I've recently become aware of a number of people who strongly object
to daylight saving time.
OK, I'm not a great fan, but there are many other things I'd rather grumble about.
But then, a couple of days ago was the 49th anniversary of the day I wrote my first program. For some reason, people found it more interesting that
it was also the day that the first two datagrams were transmitted across
the ARPANET.
Or was it? The documentation states that it happened on 29 October 1969, at 22:30. What
time zone? US Pacific Time.
DST or no DST? Nowadays it would be DST, since the transition is the first Sunday in
November. But was it like that at the time? Spent quite a bit of time
reading /usr/src/contrib/tzdata/northarmerica and watching my eyes go funny, and came
to the conclusion: yes, standard time. In 1969 (and, it seems, until as recently as 2006),
DST ended on the last Sunday in October:
# Rule NAME FROM TO TYPE IN ON AT SAVE LETTER/S
Rule US 1918 1919 - Mar lastSun 2:00 1:00 D
Rule US 1918 1919 - Oct lastSun 2:00 0 S
Rule US 1942 only - Feb 9 2:00 1:00 W # War
Rule US 1945 only - Aug 14 23:00u 1:00 P # Peace
Rule US 1945 only - Sep lastSun 2:00 0 S
Rule US 1967 2006 - Oct lastSun 2:00 0 S
Rule US 1967 1973 - Apr lastSun 2:00 1:00 D
Rule US 1974 only - Jan 6 2:00 1:00 D
Rule US 1975 only - Feb 23 2:00 1:00 D
Rule US 1976 1986 - Apr lastSun 2:00 1:00 D
Rule US 1987 2006 - Apr Sun>=1 2:00 1:00 D
Rule US 2007 max - Mar Sun>=8 2:00 1:00 D
Rule US 2007 max - Nov Sun>=1 2:00 0 S
Off down the road again today to take some more photos of
the Thelymitra pauciflora.
It wasn't easy: it was windier than I had expected, my footstool proved to be so low that it
was almost no help:,
The barely visible pair of Thelymitra in the middle of the second image show the problem.
In addition, I ran into significant technical problems:
I really, really want to be able to tell the camera to take a series of
images over a focus range, not just a fixed number, which might be too many or too few. And
to help that, I need much better support from the camera.
“Focus peaking” is an excellent
idea, but for some reason it pretty much doesn't work at all when you're close to 1:1
magnification. And then there's this stupid bug in the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II firmware: when the external viewfinder is connected, the camera switches off focus stacking,
so I continually had to disconnect it before taking the photos.
Back home with 240 odd photos (about 5 GB), but wasn't able to get any useful results before
evening.
CJ Ellis along towards evening. He hadn't called or sent email: his entire electronic
infrastructure was offline, he said. Aussie Broadband had cancelled his service because he had accidentally replied to a
spam message, so his VoIP service didn't
work any more either. And his computer continually displayed pornographic images that he
couldn't get rid of.
OK, first things first. Contacted Aussie Broadband. No, the service was still intact. OK,
fire up the machine. Indeed, as soon as I started chrome, up popped multiple very pornographic images like
a Hydra: as soon as you closed on,
another popped up in its place. Installed firefox and confirmed that this was some configuration of his chrome.
Some time, when I have the time, I suppose I should reinstall that for him. Probably it
would make more sense to reinstall the whole system from an image I took a while back.
The other issue: his machine runs Microsoft “Windows” 7. It has 2 GB of memory:
And that is clearly too little. The poor little thing is swapping its heart out. Now where
did I have a spare DIMM? What kind is it, anyway? Do I really have to count the contacts?
A couple of days ago I
discovered that I couldn't download MediathekView's file list using the internal download function: it timed out
repeatedly. But using fetch worked fine, so I decided to do that instead.
But things aren't that simple. Today fetch timed out repeatedly for over an hour.
So I tried it with the internal downloader. It worked immediately! So whatever the issue
is, it's not as simple as bugs in the internal downloader.
That's all I got out of a total of 240 images: only four in total (the other two look very
similar), and even those don't bear much looking at.
What went wrong? Mainly the wind, but also getting things in focus. Even the close-up
isn't as good as it should be: the tip of the petal at the bottom isn't completely in focus,
nor is the back of the flower. In this case, clearly I needed not only a better start focus
point, but also more steps. There should really be more help from the camera. And why
doesn't focus peaking work at these
distances?
On the positive side, I found some more, much more accessible flowers in front of our own
property. But it was far too windy—we had winds of up to 33 km/h and gusts of up to 48
km/h. Tomorrow? Then it will be cooler, so the flowers will probably shrivel up and die.
Now that we have the new gas and induction cooktops, it's time to install them. I had been
recommended Mike Simpson (“Mike for odd jobs”, phone 0419 935 147), who proves to do mainly
joinery, and definitely no plumbing, electrical or painting work. He charges round $80 just
to come out here, but today he was prepared to do it for free—just to take a look, and
definitely not to install the cooktops.
He showed up and spent some time investigating. The good news: it's straightforward. The
less good news: he can't do it for at least 2 weeks. I was also left wondering whether it
would even work the way we planned it, with a single hole for both cooktops. The Bosch cooktop has clips on either side to hold it in place. How can that work if
there's nothing to clip to on the one side?
The weather has changed completely in the last couple of days. On Thursday the temperature
reached 32.8° and didn't drop below 20° after 8:00. Today the temperatures ranged from 9°
to 18°. And not surprisingly,
the Thelymitra pauciflora
were no longer flowering. While searching for them, though, I found at least a dozen plants
at the north-east corner of our plot of land. Have they all finished flowering? I'll keep
my eyes open.
Further south, there are plenty of wildflowers, but how do you catch them in a photo?
The white flowers are Burchardia
umbellata (or “Milkmaids”), and the violet flowers are, I
think, Thysanotus
patersonii, also called Twining Fringe Lily. The problem is that there is no fringe.
Could it be something else?
Rather against my will, Yvonne wanted to
serve hash browns with the pepper steaks this evening. How should we
prepare them? Another task for the digital air fryer. But how do I arrange them? Put them
flat and they'll only get done on one side. But that wasn't an option: the basket was too
small. In the end, tried them in different orientations, and all worked. Here before,
after, and in the serving dish (Yvonne had tastefully turned the pale side downwards):
Chris Bahlo has been coming here to go riding for a simple reason: she needs somebody to
help her to put on her armour. For me, it was a chance to try out new autofocus settings.
Kev Russell on the M43 Tech
TalkFacebook group had made a
post suggesting the use of “small” focus points on the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II,
so I tried that.
She returned again later for more adjustments. The cord is electric fence wiring, though we
considered that cable ties probably would have done better:
Finally she was off, and I had the opportunity to compare my focus tracking:
Nope, I'm still losing focus, though I kept the focus point on the horse throughout the
clip. In addition, the exposure compensation is jerky. I haven't seen that before. Could
that be due to the M.Zuiko Digital ED
14-150 mm f/4.0-5.6 that I used on this occasion?
While writing up yesterday's
article on the wildflowers, I found a discrepancy between what I considered
a Thysanotus patersonii
(twining fringe lily) and what I had. On Google image search I found a photo that exactly
matched my flowers:
Unfortunately, it proved that I had taken it myself, even in exactly the same place. And
closer examination shows that the “fringe lily” is called that because of the fringes on the
petals, which are missing here.
Further investigation suggested that it might instead be
a Dichopogon strictus, for
some reason called a “chocolate lily”:
OK, time for some focus stacked images, this time in a more controlled environment than
last time. Much work, and
once again failure! Firstly, I didn't get enough shots (WHY can't Olympus
supply better aids to decide on start and end focus?):
Apart from that, of course, the photo was taken from the wrong angle, which only occurred to
after it was all finished. I really need to spend a lot more time setting up these images.
A while back I signed up with Encyclopædia
Britannica in the hope of getting some interesting suggestions. Instead I got
marginally disguised spam. But today's message was the limit:
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2018 18:40:47 -0600
From: Britannica <noreply@email.britannica.com>
Subject: Who did Ben Franklin consider deranged?
Interestingly, the content didn't refer
to Benjamin Franklin at all.
But how should I parse it? Who considered Ben Franklin to be deranged? Good-bye,
Britannica.
Yesterday's video clips contained some interesting individual frames. They
were 1080p, so the resultant images would
be quite acceptable. But how do I extract them? It's not the first time: I did exactly the
same thing two months
ago. But how? I forgot to write it down.
While pondering the issue, I received one of these horrible spams from Ashampoo: video optimizer, for a special low price.
I've had lots of issues with Ashampoo recently, and I'm seriously considering changing to
some other software—if I can find something that's not equally painful. Still, it might be
what I'm looking for, at least for today, so I downloaded it.
And once again I ran into a hang entering data. I was offered an extension of the 10
day free trial to 30 days—just enter my customer email address. But once again it hung, and
I had to shoot it down. But it didn't want to know: when I tried to restart it, it claimed
to be already running, no matter what the Task Manager might say:
What's the problem here? I've established that their support department, though
well-meaning, doesn't know how to escalate things, but my guess is that this is related to
the fact that I access my Microsoft box
via remote desktop, and there's
some bug that the developers aren't finding out about. But life's too short for that kind
of thing, so today I just took screen shots of the frames I wanted. I probably should spend
some time investigating video processing software.
And now DxO has brought out another release of
PhotoLab.
What are the features? What are the differences? Is it worth paying $70 for the upgrade?
In principle I've been relatively happy with DxO, but documentation is not their forte.
Spent some time looking at their videos, which are more geared towards advertising, and it
seems that it can do the same things as Inpaint and movavi. Tried it out and discovered one
serious issue: one of the functions is assigned to Alt-left button. But that's
already used by my window manager. Not DxO's problem, of course, but it's a concern: the
first time in over 20 years that I've run into this kind of conflict.
Still, I was able to mark things. How do I then delete them? I still don't know. It's
certainly not “intuitive”, and once
again I couldn't find the manual. Why don't they have videos showing the details and not
just the result? This is exactly the situation where it would be a good idea.
Time to plant some and give the rest away. Yvonne and Chris
Bahlo are off to Garvoc tomorrow to pick
up a horse from Nele Kömle, so we'll send four plants for Nele. Chris only wants one, but
it looks like we can get rid of two more with Pene Kirk.
This morning was a day to trim my beard. Grabbed the trimmer, idly wondering whether it was
worth fixing the old one that had suddenly just decided not to run any more. Clearly a
wiring issue, but why bother fixing them when they're so cheap...
Plugged in the trimmer. Nothing. Exactly the same symptoms. Power failure? No, other
things were running, including the water pump. But on checking, discovered eventually that
the circuit breaker for one circuit had tripped. Damn! Why did that happen?
And, of course, it was the one circuit to which eureka was connected. I didn't have
it on the main UPS circuits because that UPS keeps fluctuating (switching on and off based on the
power input?), and that causes the second-in-line UPS to beep, so I had moved it to the
other circuit. If it had been on the primary UPS circuit, nothing would have happened.
Fortunately, this time the fsck went smoothly, and an hour later I was back online.
But I'm left wondering: my decision to use
standard UFS
(without journaling) was
based on the assumption that I would almost never have a crash. And that's just not the
case.
So what do I do? Everybody tells me to migrate
to ZFS. But that scares me, and it seems to
require ridiculous compute resources. Maybe
a NAS box? Clearly
things can't go on like this.
Yesterday's fun with
Ashampoo video optimizer had me wondering.
In the past I had noticed
stuff like that, where characters echo at about one every 30 seconds. So today I tried
again. And sure enough, to get my extended trial period took me 27 minutes before my cut
and paste had echoed and I was allowed to click on the Next button. And after that,
another 4 minutes before the application actually started.
Then it seemed to react normally. But can I be bothered? Not today. Peter Jeremy pointed
me to FFmpeg, which can extract stills
from videos. That's the second recommendation. I should take a look.
Yvonne off to see Nele Kömle today, as planted, taking five
tomato plants with her, four for Nele and one for Chris Bahlo. Now I only had six left
over, two for Pene Kirk. One was already planted, and I planted two more.
Here's the one that I planted a
week ago, and now:
It's not clear how much the plant has changed; I'd guess that it has grown. But what's very
clear are other plants around it. I counted no less than 17 volunteer descendents of last
year's plant. What do I do with them?
Is he right? First I need to hear what he has to say, so I watched the entire clip.
There's some interesting stuff, but not enough for a blow-by-blow discussion. In many
respects I can't agree with his arguments.
One of the big ones is “A manufacturer will not tell you when he's going to stop production
of a product”, and he points to Panasonic's introduction of the new Lumix S series, still under development. Why would they jump into that market if
they weren't thinking of stopping production of the Micro Four Thirds system?
Well, their CEO made that clear: there's an opportunity. He expects that Micro Four Thirds
will continue to be the mainstay of their camera production. And the fact that they're
bringing out a 10-25 mm f/1.7 zoom lens—the world's fastest zoom—lends weight to that claim.
Then Tony goes on to state that the reason for smaller sensors in the first place was just
because the sensors themselves were so expensive to make that they were a significant part
of the camera price, and now that has changed. Is he right? He could be, but I didn't know
that. When I chose the Four
Thirds system in 2007, that was not a factor.
Innovation was.
But Tony says that small sensors produce bad results. He also says that mobile phone
cameras produce surprisingly good results. Which is it to be? Four Thirds has a quarter of
the area of a full frame sensor. The current best mobile phone
camera on DxOMark's site is the Xiaomi
Mi MIX 3 with a 1/2.55 sensor, about 8.7% of the size of a Four Thirds sensor.
The other thing that Tony doesn't appear to understand is that sensor performance is
dependent on pixel size, not sensor dimensions. The Four Thirds sensor has an area of 224.9
mm², so a 20 MP sensor will have pixels of 11.2 μm². A full frame sensor has an area of
(frequently marginally less than) 864 mm², so a 45.7 MP sensor like on
the Nikon Z7 would have a pixel size of
18.9 μm². Not as big a difference as it might seem. On the other hand, the Xiaomi pixels,
despite the relatively low resolution of 12 MP, has pixels about 1.62 μm² in size.
And then he gets on to lens sizes. Micro Four Thirds lenses are no smaller than full frame
lenses, he says. To prove his point, he drags out an Olympus 300 mm f/4 and a Nikon 600 mm
f/4. This image from the 43rumours discussion:
Huh? What has he been smoking? Oh, no, you can't compare an f/4 full frame lens with a
Micro Four Thirds f/4 lens. There's this thing about equivalent aperture. You need to
compare it with an f/8 lens.
Sorry, Tony, but this is stupid. I'll write a separate rant on the subject,
but basically there are two ways to measure aperture: by the amount of light it lets in (the
standard method) or by the relative depth of field. And for reasons I really don't
understand, some people use the depth-of-field criterion. In this case, it seems that Tony
is saying that depth of field (or rather, lack of it) is more important than exposure.
Sure, shallow depth of field can be useful in composition, but for me it's been the bane of
my life. I see the increased depth of field of Micro Four Thirds cameras as an advantage.
It certainly is in the case of long telephoto photography. But never mind, that goes
against Tony's argument. He says that to compare the cameras, you need to compare full
frame lenses with Micro Four Thirds lenses with half the aperture (for example, 50 mm f/2.8
FF with 25 mm f/1.4 Micro Four Thirds). And there's the problem: there are effectively no
50 mm f/2.8 full frame lenses.
Yup, when Tony's right, he's right. This time he's wrong even according to his own strange
standards.
The next point that Tony makes is a good one: research and development for new equipment is
expensive, and to be amortized it needs large sales figures. So now that Panasonic has gone
the full frame way, it's clear that they'll give up on Micro Four Thirds within 12 months.
Never mind what the CEOs say about relative market, never mind the fact that they've spread
their costs by going along with Leica and Sigma.
And Olympus is going down a “lonely path” with Micro Four Thirds. They're too expensive.
The Olympus OM-D E-M1
Mark II costs (US) $2000, but it can't keep up with the Sony A7 III, which costs
the same.
OK, we can check what other people think about that. Here is
a good comparison. Summarizing (my choice):
Camera
E-M1 Mark II
A7 III
Price (B&H)
$1,599
$1,998
Better lens selection
•
Still frame rate
60.6 f/s
9.9 f/s
So it's not really clear that the A7 III is the Olympus killer, and his price claims don't
hold out.
But no, Micro Four Thirds will be dead within 5 years. That's why Olympus has not started
on any alternative route, of course. And if small sensors are no longer worthwhile,
what's Fujifilm doing?
Of course there have been other people who disagree. This rebuttal by Joseph Ellis goes
into some detail about his claims.
First, the dangers of mobile phones: that battle is over. Mobile phones won. Micro Four
Thirds is still here.
Then, Tony is far too fixated on sensors. The mobile phone battle shows that pretty much
any sensor is good enough, and the difference in quality between individual sensors is no
longer what it was.
Instead there are other factors, like weather sealing (in that connection, it's interesting
to note that the EOS R is barely weather sealed, despite its considerably higher price) and
multishot functionality like Pro Capture Mode. He didn't mention it, but things
like focus stacking and HDR mode also come to
mind.
Other aspects that he mentioned are what I have experienced, that users of long telephoto
lenses are migrating to smaller cameras because they're easier to use, and that Olympus, in
particular, is very innovative, while the big brands are quite conservative. That rings
true: that's one of the main reasons I got started with Olympus in the first place.
Regarding “equivalent aperture”, he notes that there's a real epidemic
of bokeh (a word that I hadn't heard of
before the beginning of this century, and which the OED still doesn't know), and that it's “the enemy of good composition”. But without
bokeh (which the US Americans seem to pronounce in two different ways), Tony's main size
argument falls even flatter.
OED added the word “bokeh” in December 2019. First attestation was in 1997.
And maybe he sums the whole issue up with the statement that the Northrups need to produce
something to please their (far too prominent) sponsors: “They've got to create articles that
make some buzz and stir things up”
That's probably the best summary of the whole thing. It's a pity, though, since it won't
help sales of Micro Four Third cameras.
There are plenty
of Sulphur-crested
cockatoos in Victoria, but they normally don't come very close. But a couple of days
ago, one flew past me so close that I thought he would hit me. And today, while walking the
dogs, I saw this:
That was just at the entrance to the driveway, and the bird was one of two or three, only
about 6 m away. They seemed to be interested in the bark of the tree, or maybe some
secretion. I wonder if we'll see more of them.
Ruth Viebrock arrived today almost as planned. We had spent some time looking at flightradar24, which disagreed with the flight
schedule. Of course the (British
Airways) schedule was wrong: BA7410,
leaving HKG at
18:05 yesterday and arriving
at MEL this morning at 6:35.
Problem: it was code shared with Qantas
QF30, leaving HKG at 19:00 and arriving at 7:30. How do people make such a mess?
In fact, she took off at 19:29 arrived at 7:07, though British Airways reported completely
different times, but too late to catch the 7:45 shuttle
to Ballarat, so Yvonne went off to meet the next bus at 10:35. Not there: there had been a pileup on
the freeway, they had to take a deviation, and the staff member at the station had no idea
when they would arrive (or of much else, it appears). But she ended up arriving only about
10 minutes late.
Ruth is overjoyed to be in a place that she previously only knew from photos. And being an
animal lover, of course she wanted to see Australian animals. The first one we encountered
was while walking the dogs:
A black snake (Pseudechis)! I don't
know when I last saw one. It must be well over 10 years ago. But they're very poisonous,
and we gave it a wide berth.
Later on Ruth saw some kangaroos at a distance in our paddocks, so she has the definite
feeling of being in Australia.
To my surprise, people on IRC were relatively interested in yesterday's article on the Micro Four Thirds system.
I knew that Jashank Jeremy has one, and by extension Peter Jeremy supports the system. And
it seems that Daniel O'Connor also bought one for his daughter
(a Panasonic Lumix
DMC-GM5), and has also invested in a couple of lenses. So clearly they're interested,
but it's also an indication that the system is popular. I may have influenced Jashank with
his purchase, but Daniel didn't even buy the same brand.
Some discussion on IRC, in which (for once) everybody agreed with me, and one overriding
concept came out of the discussion: Tony Northrup is fixated on sensor size, to a point
where his other arguments don't make sense. R&D costs? The best way to reduce them is
for makers to cooperate, and that's exactly what Micro Four Thirds does. Nearly all new
full-frame mirrorless cameras (Nikon, Canon) continue the old line of one maker, one system.
I need to think about this more and update my article.
One of the first things we wanted to do for Ruth was to activate
a SIM card for her telephone. OK,
finally a use for the free Vodafone SIM
that I got with my new phone.
The first thing you need to do is to activate it, of course. The recommended way is “Insert
the SIM into your device, switch it on and follow the prompts”. OK, insert, switch on.
Nothing exciting happens.
Is that because there's no coverage? Or does it expect to be put into
a Nokia 3? I could try activation
online, but that way madness lies. Instead I took the ALDI SIM that I had bought for this eventuality and put
it into the phone. All OK, please activate. This time I tried the online method and was
asked to provide a credit card number so that they could deduct a random sum to be used as a
password, then to be refunded.
Been there, done that. It takes for ever. So I tried the phone approach instead (2534,
free call, works even when not activated). Connected to <mumble>. How do you spell
that? <mumble><mumble><mumble>. Lee? No, finally it turned out to be
Fay. I don't have any issue with outsourcing phone support services to countries where
English is not the main language, but I wish they'd choose people whom I could understand.
The first thing that she wanted was a “Security PIN”. I've never heard of one of those
before on this service; maybe it's because I avoid phone contact. She wasn't very helpful,
and finally I gave up and decided to bite the bullet and deduct the sum from my credit card.
But that didn't work. Something went wrong (!), as they said.
What? They're too polite to say. Tried again. Same thing. Different browser. Another
different browser. Another system. Always the same thing.
Dammit, call them up again, and this time <mumble>'s name proved to be Marly. Some
script again. I asked to be connected to a supervisor, but no, she could help me. I had to
ask three times and threaten to complain to the TIO before I was finally connected to Martin, who was in fact quite helpful. The
reason for this business in the first place was a discrepancy between my name on the driver
license (GREGORY P LEHEY) and on my account (Greg Lehey). And the deduction didn't work
because the last <mumble> had cancelled the order. And yes, I need to do the
deduction, but he can do that for me. That involved resetting my password, but that's not
an issue.
Only the deduction didn't show up on my account. That's not surprising, but it means
waiting until tomorrow before I can continue.
Mick the gardener along today, this time with the task of planting many plants in the
garden—in fact, so many that I wasn't sure where to put them all. We put
the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis
in the bed on the north side of the house. Both required to be propped up:
Mike didn't water any of the plants, so I did it later; hopefully it will recover.
Then there were the couple of creepers that I had grown from cuttings. Unfortunately I
don't know what each is, so we'll have to wait for them to flower:
Nikolai has been biting himself on the behind
for a while, for no obvious reason. Today off to see Pene Kirk, in the process introducing
her to Ruth and getting rid of the last of our tomato plants.
We couldn't find much wrong with Niko, so Pene shaved the area and put on some cortisone
ointment, which will hopefully do the trick:
For once I didn't have my GPS navigator with me, and I wasn't really sure where we were.
Followed the sign to Dereel and ended up
in a little track far too reminiscent of Westons Road in Dereel on 4 July 2014, where we ended up like
this:
Managed to turn around, and then I asked my phone, which really helped, though it's still
fiddlier than with a real navigator. It seems that somebody had rotated the signpost.
Past Mount Misery Creek Bridge again, which, I was going to say, has further declined (like
I did the last couple of times), but in fact there's not much difference. Here this time last year and then today:
We found almost nothing. I had assumed that it was because it was earlier in the year last
time I was there, but in fact it was on 12 November. The difference must be the dryness
this year.
First thing in the morning I checked my bank account for the promised deduction from
ALDImobile. Nothing. There was other
activity, but not from ALDImobile.
Dammit, what now? Nothing for it, I had to brave their phone help service. This time
<mumble>'s name proved to be Ann. Why is it so difficult to understand these names?
I have never been able to understand them when they announce themselves, and I almost
invariably need them to spell it for me.
She, too, went through her script and wanted me to do the same thing I had tried twice
before. Once again I got fed up and asked for a supervisor, and once again she insisted
that she could help.
Finally she put me through. This time <mumble> proved to be called Ethel,
and how about that, she was able to perform the activation there and then! Another change
of password, of course, which, compared to the previous one, suggests that their generated
passwords consist of 4 random digits, initials of customer in capitals, two lower case
letters and a ?. For me, the two lower case letters were am in each case, for
something like 0815GLam?.
Finally through. The moral of the story?
When signing up for ALDImobile, make sure you specify your name exactly as stated on the
ID document (driver license).
If you do have issues, don't rely on the automatic deduction from credit card. Start
again with a new account.
If you have to contact their telephone support, don't put up with the “consultants” once
they get stuck in a loop. Demand to be connected to a supervisor; they can really help.
What is it? From the kind of flower, it has to be
a Melaleuca or
a Callistemon. I was just surprised
to find it there, where we've been past hundreds of times before.
Freezing chicken stock in small pieces is the only way to go. It's easy to portion and easy
to thaw out. Today I froze 5 pieces of about 200 g each. But this one was interesting:
How did that happen? The left hand side was facing the door of the freezer, where it's
clearly not quite as cold. So as the liquid on the right froze, it pushed its way out of
the left hand side and over the edge.
While taking my house photos this
morning, something terrible happened: while I was carrying the tripod over my shoulder, with
the camera overhead, the panorama bracket parted company with the tripod, and the whole
assembly, including camera, lens and remote control, fell to the ground, taking a couple of
photos on the way:
$3000 worth of photographic equipment! How much damage?
The obvious things were that the remote control lost its battery cover and batteries (seen
on the photos above), and the rail lost an adjusting screw. Nothing obvious at all on the
camera or lens!
Further examination showed that the adjusting screw is held in place with a clip, and the
rail and remote control weren't damaged. And the camera? After careful examination, all I
could find was this:
The rubber cup round the viewfinder had been pulled to one side on the left, showing the clip
underneath. After replacing it, it was a little crumpled:
And that was all! Even that went away after a while. How lucky can you be? Took many more
photos, and clearly there's nothing wrong inside the camera. But I'll certainly check the
tripod mount three times in future.
Processing my house photos has got a
lot easier since I created my batch scripts. Now I do a make pto and just have to do
minor adjustments before the scripts continue. But from time to time I get really strange
results. Here the house from the entrance:
Why is it upside-down? Tried various things, but somehow they didn't work. In the end I
edited the project file with Emacs, changing the orientation of the individual images. Here one of them:
Why three? It seems that in this case, at any rate, there are four of all good
things.
The background: Margaret Swan has lent Keldan (on the right) to Ruth for the duration of her
stay here, and they had brought them over from Chris Bahlo's place.
Chris Bahlo along for dinner today as usual on a Saturday. Christmas tide is with us, of
course, and has been for about a month, and we had bought various deep-frozen poultry
specialties. Today had a stuffed turkey roast, with cranberry and apple filling, enough for
7 portions. It was quite boring, but that didn't stop it from going away. Between the 3½
of us (Yvonne hardly eats anything) we nearly finished it.
Not to be repeated.
Off this morning with Ruth to visit the Ballarat Bird World for the first time in a while; we've been there three times
before, all in the relatively short period of time 9 May 2010 to 11 Februrary 2011.
It's an interesting place, but they have always had financial problems, and now they're only
open on the weekend. It used to be run by an old married couple, but it seems that the wife
died about a year ago, and now the children are taking over the place. Interestingly, on
checking the web site, I find that the old pair were Paul and Joan Sperber
(nomen est omen? Sperber is
German for sparrow hawk). Our car repairman at Ballarat Automotive is also called Paul
Sperber. And so is one of old Paul's sons. What are the chances that there are three Paul
Sperbers in Ballarat? Could it be that
Paul Jr. and Lisa are taking over the operation, or could it be Edward, Paul Jr's younger
brother?
Hopefully they'll be able to make a go of it; there was almost nobody there today. And for
the first time we couldn't go into
the cockatoo cage, but Yvonne had her fun with
a Major Mitchell:
Went through rather faster than I had expected: I had brought my Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400 mm f/4.0-6.3 with me to get some photos of the birds in
the aviary, but there seemed to be very few there. Were they hiding, or are there really
only about 10 in total?
In particular, the depth of field was about what I would expect. Thinking back
to Tony Northrup's claims
a few days ago, I'd
like to know which Nikon lens he would have used to get these results. The last photo was
taken at 1/25 s, focal length 400 mm (full frame equivalent 800 mm). What lenses of that
focal length are available for Nikon? I looked at this a couple of months ago: the AF-S NIKKOR 800mm f/5.6E FL ED VR (“surprisingly compact” at 4.59 kg) for only USD
$17,000. Clearly an absolute specialist lens. At least it has image stabilization (which
Nikon calls “vibration reduction”), so it's not clear that it couldn't also have taken this
photo. But who can carry a lens like that around with him?
We were finished at Ballarat Bird
World earlier than I had expected. What now? Off to the Botanical Gardens? How do we get there?
It's on the other side of town, and though I could find my way with no difficulty, I
couldn't think of an optimum way. I hadn't learnt from my experience on Friday, and I still didn't have my
GPS navigator with me. OK, what's Google good for? Hey, Google, take me to the Botanical
Gardens.
It didn't say very much, but showed me a map. In which direction should I set off? It was
too polite to assume that I didn't know. In this case I did, of course: we were in a dead
end street, so there was only one way to go. After that I got quite reasonable
instructions. Hey, Google, thank you. After some consideration, “You're welcome”.
Ruth sees this as proof that mobile telephones are the way to go. That's significantly
overstating the case, especially since the directions weren't optimal. In particular, the
lack of a map is a nuisance. I had it in my pocket, but even if I had mounted it on the
dashboard, the map would be too small to be useful. Still, it's definitely useful.
To the Botanical Gardens,
also for the first time in a while. Down the Prime Ministers' avenue, where it seems
that Tony Abbott so shocked the
sculptor that he gave up; at least the past two prime ministers are not yet there. And by
comparison, the days of Honest John seem positively nostalgic:
The Friends were selling plants again, and in
to say hello. Yvonne Curbach was there, of course, and I introduced Ruth, discovering that
Yvonne isn't Dutch after all: she's Indonesian, and though her first language is Dutch, she
doesn't like Holland much. Also saw Lorraine Powell. And of course we bought some plants
(now $8!): a Fuchsia triphylla
and a more normal Fuchsia.
Wiener Schnitzel for dinner today.
Once again I tried some of them in the “digital air fryer”. And once again they tasted
better than the ones that were just deep fried. The down side is that the basket only has
enough space for three small Schnitzel, and without fat you can't layer them. But it's
worth thinking of alternatives.
We have planted some of our snow pea
plants, but they still look very delicate. Now, however, the ones still in the house are
starting to flower. To my surprise, it wasn't even the first flower. There's also a pod on
the plant:
Nele Kömle showed up this morning, primarily to do something with Chris Bahlo, but of course
they didn't miss the opportunity to go riding. Finally we have
the Four
Horse(wo)men:
We didn't get round to assigning names. In principle Chris should be war, but she was in
civvies today. Then there are questions of colour, which are more complicated than I
realized. But there was no white (grey) horse, and assigning the colours red, black and
“pale” to the others is difficult enough.
Ruth took her mobile phone with her riding and recorded the track with an app called
Runtastic. She showed it to me on her
phone, and the map didn't look bad. I asked her to send me the log. How do you do that?
How, indeed? Despite the obvious contradiction, mobile phones are surprisingly isolated.
But no, she found a way to send it to me as an email:
Ruth hat ein runtastisches Reiten über 5,83 km in 48m 18s absolviert
Why didn't I look at the HTML version? Why, didn't I look at the HTML version? That was
HTML, but they were too polite to put the link in an a tag.
OK, paste the link into a browser. “You're not allowed to see this map. Log in or sign up”. No,
sorry, Runtastic, I don't want anything to do with you. I just want to see the log, which
is Ruth's private property.
Is it on her phone? It's almost worth searching for. But in the meantime I went to put up
my track log for Sunday.
I've done this on several occasions using GPS
Visualizer and then saved the route as a Google Map. But no, that was yesterday. Now
I need an API key.
What a pain! The signup took me the best part of 30 minutes (admittedly much longer because
I collected screen shots and tried out various things that no sane person would do).
The first time round, the web site hung after I pressed (presumably the
wrong) CONTINUE button:
Sorry, Google, I really don't trust you. But it's documented here that you want the number
(be careful not to lose it!). So I entered my credit card number the way it is on the
credit card, with spaces after every group of four digits. And like always (web programmers
seem to live in an alternate universe), it flagged “credit card number invalid”.
This time, however, it proved that it was right. I had a typo in the number. Fix that, and
it accepted the card number with spaces. One point to Google. It seems that it checks
whatever inbuilt validity checks there are in credit card numbers
(checksum? CRC?).
It's not clear what the purpose of the apple symbol at bottom left is, but it doesn't
produce a menu. Apart from that, the map doesn't seem to be very accurate either. But I
suppose that's what you get for having your GPS receiver in your shirt pocket. And the
straight line in the middle of the noose? “Sorry, forgot where I was” on the part of the
phone.
While walking the dogs, got a strange phone call. In fact, any call on my mobile phone is
strange. I've forgotten the name of the caller, but he said that he was from
the Reason Party. What?
Oh, how about a sex party? Do I know that? No, at any rate not as a political party.
It seems that somebody has put me down as a sympathizer or similar, and he didn't just want
me to vote for them: he wanted me to help on election day (next Saturday). He had my phone
number (obviously) and my canonical email address. I asked him to send me some information,
but I didn't receive any.
Once again this morning the circuit breaker for the kitchen (and much of the house) had
tripped. Now that eureka is on a different circuit, it's no longer as serious as I
had feared. But what is it? Last time I had suspected the bore pump, but it's definitely
not that, and the other pump is on a different circuit.
Ruth's been here for nearly a week now, but today was the first real opportunity that we had
to inaugurate the new caquelon that she brought with her (to replace the old one that we
damaged a couple of months ago:
The fondue tasted as good as ever, but the differences in the caqlelons were clear: on the
old one, the réligieuse looked more like a
monk's tonsure, because the base wasn't
perfectly flat. It also took some lifting. The new one (still) has a perfectly flat and
smooth base, so the réligieuse was too, and it was easy to remove.
The most interesting thing, though, was the recipe booklet included with the caquelon. Some
of the recipes look pretty bizarre, but the first one („Fondue - das Traditionelle“ / «
Fondue - La traditionelle ») was surprising because it was almost identical to our own.
That might seem obvious, but there's so much junk out there that the similarity is amazing.
By way of illustration, the first few Google hits I have for cheese fondue recipe. All
recipes are for four people unless otherwise noted:
Apart from the use of obsolete units (with a sting in the tail for US readers: the ½
pint is the Imperial pint, round 20% more than the US Customary pint, and theoretically
capable of ruining the dish), the choice of cheese is not just suboptimal, it's
wrong: never use Emmental
cheese in a fondue. And even for US readers, the quantity of wine is too much. For
450 g of cheese you need between 200 and 225 ml of wine. I won't comment on other
details of the recipe, like boiling the little Kirsch with the fondue to completely
destroy the flavour. And the quantities are far too small for the claimed 4
people. You need about 200 g of cheese per person (though at home we use a little over
300 g total because Yvonne doesn't eat much).
Sandra
Bernard's classic French cheese fondue (an attribution presumably
made by SBS, who are good at these things)
is better: 800 g Gruyère
cheese, but nothing else, and 375 ml of wine to go with it. But only one kind of
cheese? Possible, not ideal.
1
garlic clove
800 g
Gruyère cheese (or a cheese with a sweet, fruity flavour)
375 ml
dry white wine
1 tbsp
cornflour
4 tbsp
Kirschwasser (cherry liqueur)
Still, this one looks reasonably OK, just different from ours.
This recipe turns me off even before I read the recipe itself:
Easy cheese fondue recipe with white wine is a perfect gourmet appetizer that you can
make at home!
The ingredients are similar to the first:
1
Garlic Clove, grated
1 cup
dry White Wine
200 grams / .4 pounds
Emmentaler cheese (at room temperature)
200 grams / .4 pounds
Gruyère cheese (at room temperature)
50 grams / .1 pound
Smoked Cheddar (at room temperature)
2 tablespoons
Cornstarch
1 tablespoon fresh
Lemon Juice
By comparison with the BBC recipe, it uses even less cheese (assuming 4 people), but
then they want to eat this heavy dish as an appetizer. A good fondue is pretty
much the opposite. Emmental again, and smoked cheddar! Certainly not
traditionel.
OK, maybe looking for English-language recipes is a bad idea. How about French?
recette fondue fromage? This
one is convenient because, although it's originally in French, there's an English
translation. On the other hand, even the French version contains cups and spoons and
things, making it less plausible. It wants:
2 small
garlic cloves, lightly crushed
14 oz (400 g)
cave-aged Gruyère cheese, grated
3.5 oz (100 g)
Emmentaler Swiss cheese, grated
3.5 oz (100 g)
Swiss Vacherin cheese, grated
4 tsp
cornstarch
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Freshly grated nutmeg, to taste
1 1/4 cups (310 ml)
Riesling (or other dry white wine)
4 tsp (20 ml)
Kirsch (optional)
Emmental again! But mercifully not too much.
And Vacherin,
certainly not a bad idea. And for my taste a little too much wine, but the traditions
vary.
This
one (for six people) looks good at first sight:
400 g
de gruyère suisse
200 g
d'appenzeller
200 g
de vacherin Fribourgeois (à ne pas confondre avec le Vacherin Mont-d'Or)
200 g
de tilsit
30 cl
de vin blanc sec
1 cuillère à café
de maïzena
5 cl
de kirsch
No garlic. No lemon juice. And four different cheeses! Three of them are classics
(and this is the first mention
of Appenzeller cheese),
but Tilsit cheese? If there's
one thing I've learnt about fondue in the last 45 years, it's that only cheeses
from Switzerland and
the Jura are suitable. I
wouldn't risk 1 kg of cheese on the Tilsit being an improvement. Also, this recipe has
the lowest ratio of wine to cheese yet, only 300 ml of wine for 1 kg of cheese.
So it should be clear how little I expected the recipe from the caquelon to match our own.
But we have, for four portions, slightly adjusted for normal portions and cheese type, and
guessing some of the quantities, like “clove of garlic“:
Ingredient
Groggy
Stöckli
Recipe 1
Recipe 2
Recipe 3
Recipe 4
Recipe 5
Garlic
15 g
15 g
5 g
5 g
5 g
7 g
Cornflour
20g
20 g
15 g
20 g
15 g
10 g
Gruyère
600 g
600 g
225 g
800 g
200 g
400 g
400 g
Appenzell
200 g
200 g
200 g
Vacherin
100 g
200 g
Ememntal
225 g
200 g
100 g
Tilsit
200 g
Cheddar
Wine
370 ml
350 ml
290 ml
375 g
238 ml
310 ml
300 ml
Lemon juice
20 ml
20 ml
5 ml
Kirsch
60 ml
50 ml
15 ml
80 ml
20 ml
50 ml
Ratio cheese/wine
2.16
2.3
1.55
2.13
1.68
2.58
3.33
Clearly there's room for differences in the recipes, and also for individual taste. My own
recipe has changed from a ratio of 4:1 Gruyère to Appenzeller to a ratio of 3:1. On the
whole, recipe 2 doesn't look too bad, though you need a very good single cheese. And
Vacherin is an excellent fondue cheese, but we can't get it here (though I suggested it to
Kevin Teather of the last month). And many recipes suggest pepper and nutmeg, though I find that they only help if the
cheese is second-rate. And the difference in wine:cheese ratios (2:1!) is amazing.
Off to Ballarat today to meet CJ Ellis,
dressed up in his costume, and
visit Sovereign Hill again.
Things didn't start off well. When we got there, I discovered that I had no footwear.
Never mind, this has happened before; that's why I keep a spare pair of thongs in the back
of the car. Dug for them: not there! And while doing so, I managed to turf my camera out
of the car and on to the parking lot. Two dropped (same) cameras in less than a week! And this time there
was no panorama head to protect it, and it sustained damage:
The lens was (mercifully) again untouched, the camera still works, and the marks look pretty
superficial. The camera still works, but I should really stop dropping the thing.
In to buy tickets, while Yvonne went off looking for footwear
for me. It was definitely necessary. There are some places where I can walk barefoot with
few problems, but Sovereign Hill is not one of them. By the time Yvonne got back, we hadn't
got very far, but I really couldn't continue much further.
On up the hill. It's been nearly 10 years since we were last here, and things have changed—for the better. They now have a school,
full of schoolchildren. And with CJ dressed the way he was, he was welcomed, and he told a
story about wanting a school for his nieces who would shortly arrive by ship from the Old
Country:
CJ had wanted to take us to see the wheel wrights after lunch, but the girls decided
differently and went to see the gold pouring instead, in light that was barely visible. I
missed having the right lens with me, and was limited to the Panasonic Lumix G 20 mm f/1.7 from
my E-PM1:
She confirmed that it wasn't part of the act, and I had to help her up. The trooper then
sent her off to have herself looked at, before talking to the others and setting off in
pursuit of an errant miner:
And then we had had enough for the day. We're not as young as we used to be. If it weren't
for the high entry fees, it would be nice to spread it over several days. Still, Ruth was
very pleasantly surprised; I think she had initially not been very enthusiastic
As we were leaving, CJ asked me how old I was. In principle he knows: 10 years younger than
he. But it seems that I'm entitled to a “Pioneer Pass”, a service so secret that I couldn't
find any useful reference to it on the web site. It's available to people of the age of 70
or over who live in or near Ballarat
(post code areas 3350 to 3358; we're in 3352). And it entitles the bearer to unlimited free
entrance to Sovereign Hill and the Gold
Museum. Filled out the form and was issued immediate access. Now if only he had told
me that before we entered!
The good news is, of course, that I can go back and take specific photos whenever I want.
That could be quite worthwhile.
Middle of November; spring is going by quickly, and it's time for the “flowers in late
spring” series.
There's nothing much to see this month. The dead trees are dead, and the others aren't
doing that much better, though there are signs that
the Paulownia kawakamii might
be growing a little faster. Other plants have reacted more obviously to the relatively
generous load of fertilizer that I gave them, notably the roses:
That's all the more interesting because
the Tropaeolum in the middle are not
flowering particularly strongly, in contrast with the ones in front of the water tank:
A couple of plants are flowering or coming up to flowering, I think for the first time: the
Adenanthos sericeus (“woolly
bush”, the small but
brilliant Carpobrotus species that
flowers all too shortly, and one of
many Hebes that seem to be
benefiting from the fertilizer:
A (small) family of Australian
wood ducks walking across the paddock, not far from where our pond used to be 4 years
ago. I wonder if they were looking for it.
But more importantly, a couple
of magpies took exception to
their presence. I've seen them chase other animals before, notably foxes, but this is the
first time I've seen them chase ducks.
