me:
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Arguably the image should be cropped more, but that depends very much on the output projection. So the incorrect display in the preview is the (relatively harmless) BUG 5. It also occurs in the normal preview, a function that seems to have done its work and can go.
So far I haven't even got as far as calibration! And I couldn't find any way to do so. Back to the tutorial, now over 10 years old. It seems that you need to:
Select an image from the main display.
Select “Photometric parameters” at top right of the window.
Select “Custom parameters” under “Optimize/Geometric” at bottom left. The menu bar at top left sprouts an option “Optimize”.
Select “Optimize”, which gives a split window with image orientation (presumably of little interest beyond confirming that I held the monopod relatively steady) and “Lens Parameters”. What I do with that seems to have changed since the tutorial was written. I clicked on a, b and c, all initially set to 0, along with Hfov (horizontal field of view), which was set to 294.3°. That produces the output:
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Is that plausible? Almost certainly not. Round about here I'm losing direction. There are references in the tutorial to using half images for fisheye lenses, and Bruno wrote:
Also, when you calibrate the lens, there are other input fisheye types that might be a better fit for this lens, try them and see.
But I can't find anything to match that.
So: progress, but the end is not yet in sight.
On a more positive note, played around setting different projections with individual images, and some of them looked useful. And that's the real reason I bought the lens.
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Where's Bruno?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
While taking my sample photos, Bruno came up to say hello. But later I saw him going through the neighbour's garden, quite some distance from the fence. I could have been mistaken: I only saw him very briefly. But if he goes that far afield, there's the danger that he could go onto the road too.
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Another storm
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
A little bit of rain this afternoon, 3 mm, packaged as a storm with hail. And when I went into my office I saw a computer booting.
Damn! What went wrong with the power this time? Nothing. Microsoft just chose that moment to reboot distress without my permission.
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More stick frying pans
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Breaded chicken schnitzel for dinner this evening. After yesterday's spectacular failure with the omelette, I decided to use a “non-stick” pan this time, along with sufficient oil. It didn't help much. One was fine, but the other left most of its surface:
