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| Greg's diary |
| May 2025 |
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| Thursday, 1 May 2025 | Dereel → Bannockburn → Dereel | Images for 1 May 2025 |
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The damage Trump does in 25 minutes
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Topic: politics, language, opinion | Link here |
Ukraine and the USA have signed an agreement on mining minerals in Ukraine. As this phone screenshot from an article in the Washington Post shows, “... a win for Kyiv, which has been seeking any concrete show of support from the United States since President Donald Trump returned to power 25 minutes ago”.
The power of punctuation.
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Bruno sick?
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Topic: animals, health | Link here |
First thing this morning I let Bruno out into the garden. Funny, his neck seemed so thick. He came back soon and gave us a chance to look at it:
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It didn't seem to be painful, but in the course of the morning it increased in size, and he no longer wanted us to touch it. It's not clear whether that's because it was sensitive or whether we were just annoying him. But clearly something needed to be done. Yvonne facebooked Pene Kirk, who was out of town, but could see him tomorrow.
Can we wait that long? No, I don't think so. Made an appointment with the Bannockburn Veterinary Clinic and took him down there in the afternoon, along with Mona not just for company, but in case it was something infectious. Put the carriers so that they were facing each other, and they didn't make any noise the whole distance.
Gen, the vet, tried to take a sample from the swelling. Bruno disagreed, violently. In the end she called in a nurse, who tried to muzzle him, without success:
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Finally they carted him off out the back, where I wasn't allowed, to sedate him (I had the impression of a large hammer) and lance what proved to be an abscess. Gen took this photo, and the version I got had no Exif data, so I'm not sure when it happened:
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An hour later he looked like this:
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Jen tells me that they didn't find any injury—she had thought it might be the result of a fight with another cat, but I don't think there are any round our way—and that there was no evidence of any injury in his mouth.
Back home, he looked like this:
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That's quite an opening, but maybe it's necessary to drain the abscess. He seemed to be well, but Mona didn't want to know him: “Who are you, and what did you do with Bruno?”. The dogs were, of course, sympathetic. But he didn't want company, though he didn't seem to be suffering, and by the time we went to bed he was relatively normal. Only Mona still didn't want to know: she kept trying to get into my bedroom half the night.
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Home-made lard
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Now that lard is not only hard to find but also very expensive, how about reconsidering making it myself? Found this in the deep freeze, once intended for making Bratwurst:
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Clearly those days are long gone. But look at that price! $5 per kilogram. They have since changed their name from the “Mega Meats” on the label to Sinclair Meats, where they sold us lard for round $55 per kilogram.
OK, cut it up, melt it and reap the greaves:
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That's a surprising number from only 350 g of fat—if indeed there was that much. But the lard that came out was not only discoloured, but it smelt rancid:
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That's possibly because it was so old, but I wouldn't have expected that in the deep freeze. But since it looks like we may need to do this more often, I should check the details of how to make it without discoloration.
| Friday, 2 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 2 May 2025 |
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Bruno's recovery
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Bruno seems to be recovering well:
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He's a lot livelier now, almost to the point of being unbearable. Over the last couple of weeks he had been quite placid, but I'm beginning to think that that was a symptom of his abscess. And he now weighs only 4.6 kg, whereas he had been round 4.9 to 5.0 kg.
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eBay payment pain
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I've bought a Panasonic Lumix G 20 mm f/1.7 on eBay for Yana. Time to pay. Oh:
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Well, not surprising, since they haven't given me a payment method. Try PayPal:
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What's wrong there? Has somebody cracked my PayPal account? No. Must be an eBay problem. Pay with my bank card:
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Oh. This one was my fault. I really didn't have enough in that account. High time to stop messing around with moving money from one account. Fixed that, and it finally worked. But there's always some anxiety involved with these things. And I can only guess that eBay really had a problem, though it's too polite to show what it tried: it unsets all possibilities before presenting the error message.
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Bloody Android!
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Topic: rant, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne was at Chris Bahlo's place this afternoon. Chris is currently in South Australia, and Yvonne is looking after the horses. And I got a phone call from her, hiding the green “answer” button. Found it in time (just push other stuff aside, you know which) and answered. The call was disconnected after less than 5 seconds.
OK, she'll call back. But she didn't. So I called her. Immediate “not available, please leave a message”. Damn. Tried again a few minutes later. Same thing.
And for some reason the display went blank while I was waiting, repeatedly. Why? These horrible Android devices are full of problems. Did a power down and reboot (I don't trust a hot reboot). But I still couldn't contact Yvonne.
What's going on? Phone failed? Yvonne failed? My money's on the phone, or more likely Android. But what if I'm wrong? Over to Chris' place, where Yvonne told me that her phone didn't ring.
Once phones were simple and worked. Now there are all sorts of problems. No wonder people prefer the agony of SMS.
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Next Budget Direct nonsense
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Budget Direct have finally got round to sending me the transcript of my “chats” the other day. It's some strange Gmail function that requires 2FA to access. And then I can only display it, slowly and with timeouts. I can't find a way to save it.
Replied to the email and asked for better access. Got a surprisingly quick reply explaining that it's for security reasons. I can't quite deny that: in my case there's nothing sensitive, but there could have been. But why this horrible access method? A password protected web page could have done it too.
And a little later I received an automated mail:
Thank you for sending an email to Auto & General Services about RE: BUDGET DIRECT: 12035912 CHAT TRANSCRIPT.
Our reference number for your email is .
Please note, this is an automated inbox.
O Brave New World!
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Yelp: howl!
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Topic: technology, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
There must be other butchers in Ballarat than Sinclair Meats and Davies. Off on the web to find Top 10 Best Meat Shops Near Ballarat, Victoria - With Real Reviews.
Oh. Not a single butcher in Ballarat, not even Sinclair. Instead I got:
This is a review for meat shops in Ballarat, VIC:
"Farmer Joes Market has a fantastic array of fruit, vegetables, nuts and meats... "
Sounds good. Where is it? In Boronia, a place so far away that we almost never went there even when in Melbourne, though Fleischers, now sadly gone, made it worthwhile. From Ballarat it's 150 km and 2 hours' drive. Admittedly, that's the furthest (2 on the map below), but it's their favourite, and the others aren't much better:
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What a waste of time! Goodbye, Yelp.
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Another water pump failure!
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
While cleaning my teeth this evening before going to bed, Yvonne came and told me that we had no water. I had just run water to wet the toothbrush. But in that time, it seems, the water stopped.
Into the garage to the switchboard. The outside RCD had tripped. We've seen that before: wet contacts on the plug to the septic tank pump. Disconnected. RCD still trips. Sump pump in front of the house? Same thing.
Finally I disconnected the house water pump. Yes, that was it. It's not even 3 years old! And it's the fourth pump failure we have had since we moved here 10 years ago: 13 January 2018, 15 December 2018 and 19 July 2022. And somehow they all seem to happen at weekends. Nothing to do tonight. I have a spare (the repaired one from July 2022) in the shed somewhere. I'll put that in in the morning.
What horribly unreliable devices these pumps are!
| Saturday, 3 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 3 May 2025 |
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Replacing the pump
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
No water this morning, of course. Well, a trickle from the tap in the laundry, due to gravity feed. And in fact it filled a 9 litre bucket relatively quickly, and we later discovered that the toilet cisterns were filling too. But not a hope of a shower.
After that out to change the house water pump. Relatively simple: remove old pump, change the connections to the new pump, replace.
Oh. The pump was on a wooden plate that had rotted away, and the soil underneath had fallen:
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Tried it anyway, but the incoming water connection leaked, and I couldn't get it to stop.
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That reminds me of a similar incident in exactly the same place 10 years ago. Nothing for it: call UPI and ask for help. That wouldn't happen until the afternoon, but then Nick came along, earlier than planned, and within 15 minutes he had dug a new foundation, put in a better board than what I had, and connected up the pump exactly the way I had tried, except that for Nick it didn't dare leak. He ran into one issue: the pump is now lower than it had been, so he had to trim the exit pipe:
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That, too, would have been beyond me.
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Bruno's progress
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Bruno's wound is healing nicely:
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100 years of Leica?
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Topic: photography, history, language, opinion | Link here |
Leica Camera AG have brought out a new limited edition camera in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Leica I, the first Leica built for sale, which apparently was presented at the Leipzig Trade Fair:
Leica's history is certainly interesting, much more than any camera they have brought out in the last 70 years. Spent some time watching a video by some British man who thought they were built by Önest Leitz, and that the first camera built was the Ö, but who at least clarified things from my perspective.
I'm still puzzled by Leica. Why did they succeed when Contax didn't? How can they still command such prices for a camera that is at least 20 years out of date? But looking at the history of modern digital system cameras, now coming on 30 years, it's interesting to see that the screw Leicas lived for 45 years, though nothing really new happened after the first 10 years. Similarly, the M series seem hardly to have evolved at all, modulo the transition from film to digital.
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Blank images and pixel mapping
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Looking at the photos I took of the pump swap, I discovered to my horror that no fewer than 11 blank images. What happened? In the Bad Old Days (think Leica) that could happen if you took a photo with the lens cap on, but on the Olympus E-PM2 the viewfinder would also have been blank.
Shutter failure? It wouldn't have been the first with this camera. Took a sample shot with the camera, coincidentally showing my FED 1:
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No, that's OK. Intermittent error? What does the Exif data say? 3200/36° ISO, 1/2 s, f/1.7. Clearly the exposure system thought it was dark. The others were taken at 200/24°, 1/200 and about f/2.5. That's consistent with lens cap.
But then I looked at the times. They were taken between 9:03 and 9:09, rather longer than I stayed around after giving up. Could I have put the camera in my pocket, forgetting to turn it off, and then accidentally pressed the shutter button? I'm not convinced, but it seems a possibility. I'll certainly keep my eyes open.
The blank photos had another surprise:
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They weren't completely blank. On the DxO PhotoLab processing window they reached out and grabbed me, but here they're barely visible. The first image is a full-size selection from the second. That proved to be due to my processing parameters (“presets” in DxO-speak), “Myset”. This image, which requires expansion to full size, shows that they were almost invisible with any other preset:
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Real stuck pixels? Yes, must have been a couple of hundred of them. Running the Pixel Mapping (Utility menu J) got rid of them.
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Thank you, Donald Trump
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Topic: politics, general, opinion | Link here |
Today was the Australian federal election. Somehow the whole thing seemed low-key compared to the nonsense going on in the USA. But nevertheless, there are significant issues at stake. Somehow Peter Dutton stands up for all the things to which I object. More than ever before, I went to vote in the hope that, despite all early indications that he (his parties) would win, that the incumbent Anthony Albanese would win. And no, his nickname “albo” has nothing to do with my mobile phone albo.lemis.com. For the first time ever, I messed up a vote sheet (the one for the senate, with round 100 boxes from which I needed to select 12 in order).
In the evening the results came in quickly, less than an hour after the votes closed in Western Australia. Like Pierre Poilievre before him, he went from being favourite to being out of work. And unlike Mark Carney, Albo won an increased absolute majority.
Thank you, Donald Trump. For a second time he has done something useful, as The Chaser agrees.
| Sunday, 4 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 4 May 2025 |
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Bruno's progress
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Bruno's operation wound continues to heal quickly:
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It has only been 2½ days, but it has closed nicely.
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Watts' succulent garden
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Walking past the entrance to the Watts' horse parcours today, saw this:
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That's interesting not just because it's there, but because of the variety of succulents they have there. We're still trying to identify the skulls.
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Web site overload?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Lately I've been seeing a lot of heavy load on www.lemis.com:
last pid: 32899; load averages: 171.42, 167.37, 168.65 up 424+07:01:22 02:39:57
340 processes: 181 running, 159 sleeping
Very frequently the load averages are like that, round 170. At other times they drop below 1. An obvious reason is the load on the server, of course, but there's no obvious difference between the two.
But: the server is a virtual machine, run by Vultr. Their choice of the number of machines on a given physical host makes assumptions about the CPU usage of each VM. What happens if the assumption fails, and too many machines compete for CPU time?
Nothing for it, of course: I need a new machine. ffm.lemis.com seems the obvious choice—if it has enough memory.
| Monday, 5 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 5 May 2025 |
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Bruno
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Topic: animals | Link here |
I'm amazed how quickly Bruno's wound is healing:
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10 years since Stones Road handover
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Topic: history, Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Ten years ago today we had the official handover of our house in Stones Road:
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How time flies!
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Delivery unsuccessful
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
Aliexpress may have a really hard-to-navigate web site, but they certainly keep me informed with the progress of their postage. But today I got this message:
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What's that? Follow the link to Australia Post, re-enter the tracking number: this is Aliexpress' new way of saying “your parcel is waiting at NAPOLEON [sic] post office”.
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Another new washing machine
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Topic: general | Link here |
Yvonne doesn't like the new washing machine that we got six months ago. She claims that it makes the clothes dirtier than when they went in, showing some greasy singlets as proof.
OK, under those circumstances it's good that Glen Castleman repaired the old one. Today Paul Donaghy came by to help me swap the two. While he was there, we also moved the curry tree inside for winter.
What a lot of failures we've had lately!
| Tuesday, 6 May 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 6 May 2025 |
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Bruno
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Topic: animals | Link here |
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To Ballarat again
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Topic: general, food and drink | Link here |
I'm running out of food supplies. Much of it comes from the Fruit Shack, and there are always choices to be made there, so I had to go myself. On the way stopped in at the Indo-Asian Grocery Store in Sebastopol, where I found a surprising number of things that I wasn't looking for: dumplings („Kochbeutelklöße“) for Yvonne and what I presume is Bomba rice for the paella that we're planning for this weekend.
At the Fruit Shack there were the usual issues. Their stock varies, and I don't think I have ever found everything I was looking for. It's not helped by the fact that they move things around. Today there were no dòufu puffs or the kind of fish balls I was looking for, nor 3 of the 5 types of noodles. But somehow I found enough stuff to fill the fridge when I got home.
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Blast from the past
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Topic: history, opinion | Link here |
To the post office, where they had a letter for me:
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Nothing interesting in that except for the address:
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We moved out of Kleins Road ten years ago today. But it seems that I forgot to tell the National Diabetes Services Scheme about the fact. Now, 18 years after diagnosis, they have changed their URL and the old one doesn't want to know. They want to educate me about diabetes mellitus. A little late, but I suppose I should tell them that my address has changed.
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New toys
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Topic: general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
At the post office, also picked up the new toys that I had ordered from Aliexpress. A mixed bag: a new remote control for my cameras (the old one looks worse for wear after a fall over 6 years ago. For some reason I didn't take a photo of it at the time, but now it looks like this:
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The new one is as good as identical, but it's more modern, so it has removed any reference to the model number RW-221.
As set both remote controls can trigger both receivers, which could be useful. If not, there are DIP switches that I can set if I want something else.
Then ultra-cheap thermometers. They came with no instructions whatsoever, and they didn't work: they had no batteries. Each requires two AG-10 button cells, and I only had 4. They could at least have warned me.
And a new mandolin for the kitchen. It looked so much better on the screen, but I'm not sure that it's very good.
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Web site performance
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
There's no doubt about it: I need to do something about my external web site www.lemis.com. The load average is almost alway over 100, and just copying data there takes forever:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/13) ~ 489 -> syncgrog
Tue 6 May 2025 13:20:53 AEST
...
sent 515,480 bytes received 271,541 bytes 55.99 bytes/sec
total size is 5,028,536,454 speedup is 6,389.33
34103.31 real 3.24 user 0.18 sys
Tue 6 May 2025 22:49:16 AEST
Normally that takes about 20 seconds.
So why not add a second, more powerful server? It's work!
| Wednesday, 7 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 7 May 2025 |
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The daily Bruno
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Topic: animals | Link here |
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Anniversary rabbit
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Topic: history, animals, general | Link here |
It's been ten years since we moved into the Stones Road property. When we arrived, there were a number of rabbits, but they soon miraculously disappeared. But recently one was brave enough to come back. It must have lost its head:
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More phat see ew
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another attempt at pad see ew (or is that phat see ew? I need to check) today:
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I used some of the gai lan that I bought yesterday. It's a lot tougher than I expected; next time it'll need longer cooking.
And then there's the question of the noodles. It seems that the Jack Hua noodles are not the best; many of the more plausible recipes want fresh, wide rice noodles, something that I couldn't find.