Off relatively early this morning with Nikolai and Leonid to visit
the Great Ocean Road again. To
my surprise, it's only the third time that Yvonne and I have
been there together, and the last time was nearly 10 years ago. And in that time the public has not only changed completely,
but become much more.
On the way stopped to show Ruth
a Callistemon (bottlebrush):
Yvonne was rather taken with them, and we broke off a short twig and took it home. To my
surprise, it survived, and Yvonne wants to try to propagate it.
First to Mait's Rest, where things
were not in as good a state as last time we were there. In particular, I had wanted to take
a repeat of this photo:
The tree (fern) was still there, and possibly a bit bigger, but the whole area was cordoned
off because the platform was unsafe.
From there down towards Cape Otway to
look for the Koalas that used to be there
in great numbers. We found a couple, but nothing like as many as five years ago, and I didn't get much
in the way of photos:
Last year we had a pretty
average catastrophe trying to get to Halls
Gap with the “aid” of a GPS navigator. Today wasn't as bad: firstly, we knew the way
pretty well (though finding Mait's
Rest wasn't that obvious), and secondly I had researched the route online with Google
Maps and then sent the route to my phone, even being careful enough to test to ensure that
it got there.
So when we set off, it was a little surprising to discover that the route wasn't there. I
had tested it the first time, but not the second one. So I had to used the first one, which
only took me to the Koala place
on Cape Otway. And when we got
to Colac, my car navigator and my
phone disagreed. Ruth fired up hers too so that we could at least get a majority. But my
phone came up with all sorts of nonsense, like telling me to turn right where there was
absolutely no turnoff, and mentioning road names that didn't exist. My best guess was that
it lost signal and was too polite to tell me so. But there's nothing obvious from the track
that suggests that:
On top of that, the damned thing kept beeping at frequent but irregular intervals. If it
gave any indication on the display, it was too fast for Yvonne. Why do phones do that? They go to immense lengths to do voice recognition, sometimes
successfully. Why can't they do the much simpler task of voice generation to say what they
want?
Spent most of today writing up and processing photos for the past two days, and I still
didn't get finished. Once again I ran into issues with panoramas including the sea:
Maybe I should have taken a fisheye lens with me to get a single photo of the sea to blend
into the panorama.
And in the evening Ruth did some cooking. OK, take a photo for souvenir's sake. It's so
simple now that we have the flash units in place.
Well, no:
The first time round the flash didn't fire. Dammit, these contacts are really an issue.
The second time round the flash didn't fire. Further checking showed that this was the
flash trigger with the on/off switch. Maybe I should leave it on.
The third time round the flash didn't fire. Dammit, these contacts are really an issue.
The fourth time round the flash finally fired. And it was overexposed! I had the thing
set to auto-ISO, so modulo noise (39°/6400 ISO), in fact the first three images were
almost OK:
And then the display on the back of the camera went dead! Instead I got everything only
through the viewfinder. Delayed damage from dropping the camera? Took off the
viewfinder cup and it worked. Somehow I must have managed to mis-position it in a way
that caused the automatic viewfinder switch to trigger. After repositioning it, the
camera worked normally.
And later in the evening I decided to take some photos without the kitchen
flash—and without checking the exposure. Bad idea:
CJ Ellis' computer is so infected with viruses (I think) that the best thing appears to be
to reinstall the OS. But on discussing it on IRC, people suggested that I should avoid
Microsoft and install Ubuntu instead.
I resisted. Why? I really have very little love for Microsoft, but if I install Ubuntu, I
alone will be responsible for support. But on thinking about it, the idea didn't sound that
bad. I seem to end up doing it anyway, and certainly there will be less infections with
Ubuntu. So I downloaded the 18.04 LTS version and installed.
Installation was much as I feared. It started off by identifying the existing FreeBSD installation:
For some reason (probably the keyboard) I managed to enter the password incorrectly several
times, culminating (as I discovered) in entering the same incorrect password twice, meaning
that I couldn't log in after rebooting.
How do you recover from this in Ubuntu? In FreeBSD you would boot single-user and reset.
But how do you boot single user in Ubuntu? It's even too polite to show me the boot
messages. Again, IRC to the rescue:
<ozz> During beginning of boot press the any key
<ozz> You should see a language select menu.
<groggyhimself> Nope.
<groggyhimself> Came back to the login prompt.
<oggle> groggyhimself: hold shift when booting?
<groggyhimself> Ah, *that*'s the ANY key?
Tried both, and they didn't work.
Looking online told me that the SHIFT key was
correct, but that it “didn't always work”.
I've noticed on some systems that timing when to hit the left Shift key can be tricky,
sometimes I miss it and need to try it again.
Dammit, boot from DVD and see if that helped,
noting once again how glacially slow the boot process is.
This page was of some help, though in principle it was pretty obvious:
Boot from DVD and start live system or whatever it's called.
Mount the root disk of the installed system (usually /dev/sda1).
chroot to that file system.
Set the passwords normally.
The only thing that wasn't obvious was the chroot.
After that, setting up the system. How I HATE these colours that they insist
on producing. Apart from the fact that they're far too gaudy, all assume a terminal with
bright (white?) text on a black background. Make it sane and you get something like this:
My background isn't completely white, which makes it (barely) possible to see the white
text.
I've noted how to do this before, by fixing a file called /etc/DIR_COLORS. But
that's an old, worn-out magic word. More searching online gave me that
ls and grep are aliases deliberately intended to annoy with these
colours. Unalias and they behave normally. But apt isn't like that, and I
haven't found a way to get around it. I tried resetting the TERM environment
variable to something monochrome, but that didn't interest it. WHAT a pain!
Apart from that, yet another GUI to get used to. As they proudly announce:
Nothing spectacular, but that's a plant that I've been tending for over 10 years, and this
is the first cutting that I have planted outside, so it seemed to be something of an achievement.
Also got round to taking more photos of the flowers that Ruth picked on Saturday. They have certainly lasted
well, considering that they were stuck in the ventilator grille of the car all day before
being put in water. Here hopefully enough to identify them:
I had intended to do more work on Saturday's photos today, but somehow I didn't get round to
it. But it's interesting to compare two individual photos that I took:
Which looks better? The first is merged from a group of 3 photos taken hand-held at 3 EV
intervals, and the second is an in-camera “HDR2” image. Sorry, I still can't find any use
for in-camera HDR.
These were the images as processed at the time. After optimizing them, there was
little difference to be seen:
Another letter for Yvonne today from Carsat, the French social security department, asking
for an “attestation d'existence”, close enough to English to be obvious.
That makes sense: people die, and somehow they have to know when they can stop paying. But
look at the date! 25 October, nearly a month ago! And they want an answer by 11 December,
or they will stop pension payments. If it's that urgent, they could at least have sent it
by airmail, rather then storing it in Belgium for a few weeks.
So I have Ubuntu installed on CJ's
computer. Now to make it easier to use.
Suspend to RAM or disk. Does this even work on Ubuntu? One of them does, but they're
too polite to use normal terms, preferring “sleep”, so I can't know which they mean.
Based on the speed at which it occurs, I'd guess suspend to disk. And yes, it works.
Install TeamViewer. Is it
available for Linux? Yes.
Not much, really. But it took all day. TeamViewer had exactly what I wanted: a package for
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, along with instructions But trying to install it was like pulling teeth:
=== root@cj (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog/Downloads 5 -> dpkg -i teamviewer_14.0.12762_amd64.deb Selecting previously unselected package teamviewer.
(Reading database ... 169272 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack teamviewer_14.0.12762_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking teamviewer (14.0.12762) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of teamviewer:
teamviewer depends on libqt5gui5 (>= 5.5) | qt56-teamviewer; however:
Package libqt5gui5 is not installed.
Package qt56-teamviewer is not installed.
(many repeats)
dpkg: error processing package teamviewer (--install):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.13.3-11ubuntu1.1) ...
...
Errors were encountered while processing:
teamviewer
Doesn't that make FreeBSD'spkg look
good! OK, clearly it wants Qt
installed. Went looking for that. apt is too polite to assume that you don't know
any names, so there's no search function (or it's also renamed so that I can't find
it). Back to memories of 15 years ago... apt-cache search, that obviously named
program. But no, no qt. After fighting my way through hundreds of packages, finally
decided on libqt5core5a, having successfully ignored the text libqt5gui5 in
the vomit from dpkg.
OK, on and try to install that:
=== root@cj (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog/Downloads 19 -> apt install libqt5core5a Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt --fix-broken install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libqt5core5a : Depends: libdouble-conversion1 (>= 2.0.0) but it is not going to be installed
Recommends: qttranslations5-l10n but it is not going to be installed
teamviewer : Depends: libqt5gui5 (>= 5.5) but it is not going to be installed or
qt56-teamviewer but it is not installable
(etc) E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt --fix-broken install' with no packages (or specify a solution).
