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| Greg's diary |
| October 2018 |
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| Monday, 1 October 2018 | Dereel | Images for 1 October 2018 |
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Jehovah's witnesses again
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Unexpected visitor drove into the driveway today: two women, one very black. That's unusual round here: most non-European people are from East Asia, and even the darkest skinned people are relatively light-skinned compared to the darkest Africans. Since Australia has (far too grudgingly) admitted some refugees, we see them now from time to time in Ballarat. But this woman puzzled me: she didn't look African either. And her accent didn't help: she sounded like any normal Australian, possibly of British origin. Of course, I didn't want to ask.
It proved that they were Jehovah's witnesses. Yvonne was in the process of shooing them away when I came out and had a chat. The Jehovah's witnesses interest me, and I've had various chats with them over the years, most recently 6½ years ago, where I discovered that they didn't know the Ten Commandments, or at least not the second 10. Mentioned that this time too, and she (the black one, who did all the talking) hadn't either. But she held her ground, even though her education was very bible-centric, and when she left she said that she was going to check on the second Ten Commandments (for which I couldn't give a chapter number, just that it was probably less than 7; in fact it's Deuteronomy 5, their link, whose wording differs from other translations I have seen, notably the repeated mention of the name “Jehovah”).
She didn't know other religious books. She claimed that the Bible was the oldest surviving religious text. and hadn't heard of the Epic of Gilgamesh or Bhagavad Gita. Are they older? Gilgamesh yes, nearly twice as old, and it clearly had significant influence on the Bible, but the Bhagavad Gita is probably newer.
Finally they left, undefeated, for the first time in 50 years. I was quite impressed.
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Cooktops: defeated by technology
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Topic: food and drink, technology, opinion | Link here |
I really need to find a replacement gas cooktop to fit next to the new induction cooktop. It's not easy: most cooktops are 60 or 90 cm wide (and, strangely in Australia, not 600 or 900 mm). I want one that is only 30 cm wide, and there's not much choice.
In principle I'm not asking for much: two burners, one a “wok burner”, the wok burner at the front so that it doesn't burn the wall like our current cooktop does:
But in the past I've discovered a number of issues:
Off to Appliances Online to find out. They knew exactly what I wanted: Domino 30 cm cooktops, politely arranged so that I didn't have to think or get information overload: one truncated line of “Highest Rated”, one truncated line of “Biggest % Discount off RRP”. And the truncation was in the middle of the page:
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To see more, I had to press on this silly grey arrow in the middle of the first image, removing what I already had on the screen. I've seen this on mobile phones, where it's a result of the appalling user interface. But why do they force it onto users of better interfaces? I can only attribute it to mobile phone brain damage.
OK, fight my way past the inappropriate grouping and look for the specs. There are 17 of them, only one (according to their page) suitable for LPG. Do I believe them? Not in the slightest. As I discovered, all the cooktops I looked at could be adapted for LPG, and many came with an adapter kit. One even delivered more power with LPG than with “natural gas”.
Next, what power output do the burners have? Who cares? I do, of course, and clearly so do the people who distinguish between “burner” and “wok burner”. But when I try to compare these two cooktops, both from the same maker, there's nothing to explain the 3:1 price difference:
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There's a little more below, but basically the “comparison” shows no difference whatsoever beyond minor differences in dimensions. except that the cheaper one includes trivets and wok stand, not specified for the others. That's a “comparison”?
Finally ended up downloading the manuals and spec sheets for those cooktops that met the primary specification: two burners. Even the spec sheets and manuals don't include all the information. What I got was:
| Item | Price ($) | Front burner | Rear burner | Comments | ||||
| Artusi AGH30XFFD | 359 | 1.08 | 3.11 | |||||
| Smeg SARV532X3 | 409 | 1.33 | 4.2 | |||||
| Delonghi DE302GBX1 | 699 | 1.75 | 3 | More power with LPG | ||||
| Fisher & Paykel CG302DLPGB1 | 919 | 1.2 | 2.3 | LPG only, $100 more expensive than natural gas | ||||
| ILVE H30VSS | 929 | ? | ? | looks weak | ||||
| Smeg PGA23G | 1240 | 1.08 | 3.33 | |||||
| Asko HG1355GD | 1899 | ? | ? | |||||
| V-Zug GAS421GSBZ | 2499 | ? | 17.1 | |||||
| EPZ2GFFDSS | ? | 1.14 | 3.33 |
For completeness sake, that last entry isn't from Appliances Online.
I have converted those ratings to kW, something that Australians don't believe in: they prefer MJ/hour (or, on one spec sheet, mj/hour), apparently because the resulting number is close to BTUs. From https://www.stovesonline.co.uk/btu-kw.asp:
To convert kWh to BTU simply multiply by 3414.
To convert kW to MJ/h, you multiply by 3600, of course, making a BTU 1.054 MJ/h.
Only the most expensive one quotes the power in kW, unfortunately incorrectly: it's off by a factor of 3 or 4. Maybe they meant 17.1 MJ/h, corresponding to 4.75 kW. That would be the most powerful one—if it's correct. But at $2,500 it's ridiculously expensive.
Apart from that, which is the best choice? The cheap Smeg, for only $409! Who says that expensive is better?
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Gun violence: worse than war
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Topic: history, opinion | Link here |
Statista published some statistics today: between 1968 and 2015, 1.53 million “Americans” (residents? citizens?) died from firearm-related injuries. That's over 25% more than all US wars since 1775. And still they haven't done anything about the problem.
