I'm currently reviewing a paper for publication. Amongst other things it talks about what
made Unix different from other
systems. I'm not happy with the paper as it stands, but it's a cause for me to step back
and think, especially as the author doesn't seem open to my argumentation.
Unix was a multi-user system Yes, but it wasn't alone in that. By 1970 most
systems were multi-user. Arguably Unix was one of the smaller multi-user systems, but
my first experience with computers at all was multi-user FOCAL on a
PDP-8, an even smaller system.
Unix was portable Well, it became portable. It certainly wasn't at the
beginning. And the reason for that is elsewhere:
Unix was not bound to a manufacturer. Yes, this one is different. And it
explains why people made efforts to make it portable. I don't think that it was
significantly more portable in itself.
The C programming language was something completely new. No, it always reminded
me of Algol. It still does.
(Later) The C language invented structs. Well, no, they came from Algol 68, as Comparison of
ALGOL 68 and (perversely) C++ shows. That page is also interesting because it
shows an Algol 68 program using a printf() function, while the corresponding
C++ program uses this silly << construct.
So what was unique about Unix? I think it was the first operating system to
introduce easy-to-use interprocess communication, but probably the real thing was that it
was a clean, small collection of the best things that had happened in computer science up to
that point. Is there more? I need to think about it.
In the afternoon, Yvonne came inside from working the horses,
looking somewhat the worse for wear. Fallen off a horse? No, she tripped over a tyre while
working Valeta on foot. And the PIXIO “Robot Cameraman” captured the entire incident:
Called up Melissa Wisbey, who despite a family event was able to take a look at Yvonne and
confirm that nothing was broken. It reminds me of a similar accident 10 years
ago. That took weeks to heal. Hopefully Yvonne will not have to go through that.
Paul Gallagher along again today to mow the lawn, which after only 2 weeks really needed it.
But the signs are there: the weather is getting warmer—today the temperature reached 31.8°
instead of the predicted 25°—and the grass is already beginning to brown. When he comes
again in 2 weeks it might be for the last time this season.
Apart from that, he got through an amazing amount of weeding. Soon the garden will look
good again. Now if our plants would just stop dying...
Yvonne is still not feeling any better after her fall
on Sunday. OK, time to get a doctor to take a look at it.
Oh. 20th-century US American tones when trying to call Health First. I'm not sure what the
difference is between them and a normal “engaged” tone, but I think it means something like
“this line inaccessible” or “this line not in service”.
Was it Health First or the phone system? Tried calling my other phone line. Same thing.
So: MyNetFone? Tried calling Health
First from my mobile phone. Same ancient tones. Tried calling my mobile phone from my
VoIP phone. Worked. Asked people
on IRC to call me on my VoIP numbers, and sure enough, a little later got a garbled call
from *!@#@$. Who? *!@#@$. Or how about $*"++? Can you spell that, please? ^^#:~| More
slowly please? eevin.
Ah, Edwin (Groothuis). Not the best mobile phone connection I have ever had, but it was a
connection. Am I maybe going deaf? No, later Melissa Wisbey called and couldn't understand
when I announced my name distinctly and clearly. Do I have issues with my phone or VoIP
codec?
In the meantime Yvonne established contact with Paul—via Facebook! The clinic was closed today—of course! It's
Melbourne Cup Day. That
didn't explain the connection problems, which went away later in the day, but it meant that
Yvonne called Melissa Wisbey and asked for a referral, which I picked up later in the
afternoon.
It's relatively clear that Yvonne won't be riding for a
while, so now seems like a good time to send off her riding vest for service. More contact
via Facebook, this time with Michelle in
Gisborne. A PDF
document arrived by Facebook. How do you print it? Why would you want to print it when you
can send it to a device (clearly not a printer)? I couldn't find any way to send it
to a printer.
Yvonne asked Michelle. “Just download it”. I couldn't see a way to download it either. In
the end I went searching for it with Google, found the PDF, displayed it with xpdf
and printed it. But why is it so complicated for “normal” people? Or did I miss something
that is intuitive for normal people?
Off to Ballarat this afternoon
to have Yvonne's arm X-rayed. While she waited, I did the
weekly shopping.
The X-ray detected a hairline fracture in the wrist—I think. He referred her to the
emergency department of the Ballarat Base Hospital to have a plaster cast on it. OK, take her there and continue my shopping.
As usual, the Base Hospital took forever. Round 16:30 it sounded as if she would be ready
relatively soon—she was already (alone!) in the “plaster room” while they looked for
somebody to attend to her. OK, off to the hospital, and was just parking when she called to
say that it would take “one to two hours”. With the Base Hospital I automatically interpret
that as “at least 2 hours”, so set off home. By the time I got to Sebastopol she called again:
done! No fracture after all, just a sprain. Back to pick her up, noticing the signs of the
times:
What does that mean? My guess is that “visitors” means “visitors to the main hospital”, not
“visitors to the emergency department”. You can get through to the hospital via that
entrance, but they don't like it. But the message is anything but clear.
What, no KN95 masks allowed, only the cheap ones? Or is it just an indication that the mask
must cover all relevant orifices? I was coming to the conclusion that it was the latter
when Yvonne appeared wearing a regulation mask, which she had
been given to wear instead of the KN95 mask with which she arrived. Why?
On the way home, dropped in the new Chemist Warehouse in Sebastopol to buy some Ibuprofen, at least partially to see what
the place is like: our normal chemist, UFS, is
just down the road. I had hoped to be out quickly, but it took me at least as long. The
place is Just Plain Unpleasant; I don't know why they build places like that.
Finally home, round 18:10. What a way to spend a day!
Part of my shopping was at Woolworths,
where I've had fun with their checkout machines in the past. To their credit, they've fixed one of the issues I had: how do you pay?
Now they say it clearly:
Until I told it, it wouldn't proceed. Dammit, I have my own bags. Skip.
But I had to scan Every Individual Bottle. No way to tell the idiot machine that I had 6 of
them. And for Every Individual Bottle I had to select “Skip Bagging”. An assistant came
along and told me that I needed to put them in the bagging area to the left of the terminal:
Why? My guess is that the terminal weighs the goods and does some kind of plausibility
check. That would at least make it easier to stop people putting things there without
scanning them. But it doesn't stop people putting them back in their trolleys, like I did.
For that they need people. And a little explanation would go a long way. If I'm right, it
has nothing to do with bagging.
And why do I have to scan Every Individual Bottle? Ah, she can help there. She can
enter the number, but I can't. I tried to explain that this was an insult to the customer.
She went and came back with somebody else, probably a supervisor, who explained that they
had lots of theft at the self checkout terminals, and this was designed to limit it. But of
course it does nothing of the sort.
They did it right with the card reader terminal. Do they need to look at every minor
detail? They should send their programmers to use the things themselves, and then to stand
around for a day or two looking at the problems that customers have with their system.
Also to the Ballarat
Botanical Gardens, where things are relatively low-key. Came across the sundial
behind the Statuary Pavilion and looked at it with new eyes:
So though it was presented to the citizens of Ballaarat, the time is set to the Victoria
time zone, and there's no correction for the equation of time.
In fact, that's incorrect. The “MINUTES To be ADDED” column addresses both issues.
The sundial is located at “-37.54651108247229, 143.82223393524572” according to Google
Maps (admire the precision of 10⁻¹⁴°, or about 1 pm), so the offset in mean solar time is
about 24 minutes. Add that to the equation of time and you get the values in that
column.
I've always been a little irritated about how long it takes my cameras to power up, nearly
2 seconds. Today while at Lake
Wendouree I saw three swans take off and fly low over the water:
And of course my camera was powered off. Turn on, shoot blindly, and how about that! Those
two images were taken before the display came on. Of course, I had the wrong focal length
set (12 mm), requiring ridiculous cropping, but they seem almost as good as the ones I got
later:
Today was the US General Election, the one where they also elect the president. Yes, they dated it
yesterday, but they're always a day behind.
Finally a chance to get rid of the disaster that was Donald Trump. I was reminded of the
1952
election, where for the first time a computer (UNIVAC) was used to predict the results.
The prediction quickly came up with an unexpected landslide for Eisenhower. Damn! What did we
do wrong with the program? Tweak it. It still predicted a landslide.
But it was right. Eisenhower got 442 Electoral College votes out of a then total of 531. Now wouldn't that be something to repeat today?
The polls closed at—I think—13:00 our time, and we listened to the news on the way home.
It's a cliff-hanger!
How could that be? That the US elected Trump 4 years ago is a quirk of their electoral
system: Hillary Clinton got more votes. But after seeing him in action over 4 years, who would vote for him again?
Far, far too many, it seems.
I don't know where to start in describing the damage that Trump has done. Arguably nobody
cares if he does damage to me, but in fact he hasn't. He has damaged his own people—apart
from other things, Covidly currently reports
236,951 deaths from COVID-19,
many of which could have been avoided if the country had had any leadership. And just today
the USA has withdrawn from the
Paris Agreement.
International relations will never be the same again.
Why do people vote for him? Clearly they're thinking about themselves rather than the
broader community, but even then, what good has he done them? Do they believe his lies? We
don't know who will win the election, but the fact that it is so close is a real concern.
While shopping at ALDI, found a jar of
chicken tikka masala mix, the British national dish. Not my sort of thing at all, but potentially it was
something that Yvonne would like. Bought one, and since we
were short on time, cooked it this evening.
It was edible, but not my thing. And Yvonne doesn't like it either. At least we know now,
though.
I'm getting quite discouraged by the lack of success in the garden. But the tubers and
bulbs and so on are clearly an exception. Here the view from in front of the garage today:
It's been years since I put up a page with a recipe for cabbage salad (Weißkrautsalat), but somehow it never worked
well. Cutting the cabbage was a pain, and Yvonne found that
I did it too coarsely.
But now we have mandolins,
cutters that make not just slices, but also finely chopped pieces. Just what we need.
Tried it today, and on the whole it was better. Probably I cut the cabbage too finely.
In the last few years I have found two kitchen items surprisingly useful: plastic spatulas
and mandolins. In particular,
mandolins with toothed cutter sections make it easy to chop things like onions finely.
But they're dangerous! And there's a lot of waste. In addition, most of them only have
fixed cutting dimensions. Somehow there must be a way to make them safer and also more
adjustable. But how?
By rights Donald Trump should have been fairly and squarely defeated in the US election, along with his party. In
fact, the party did quite well, and 2 days after the election it's not clear to anybody
except Donald Trump who won the presidential election.
Why? I've already marveled that he had any showing at all, let alone—still—a chance that he
might win the election. But then I came across this
statistic:
So it's the economy, and there are enough misguided voters who think that unsustainable
borrowing is good. Arguably this is an argument against term limits: Trump knew that he had
no more than 8 years at the outside. If he had had the potential for unlimited terms of
office, like in every country I have ever lived in, he might have been less extravagant in
his borrowing.
But then, his personal history tells us otherwise.
I've always shied away from content management systems, but it's clear that they address a real issue: how to ensure that everything is
consistent. With 2400 odd text pages, I'm not always winning.
Damn! I've been there before! I just forgot to change the link in my recipe index. It was
a certain satisfaction to discover that the recipes (in each case modified from the
original) were as good as identical. But what a waste of time!
The orange ones grow in the “nature strip” outside our house, and the others on the corner
of Stones Road and Bliss Road. Are they all the same (sub)species? Today I took the
trouble to take some focus stacked photos of them.
The most obvious difference is that the orange ones hang down, while the others are erect:
And the petals of the orange ones seem to be thinner. But in particular, the stigma of the orange ones is much
longer and more developed than on the other one. So my guess is that they're slightly
different, though it's not clear whether it's enough to be a different species.
Lately the lack of progress in the garden has been quite discouraging, but there are some
exceptions. The roses are already flowering well, for the most part:
Cooked Chinese-style prawns and squid for dinner tonight. It's been some time since we last did so, and I found a surprising
number of things that I wanted to change. In particular, the recipe called for up to three
frying pans—enough to fill the bottom tray of a dishwasher. Nowadays, with the help of a
microwave oven, I can get by with one.
I've already commented on how strange it is that Donald Trump even stood a chance. But
in fact he received more votes than any US presidential candidate before him, something that
he will doubtless emphasize for years to come. On the other hand, Joe Biden's lead of 4.45
million is considerably larger than Trump's lead of 3.86 million 4 years ago. And on that occasion the results were known almost immediately. That
can only mean more uniform voter behaviour this time.
The other thing of interest was that Yvonne wanted to watch
TV news for the first time I can recall, both from Al Jazeera and ARD. If he has done
one thing, Trump has managed to get people interested in politics. The large voter turnout
is doubtless another indication of the same thing.
What are they? A kind of ball, about 4 cm in diameter. The “Kiev” appears to be a
reference to chicken à la Kiev, and they're intended to be baked in an oven. But what's an “air fryer” for? Did them in the “coffee machine”
for 15 minutes at 180°, which proved to be too long: the filling (whatever it was;
ostensibly containing bacon and cranberry) melted. But they didn't taste bad. Maybe 10
minutes next time?
I'm currently reviewing a yet-unpublished paper about (effectively) how Linux “took over” from Unix (and thus also BSD). And clearly Linux is now an order of
magnitude more important than BSD. Why did BSD fail?
Why, did BSD fail? No, it's still going strong, just not as strong as Linux. But why did
that happen? I still don't really understand.
A couple of suggestions that have done the round:
The AT&T lawsuit scared people off
The AT&T lawsuit was over by 1994, long before Linux became usable. So it's easy
to argue that it couldn't have had any effect.
BSD people are difficult to get on with
There's a certain truth here, but it seems that the Linux people at the time were no
friendlier to each other or outsiders.
BSD people discouraged new blood
There may be some truth here, but is that enough?
BSD had no leadership
It's certainly interesting to note that Linus Torvalds presented a unifying
influence in Linux. There was nobody quite that unifying in the BSD camp; the closest I can
think of was FreeBSD'sJordan Hubbard, but he was nowhere
near as strong.
But all that was in the early days (say, until 1995). By 1995, the first big companies
were starting to use free operating systems, and my (admittedly distorted) recollection
was that it was mainly BSD. Yahoo!, for example, was an all-FreeBSD shop. Google didn't exist. And from 1995,
gradually the first big companies started to take free operating systems seriously.
And for some reason they mainly chose Linux, not BSD. Why? That's the nut that I'm
currently trying to crack.
Almost no work in the garden today, which makes a big difference from the last few days,
where I did none at all. Spread fertilizer in the east garden, on the long-suffering
Gingko biloba in the north,
the row of Hebes between
there and the garden, and on the Buddleja and a few other things in the north garden. The rosemary and the lilac seem
to have completely died now.
After the blood test, on to Sturt Street to buy a film (you know, those things you put in
old-fashioned cameras). But of course the photography shop had closed down:
There's a double problem: first, people no longer need photographic supplies the way they
did in the last millennium, and secondly bricks-and-mortar shops are going away too. It
seems that since they closed down, another company (“Weddings—Debutante—Ballet”) set up in
there, and they're gone too:
Of course, as only occurred to me later, that could have been some of the services that the
photographers provided.
When did they close? When I got back home, I checked and found that Harvey & Sons
closed down nearly two years ago, mainly because the proprietors were so old. And there are,
indeed, still photo shops in Ballarat: Camera
House has a shop just a few hundred metres down Sturt Street, easy walking distance
from Health First. They even
claim to be the oldest shop in
the country (1872), not quite what the Courier article about Harvey & Sons says.
2½ years ago our expensive (well, relatively expensive) Bosch dish washer broke down.
A repair would take weeks. Nothing for it: we bought a new one pending the repair of the old one. That way we would be protected
against such a problem happening again.
The new one was a Whirlpool WFE2B19XAUS,
and it cost less than half the price of the Bosch. But it worked fine, and we postponed
repairing the Bosch. A good thing, too: the problem was transient.
Swap the dish washers again? The new one was in the kitchen, the old one was in the
laundry, and it hadn't been easy to install the one in the kitchen. What happens if the
Bosch fails again? So we left them as they were, and we're still using the Whirlpool. On
some days, like yesterday, we have enough to fill both.
And then I see things like this, after being through the (Bosch) wash:
That's fat in the pan, and it has proven to difficult to remove. Maybe the relatively low
temperature (45°) that I chose for the Bosch? It wouldn't explain the spatula. And after
going through the Whirlpool (admittedly with some preparation), it was fine.
While looking for reasons for Linux overtaking BSD, came across
this page. There's a lot in there, and I haven't read it yet, but it quotes a number
of people who were active early on. I should read it.
Another 6 second grid power
failure this afternoon at 16:01:43, interesting because it wasn't just a 1 second
blip. To be fair to Powercor, their
unplanned outages have become shorter, fewer and further between. Now if they would just
stop planning outages.
I've heard from several sources recently that “Coronavirus” numbers are “spiking”.
What does that mean?
First, Coronavirus, one of
the main causes of the common
cold. Do people really keep statistics on the kind of virus that people have? It
seems highly unlikely. Clearly they're talking about one specific coronavirus, the
severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Given that name, or even the
abbreviation SARS-CoV-2, you
could almost forgive the inaccuracy. But in fact they're not talking about the virus at
all, but COVID-19. Why do they
have to be so inaccurate? In Germany they tend to refer to it simply as „Corona“, which I thought was a crown or a
beer or something.
And yes, the numbers are alarming. But not to worry, it's just a spike.
What's a spike? The Oxford English Dictionary, as
usual, comes up with dozens of meanings: “A young mackerel”, “A prickly resentment; anger,
venom”, “A young buffalo”. Clearly not what is meant here. My recollection of a spike is
seeing one on an oscilloscope in the olden days: a sudden deviation from an otherwise relatively continuous signal.
And yes, OED knows that too:
(a) An electrical pulse of very short duration in which a rapid increase in voltage is
followed immediately by a rapid decrease; (b) a burst of electromagnetic radiation marked
by short duration or great intensity, esp. one from space.
I'll go along with that. So what they're implying is that the numbers, steadily climbing,
will deviate suddenly from that curve in one direction or the other, like the Swedish lack
of cases at weekends, and then continue as if nothing had happened.
But of course that's not what they mean. They're using inappropriate terms to
describe an increase in cases. Are they maybe thinking of the differential of the curve? I
doubt it.
One day I should rant about “glitch”, which has long lost its original meaning.
a chart showing a spike of unusual activity in the stock market; a sudden spike of
electrical current.
Clearly not as authoritative, and also not as clear.
In fact, it was almost impossible to find. dictionary.com is too polite to say “your
browser is old and worn-out, and I won't disclose more than 3 meanings”. Another indication
that I must finally continue with my system upgrade.
It was almost completely destroyed in May when the screen to which attached got blown away. And interestingly it's now
flowering further down, so possibly it will spread better than it did the first time round.
Our grid power uptime has certainly improved greatly over the past few months, if you
exclude the extended “routine maintenance” periods. But somehow the number of outages has
increased (“spiked”?) in the past few days. Today we had two grid power failures, both round 1
second, at 06:54:44 and 15:42:00.
Of course, that involved checking some details, in particular pricing and what kind of
adapter would work for D and G lenses (for which, I discover, I don't have a good link at
hand). It seems that the most expensive adapter from B&H is the MTF Services Ltd Nikon G to Micro 4/3 Adapter for a measly $396 US. What can it do
that my $9 adapter can't? Control the aperture ring. There are cheaper adapters that do
that too, like the Metabones adapter for only $139. A bargain!
But in the process I came across “speed boosters”, an adapter with inbuilt optics something
like a reverse teleconverter. That's what I really know Metabones for, but their prices, round $500 US, make it
uninteresting. There are others, though, like the Viltrox NF-M43X for only $78.50 US. It converts the focal length by 0.71x,
effectively changing the aperture by 1 stop. With that, my wide aperture Nikon lenses would
change from 85/1.4, 50/1.4 and 35/1.4 to 60/1.0, 35/1.0 and 25/1.0. It would also make it
much easier to do shallow depth of field photos like I failed to do a couple of weeks ago.
But how good are they? Viltrox isn't unknown: I have a ring flash from them. But this is
optics. Off to look for some comparisons, and came up with this:
That compares three adapters: an el-cheapo adapter that isn't available for Micro Four Thirds system,
the Viltrox and the Metabones. Bottom line: very little difference between the three,
though the el-cheapo is marginally worse. What interested me in every case was a certain
circular pattern in the background distortion, like this:
It's really only visible when enlarged, but the leaves behind the person seem to be arranged
in a circle. Since it happens with all the adapters, and the author doesn't mention it,
maybe it's a problem with the lens.
Still, it sounds good. Took a look round and found one in Australia for $118, corresponding
to about $84 US. That's clearly much cheaper than I could import it for, so bought it.
I'll be interested to see what the results are like. If they're good, it could have saved
me the cost of the Voigtländer 25 mm
f/0.95, since the 35 mm Nikkor would end up with the same specs.
There's some species of Acacia (Wattle) that flowers at any time of year, but I don't recall seeing many of our most common
wattle in flower. What's it called? I thought Acacia melanoxylon, but that has
phyllodes, while our wattles
have real leaves.
But this year the trees seem to be flowering everywhere, even the volunteer between the
house and the water tanks (first two images):
Could it be an Acacia
baileyana? As its common name “Cootamundra wattle” implies, it, too,
comes from New South Wales, but it seems to have spread all over the world. But when I
consider that we planted one when we moved in here, and watched it die, it seems unlikely.
Most of the tomatoes that I planted in July are still in pots, though they're growing well. High time to plant them
outside. In the end, though, I only planted two: a “Beefsteak” in the wind break at the
north-east end of the house:
The older one is in front, a good indication that it's not a good idea to plant outside too
early.
I had also planned to plant our second Buddleja to the south of the house, but the “soil” proved to be only 20 cm deep,
under which is rubble, presumably waste from the house construction. More thought
necessary.
Not everything is dying, though. The Strelitzia nicolai is flowering
multiply:
Andy Farkas has a new DVD collection: “Get Smart”. He paid money for it; I downloaded my copies legally for free.
That led to a discussion on IRC, which was interesting.
But first, a digression. It's been over 50 years since we first had a TV in the house.
Times have clearly changed. Thinking back,
30 July 1964
Home TV (parents)
1 June 1972
TV in my home
10 December 1975
Colour TV
26 December 1983
Video recorder
1 April 1991
Satellite receiver
27 July 2001
TiVo
18 September 2004
Computer-based video recording
28 June 2005
Data projector
27 July 2015
Return to using (analogue) TV
1 April 2017
End of terrestrial TV
The dates in the 1970s to 1990s are guesswork, but they're close.
3½ years ago we gave up receiving terrestrial TV. The TV can still receive it, and on rare
occasions we use it (breaking news, for example), but in general my method now is to
download files and display them locally with a computer connected to the (real) TV. We
started that with the first video recorder 37 years ago, but now it's the only way we do it.
But that's definitely not the way the content providers want it. Many don't want people
downloading their content, presumably because of licensing issues based on concern that the
content might be redistributed in violation of the license.
That's rather like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Recently SBS has changed their
interface so that you can only stream. Can I work around that? Possibly. But why bother?
I've found so little of interest on SBS that I can't be bothered. Goodbye, SBS. The world
is my oyster.
Other people go along with what the providers want them to do. Recently Jamie Fraser bought
a Chromecast box. What's that? Google to the aid, followed by Google to the hindrance.
It's far too polite to display https://store.google.com/au/product/chromecast_google_tv on my old, worn-out
firefox: I had to go
to teevee to display it at all.
And the result was emetic. What does the thing do? I still don't know. I know what
the page does: it doesn't allow me to scroll normally, just showing part of an image even on
full screen:
Scroll down? The remote control runs away, and the background image gets larger, showing
the kind of programme that I would never think of looking at (“A lone gunfighter makes his
way through the outer reaches of the galaxy”). What is the thing? It seems to be a
dongle, possibly one that has an Internet connection, that plugs into an HDMI connector and
displays the kind of menu that scare me off. Yes, there's a “see how it works” link, but
that just takes me to a commercial video free of technical content. About the only inkling
of a detail that I can get from that is that it has voice input, hopefully only as an
option. What it's clearly lacking is a keyboard. OK, you can use your mobile phone for
that. You could also rivet pancakes to your ears and call yourself a dachshund.
Clearly the Chromecast box is only part of the solution, hopefully one that can be improved
on. It has an interface that appears completely useless, just a couple of buttons (for
people confused by more buttons?). And it costs about half the price of a second-hand
computer. How would I use it to find, say, „Die Küstenpiloten“, which I was downloading during this time? And how would it
display it? The ARD Mediathek has become
very slow lately, and it took me 5 hours to download a 90 minute video in 1080p. How can I
stream that? Clearly I can't.
So, things don't seem to have changed much in the nearly 2 years since I bought a TCL Android-based smart TV.
I grumbled about it then, and I'm sure I'd do so again. Ultimately there's a choice:
simplicity at the expense of unnecessary complication and limitations. But as long as most
TV broadcasters have web sites as broken as Google's Chromecast page, I see little hope.
Clearly I'm way off centre with my ways of doing things. I know what I like better my way.
But what am I missing? There are other components too, names like radarr:
Radarr is a movie collection manager for Usenet and BitTorrent users. It can monitor
multiple RSS feeds for new movies and will interface with clients and indexers to grab,
sort, and rename them. It can also be configured to automatically upgrade the quality of
existing files in the library when a better quality format becomes available.
Usenet? How old is this stuff?
Reading the “features”, it seems just to be an interface to my download client: uTorrent,
Deluge, rTorrent, NZBGet, SABnzbd, qBittorrent, Transmission and many more, most of which I
have never heard of. Does it work with the German Mediatheken? I'd probably have to try
out. But potentially it could be interesting.
And then there's sonarr. Their home page is too
polite to assume that you don't know what it is, but this page quotes “their GitHub
page”:
Sonarr is a PVR for Usenet and BitTorrent users. It can monitor multiple RSS feeds for new
episodes of your favorite shows and will grab, sort and rename them. It can also be
configured to automatically upgrade the quality of files already downloaded when a better
quality format becomes available.
Haven't I seen that before? Clearly it's closely related to Radarr. Maybe they're
something like MediathekView, in which case
they could be useful. But somewhere I got the impression that they might work as a media
server. Yes, NFS works fine, but it's not exactly portable, and people who visit and are scared by big
screens can't use it to watch videos on their mobile phones, because the mobile phones are
too polite to support obsolete protocols.
So: I think I'll have to investigate one of the arrs. I'm not expecting it to be fun.
Another transient grid power
failure at 6:21:33 this morning. They don't do any harm, but why are we getting so
many recently? We've had five in the past 5 days, as many as we had in the over two months
previous to that.
Decades ago I was with my father and sister somewhere in Devon. We saw an old man sitting near a
bridge, watching life go by. My father asked, idly, “I wonder what he's thinking about”.
My sister, in a Devonish accent: “He be thinking arr, that's what he be thinking”.
“Arr” is somehow Devonish, a typical fill word used by old people when recalling something.
It seems to have been picked up by some people in conjunction with pirates, possibly
Jamaica Inn, which
takes place in that part of the world, though OED relates it to a Walt Disney filming of “Treasure Island”, dating back only to 1966.
Somehow that's what I think of when I hear names like radarr and sonarr. Today I installed them,
mainly to find out what they are.
To my surprise, radarr installed with no problems and no
dependencies! sonarr was even better: it was already installed, presumably as a
dependency of some other package.
But how to start it? Just typing in the name brought the expected result:
=== root@teevee (/dev/pts/2) ~ 14 -> sonarr su: sonarr: command not found
Daniel O'Connor recommended it, so he must know how to start it.
* groggyhimself wonders how to start it.
<Docco> "service sonarr onestart" ?
<groggyhimself> Right, that's the Unix way.
* groggyhimself marvels.
<groggyhimself> Is it supposed to say something?
* groggyhimself discovers a /usr/local/share/sonarr/NzbDrone.exe
<Docco> it runs headless
<groggyhimself> How do I access it?
<Docco> point a browser at localhost:8989
<groggyhimself> Ah, of course!
<groggyhimself> What about radarr?
<Docco> localhost:7878
Now that's amazing. It's certainly interesting to know that the standard system startup
scripts can start it, but that's presumably because it's a server that interfaces via
HTTP. But you need to know the port
numbers.
Accessing the servers was relatively trivial, but understanding the interface wasn't. By
comparison MediathekView is a model of
clarity. Lots of icons with no explanation. radarr at least pointed to a setup guide, and it looks as if
I will need to read it. Without it, I couldn't get much sense out of either of them. They
both require an external program for downloads. The only one I had installed was rTorrent, so I tried that. User
name? Password? I don't need no steenking authentication!
Oh yes, I do, at least for arr. But I've been using rTorrent for years without
authentication. And my suspicion is that rTorrent will only work for (very?) few
sources. So it looks as if both programs will have to wait in the tuit queue.
On the positive side, it passed the test I set yesterday: it found „Die Küstenpiloten“ (a new episode that was only released today). But it didn't find
„Die Kanzlei“, which has been running for ever, and came up with some ridiculous
alternatives: „Die Camper“, “Die Sterntaler”, “Die Kocharena”, all with the information that
they had “Ended” (and thus presumably that no episodes were available). Still, it's one
more tool, even if rather hard to use.
„Rouladen“ are a typical German
dish, roughly equivalent to what I knew as “beef olives”, though I note that the Wikipedia
page for beef olives redirects to Rouladen. I don't think we've ever eaten them at home
before: it's a fair amount of work. First you need sliced beef to wrap up, and that's not
easy. But that's what butchers are for, and the only thing we needed was to know how thick
to slice the beef.
Yvonne bought the meat on Wednesday before I got round to
checking on the thickness of the meat. No worry, she just bought 1.5 kg of “outside”, if
she understood the term correctly.
Panic! How do we cut them? Will our slicer do the job? At least we could try, and if it
didn't, we'd have to make something else from the meat. But it worked, even well:
The one on the right was sliced at 5 mm thickness, which seems the right thickness. The one
on the left was sliced at 7 mm and hammered, which is more in keeping with the way these
things are made.
We took this
recipe („Rinderroulade wie bei Oma“, “Beef Rouladen like grandma made them”) as a
basis, and Yvonne modified them by wrapping them with smoked pork belly. In principle she
was doing the dish, but her sprained wrist made it difficult, so I joined in after she had
wrapped them:
And they weren't at all bad. We had 7 of them, of which we ate three. And there are many
more slices of beef in the freezer for next time. We'll probably update our recipe.
Yvonne wanted to print the recipe for the Rouladen so that she could mark it up in the kitchen. It wasn't easy; in fact, I
nearly gave up:
First, her firefox didn't
want to know about the printer. Why not? No idea. So I had to print to a file and
then copy the file to the printer.
But that didn't work as expected. I got three pages, the first only with headings, the
second showing only the photo, and the third also almost empty.
Ah, I'm too stupid to think that just pressing c-p will print the recipe.
For that I have to find the greyed-out „ALS PDF DRUCKEN“ (“print as PDF”) button in the
middle of the text. Did that on eureka to avoid the firefox problems on
Yvonne's computer.
The result: a single page:.
Unsupported PDF data for Direct Print:1000
What's that, apart from an obvious compatibility issue? My Brother HL-3170CDW has
almost never had issues with valid PDF data, so I suspect the file.
OK, what does xpdf think of the
file? Yes, it can display it. Again an empty first page, then a relatively readable
recipe entirely on the second page. Print it.
ERROR NAME
typecheck
COMMAND
image
OPERAND STACK:
Dammit, what about converting it to PostScript first?
I don't have much to do with the horses on our property any more, especially since they
mainly don't belong to us. Down with Yvonne this morning to
look at the three that Chris Bahlo left here 10 days ago. It's easy to see which horse
(Valeta) belongs here:
We've had heavy winds lately, and I think that they may have damaged the stems. Moral:
plant not too early, not too late. Maybe early October's the right time.
Nice and shiny! Of course, anybody arriving there has almost certainly driven the length of
Grassy Gully Road; what they want to know is where they have got to. Yes, the Stones Road
signs are legible, but they're still the old ones. I'm left wondering if it was worth
changing them at all.
Andy Oram, my old editor at O'Reilly, has published the first of a series of articles From Unix to Linux: Key Trends in the Evolution of Operating
Systems. This is the series that I was reviewing last week, and which gave me cause to think. I told Andy about this in my review, of
course, but it's clear that he sees things differently. He took some of the suggestions on
board, but I'm left wondering whether the difference is simply our viewpoint. For my
viewpoint, it looks a little uneven. Why the issue of upper and lower case? The one-letter
options that we know and love? And the fact that C arrays are indexed starting at 0, not 1?
Ultimately, though, I think both of us missed an important point: Unix was the operating
system chosen for the initial implementation of the Internet protocols. That
allowed companies in the 1980s to network their systems cheaply and efficiently, and it led
the way to today's view of computers.
I'll be interested to see how the other articles (there are three more) will turn out.
Paul Gallagher, the gardener, along today for lawn mowing and weeding—he's certainly doing a
good job of the latter.
By coincidence found that
the Leucadendron salignum
at the house entrance was flooded. There was about 1 cm of water over the level of the
soil. Had the drippers failed? No, all seemed well. Must have been the drain holes. With
Paul's help, turned it over—it must have weighed 125 kg.:
That's going to be difficult to fix. Clearly the bush is too big for its pot. But how do I
get it out, and where do I plant it where it won't die like everything else? And how do I
do it without destroying the relatively expensive pot?
A couple of days ago I grumbled that I could no longer download videos from
SBS. That's
a challenge for some; Callum Gibson tells me that he can download them with , exactly the same tool that I
use. Do I have an old version installed? No, for once it was newer than his, probably
because it's necessary. OK, I can try upgrading, and of course there's a new version, but
it didn't make any difference
OK, an example. Today was the 100th anniversary of the foundation of QANTAS, an acronym for the Queensland And
Northern Territory Aerial Service. As Wikipedia says,
99 years ago? That's 100 by my reckoning. But Wikipedia is in the USA, which is always a day behind. I got this
information at 16:57, pretty much the end of the working day, so it should have shown 100
years ago. Even if you go by UTC, it was 5:57 this morning.
Half an hour later I refreshed. Today had dawned for Wikipedia. That suggests that its
time is running on UTC-6, not what I would have expected.
Presumably in honour of the QANTAS anniversary SBS had produced a documentary about the
evolution of air transport in Australia. But when I try to download it, I get the error:
It looks like we're going to have to feed Leonid4Cyte for the rest of his life to
treat his arthritis. It's expensive stuff—our vet charges $74 for 100 g. Melissa Wisbey gave Yvonne a
cheaper source, PetCircle, offering it
for only $62.95, post free. OK, we can do that. Signed up, added to my “cart” and went to
checkout:
I didn't ask for that! And it seems that I would have to jump through hoops to disconnect
it again. No, thanks, PetCircle, I don't like being treated like that.
Off searching and found the stuff again, this time for “only” $59 from The Vet Shed. Again no mention of postage. OK,
sign up, go to checkout. Sure enough, suddenly $9.49 postage on top of the price.
Are these people trying to annoy me? No, I think they're managing without trying. It's
understandable that the postage depends on the composition of the order. Even the “every 7
weeks” might make sense. But that, of course, requires them storing my credentials. They
should just come out with it up front, rather than waiting until you check out.
Tried a different approach: Pene Kirk. Yes, she can get the stuff for us, only $60. So we
did that, rather stupidly paying another $8 because we called her 2 hours after she did her
weekly order. But that's clearly the way to go.
In passing, it's interesting to note that 4Cyte is manufactured in New Zealand, and that the Australian
distributors are in Ballarat (10
Skipton Street, +61-3-5330-0300).
Still more problems with my ancient firefox today. OK, bite the bullet, run it from dereel. Apart from
mail interface problems (also on dereel), things now seem to work. I had to change
my dobrowser script to put the web pages somewhere neutral (/eureka/var/tmp),
and I needed to copy the ~/.mailcap to dereel.
Somehow the biggest issue of running like this is the maze of twisty little symlinks, all
different.
That's amazing, because the background was in the shade and the sun was shining on the
grass. And I even darkened the background, but the result is less than satisfactory.
So today we picked a number of grasses and I tried photos in the “studio”:
Which is better? It's not made any easier by the fact that those are two different stems;
the one on the left is riper. But clearly the background is uneven. That was taken with
the studio flash units, which illuminate everything equally. Here I had made a backdrop of
some black cloth that I bought years ago and never managed to use effectively:
But another option is the ring flash, which has the advantage of differential illumination;
in this case the difference between the subject and the background would be about 3
EV:
In principle it should be the last one, but there the background is lightening up. Maybe I
should move the subject further from the backdrop, but there's only so far that I can go.
Or maybe with a bright backdrop after all (fold up the black cloth)?
It makes surprisingly little difference, and for some reason (possibly flash coverage) the
“light” background is uneven. Clearly there's more experimentation ahead of me.
Somehow I have had this knowledge in the back of my head for decades: when IPv4 was finalized, DARPA gave contracts to BBN and University of
California, Berkeley to implement it—on Unix. The university created a Computer Systems Research
Group (CSRG) to do the work. And the first functional version of the IP stack was in
4.1cBSD, though it was really
released in 4.2BSD.
Kirk McKusick put me right
on one detail: it was 4.1aBSD, not 4.1cBSD. But in the course of my reviews I read the
Internet protocol
suite page on Wikipedia, and it barely mentions Berkeley. The only reference is:
The spread of TCP/IP was fueled further in June 1989, when the University of California,
Berkeley agreed to place the TCP/IP code developed for BSD UNIX into the public domain.
Did that really happen? I thought that was all under the BSD license. But more to the point,
apart from the fact that the page is missing any other mention of the BSD implementation
(dates, for example), who did “code the Internet”? From the Wikipedia page:
DARPA contracted with BBN Technologies, Stanford University, and the University College
London to develop operational versions of the protocol on several hardware
platforms. During development of the protocol the version number of the packet routing
layer progressed from version 1 to version 4, the latter of which was installed in the
ARPANET in 1983. It became known as Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) as the protocol
that is still in use in the Internet, ...
OK, that goes back before IPv4. But where are the Stanford and UCL stacks? And why no
mention of Berkeley? It's beyond doubt that the CSRG was funded by DARPA (something of
which the radical UCB people weren't universally in favour).
Yvonne went shopping today, and called me several times.
I've more or less learnt to live with pain smart phones: pull gingerly out of my
shirt pocket, being very careful not to touch the screen, then smash swipe
upwards. Works if you're careful.
One time, though, I did it wrong and touched the screen. A completely different display
appeared. OK, I've analyzed this one in the past: wait a few seconds for this glacially
slow phone to produce a DISMISSACCEPT
display, then accept.
And yes, it did that. Press ACCEPT. Display goes away, phone continues ringing. And that was all until
Yvonne got bored and hung up.
This is RIDICULOUS! This is supposed to be a phone, not a children's toy.
The very least it can do is allow me to answer it without jumping through hoops.
How did we get here? Older mobile phones had buttons, things that you press and that gave
tactile feedback. Then there were the foldable phones, which I personally thought the best:
phone rings, and opening it answers the call.
But foldable phones have the disadvantage of an even smaller screen size than modern “smart”
phones. The modern chocolate bar shape maximizes what is still a tiny display, and to do
that you need to get rid of the keyboard. Instead people need to make “gestures” (most of
mine are obscene). A small price for the ability to watch barely visible videos on your
phone.
Problem: other people do this on a regular basis without the problems I have. What's
different about my situation? There are a number of possibilities:
Greg is too stupid to handle modern technology? No, that can't be the answer.
This phone has “features” that other Android phones don't,
and that I haven't been able to discover yet. What speaks for this idea is that I
continually get messages that display on the phone for about 2 seconds and then
disappear for ever. I would expect them to be in the “Messages” tab, but they don't
show up there.
The phone is misconfigured. That could explain the missing messages, but a slow trawl
through the “Settings” tab has not shown anything that I could have done wrong, nor that
I could fix.
The touch screen has issues. That might at least explain why my attempt to answer
failed.
But surely I'm not the only person who has these problems. Why don't they have a button
that will answer the phone, no matter what the display? And should I buy a different phone
that doesn't have these bugs? How can I know in advance? I'd revive my still-functional
fold phone, except that it doesn't handle my contacts list.
I'll have to take it out again before it dies. But why is it having these problems? It's
not alone. The weeds are happy, but the lilac next to it died off about a month ago, and
two salvias and the Gallipoli rosemary died too. It's not lack of fertilizer, and it's not
lack of water. Once again I'm considering the possibility that there's something in the soil.
Taking the photos of the Buddleja wasn't easy: there's so much mess around it that it's difficult to distinguish what's
left of the plant. Clearly a case for the wide-aperture lenses like the Nikkor 85 mm f/1.4 or the
Voigtländer
Nokton 25 mm f/0.95:
Not exciting, but that's partially the subject. But how about even less depth of field?
Where's my Viltrox NF-M43X adapter?
At the Napoleons post
office, it proved. 90 minutes later Yvonne had brought it
back with her. A lot more professional than the el-cheapo non-optical adapter that I got
a few weeks back, and, as seems a requirement for these things, equipped with a
tripod mount (why? It's too close to the camera to make any difference).
These photos are unprocessed. The 35 mm Nikkor and the Nokton have pretty much the same
aperture and the same focal length, so it's not surprising that they look similar. But
though the Nikkor shows some vignetting, the Nokton has notably more. That's not surprising
for the Nikkor, since the adapter supplies only then inside 50% of the angle of view. It's
difficult to compare the 85 mm Nikkor (reduced to 60 mm), since the perspective has changed.
The best I can say is that the image quality doesn't look noticeably worse, though I may do
some pixel-peeping some time later.
The other thing of interest is the shutter speed. The camera can't know the aperture, so it
just sets the shutter speed: “1/12800” (a misunderstanding for 1/12500) for the Nikkor
lenses, and 1/10000 for the Voigtländer. Why? I had already noted that the “f/0.95” didn't deliver double the light of f/1.4, and in fact
I accidentally set it to f/1.2 for the first photos. But the shutter speeds that the camera
chose were:
Aperture
speed
0.95
1/10000
1.2
1/10000
1.8
1/6400
2.0
1/5000
That would suggest that the Nokton maxes out at effectively f/1.4. I have a better lens
that can do that.
Taking my ring flash photos yesterday ended up with what I expected: the batteries went
flat.
Well, as usual, one battery went flat. These
were Nickel-Zinc batteries, and I've already
noted that in almost every case, only one went flat. While the other three had dropped to
about 1.55 V, this one was round 0.6 V.
Throw it away? That's what I've done in the past. But this time I measured the voltage
some hours later, and it was back to about 1.2 V. So I charged it, and it reached the same
level of charge as the others. Has it survived the ill-treatment? It's certainly worth
thinking about, and that I should replace the batteries on the first sign of weakness.
Yvonne has been looking for new kitchen scales for some time.
There are plenty on eBay, and they all seem to
work well, but they're so tiny. This was significantly larger, and much more
expensive—$80 compared to the $12 or so that I paid for the eBay offerings.
But it had been halved in price, and in addition they were offering 20% shop-wide, so she
“only” paid $32 for it. From Soehnle, a
well-known German company, with the rather silly name “Page Comfort
400”, and no indication of the resolution (which proved to be the expected 1 g).
Came with a single sheet of “instructions” that carefully avoided language, just pictures to
interpret. How hard can it be? Put in the batteries, turn on. Nothing. Try again.
Worked. I have the impression that the electronics needed to charge up before working.
I've had difficulties with expensive scales before, during our time in Echunga, though I don't seem to have
mentioned the fact: the scales drifted so fast that it was impossible to get a good reading.
OK, we have two other scales here. Compare them with, as it happened, a mixer jug. The
ones we had showed 1469.8 g and 1471 g, close enough. Sonny boy showed 1458 g.
Played around a bit, and it changed its mind. Now it was 1471 g. Really? Take off the jug
and it showed 6 g. Tare (which takes a surprisingly long time) and weigh again. 1458 g.
That doesn't even add up.
Why are these things still on the market? At least it explains the sharp markdown.
Another two grid power failures today, both transients. Somehow it's not worth noting them in this diary, especially as
it requires more effort than anything else. From now on I'll record them on the outages
page, but not here, unless there's a special reason.
I took the photos of the cat pawprints with the M.Zuiko Digital ED
75 mm f/1.8. To my surprise, I couldn't focus that close. I had to use extension
tubes, pretty much the first time I have had to do that for “normal” photos.
Yesterday's wide aperture lens experiments were interesting, but rather off the
beaten track—I thought. Then today I discovered this news item: Cosina have
announced a new lens for the Micro Four Thirds system,
a Super Nokton 29 mm f/0.8. That's ⅔ stop wider than my Voigtländer Nokton 25 mm
f/0.95, and possibly the widest aperture lens on the market at the moment.
Is it worth it? The f/0.95 Nokton isn't the sharpest lens I've seen, at least fully open
(and how else would you use it?). And the new lens has a list price of $2,100 US. But
unlike my current crop of Nikkor f/1.4 lenses, which become f/0.99 with the Viltrox adapter,
there are no Nikon lenses with the f/1.1 that I would need to be able to reduce the
aperture to f/0.8.
Ate the remainder of a pack of sate ayam (chicken satay) today, this time grilling as
Yvonne had wished, 20 minutes at 230° in the “hair dryer”
“air fryer”. They seem to have come out
well:
Not so the ketupat, which I had
also deep frozen. Usually deep frozen cooked rice comes out almost indistinguishable from
fresh, but this tasted terrible cold. Heated up it was a little better, but not to be
repeated.
What's that? Cheese fish dofu? What kind of idea is that? It's not the only
strangeness: the stuff comes from Hutan Melintang, Perak, Malaysia,
which sounds like it's somewhere out in the jungle. The name rings a bell, and on checking
I discover that we set sail for it in the late 1960s,
though at the time I spelt it “Utang Melantang”, probably a spelling given to me by our
skipper. I had the impression that it was only accessible by sea. “Hutan” means “forest”
(think of the forest people, Orang
Utan). And the street address Jalan Tepi Sungai, the old spelling, means “river edge
road”. Certainly not the big smoke.
And the text is in Chinese, English and French—but not Malay. And the packaging unit
was 450 g, clearly a nod to the old avoirdupois pound measurement. What market is it designed for? If it were North
America, you'd expect Spanish in addition to French.
Into town today for my six-monthly dental checkup. It seems that it's been 4½ years since my last dental X-ray, so he did another set today. And found that
there's some decay in a hard-to-reach place on a molar (7 upper left, or however the
dentists call it). Well, he noted that 4½ years ago, but it seems to have spread. He has
given me a number of options:
Do nothing, and it will probably require removal in 2 to 3 years' time.
Clean with high-fluoride toothpaste, and it will probably require removal in 2 to 3
years' time.
Drill through the chewing surface and fix it like that. Not a good idea for chewing.
Drill from the front, very difficult.
Remove number 8 molar and go from the side. Could be issues with the maxillary sinus, as 4 years ago with the number 7 on the other side.
So which do I do? They're going to send me the X-rays by email. Then I go to Lake Imaging for another X-ray, and then we
discuss. I took the high-fluoride toothpaste in the meantimg
While in town, dropped into Camera House in Sturt Street, apparently a franchise and otherwise the oldest camera
shop in Australia (founded 1872). I had decided to put a film through my Nikon FM2, and ended up taking two. I had
forgotten how expensive film is: with developing, and without printing, a 36 exposure roll
of Fujicolor 200 will cost me $21, or about 58¢ per shot. That's such a difference
from digital cameras.
Also while in town, brought back the scales that Yvonne bought on Wednesday. Fortunately they misbehaved for the sales staff too, so there was no
problem returning them.
We rather liked the “seafood bisque” that we bought from ALDI a
couple of months ago, but it seemed like something that we could do better, so today
Yvonne started on her own recipe, based on this
recipe.
While Yvonne slaved away, I tried something simpler: roast
chicken.
But why do it in the oven when we have an “air fryer”? That sounds ideal for it, in this
case the “hair dryer”. . And sure
enough, the “instructions” included roast chicken: 200°, 25-50 minutes, rotisserie with
chicken forks.
Isn't that typical? What weight of chicken? OK, off looking for the chicken forks,
thoughtfully supplied without attaching screws; I had to remove them from the skewer plates.
Put the chicken (a relatively small one, 1.65 kg) on the rotisserie, and...
It won't fit. Whatever the instructions person thought (if anything), it clearly related to
an even smaller chicken. I don't think you can get anything smaller in Australia; a more
typical size is 2.2 kg. OK, put it on the rack, inverted:
3 minutes! OK, turn it over, turn the heat down to 170°, and continue. That was a
lot better. After 45 minutes, it looked reasonable, but most definitely not cooked:
Turn it over, insert the meat thermometer. 56°. It needs to get to 80°. OK, turn the
temperature back to 180° and continue. It took a total of 100 minutes. So much for it
being faster. In the oven I would have expected 83 to 91 minutes. OK, it was done at 170°
for much of the time, but I had expected it to be faster than in the oven. No time
to let it rest.
On the positive side, it seemed to have been cooked more evenly than in the oven. Normally
there's an issue that either the breast is overcooked or the legs are undercooked, but this
time everything looked right:
Next time I'll try to get it before it flies away.
What does that have to do with Haeberlin? Haeberlin is the name of the family that runs the
Auberge de l'Ill, one of
the best restaurants in France. Yvonne found that the
attraction of the flowers suggested excellent taste.
Somehow the garden is not doing well. We've been here for 5½ years, and there's almost
nothing to show for it. A comparison after the same time in Kleins Road makes
that very clear.
In particular, the Paulownia kawakamii looks as if it will never grow. It's still only about 1 m high.
Here it is next to the parent tree in Kleins Road taken at the same age:
Both of those appear to have been accidents when Paul mowed the lawn. The first is on the
corner of the riding arena, and while it didn't directly impact the Paulownia, it might have
reduced the flow. The second is more direct: it's the dripper for the Corymbia ficifolia. Not
surprisingly, it's not looking happy:
It was moist, it had fertilizer, but it just died. Why? In Kleins Road they grew like
fury. It seems as if the roots had rotted away. Fortunately I have one more plant, but
where can I plant it?
Plants that aren't doing quite as badly are the ornamental cherry tree and the Banksia integrifolia. The
latter seems happier than last month, though there have been relatively few flowers:
Then there are plants like the Camellia japonica, which has flowered, but despite large quantities of fertilizer,
the leaves are still yellow. And it's hardly any bigger than when we bought it ten
years ago.. I suppose the positive way to look at it is that it has survived that
long.
Another plant that has—indirectly—survived 10 years is my last remaining cutting of the
Hibiscus
rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max”, which I got on my 60th birthday 12 years ago. The original cutting has died, but the one I planted outside is
showing some signs of recovery:
I suppose it's an indication of the sad state of affairs that that seems to be progress.
But later in the summer I'll take some cuttings and try to cultivate it indoors again.
The Clematis are doing
acceptably. The “General Sikorski” is flowering relatively well, while the mistreated “Edo
Murasaki” is at least growing; hopefully we'll see some flowers in the autumn.
Lobster balls? On the face of it, that's similar to the fish balls, pork balls and other
things that I put in Chinese and Malaysian soups. But reading the list of ingredients is
instructive:
And once again there were things to change. One obvious thing was that the second pie
wasn't evenly browned: some of the juice in the filling boiled over. So: less filling.
That's particularly the case for Yvonne, who only managed
half of half a pie.
Thirteen years ago we had a record rainfall, which I
calculated to be 53.1 mm, but looking at the photo I took at the time (first image), it
looks as if it was considerably less. This time I took the same kind of rain gauge,
measured the volume in two steps, and came to 52 mm. But clearly there was more water in
the gauge today:
Breakfast today was huevos a la
tigre again, my take on huevos a la flamenca, which I
now discover is a variant on Shakshouka. I'm still refining the process. I think it needs more time, both
cooking and then cooling down, probably 15 minutes and then up to 30 minutes for the
cooling.
But it's not just the US Americans who can make such deliberate mistakes. We've just
finished watching a German TV film, „Der letzte Patriarch“. It starts off in Lübeck, which Yvonne recognized from the view even before I did. But it was clear from the credits
that it also took place in Singapore: names like Tan Kheng
Hua don't come from anywhere else.
Wrong, fool! It took place in Shanghai. OK, Singapore actors can be in Chinese films too. But there's more. Most
of the action in “Shanghai” takes place near this building:
That's the Singapore Post Office, though the surroundings don't look right. I recall it
something like this:
But no, wrong again. That's the way I remember it, but it stopped being a post office in
1997. Now it's the Fullerton Hotel.
Still, what's a Singapore landmark doing in Shanghai? Clearly the car above is registered
in Singapore. From earlier in the same scene:
That's very clearly a Singapore registration plate. Elsewhere it's also clear that they
drive on the left. But that's nothing that can't be fixed on the fly. Without stopping, it
seems, it changes to:
That looks like a Chinese registration plate, and the 海 is the second part of 上海,
Shanghai. So it's really just a case of very poor continuity. From my point of view, I was
glad to recognize the places.
Of course, that also meant looking at maps. Once upon a time, the post office was on the
coast, at the mouth of the Singapore river. But that was in a different millennium. With
some searching found a whole set of maps of
Singapore, from the National University of
Singapore, going back as far as 1846, and with some kind of comparative overlay system
that I haven't quite understood yet. But these three views, from 1953 (the year before I
first arrived in Singapore), 2005 and 2020 seem to give a good overview (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
In passing, it's interesting to see the Adelphi hotel marked (with misspelling) on the oldest map. I stayed there on two
occasions, at least in September 1965 and on one other
occasion much earlier, before I started keeping a diary, but I can't decide when it was. By
contrast, the Raffles Hotel, which has been there all along, is only marked on the last map (at the top, just right
of the centre).
Upgrading eureka seems to be a never-ending task. It's been well over 7 months since I came up with the bright idea of running two computers
again, and gradually updating the second (dereel) as I go along. Clearly this isn't
working either.
Why not? One obvious reason is that the configuration has proved much more complicated than
I expected. Where do I put my files? I ended up with a maze of little twisty symlinks, all
different. And of course modern programs like firefox and (especially) Google Chrome have issues with
networks. Chrome won't work at all on a remote display.
So: looking back, one of my previous attempts had been to build a system in a virtual
machine and then migrate the image, ports and all, to a second partition on eureka.
And I even got that far, but ran into more pain with DNS than I could bear. So how
about having backup services on dereel and trying again? Made the first step today:
copy the eureka root partition to a new virtual disk on eureso.
In fact, they expired nearly 4 years ago. High time to cook them. The problem is that
they're individual woven “baskets” of about 55 g, which I unfortunately didn't think of
taking photos before I cooked them. I like portions of 180 g cooked noodles. My rule of
thumb is that noodles approximately double in weight when cooked, so I would end up with 110
g or 220 g. These were the last two baskets. What to do?
Started cooking them anyway, in the process discovering on the package:
OK, so I should end up with 440 g of noodles. I can do more with that. In fact, I ended up
with 350, marginally on the low side for two portions. But the real problem was the cooking
time: according to the packaging, they should be done in 3 minutes. In fact, they took 6.
Why? Noodles always seem to take longer to cook than the packaging suggests. Why?
I don't like mushy noodles, but after 3 minutes the noodles were really hard. Time for a
cooking times page.
A bit of particularly frustrating gardening today. The tomatoes and chilis are not doing
very well outside. The best thing I can say about the chilis that I planted out at the beginning of last month is that the Serrano isn't dead yet, though it's a
shadow of its former self (first photo):
The arbol is dead, along with the “Tommy toe” tomato that I planted nearby. By
contrast, the ones left inside aren't doing badly, so it seems reasonable to keep at least
some of them inside. Planted the last “Beefsteak” tomato in the pot in which the original
Hibiscus
rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” died:
There are one more of each chile. Should I plant them in pots too, or outside? Last year's
harvest of the Thai chilis was less than worthwhile: I could have bought that many chilis
for less than the plant cost me.
Finally got round to building a new world on eureso, the virtual copy
of eureka. It didn't get far:
sh /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/tools/install.sh -s -o root -g wheel -m 555 make make.amd64/bmake
install: make.amd64/bmake: No such file or directory
*** Error code 71
Stop.
make[2]: stopped in /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/usr.bin/bmake
What's that? Do I have Yet Another Corrupt Source Tree? Established that there was
no /usr/obj hierarchy. What is this crap? Is the system too old to build the
current FreeBSD-12 system? How do I work
around it? Enough frustration for one day. I'll look at it tomorrow.
Time to make more frijoles de la olla (Mexican beans) today. I've been making them for a long time, but there's always room
for improvement. Recently we've found a source of frijoles negros, so I used them,
of course. And there's the question of epazote. How much? Initially, when it was expensive, I put in a couple of grams of
dried epazote (the equivalent of the recommended “two bay leaves”), which had almost no
influence on the taste. But now I have grown some, and I have lots of it in the freezer.
Last time I used 8 g. I've seen videos where they used much more, so this time I used 72 g.
And the idea of using bay leaves instead is just plain wishful thinking.
In addition, what about the chilis? I blend the onions and the garlic with the tomatoes,
but in the past I cut the chilis into strips. Why? This time I blended them too, which
certainly made a difference to the taste. Maybe I should reduce the quantity next time.
Why couldn't I build bmake on euresoyesterday? Could it be that FreeBSD 12
has changed too far from release 10? OK, how about an intermediate step of release 11?
Once again somebody wanted to see how my now monitors are arranged on my desk top. The
obvious projection is cylindrical, since that's the way I view the monitors, but previous
attempts have been less than successful:
Apart from the ever-present Moiré,
which no software seems to be able to remove, there's a question of distance from the
monitors and their relative height.
OK, dammit, take a single photo with an extreme wide-angle lens. Rectilinear or fisheye?
Conventional wisdom is that fisheyes distort and rectilinears don't:
That is in fact the same photo, taken with the Olympus M.Zuiko
Digital ED 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO, but the second time it was “defished”, making
it look something like the output of a 5 mm rectilinear lens. Look at the right-hand
monitor. So much for “distortion”!
Since then we've had some of the heaviest rain I've seen in Australia, but gradually time
has come to fix the damage. It took me at least 15 minutes. Why am I so lazy?
According to the packaging, they need cooking for between 8 and 10 minutes. Today I
measured 12. That's still closer than others, and one more for my noodle cooking page. And of course I
forgot to check the ratio of cooked to raw, though I think it's about 2.2:1.
As planned yesterday, started building a current FreeBSD-12 system on dereel, which is already running an older version. What
I forgot was that dereel has 4 CPUs, but I did a single-threaded build because that's
what I would have done for eureso, a virtual machine, so as not to overload the
host eureka.
It took all day for buildworld and buildkernel:
--------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Kernel build for GENERIC completed on Fri Nov 27 18:11:03 AEDT 2020
--------------------------------------------------------------
20015.05 real 16524.06 user 1195.53 sys
...
Fri 27 Nov 2020 18:11:03 AEDT
OK, dereel's not the fastest machine I have, but that's over 5½ hours. That never
happened to me when I was running Intel 80386s.