Isn't that useful? “It (the dependency) is not going to be installed”. OK, let's try to
fix the breakage that I didn't cause:
=== root@cj (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog/Downloads 20 -> apt --fix-broken install Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
libdouble-conversion1 libqt5core5a libqt5dbus5 libqt5gui5 libqt5network5 libqt5positioning5 libqt5printsupport5
libqt5qml5 libqt5quick5 libqt5sensors5 libqt5svg5 libqt5webchannel5 libqt5webkit5 libqt5widgets5 libqt5x11extras5
libxcb-xinerama0 qml-module-qtgraphicaleffects qml-module-qtquick-controls qml-module-qtquick-dialogs
qml-module-qtquick-layouts qml-module-qtquick-privatewidgets qml-module-qtquick-window2 qml-module-qtquick2
qt5-gtk-platformtheme qttranslations5-l10n
Suggested packages:
qt5-image-formats-plugins qtwayland5 qt5-qmltooling-plugins
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libdouble-conversion1 libqt5core5a libqt5dbus5 libqt5gui5 libqt5network5 libqt5positioning5 libqt5printsupport5
libqt5qml5 libqt5quick5 libqt5sensors5 libqt5svg5 libqt5webchannel5 libqt5webkit5 libqt5widgets5 libqt5x11extras5
libxcb-xinerama0 qml-module-qtgraphicaleffects qml-module-qtquick-controls qml-module-qtquick-dialogs
qml-module-qtquick-layouts qml-module-qtquick-privatewidgets qml-module-qtquick-window2 qml-module-qtquick2
qt5-gtk-platformtheme qttranslations5-l10n
0 to upgrade, 25 to newly install, 0 to remove and 31 not to upgrade.
1 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 25.2 MB of archives.
After this operation, 109 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
And then it installed everything! But what a pain. Others on IRC even agreed. How does a
non-technical user handle this kind of pain?
So I set up TeamViewer and established that it worked. Next, “sleep”. Yes, that worked
too, and when I came back things still seemed to be OK. Except that TeamViewer no longer
worked. The message wasn't helpful: “Not ready. Please check your connection”, implying a
network connection.. OK, let's check the connection. It's fine. What next? There's no
“retry” button.
Reboot? Yes, works. Sleep and resume. No, doesn't work. So clearly there's a connection.
More web scouring to confirm that I was not alone, and that there were various suggestions
about stopping and restarting the teamviewer daemon, none of which helped. This one, from the TeamViewer community, jumped to conclusions that it was a DNS
issue (it wasn't), and suggests an inappropriate way to set up DNS. This
one, from the Ubuntu community, at least told me how to restart the service, but that
didn't help either. About the only obvious thing was that the deamon couldn't reinstate its
PID.
OK, what does that mean? Pressed “Report problem” and it told me, yes, indeed, it had
reported the problem. But it didn't say to whom, and told me absolutely nothing
about its nature. That's disgusting.
Another less irritating indication of the sloppiness was
starting chromechromiumchromium-browser:
Went walking with the dogs today, as always, taking my phone with me for GPS location. When
I got back, it was completely unresponsive. I couldn't even get it to boot. It shouldn't
have been the battery: it had been on charge until I left with the dogs. Discussion on IRC,
and “ibiza” came up with this
video showing how to take the thing apart, not something that I wanted to do on a
phone less than two months old and thus still under warranty.
But while I was watching it, the phone started to boot, after at least 5 minutes of silence.
What caused that? Should I have it exchanged anyway?
Over to the Marriotts next door this evening for dinner. It's been nearly five years since we last sat on
this verandah and agreed to buy the Stones Road property:
I really have nothing but trouble with on-camera flash. Going to the Marriotts this
evening, I decided not to take the mecablitz 58 AF-2, and took the gutless FL-LM3 flash that came with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II,
and of which Olympus thinks so highly that they don't have a description page.
Things didn't go well. This photo could almost have been OK, but the lens got in the way:
It wasn't until later that I discovered that I had the flash settings to manual, 1/10 power.
Or did I? Looking at the settings (also later), it told me that it was set to full power.
Is this an issue with the settings or with
the Exif data? On the face of it, with the
Exif data: it has a guide number of only 12.9 at 24°/400 ISO, so 1/10 would mean a guide
number of 4.1 would only illuminate up to 1 m correctly at the f/4 that I used for the
photos. The first photo clearly has more illumination than that. In addition, the Exif
data claim that it's fill-in, not manual.
Anke Hawke is coming for a couple of days to hold a clinic at Chris Bahlo's place. We
already have Ruth in the guest room, so we put Anke in the room opposite my office,
variously called music room and library. And that meant the first ever use of the sofa bed
that we bought in May. We
even had to unpack the (separate) mattress from the plastic packing:
Anke arrived in the evening, somewhat tired, so we ate, the girls spoke about horses, and
went to bed. It's interesting to note the composition of the participants: Anke, of course,
and also (of course) Ruth, Chris, and Yvonne. Then Nele Kömle and her friend Silke, and
somebody called Meg, whom I haven't met yet. Meg has the distinction of being the only
person who doesn't have German as her native language. I get the feeling that she might end
up missing something.
In principle CJ's computer is ready, but I can't rely
on TeamViewer to recover after
hibernating. What alternatives do I
have? ssh, of course, and that works
(after all, it does come from the BSD
space). But I want something that will display the “desktop”. And how about
that, Ubuntu has a solution, “remote
console”. OK, set that up, after more web searches and discovering that you can't configure
it if the desired network connection isn't active. But then it said, sure, all up and
running.
What do I use to connect to it? None of the documentation tells you that,
just how
to set it up on the Ubuntu side, something like the sound of one hand clapping.
Finally found out: use TightVNC. And
then I discovered that the configuration had lied. Nothing was listening on the port. I
had to reboot (echoes of Microsoft) to get any response. That's particularly silly when the
link has to be up to configure it in the first place, and maybe it wasn't necessary, but
without any other information it was the only thing I could try.
Finally got a connection, sort of:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/12) ~ 76 -> vncviewer cj.lemis.com Connected to RFB server, using protocol version 3.7
Server did not offer supported security type
Huh? Read the TightVNC man page. No mention of any security options.
More web searches, and came across a number like this page: disable security on Ubuntu.
Ugh. This is wrong for so many reasons:
Disabling security is Just Plain Wrong.
It's required, but not documented. Further investigation shows that it only applies to
non-Linux machines, but that's no excuse.
A bug
report has been open since 17 February 2014, and it still hasn't been fixed.
The bug report indicates that the bug is a regression, probably
in GNOME, apparently because they
changed their security model to one that many VNC packages don't support. It must be
relatively trivial to fall back to the old model if the client doesn't support the new
model.
A standard setup doesn't disable security and doesn't warn you that you need to do so.
To disable security, you need to run dconf-editor (misspelt as conf-editor
in this example).
Sorry, Ubuntu, this is unacceptable.
Still, maybe all of this isn't necessary. It's not clear why TeamViewer failed after
resumption, and maybe it wouldn't happen at CJ's place. In any case, I needed to go over to
check that he could still access the Internet. So went over (17 km) and set it up. The
Internet connection worked out of the box. That's not that much of a surprise, since it's a
straight DHCP connection, but it was also
not a foregone conclusion.
But suspend/resume still doesn't work right. In fact, after resuming, the Internet
connection didn't come back at all. So for the time being he'll just have to shut down,
which has the side effect of hiding the TeamViewer bug. And all my attempts to set up
remote console were a waste of time: I had forgotten that he was
behind NAT, so neither remote console
nor ssh would work.
I've installed Ubuntu several times over
the last 13 years. Every time I have decided that it wasn't for me. So why did I install
it for CJ? His requirements are pretty standard, and Ubuntu seemed to be a good match, so
the install and usage should have been a no-brainer.
They weren't. In fact, I get the feeling that Ubuntu has become less usable since I last
tried it. Certain aspects are unforgivable:
Hibernation or suspend to RAM (which?) works better than on FreeBSD, where X doesn't recover, but it's just not good enough. In particular, the network
connections don't recover.
The GUI and the kernel disagree about network status. While the GUI claims “no cable
connected”, I can happily communicate via ssh.
There seems to be no way to tell the GUI to retry the network connection. That
effectively makes it useless for me.
Installing third-party software is some of the most difficult I have ever
experienced. TeamViewer installs
on Microsoft out of the box. It took me over an hour fighting with the install tools to
get it to work on Ubuntu, not helped by TeamViewer's own documentation. Presumably I
can expect similar pain with other tools.
The remote console functionality is inadequately documented. I couldn't find anything
in the official documentation that told me how to connect from the other side.
The remote console functionality shows a basic lack of interest. The underlying bug is
relatively trivial to fix, but it has been open for nearly 5 years.