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A new server
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
There's nothing for it, I need a new external web server. Where? The obvious place is Frankfurt am Main, where I already have a smaller server, ffm.lemis.com. That server does almost nothing, so a larger one could take over its load as well.
So: set up a new virtual machine, provisionally called fra.lemis.com, and start copying data from lax. What do I need to do? I already have a HOWTO, but it's over 11 years old. I'll update it when the dust settles, but basically:
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More ancient photography insights
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Topic: photography, history, technology, opinion | Link here |
I'm still following up on the apparent 100th anniversary of the announcement of the Leica I on 5 May 1925. I've watched a number of videos, some informative, some just plain stupid. One that was in between came up with an interesting claim: the Leica II, the first Leica with a coupled rangefinder, was a reaction to the Contax I.
Oh. I thought the Leica came first. Both cameras were introduced in 1932, but in which sequence? Is the otherwise mediocre video correct? Ask Google Gemini:
Q: Which 35 mm camera was the first to have a coupled rangefinder?A: The first 35mm camera to feature a coupled rangefinder was the Leica II (Model D), which was introduced in 1932.
While the Kodak 3A Autographic Special of 1916 is often credited as the first camera with a built-in rangefinder, it was a medium format camera, ...
Why mention a non-35 mm camera? Thumbs down.
Mentions cameras that don't fit the description, doesn't mention Contax I
To my immense surprise, it reacted:
You are absolutely right! My apologies for the oversight and the incomplete information.
While the Leica II (1932) was indeed a very early and influential 35mm camera with a coupled rangefinder, it was not the absolute first.
That distinction belongs to the Contax I, which was introduced by Zeiss Ikon also in 1932, slightly before the Leica II.
A coupled rangefinder integrated into the viewfinder.A vertical-travel metal focal plane shutter.Interchangeable lenses.My earlier response incorrectly focused solely on the Leica II and failed to acknowledge the Contax I's priority. Thank you for pointing out this crucial omission and the inaccuracy regarding the Kodak 3A Autographic Special's format. I am still under development and learning to be more precise with historical details.
That's quite impressive. Time for another question that has puzzled me:
Why did the Contax fail and Leica succeed?
This time the answer wasn't nearly as good, going long beyond when Leica and Contax were in competition with each other (“The introduction of the M-mount in 1954 was a game-changer", as if the Contax hadn't had a bayonet mount 22 years earlier). But here, too, there's information to glean:
That's a fascinating question, and the reasons for Leica's long-term success compared to Contax are multifaceted and involve a mix of technical factors, market positioning, historical events, and even a bit of mystique. Here's a breakdown of some key contributing factors:
Contax's Challenges:
Reliability Issues (Early Models): The original Contax I, while innovative, was known for having a complex vertical metal focal plane shutter that was prone to unreliability. This damaged its early reputation, especially compared to the more robust and simpler horizontal cloth shutter of the Leica.
Ergonomics and Handling: Some photographers found the Contax I to be less comfortable to handle than the Leica, which had a more svelte and ergonomic design. The placement of controls also differed, and Leica's design often felt more intuitive to its users.
Post-War Disruption: World War II significantly impacted Zeiss Ikon and Contax. The Dresden factories were heavily damaged by Allied bombing, and much of the technology and even personnel were taken by the Soviet Union as war reparations, leading to the development of the Kiev cameras. This division and loss of resources hampered Contax's post-war recovery and development.
Slower Evolution of Rangefinder System: While the Contax initially had some technical advantages (like faster shutter speeds and bayonet lens mount), Leica continuously refined its screw-mount system and later introduced the revolutionary M-mount in 1954 with the Leica M3. The M-mount was a significant leap forward in terms of ease of use, brighter viewfinder with framelines, and more precise focusing. Contax's rangefinder evolution, while producing excellent cameras like the Contax II and III, arguably didn't achieve the same level of long-term system integration and user-friendliness as the Leica M system.
Market Perception and "Mystique": Leica cultivated a strong brand image associated with high quality, precision engineering, and a certain prestige. It became the camera of choice for many iconic photographers, which further cemented its legendary status. Contax, while respected for its technical prowess and Zeiss lenses, never quite achieved the same level of cultural cachet.
Leica's Strengths:
Early Adoption and Refinement of 35mm: Leica was instrumental in popularizing the 35mm format for serious photography. They continuously refined their cameras, focusing on reliability, compact size, and high-quality lenses.
Robust and Reliable Design (Post-Contax I): While early Leicas were evolutionary, the Leica II and subsequent models built a reputation for being well-engineered and reliable tools.
Exceptional Lenses: Leica consistently produced some of the finest photographic lenses in the world, which was a major draw for discerning photographers. The quality of their optics has always been a cornerstone of their brand.
Strong Brand Identity and Legacy: Leica successfully cultivated a brand image of quality, craftsmanship, and artistic expression. Its association with iconic photographers and historical moments further enhanced its prestige.
In essence, while the Contax I was a technically impressive camera for its time, a combination of early reliability issues, the disruption of WWII, slower evolution in key areas compared to Leica, and ultimately, the discontinuation of the brand by Kyocera contributed to its failure...
That last point has missed the point. Contax failed long before it became Japanese, and when it did (1950?) it was still technically superior to the Leica in almost every way. Maybe the Soviet takeover was a point.
And the other details? I need to think about this carefully. Much is irrelevant: I really can't see any concept in the Leica M3 that wasn't already in the Contax 1 32 years earlier. The shutter may have been unreliable (and a reason that people avoided Contax), but it was more modern than the cloth shutter in the M3. It wasn't until the M8 (2006, 74 years after the Contax I) that they changed to the kind of shutter that the Contax I had.
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Gemstone 15
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I've had a really good offer for acdsee Gemstone 15, the latest version. It looks as if it can do some things I need, like good background removal and noise recovery. Only $59.95 with a free video editor thrown in. But only until this evening, and I'm busy setting up a new web server. OK, what the hell, let's buy it
I wish I hadn't. Firstly I couldn't enter the license key, and it kept hanging. Finally I found a way to enter it, and it refused it—and hung again. OK, reboot, braving the rwhod bug, and was finally able to enter the license key to its satisfaction. But then I couldn't access my files! It offered me the choice of drive C: or “network”, which apparently doesn't include my SMB shares. Damn you, give me my money back!
Then I found that I could access the files if I typed the path name (P:\Photos\2-grog) into the search window. And it was able to remove the kitchen from the Bruno photos of the last week. Maybe I should try again after all.
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Bloody CAPTCHAs!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It seems that CAPTCHAs are rearing their ugly heads again. acdsee wanted them from me before logging in! Why? Is a CAPTCHA more secure than a password? No, just infinitely more annoying. And Vultr wanted one even when I was logged in.
People, why do you want to annoy potential or real customers?
| Thursday, 8 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 8 May 2025 |
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Bruno and Mona
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Topic: animals | Link here |
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It's been a week since they lanced Bruno's abscess. The wound has healed nicely, so I don't see any reason to continue to take daily photos.
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Noodle experiment
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another experimental noodle dish this morning, mainly to use up some fresh stuff that I bought on Tuesday:
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| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 10 g | lard | |||
| 75 g | firm dòufu | |||
| 60 g | fresh pork, sliced | |||
| 80 g | gai lan | |||
| 20 g (2) | spring onions | |||
| 3 g | Thai chili | |||
| 15 g | garlic | |||
| 17 g | sweet bean sauce | |||
| 16 g | bean sauce | |||
| 15 g | soya sauce | |||
| 50 g | chicken wing broth | |||
| 110 g | fresh “Shan Dong" noodles |
The verdict? A little boring. It needs more sauce, maybe 50% more. The most interesting thing is that the “Shan Dong” noodles might be a good choice for yesterday's pad see ew.
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New web server: no time
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Topic: technology | Link here |
So where am I with the new web server (provisionally called fra.lemis.com)? In principle I should be able to start the web server. In practice, I still need to configure it. I've done this before, of course, and what I recorded then helped a lot.
First, copy /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf and /usr/local/etc/apache24/Includes/www.lemis.com.conf from lax to fra. I'm not serving the other web sites from Frankfurt. Compare with the standard installed version. To my surprise, there was almost no difference.
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/apache24 6 -> diff -wu httpd.conf.old httpd.conf
--- httpd.conf.old 2025-04-17 01:40:47.000000000 +0000
+++ httpd.conf 2025-05-08 05:38:26.545876000 +0000
@@ -149,7 +149,6 @@
#LoadModule dialup_module libexec/apache24/mod_dialup.so
#LoadModule http2_module libexec/apache24/mod_http2.so
#LoadModule proxy_http2_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy_http2.so
-#LoadModule md_module libexec/apache24/mod_md.so
#LoadModule lbmethod_byrequests_module libexec/apache24/mod_lbmethod_byrequests.so
#LoadModule lbmethod_bytraffic_module libexec/apache24/mod_lbmethod_bytraffic.so
#LoadModule lbmethod_bybusyness_module libexec/apache24/mod_lbmethod_bybusyness.so
@@ -179,7 +178,16 @@
#LoadModule userdir_module libexec/apache24/mod_userdir.so
LoadModule alias_module libexec/apache24/mod_alias.so
#LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache24/mod_rewrite.so
+LoadModule php7_module libexec/apache24/libphp7.so
+# Does this belong here? Greg 20190916
+<FilesMatch "\.php$">
+ SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
+</FilesMatch>
+<FilesMatch "\.phps$">
+ SetHandler application/x-httpd-php-source
+</FilesMatch>
+
# Third party modules
IncludeOptional etc/apache24/modules.d/[0-9][0-9][0-9]_*.conf
@@ -214,7 +222,7 @@
# e-mailed. This address appears on some server-generated pages, such
# as error documents. e.g. admin@your-domain.com
#
-ServerAdmin you@example.com
+ServerAdmin grog@lemis.com
#
# ServerName gives the name and port that the server uses to identify itself.
@@ -223,7 +231,7 @@
#
# If your host doesn't have a registered DNS name, enter its IP address here.
#
-#ServerName www.example.com:80
+ServerName www.lemis.com:80
#
# Deny access to the entirety of your server's filesystem. You must
@@ -247,8 +255,10 @@
# documents. By default, all requests are taken from this directory, but
# symbolic links and aliases may be used to point to other locations.
#
-DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/apache24/data"
-<Directory "/usr/local/www/apache24/data">
+# DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/data"
+# <Directory "/usr/local/www/data">
+DocumentRoot "/home/nowhere"
+<Directory "/home/nowhere/www.lemis.com">
#
# Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",
# or any combination of:
@@ -261,8 +271,8 @@
# http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#options
# for more information.
#
- Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
-
+ Options FollowSymLinks
+ Options -Indexes
#
# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
@@ -281,7 +291,7 @@
# is requested.
#
<IfModule dir_module>
- DirectoryIndex index.html
+ DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
</IfModule>
That's quite surprising for a file that was created well over 5 years ago.
And of course I keep the configuration details under RCS, and since the FreeBSD project has seen fit to remove it from the base system, I had to install that too.
And then I looked more carefully at the httpd.conf:
+LoadModule php7_module libexec/apache24/libphp7.so
Oh. That's another can of worms. Last time it took me nearly a week to drum up courage. Hopefully with that history I can do it faster this time. But not today: I ran out of time. Past of the pain is demonstrated by:
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/3) /usr/local/etc/apache24/Includes 50 -> pkg search php | wc -l
2996
And syncing to the new system? It seems that eureka is using an old version of ssh, and when I try I get:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/13) ~/public_html 494 -> WEBSITE=fra:www.lemis.com syncgrog
Fri 9 May 2025 12:50:32 AEST
+++ Transferring grog to fra:www.lemis.com
+++ rsync -lKzzavP --delete-after --copy-unsafe-links ...
Password for grog@fra.lemis.com:
Oh. Yes, that will still work, at least until I update the ssh configuration, but I should be able to do it without passwords. It works from hydra, but there I get other issues related to broken symlinks. I really need to get my act together.
| Friday, 9 May 2025 | Dereel | |
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More anniversaries
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Topic: history, general, Stones Road house, opinion | Link here |
Somehow it wasn't that clear to me how many anniversaries have accumulated round today. Fifty-five years ago I started my relationship the first love of my life, Susan Fortescue. It didn't last long: fifty years ago, almost to the day, I married Doris Pischke. That, too, didn't last, though my marriage with Yvonne was less than ten years later.
That's all in the last millennium, of course. But now we have lived in Stones Road for ten years, longer than I have lived anywhere. And I have spent every night of those ten years in this house, a marked difference from anywhere else I have lived. The joys of old age: on reflection, nearly all our moving around had been chosen by my employment.
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Web site setup, continued
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Topic: technology | Link here |
More work on the new web site, fra.lemis.com today, to work my way round the issues I had had with PHP.
First, which PHP? On lax /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf contains:
LoadModule php7_module libexec/apache24/libphp7.so
But the freshly installed /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf has:
# LoadModule php7_module libexec/apache24/libphp7.so
LoadModule php_module libexec/apache24/libphp.so
Where does that come from? Where does libphp7 come from? There's nothing similar in the pkg repository, but something in my memory suggetsed mod_php. Yes:
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/apache24 10 -> pkg search mod_php
mod_php81-8.1.32 PHP Scripting Language (8.1.X branch)
mod_php82-8.2.28 PHP Scripting Language (8.2.X branch)
mod_php83-8.3.19_1 PHP Scripting Language (8.3.X branch)
mod_php84-8.4.5_1 PHP Scripting Language (8.4.X branch)
OK, go for the latest and greatest modphp84.4.5_1. And then? I still need PHP. Can't that be a dependency? No, I also needed to install php84.
Then there was some talk of a php.ini. Where is it? /usr/local/etc/php.ini, and it needs a pointer to my PHP functions:
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/2) /usr/local/etc 5 -> rcsdiff -wu php.ini
--- php.ini 2025/05/10 04:29:01 1.1
+++ php.ini 2025/05/09 05:42:33
@@ -739,6 +739,7 @@
; UNIX: "/path1:/path2"
;include_path = ".:/php/includes"
+include_path = ".:/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/php/includes"
Then a couple of minor mods. Add to /etc/rc.conf:
apache24_enable=YES
Make a log directory, and we're away:
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/3) /etc 56 -> mkdir /var/log/www=== root@fra (/dev/pts/3) /etc 61 -> apachectl start
Performing sanity check on apache24 configuration:
AH00526: Syntax error on line 261 of /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf:
DocumentRoot '/home/nowhere' is not a directory, or is not readable
Oh. That's not a syntax error at all, of course. The syntax is fine, the semantics are wanting. /home/nowhere is a dummy directory for people who try to access the web site via a name I don't know. I didn't realize that it still needs to exist. Create it and all is well:
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/3) /etc 63 -> apachectl start
Performing sanity check on apache24 configuration:
Syntax OK
Starting apache24.
That was easier than I thought. Does it work? Yes!
Well, mainly. My photos are empty. More searching showed that only the “tiny” pages are empty. If I display “small” or “big” versions, all works.
What's that? My guess is that this one is my fault. Nothing in the error log, and the server seems to think that it's doing the right thing. My PHP functions have grown over the decades: onephoto.php, the file responsible for displaying photos, is now over 17 years old and has 2971 lines. There must be some sensitivity in it. Surely I didn't put a dependency on the server name? Mañana.
| Saturday, 10 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 10 May 2025 |
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Web site: complete?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
On with the web site installation on fra.lemis.com. It''s certainly getting necessary. One of my cron jobs just arrived yesterday after nearly 3 days:
Received: from lax.lemis.com (localhost [127.0.0.1])
by lax.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 53FA2285C4
for <groggyhimself@lax.lemis.com>; Fri, 9 May 2025 07:51:39 +0000 (UTC)
Received: (from groggyhimself@localhost)
by lax.lemis.com (8.15.2/8.15.2/Submit) id 546An1n6056671;
Tue, 6 May 2025 10:49:01 GMT
(envelope-from grog)
On 5 May 2025 you had a total of 10656307 hits.
Look at that number! 10,656,307 hits in 24 hours are 123 per second. It didn't continue like that:
On 5 May 2025 you had a total of 10656307 hits.
On 7 May 2025 you had a total of 1867361 hits.
On 8 May 2025 you had a total of 4312517 hits.
On 9 May 2025 you had a total of 5252655 hits.
Where is the info for 6 May? I don't know. It didn't make it here, but I can't see any evidence for it on lax. But one thing is clear: the extreme hits on 5 May were an exception, even if the situation on 7 May still represents 22 hits per second. Will a second server of the same dimensions even help? That remains to be seen.
Regarding the installation, yesterday I was nearly there. The only issue was that my photos wouldn't display in normal (“tiny”) size only, and I suspected that this one was my fault.
TLDR: I was half right. The third (optional) parameter to showphoto() is named $minwidth. In the code I had:
$minwidth = 0;
switch (func_num_args ())
{
case 3:
$minwidth = func_get_arg (2);
...
if ($minwidth == "=") /* select tinywidth as minwidth */
$minwidth = $tinywidth;
...
if ($tinywidth != 0) /* this could be 0 */
$myheight = $tinyheight * $minwidth / $tinywidth;
It seems that in previous versions of PHP, a $minwidth value of 0 fulfilled the condition (minwidth == "="). That's nonsense, of course, and PHP 8 seems finally to have evaluated this to FALSE. Thus $tinywidth, the width of the “tiny” images, was set to 0.
So: how do I fix it? The quick and dirty way is just to set $minwidth to $tinywidth unconditionally. And that works. But what was I trying to do? Emacs annotation tells me:
2012-09-20 1.224: $minwidth = 0;
...
2016-02-10 1.267: if ($minwidth == "=")
Looking at revision 1.224, I see:
revision 1.224
date: 2012/09/20 02:42:34; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +61 -45
showphoto: Remove vestiges of obsolete parameters.
Add new optional parameter $minwidth
So my best bet is that I had never intended a 0 there, and that my bug was masked by the PHP bug. Now I need to go back and see where I pass the $minwidth parameter to showphoto(), and why.
I wonder how much more old cruft is in there. In passing, I note that the HTML generated by this function includes &edit=0. That's correct—the parameter allows me to edit certain things on the page, and it's only allowed on my local pages (and it can't be set remotely). But edit=0 is the default, and it's not in the code generated on lax. Where does it come from? My guess is that it's another benign reaction to a bug similar to the $minwidth bug.
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Shelly and Jodie arrive
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Topic: general | Link here |
Overnight visit today from Shelley Cooper and Jodie Latta. Shelley is an acquaintance of Jane Ashhurst, and they're planning to keep their horses together somewhere south of Sydney. Shelley is interested in buying Dana, who has proved to be too lively for Yvonne.
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Soggy bread?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Baked bread again this week. I then cut it into slices and freeze most of it. Today I took note of the slicer, which not for the first time looked like this:
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On reflection, that's incompletely cooked dough. I've been baking my bread the same way for years. Time to increase the baking time (from 100 to 120 minutes, maybe)?
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Paella again
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Topic: food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
Shelley and Jodie are here. Time for some good food and invite others too. Chris Bahlo came for the first time in years, it seems—she hadn't seen Mona before: she's only been here for a little over a year. Pene Kirk was also going to come, but had to cancel at the last minute due to a complicated calving.
So it was another paella, today for the first time with real Bomba rice, in the process deciding that the quantities are too much for the specified 35 cm paellera. Here it is in a 40 cm pan:
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It definitely tasted different, softer than Arborio. Is it worth the price? It's interesting to compare some of the prices:
| Ingredient | Weight | Price | ||
| Saffron | 2 g | $10.00 | ||
| Rice | 500 g | $6.75 | ||
| Chicken thighs | 888 g | $2.56 |
Why was the chicken so cheap? I would have expected a price between $10 and $12 per kg. Yvonne bought it at the fresh meat counter at Woolworths, and my guess is that either the salesperson mistyped, or he/she wanted to do her a favour.
It also gave me the first chance to try out my new onion cutter mandolin. Not an unqualified success. Just inserting the cutting frame was really difficult, though I was able to prove that it is sharp:
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The real issue, though, is that it doesn't cut anywhere like in the advertisements (first image):
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So it looks as if I don't have any use for it, especially as the small print on the packaging (but nowhere else) reads:
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“Do not clean this product in a dishwasher”. Even there it is almost obscured by a label that is interesting in itself:
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I wonder what the story behind that is.
| Sunday, 11 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 11 May 2025 |
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Web server load
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Finally got fra.lemis.com up and running. Changed my DNS so that www.lemis.com pointed at fra. As I feared, its load average shot up to round 150 and peaked higher than I have ever seen it. OK, add a second entry for www pointing at lax.lemis.com. To my surprise, nothing much changed during the course of the day. But everything's pointing to the fact that I need to change my PHP code. I don't really need to reload the page every time a photo changes size, but somehow web crawlers love trying out the different sizes:
47.82.18.245 - - [11/May/2025:22:14:48 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230410&size=4&imagesizes=44444444444442444444444444444444444444444440444444444444444444444444444444404444444444440 HTTP/1.1" 200 325860 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/121.0.0.0"
47.82.18.245 - - [11/May/2025:22:19:35 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230420&size=2&imagesizes=22222222202222222222222222222222222222222222222222223222222222222222222222212222220 HTTP/1.1" 200 147323 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/121.0.0.0"
47.82.18.245 - - [11/May/2025:22:21:15 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230406&size=2&imagesizes=2222222220222222222222222222223222222222222222222222322222222222222222222221 HTTP/1.1" 200 210368 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/121.0.0.0"
47.82.18.245 - - [11/May/2025:22:31:21 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230412&size=2&imagesizes=2222222222222222222222222222222222222222222212220222222222222222222222222222222222122222222222223 HTTP/1.1" 200 191491 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/121.0.0.0"
47.82.18.245 - - [11/May/2025:22:34:04 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230429&size=4&imagesizes=444444444444444442444444444444444440444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444424444444440 HTTP/1.1" 200 75950 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_0_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1"
47.82.18.245 - - [11/May/2025:22:39:02 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230420&size=2&imagesizes=222222222222222222222222222222222230222222222222222222222222222222022222222222221 HTTP/1.1" 200 282268 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) EdgiOS/120.0.2210.150 Version/17.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1"
Those numbers in imagesizes are the sizes of each individual image. What I really need to do is to simply resize locally without reloading the page. But how do I do that? My web fu isn't up to it.
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Aliexpress gets highest ratings
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Topic: general, technology, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
As if I hadn't had enough trouble with my new mandolin already, I ran into another problem when trying to clean it: I couldn't get the cutting frame out of the device. It was stuck fast, and no lever would get it out. It's a dangerous thing, as my cut finger yesterday shows. And I can't put it in the dishwasher!
Well, it seems that I can express my opinion:
Very disappointing. It doesn't work nearly as well as in the advertisements: cutting onions is almost useless. After difficulties inserting the cutting frame, I can't get it out again. In addition, it isn't dishwasher safe. It will probably end up on the shelf.The photo upload function on the review page doesn't seem to work. See here or here
But when I tried to submit the review, I got the message “System is busy! please try again 10 minutes later”. And the web form politely erased my entry. That repeated several times. So I tried it once, got the error, entered a positive review for the camera strap clips. It was accepted immediately. Try the negative review. System busy. No wonder Aliexpress items get such good reviews.
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New camera strap clips
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I've had issues with my camera straps for years now. Basically, none allow easy attachment and detachment of the strap. It's been nearly 10 years since I started using different kinds of clips instead. A year later I found smaller clips, but they're not that reliable: they can come undone and they can scratch the camera body:
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And on one occasion one simply broke on me:
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Recently I found an alternative from Yogodins Official Store at Aliexpress:
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They're made out of metal, so they're unlikely to break. They're thin enough to fit through the strap lug. There's nothing protruding to scratch the camera or accidentally open the clip:
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Perfect? Well, I'm careful with words like that. The ring for the strap is marginally too small, and it's almost too difficult to open. But so far it's the best I've seen.
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Another dishwasher error
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Topic: general, photography, opinion | Link here |
Lots of dish washing to do lately, of course. And our Bosch dishwasher came up with a new surprise: E:22. That reminds me of Ektachrome processing, but that's E-2; the 22 comes from Kodacolor.
More to the point, of course: what is it? My last search for error codes (in that case E:15) brought a number of contradictory claims. But surely Bosch has something on line.
Yes! A list in roughly the format I expected. E:22 is “The dishwasher filter is blocked”.
Really? I had to wait for Yvonne to remove the dishes, but I can't really expect that the filter was that clogged. Hopefully it's not a pump or something.
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Another dinner
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Topic: food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
Another dinner this evening. I was still recovering from the work I did yesterday, and today I was to make sweet and sour fish, also a lot of work. I was rather relieved when I discover that Yvonne hadn't bought all the ingredients. So we had scaloppine al limone, and Yvonne cooked.
Today Pene Kirk came along with delightful tale of decapitating dead calves during the “birth”—and of course the main dish was veal.
Another interesting discussion, during which we touched on the subject of recipes. It started with the question of using rice cookers or not. Jodie was interested in how much water to put in the rice, something that I've investigated in detail. But she talked about cups of rice. How much does a cup of rice weigh? She thought that a cup was a “metric” up, 250 ml, when in fact for rice cookers it's 180 ml. Admittedly, it was more proportions than absolute volumes, but it just goes to show once again how confusing these cups are.
Jodie mentioned sauce béchamel. How many ingredients? Somewhere two tablespoons of flour came into the recipe. It's not clear how that relates to my recipe, because I don't know what a tablespoon of flour weighs. Weights are the way to go.
Jodie was ready for me: when did you last calibrate your scales? I didn't have the answer immediately, but it could have been 12 September 2012. I do compare the results from various scales from time to time, and they show the same down to the last digit, so I'm sure they're accurate enough for kitchen work. But one point to Jodie.
Then the recipe itself. Salted or unsalted? What a question! But yes, it's ambiguous, and it influences the quantity of salt to be added. Another point to Jodie. Shelley checked with her phone and found some number of teaspoons per cup, which doesn't help at all. But it seems that salted butter has about 1.5% salt, so in my recipe the 50 g of butter, if salted, would require reducing the salt by about 0.75 g.
| Monday, 12 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 12 May 2025 |
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Catchup day
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Topic: general | Link here |
The weekend was quite busy, evidenced also by the fact that I had more than 2 dishwasher loads to wash, and I spent much of the day catching up.
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Web server load
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Spent some time looking at the web server loads today. They weren't low. fra had load averages of over 200, lax always a little lower at round 150—and then they suddenly both dropped to below 1. So it's clearly a load issue and nothing related to shared VMs. Nothing for it: I need to learn how to resize images without reloading the web page. I don't know where to start.
| Tuesday, 13 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 13 May 2025 |
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Interrupting power supply
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Got up to go to the toilet at 4:00 this morning. Flash! The lights got brighter, maybe an overvoltage spike courtesy of Powercor. Nothing seemed to have suffered. Did the PV inverter take umbrage? No, everything as usual.
But from my office I heard a continuous alarm beep. In to find that my “CyberPower” UPS had interrupted power and wouldn't take input power for an excuse. It had taken down hydra and eureka, my main machines, which had been up for over 6 months. What a useless contraption!
Removed the “UPS”, and while I was at it changed the swap SSD on eureka as planned a few months ago.
Then find the monitors for eureka. I know where they are: to the left of my desk. But which is connected to the “console”? The right one, currently. And I needed a keyboard. Finally got it up and running. hydra started more easily, but for some reason the .xinitrc file was missing. It's a symlink to /home/X/.xinitrc, which is on eureka, but it shouldn't just have gone away. And I had forgotten that I load the nvidia-modeset module manually after problems loading at boot last year. After that, X came up, but the mouse button map wasn't set correctly, meaning that I had no way to simulate a button 2 event, which I needed to solve the problem. That may be because the xinput IDs had changed, but I haven't checked that yet.
And then the daily photo backups started at 5:00. Oh. I hadn't mounted the external drives correctly, a problem (random unit IDs) that I have had for a long time. Today it tried to back the photos up to the /dump disk, which would have continued until the disk was full. Force umount /dump? No can do. Finally I disconnected the drive, which resulted in a panic. I really need to do something about these random device assignments.
All done? Well, things were up and running, and at 6:00 I went back to bed. But in the course of the day I found a number of issues:
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Translating Sütterlin
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Topic: language, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has received a couple of documents to translate, like this birth certificate:
The Fraktur (printed) text is no problem, but the handwriting? It's the old German script, usually called Sütterlin, though that only refers to a specific version of the script. We can both painfully work our way through it, but it's really not easy. Yvonne came up with a partial translation, but we needed to improve it.
Google Gemini to our aid? Yes, there's a free online tool, Transkribus, which does just that. But it too didn't like the originals. Here the three versions we came up with:
Register of birth No. 2 of the year 1926
Certificate of Birth
First name and family name: Ruth Leonore Schmidt
Sister of Lutz Wilhelm Schmidt in Zeschwitz
born August 5, 1926
in Zeschwitz District Leipzig
Zeschwitz, August 8, 1926
Registrar
(signature)
(stamp)
Potoregister dr. des Jabres 1926
Geburtsschein
Bomanen und Familiename: Ruth Lesnore
Schmidt
eheliche Tochter des Vorlaurs Kart Wilhelm turt Schmibt in Beschwitt
geboren am O."
August
1926
Umtshauptmannschaft
Eignig
inBeschwitz,
1926.
Keschwitt. am 8. Mudguet
Der Staktesbeamte
1105
Register of birth No. 2 of the year 1926
Birth certificate
Given names and family name: Ruth Leonore Schmidt
Legitimate daughter of Carl Wilhelm Schmidt in Zeschwitz
born 5 August 1926
in Zeschwitz, district of Leipzig
Zeschwitz, 8 August 1926
Registrar
(signature)
(stamp)
The mess that Transkribus made made us feel better in our attempts, though it was useful in a number of points. Part of the issue was, of course, that the original wasn't very good.
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Peter Dutton found
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Topic: politics | Link here |
Last weekend I was looking for a typical caricature of Peter Dutton. This is the one, from The Chaser, though I can no longer find the article:
I suppose that it's part intuition, but he looks surprisingly recognizable.
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Web site slowdown
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My web server load is still unbearable, load averages over 100 on both servers. And I got other warnings that things are not as they should be:
Date: Sun, 11 May 2025 08:51:22 -0400
From: "support@vultr.com" <support@vultr.com>
This is an automated notification that bandwidth usage for your account has exceeded 75% of your available bandwidth pool.
Date: Mon, 12 May 2025 11:50:06 -0400
This is an automated notification that bandwidth usage for your account has exceeded 91% of your available bandwidth pool.
Date: Mon, 12 May 2025 21:47:45 -0400
This is an automated notification that bandwidth usage for your account has exceeded 101% of your available bandwidth pool.
How much bandwidth am I using? Installed iftop and found that lax was delivering over 100 Mb/s, comparable with a fast magnetic disk drive. Apart from the load, there's also a cost factor involved, though Vultr is too polite to say how much.
Still, there's a simple workaround: the real issue is the number of requests for the same page with different image sizes. By default there's no image size specification, so I put a 10 second delay on any request with the ?imagesizes= parameter. And how about that, the load dropped.
But somehow there's still something wrong. The servers are still responding very slowly, and I've had some connection resets even after the load average dropped below 10. Is that related to the number of outstanding requests? A quick and dirty count shows:
=== grog@lax (/dev/pts/5) ~ 5 -> netstat -n|wc -l
2114
It stayed like that for some time, until I got bored checking.
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Flowering Schlumbergera
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Topic: gardening, photography, opinion | Link here |
It's been nearly 2 years since Yana brought us a multitude of Schlumbergera cuttings, but for some reason they only really started to grow a few months back. One of them is a truncata variety with large leaves and large white flowers. At first I thought that would be uninteresting, but the stigmata are still red, and the result is quite pretty. Time to get my macro gear out again and take some focus stacked photos.
Not a success. I had expected the background to be completely out of focus and thus to be ignored, but that wasn't the case. And the lighting of the second image leaves much to be desired:
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Another attempt tomorrow?
| Wednesday, 14 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 14 May 2025 |
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More pump work
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Jarrod from UPI turned up unannounced this morning just before breakfast to change the water pump. They had established the cause of its failure: it had been submerged in water! That must happen when the tanks overflow, and it would explain why the plank underneath had rotted away.
I had suggested to him that he speak with Nick, but it seems that hadn't worked. In any case, he found a solution. Move the pump to higher ground:
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Hopefully that will be enough.
One thing Jarrod didn't do is to replace the cover. Yvonne found out why (seen here from the other side):
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Now where did I have that jigsaw?
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More web server pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
What causes ECONNRESET, “connection reset by peer"? I've been getting a lot of them from my overloaded web servers lately. Searching the web didn't help; I suspect that I'll get more information from Stevens, but I need the time to look for it.
But there's one obvious possibility: by delaying all requests by 10 seconds when imagesizes is specified, I'm increasing the number of requests. What if I'm running out of some basic net resource? And clearly the delay may not deter crawlers. What I need is to redirect requests with imagesizes—if they are very long. So I hacked something together to redirect any request with an imagesizes string longer than 5 characters:
177-38-154-79.brasrede.psi.br - - [14/May/2025:23:07:12 +0000] "GET http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230430&size=2&imagesizes=22322222022220222222222222222222222223222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222220&edit=0 HTTP/1.1" 301 382 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Trailer/93.3.3516.28"
static.vnpt.vn - - [14/May/2025:23:07:11 +0000] "GET http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230420&size=4&imagesizes=4444244444444444444444444442444444444444444444444444444414444444444444444444444444444424444444442&edit=0 HTTP/1.1" 301 365 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:123.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/123.0 Config/92.2.7601.2"
static.vnpt.vn - - [14/May/2025:23:07:11 +0000] "GET http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230405&size=4&imagesizes=1444444444444444440444444444444444444444444444444444444444414444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444441444440 HTTP/1.1" 301 383 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) EdgiOS/120.0.2210.86 Version/17.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1"
47.79.3.17 - - [14/May/2025:23:07:11 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-dec2006.php?dirdate=20061223&size=2&imagesizes=22222222222222122222322222122222222222220 HTTP/1.1" 301 282 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
45.228.205.28 - - [14/May/2025:23:07:11 +0000] "GET http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230430&size=2&imagesizes=222222222223222222222222222222222232222222222222222222222223222222222222222022222222222222222222222222222222222222222221 HTTP/1.1" 301 382 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1 RDDocuments/8.4.8.940"
The fifth field in those log messages (301) is the HTTP status code, meaning “Moved permanently”. Clearly it will take a long time before the crawlers catch on, but in the meantime the request is completed much more quickly. The server loads dropped to round 25 for fra and 10 for lax. At least that will give me time to breathe.
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Gemstone: still doesn't make the grade
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I've had another special offer for acdsee Gemstone 15, something like $720 worth of software for $59. And another video to show all that it can do: superscale images (could be useful), mark parts of images and then do nothing with them, and all sorts of ways that Gemstone can disrupt your normal photo processing flow and make it different to move to some other product if you want to.
I'm sure that there's more than that to the product, and that the videos are just substandard. But I don't have time to try it out. That's not the first time: I had exactly the same thoughts a year ago with release 12. But release 12 has the advantage that I have a permanent license for it, so I don't have to hurry.
| Thursday, 15 May 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 15 May 2025 |
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Incredible dying abutilon
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
The abutilon in front of the laundry door has given cause for concern for some time. But lately many more branches have started to die off:
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I still can't see any obvious cause. I really should climb under the bush and examine more carefully.
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Blood test
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
It's time for my 6-monthly blood test. Off to Dorevitch in Ballarat, where I have never had to wait very long. But at 14:00 the waiting room was completely empty, and I got the sequence number 1. And nobody came to call me. After a few minutes, in to take a look. Down the corridor and asked a phlebotomist how they knew when a patient had arrived. “Oh, we hear that”.
Back, sat down, and she came to get me almost immediately. Coincidence? Still, I was in and out within 10 minutes.
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Fruit Shack again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I was at the Fruit Shack only last week, but there were so many things that I didn't find that I had to go again.
Somehow the Fruit Shack is a love-hate relationship. They have all sorts of good things—sometimes. But their price labelling is so useless that I don't even try: they're frequently not related to the goods to which they purport to refer, and they're difficult to read at the best of times. Today I found an even better example:
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What's that? That's the only label on each of them. Clearly the first is some kind of dòufu puff, and the second some kind of dumpling, but what? I found an assistant who told me that the first is some kind of dòufu puff, and the second some kind of dumpling. But what? He couldn't answer that either.
Looking more carefully, the first did have some kind of afterthought on the analysis label, which both the assistant and I overlooked:
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It's a dòufu puff. Who would have thought that? Under the circumstances I took it, since I haven't found any of my preferred Chung Hing puffs for weeks now. There's a well-marked empty section where they should be in one of the fridges, but somehow they don't get them regularly.
And still not all the noodles I was looking for. And the prawn wontons? They're long gone too, it seems. And I fell foul of the unmarked prices: the cashier puzzled over the price of a pack of 10 cha shao pao for some time before deciding that it would cost $30. Sorry, not for me.
The problem with the Fruit Shack is possibly that they have financial problems, and they could close down. That would be a great pity. But it would be really nice if they could get their act together.
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The daily web site pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Somehow the load on my web servers isn't dropping. How long is it going to take for the crawlers to give up? And still the load on fra.lemis.com is much higher than on lax.lemis.com. Could it be related to DNS lookups? lax runs a name server, but fra (currently) doesn't, so it needs to find them from somewhere. That's something I can try.
| Friday, 16 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 16 May 2025 |
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DDos via web crawler?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Despite all my attempts, the load on my web servers continues to increase, to over 200 on fra.lemis.com. Most of the requests were like this:
57.141.0.5 - - [16/May/2025:04:04:55 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-dec2010.php?dirdate=20101210&size=2&imagesizes=2222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222332222222222222222022222223222222222222222222122222222122221222222222222222222222222222222222222220222222222222222222222222222222222221222222222222222222222232222222220 HTTP/1.1" 301 - "-" "meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)"
That's interesting for a couple of reasons: firstly, of course, my redirect worked, and secondly this one identifies itself as a web crawler, though my robots.txt prohibits all crawlers. I got the impression that some pages were particular targets, for example diary-dec2006.php. Downloaded something like 2.5 GB of log file for local analysis, but didn't get very far with it, especially since it took a couple of hours to load.
Later I got my confirmation from my primitive web statistics tool:
On 16 May 2025 you had a total of 11053225 hits.
Top 20 hits:
362122 /grog/diary-dec2006.php
309998 http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2010.php
228801 /grog/diary-dec2006.php?dirdate=20061226
201442 http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-nov2020.php
149340 http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230420
116966 http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2023.php
99277 http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jan2019.php
98824 /grog/diary-dec2006.php?dirdate=20061223
97473 http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2019.php
65679 /grog/diary-dec2006.php?dirdate=20061205
62850 http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2010.php?dirdate=20100417
57371 /grog/diary-mar2012.php
54083 http://www.lemis.com/grog/photography/panorama-hardware.php?dirdate=20110510
53775 http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230430
53577 http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230404
53503 http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2010.php?dirdate=20100418
53263 http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230405
50965 /grog/diary-dec2006.php?dirdate=20061213
50024 /grog/diary-dec2006.php?dirdate=20061211
42999 /grog/diary-mar2012.php?dirdate=20120318
11 million hits! That's 128 hits a second, and round a thousand times normal. From lax alone! I'm amazed that the systems handled them at all. And no fewer than 856415 hits for diary-dec2006.php, round 10 a second.
It's not clear what to do about it? Firewall the worst offenders? Hope that it's all a bad dream and will go away tomorrow? Give up on a web site?
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Where's my camera?
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Topic: photography, general, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday I took a couple of photos of food at the Fruit Shack with my Olympus E-PM2 and the Panasonic Lumix G 20 mm f/1.7. Time to process the photos. But where's the camera? I searched everywhere, but nothing to be found.
It's not the best or most expensive camera that I have. I paid $299 for it new 11 years ago, and the lens cost another $219. I can survive the loss of the camera, but I'm sad about the lens. Off looking for replacements. A used E-PM2, a camera that went out of production 10 years ago, sells for over $500!
While mulling that, looked at my camera collection shelf:
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That's the camera in front of the ancient SLRs. Why did I put it there?