It's probable that there are solutions or workarounds for all of these problems, but the
real issue is that they exist in the first place. I could probably find a fix, but I'm not
the target audience for Ubuntu—as I've said before, Ubuntu is trying to be a better
Microsoft. They're failing badly. If I run into significant further issues, I'll wipe it
and reinstall Microsoft.
Radio and TV broadcasts will gradually cease. They are costly: they use a lot of power,
and that transmission and reception equipment are also expensive. Even now it is possible
to receive TV via the Internet: a recent report found that in Western countries, 90% of
Internet users watched online video. Significant investment in net backbones will be
required to deliver the content, but it will still be cheaper than maintaining current
transmission equipment. This change in the distribution method will also allow video on
demand to take the place of fixed broadcasts.
Personally I no longer use broadcast TV, though I still receive radio. But that's out of
convenience, and a lot of my “radio” reception is via the web from Radio Swiss Classic.
Clinic evening meal today. They had wanted to go to the Little
Hard Hills pub
in Enfield, but in the end it
turned out that apart from Ruth, Chris Bahlo and Anke, only Meg Romanis was interested in
the dinner, so we decided to make it here.
Over the years, Yvonne has gradually improved her opinion of
cassoulet. There was a time when I could
only eat it when she was travelling, but when I suggested Dereel Chile, she countered with cassoulet.
Surprisingly, she even suggested making a bigger portion. I had made my recipe for a 3
litre cassole, and she thought that it
wouldn't be enough. So she went and bought a bigger one, 3.7 l:
Or at least that's what it said on the packing. Measuring it told me that measurements
aren't a very good way of establishing the volume. Was that height 10.5 cm or 11.5 cm?
That makes the difference between 3.3 l and 3.65 l. OK, fill it with water and weigh. To
my surprise, my “3 litre” cassole only held 2.5 kg of water, and the new one holds 3.8 l,
effectively 50% more.
And the recipe? Ruth had found some meaty cooked duck legs, and the original recipe wanted
“double-smoked sausage”, which sounded like what ALDI now sells as “Rookwurst”.
A bit of lamb to make up the weight, and we were in business.
The other issue I had was too much juice, something I had never been able to get under
control. Today I tried adding the tinned tomatoes at the beginning, so that the juice was
part of the initial liquid. I then baked it in the oven the way I do for baked beans. And that proved to be sufficient: the
quantities, both of the cassoulet itself and the liquid, was arguably perfect (Yvonne argued
that it was perfect, I thought a bit more liquid could be a good thing).
While looking at something on the web in the lounge room this afternoon, I lost connectivity
to the Internet. Into the office to look at
the NTD. All normal. ifconfig?
All OK, right? Well, no. That IP address is “wrong”, and the net mask seemed to be so as
well, so much so that I thought that something might have gone wrong, especially as I
couldn't ping the default gateway.
Nov 22 16:18:24 eureka named[1742]: creating IPv4 interface xl0 failed; interface ignored
Nov 22 16:18:24 eureka named[1742]: could not listen on UDP socket: permission denied
Nov 22 16:18:24 eureka named[1742]: creating IPv4 interface xl0 failed; interface ignored
Nov 22 16:18:24 eureka dhclient: New IP Address (xl0): 100.64.51.240
Nov 22 16:18:24 eureka dhclient: New Subnet Mask (xl0): 255.255.224.0
Nov 22 16:18:24 eureka dhclient: New Broadcast Address (xl0): 100.64.63.255
Nov 22 16:18:24 eureka dhclient: New Routers (xl0): 100.64.32.1
OK, try resetting the IP address to the old value. No go, but that in itself wasn't
unexpected.
Called up the Aussie Broadband support line. 16 people in the queue ahead of me! Clearly something had gone seriously
wrong. But while I was waiting, it dawned on me that I had seen this before. Firewall!
Yes, of course, it needs to know the IP address range to accept, and also the IP address
for NAT to forward to.
OK, disable all firewall rules. And I could ping the remote servers again. So it seems
that the drastic change in topology was intentional. Why didn't they warn me? Why should
they? I suppose the normal router/firewall boxes (“modem”) that everybody uses don't have
an issue with this kind of change.
The more I looked, the more I found to change:
In /etc/rc.ipfw (my simplified version of /etc/rc.firewall), change the
gateway IP address:
-GW=180.150.113.90
+GW=100.64.51.240
Stop natd.
Reload firewall rules.
Restart natd:
natd -p 8668 -n xl0
I think that this is necessary to ensure that things work correctly.
Update my DNS configuration. For reasons that I forget, but which are important, I have
my local web server listening on the external interface, and that had changed:
-aussie-gw IN A 180.150.113.90 ; gateway to Aussie Broadband
+aussie-gw IN A 100.64.51.240 ; gateway to Aussie Broadband
In ~grog/public_html/php/header.php, change the local server address to be able
to recognize local access:
Update ~/bin/linkcheck to show the new remote end of the link:
# This should be the other end of the NBN link
-NEXTHOP=180.150.112.1
+NEXTHOP=100.64.32.1
Isn't that simple? I was back online at 16:45, after about 27 minutes. But clearly writing
this down for next time is a good idea. An even better idea would be to ensure that the
system weathered this kind of change without manual intervention.
“Loading the film list didn't work”. I've investigated this before and found that it was a timeout
for reasons that I couldn't establish. But this time it happened immediately. Not a
timeout. More investigation showed that the application was getting
an HTTP 403 error. Why?
More investigation, including installing a newer version of MediathekView. That didn't
help, but caused problems of its own. Finally I found that the proxy server
(ffm.lemis.com) was refusing to honour the request.
Why? Squid configuration: it
only accepts requests from my external IP address, and that has changed.
So: one more item on my “IP address change”
list. Modify /usr/local/etc/squid/squid.conf and restart amazingly slowly:
While trying to understand my download issues, discovered a lot of:
=== grog@www (/dev/pts/0) ~ 1 -> Write failed: Broken pipe Disconnected at Fri 23 Nov 2018 04:56:44 AEDT
Last login: Thu Nov 22 17:41:25 2018 from 119-17-139-240.nbn.mel.aussiebb.net
The first time is reported locally in the AEDT time zone (UTC+11), and the second is
reported from the remote site in UTC, so this represents a session duration of only 15
minutes. Given that the timeout can take a minute or two, this is really unacceptable. In
the course of the day I counted over 40 disconnections.
Why? They happened with both remote sites, and they only started after the IP address
change, so it's reasonable to assume that it's related. Sent a written problem report to
Aussie Broadband, and once again
didn't get even an automatic confirmation with ticket number. It really looks as if I need
to contact them on the phone. But explaining the issue to even their relatively clued-up
support people won't be easy. Time to log traffic to see if I can work out what's going on.
Today was the second and final day of the Anke Hawke clinic, and Meg Romanis was going to
take her to the airport. But her flight was cancelled! It seems
that Sydney had a dust storm yesterday,
and all day today it was so windy that only one of the three runways at Sydney airport was
open. She spent a lot of time frantically looking for an alternative, but in the end the
best she could do was tomorrow morning at 6:00.
Where could she spend the night? We're a good 90 minutes from the airport, and she should
be there 2 hours before takeoff, so that would mean leaving here at 2:30. It would have
made much more sense to spend the night near the airport, but of course the hotels were
booked out: the Melbourne
to Sydney stretch is one of the busiest in
the world.
So she came back here. Mercifully, Meg's husband, whom none of us have met, was prepared to
come out here and take her to the airport. They decided on leaving at 3:15 in the
assumption that the “2 hours in advance” rule didn't apply to the early morning flights.
Hopefully they're right.
Anke must have disappeared as planned during the night; I didn't hear anything, but we later
heard from her that she was back
in Sydney, though the news also clarified
that traffic wouldn't be back to normal until the evening.
The weather has been cool and dark for a couple of days ago, and this morning we discovered
we had no hot water: the circuit breaker in the hot water service had failed again. High time to get
somebody to look at it before the warranty expires.
Off with Ruth to the Dereel hall this
morning to vote in the state elections. All interesting for Ruth, of course, who was
impressed by a number of things, including the lack of dress code.
There were four people outside distributing flyers for their three parties: a very bored
member of the Australian Labor
Party, who didn't want to answer any of my questions. I asked him if he was a member of
a trade union, which he confirmed, in the process also confirming my prejudice against trade
union members.
Then somebody representing
the Liberal Party of
Australia, who happily told me that they were planning even more police (“More speed
traps?” “Probably”) and mandatory sentencing, which to me looks like putting discretion into
the “too hard” basket.
Then two girls from the Australian
Greens party, offering increased emphasis on renewable energy, and explaining that in
some countries, such as Germany, all energy is renewable. We had to put her right there.
But maybe I'm being unfair to these people; after all, I myself had received a request
(which I could only too easily turn down) to do the same thing for
the Reason Party.