Amusingly, that Wikipedia page currently displays close relatives of the Exakta and purported Contax S:
I have my grave doubts as to whether that's really a Contax S. The description suggests “Zeiss Ikon VEB”, but the term Volkseigener Betrieb (VEB) didn't come into use until long after the Contax S changed its letters. But the image is so poor that's it's hard to tell.
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More flower macros
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Topic: photography, gardening, opinion | Link here |
Tuesday's photos of the flowering Schlumbergera were nothing to be proud of. Today I got round to trying again in a more controlled environment. In the process I finally found a use for the Travor RF-550D “LED flash” that I bought 6 years ago and found so useless that it has spent its time on the shelf. But clearly it's just what I want here:
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And I still made a mess of it!
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OK, I can fix that:
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But why did I not notice it when taking the photos?
In passing, I still can't make up my mind whether Zerene Stacker's PMax or DMap algorithm is better. Here it seems to be DMap (first image). PMax has dark halos round the petals, and the gradation seems inferior:
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But elsewhere I've seen that PMax does a better job.
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Updating medical records
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Topic: health, technology, opinion | Link here |
The misaddressed letter that I received last week proved to be from the National Diabetes Service Scheme (NDSS), offering me free education about Diabetes. After 18 years I think I now know what I need to know.
But clearly it's time to update my contact details. That went smoothly with no problems nor identity checks. Anybody could have done it with no more information than my Medicare or NDSS registration number. I'm frequently annoyed by security measures that are both excessive and inadequate, but this is a little too insecure.
| Saturday, 17 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 17 May 2025 |
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Preparing for the hereafter
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Topic: history, health, opinion | Link here |
Round now there have been a number of anniversaries: 49 years ago today I started working with Karstadt, 42 years ago today I started working with Tandem Computers. And then there was UNIVAC (2 May 1973) and IBM (1 May 2001). And of course we moved into the Stones Road house 10 years ago.
All these events are in the past, of course. What will the future bring? I'm 76 years old. Will I still living here in another 10 years? Will I still be alive in another 10 years? A quick check shows that average male life expectancy at my age is 9.29 years, so the odds are “no”.
Oh. That was for the USA. For Australia it's 11.57 years, so the odds are “yes”. Those are statistical means, and unfortunately they don't give any indication of standard deviation. I think I'm healthier than most men of my age, and given the lives of the rest of the family, I think I should make it to 90, but not (much) more.
Clearly I should be preparing for the end. I really don't want to go into a nursing home, though it seems likely. On the other hand, my mother lived to nearly 95 and remained at home. But the real issue is that I need to come to terms with the concept.
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Web server: calm
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Into the office first thing this morning to check the web server load averages. Round 0.5 on both systems! And it stayed that way all day long.
What does that say? That the crawlers have finally given up? On IRC, Jamie Fraser blamed it on AI bots. What can I do about it? He suggested:
if you don't mind an anime character on your site briefly before the actual page loads, there's a project called "Anubis" that is apparently pretty effective at stopping them
Should I (search for and) try Anubis? I don't like the idea of advertising popups, and until the load goes through the roof again, it doesn't seem to be an issue any more.
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Chasing William Murdoch
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Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the more interesting English-language TV series is Murdoch Mysteries. We've watched the German version (English audio, German subtitles) up to the end of season 6. There's more, starting at season 13, but where are seasons 7 to 12?
Some searching brought me to this site, which appears to have all sequences. Only for users (free), so I signed up. But it's geoblocked! So much for that.
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Searching for fish soup
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Years ago we made a fish soup based on a thickened broth made from prawn and fish skin, bones and shells. Ten years ago I came up with a recipe, but I never finished it.
OK, we used to eat this a lot, based on a recipe that...
Dammit, why didn't I keep a diary in those days? I made up the broth, but what then? All fish soup recipes that I can find start with a proper broth. Maybe I should start again, but now I have all this broth left over from the prawns from last weekend. So: bite the bullet, add salt (too much, it turned out), garlic, fish and prawns.
How did it taste? Eatable, but only just. I added some of my chili sauce, which improved things. What do I do with the rest of the broth? It must be of some use.
| Sunday, 18 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 18 May 2025 |
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Mushroom poisoning?
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Topic: health, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Woke up in the middle of the night with diarrhoea, not the first time in the last week. Not serious, and it went away by itself. But what caused it? After some investigation discovered that both occasions occurred after I had eaten some of the shiitake mushrooms that Yvonne had bought last week.
Mushroom poisoning is in fashion at the moment, with a court case about an alleged mushroom poisoning in Leongatha currently under way in Morwell generating a surprising amount of interest. But I have had sensitivity to other mushrooms before as well, and hopefully I'm not in any danger.
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What's that stone?
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne came into my office today with some strange objects:
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What are they? Based on my last disaster I asked whether I could press on them. Yes, they're stones, probably rose quartz, and she had found them just outside the house entrance, in front of the library window.
More investigation: no, they're not stones. They're some kind of bulb. The one at bottom left looks vaguely like garlic. And gradually it dawned on me: they're bulbs from the pink lily that I have noted in the past (first photo):
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And yes, the second photo shows plenty more of the bulbs on the ground. No wonder they spread so fast.
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A new weather station?
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
My flaky weather station has come good. For a while. It keeps losing contact between the inside and outside units. Today it did so again, and I really can't understand why. It can't be the distance: it's only about 20 m, through a window, and most of the time it works. When it doesn't, bringing the two units closer doesn't help. It also can't be batteries: the batteries in the inside unit were fully charged, and the ones in the outside unit are charged by solar power. But it failed when the sun was shining after running all night.
Why don't I buy a new one? I wrote the software for the unit (Fine Offset WH-1081), and it is no longer available. But clearly I need to do something. Web searches, including with Google Gemini, brought me little help, beyond pointing to some free software, Cumulus MX, that may help. But it's written in C#, and I don't even know how to compile that. But it has an export to MySQL function, so potentially it could be useful.
But while looking for alternatives, saw this:
The inside unit is exactly the same as the unit for the WH-1080:
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And that's what I want to interface with. The external unit is quite different, but that's no problem. What is it? It's a Tesa WS1081 Solar Powered Touch Panel Weather Center with PC interface, and it's made by La Crosse. It's available from a number of places for a remarkably uniform price of $249. I have the options of buying from at least Big W (who provided the image), Harvey Norman or Instrument Choice, who make by far the most professional impression.
OK, buy it, but from whom? On closer inspection, Harvey Norman are the cheapest at $225. But I can't pick it up: they have to send it to me, for which they charge the excessive price of $24, bringing the total to $249. Big W also wants to send it, but that's free, bringing the total to $249. And Instrument Choice also sends for free, but they charge $249.95. And while checking the postage, got this message:
Backorder Now, once ordered your item will dispatch before the 17th of July 2025, call 1300 419 842 (NZ 0800 737 871 to confirm).
Clearly Harvey Norman are pulling a fast one, and Instrument Choice could have made the status clearer on their sales page. Big W offer a 30 day return policy, which under the circumstances sounds like a very good idea. So they get my order.
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60 years of flash hatred
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Topic: photography, gardening, opinion | Link here |
I'm trying more macro photos of plants. I haven't found time to continue my shots of the Schlumbergera truncata, but there are others that I wanted to take too, like these seed pods of Hibiscus rosa-sinensis:
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OK, straightforward enough. Use the mecablitz 15 MS-1, which requires the toy flash on the camera. Turn the mecablitz on, take a photo.
No flash! With a lot of messing around I got four good photos and six where the flash didn't fire. And the exposure was incorrect, despite TTL measurement. In the end I dragged out my old manual Viltrox JY-670 Macro Ring Lite, which worked without too much trouble. But why is flash always such a pain? At least now I don't waste expensive film if the flash doesn't fire, but that's about all.
| Monday, 19 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 19 May 2025 |
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Understanding ring flashes
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday's flash problems irritate me greatly. Time to investigate why I always have such problems. Found the instruction manual for the mecablitz 15 MS-1—I don't think I ever got a PDF version—and read the instructions for the appallingly difficult configuration. The big discovery was that it is possible to use my with a cable, but then I lose the clever camera functionality. But why did things go wrong yesterday? It could be the camera settings, but I would have thought that they would be OK.
Time to write down some details of what flash equipment I have and how to use it.
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