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Facebook security?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
A few days ago Facebook announced a new security breach. Was I affected? Probably not. Would it make any difference? Certainly not. There's nothing on my Facebook account that can be abused elsewhere. Even my place of birth, my domicile and my alma mater are wrong (though in each case a subtle hint that nobody has understood so far).
Still, it would be interesting to see what Facebook says. First, where am I logged in?
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“Windows” computer? I don't have no steenking “Windows” computer. Oh, well, maybe I do, but it's sleeping. What Facebook means, of course, is that my firefox is claiming to be Microsoft to get around web sites that don't want to talk to FreeBSD. My Chromium instance doesn't, so it's just a “computer”.
But what about the other “computer” in West Hollywood? I haven't been in that area for decades. Proxy, maybe? No, don't recognize the IP address. OK, log into Facebook on the firefox instance on eureka:0.3, which is connected to a proxy somewhere in the Eastern USA. Yes!
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People, with that kind of accuracy, nobody can work out what's going on. A good thing I don't need this kind of “assistance”.
| Tuesday, 2 October 2018 | Dereel | Images for 2 October 2018 |
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Anatomy of a DoS
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
On Saturday I read a message in the local Facebook group: Kim Baxter had “lost Internet”. OK, let's do what I can to help. “Try this”. No reply, just the interesting information that she was with Aussie Broadband, my ISP. So is Paul Shire, who also had no problems.
But it turned out that it was an Aussie problem after all. A few hours later Kim stated “a problem with their firewall”, and pointed me to their Facebook page, which indeed stated something about problems. Which problems? No idea. It's gone again. How I love Facebook! And why only on Facebook?
But then today I got mail describing a meltdown at their central server facility in Melbourne. Not too much detail—after all, most customers are non-technical—but a link to a technical analysis on Whirlpool. That makes excellent reading.
It seems that something, probably an infected customer machine, targeted their central VoIP infrastructure, and inadequate protection allowed the load to spill over into other systems, notably DHCP and DNS. They described what happened, what they did about it (with times), and how they intend to stop it happening again. That's a refreshing change from the CYA attitude of most ISPs.
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How the world sees the USA
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
An interesting article in the New York Times today, pointing to a Pew Research Center survey of “foreigners” (in other words, non US Americans) about their opinion of the USA. The results were no surprise, but interesting for purposes of quotation. There's still majority support for the USA, but it's diminishing, as this comparison with China shows:
And these graphs show clearly who is to blame:
The five major leaders, (Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump come in that order: Trump inspires even less confidence than Putin.
Does this one show an indication that the USA is suffering as a result?
Possibly, but it would need a comparison with the Before Trump era.
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West Lake fish?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
One of the better Chinese dishes I recall from my childhood is West Lake Fish. What's that? I only ever ate it, and never cooked it. But it's freshwater fish cooked with ginger and spring onions. Yvonne has bought some frozen Barramundi a while back, so it sounded like a good idea to try it.
Which recipe? Pei Mei had one that didn't look very typical, and she wanted it boiled. Wendy Hutton's “Singapore food” looked better, though she didn't call it “West Lake Fish”. It was to be steamed.
OK, we have a big enough steamer. But it wasn't to be steamed directly in the steamer It needed to be in a bowl to collect the juices:
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15 minutes of steaming later, it didn't look much different:
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But part of that might have been that it wasn't really cooked through:
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In general, undercooked fish isn't an issue, but here the meat wouldn't come off the bones. Another 10 minutes (probably the equivalent of 5 if we had done it before serving) was enough, and it didn't taste bad.
But it's still just a beginning, leaving us with a number of issues:
The fish weighed 500 g. Not enough for 2 people, not even with Yvonne's tiny appetite. We need to find something bigger.
What sauce? Looking at the recipes I (later) found online, most want vinegar. I'm not sure that I do. If that's the hallmark of West Lake Fish, maybe I want something else.
Steamed, boiled, or something else? It's quite clumsy using our 40 cm steamer, and it leaks, requiring a wok burner running quite hot to keep the insides hot enough. Is there an alternative? Microwave oven, maybe?
Using the steamer shows a disadvantage of all of the gas cooktops I have been looking at recently: the hot burner is at the back. That doesn't really work:
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I can't see a solution to that one.
So for the time being, I don't even have a recipe page. But I'll return to this.
| Wednesday, 3 October 2018 | Dereel | Images for 3 October 2018 |
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More cooktops
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I'm still looking for gas cooktops, and gradually I've come to the conclusion that the Smeg SARV532X3 is the best choice. But Appliances Online no longer list it. Chatting to one of their web people, I was told that it was discontinued, and that I should buy the 3 times more expensive and weaker Smeg PGA23G. Grr!
But there are other alternatives. On eBay I found an Elfa BLGSW30CF, interesting because it's the only one I have found with the wok burner in front. But that has its issues, as this review shows:
... the large gas ring is next to the handles. If you put a fry pan or saucepan on the ring, the handles become so hot you cannot touch them without a towel. When using the large ring for a lengthy time the handles will smoke and then erupt into flames. I believe the manufacturer has a fault in their design. The small ring should be near the handles or the handles made to be further away. Be careful when purchasing this item, it could burn your kitchen down!
Maybe that's why the burners are at the back. Burn the wall, not the knobs. Of course, there are alternative solutions, but clearly this cooktop is out of the question.
But then there are single burner cooktops with the burner oriented like on our current cooktop. Are they a better idea? I'm reluctant to choose one.
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The Merdeka Interviews
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Topic: history, general, opinion | Link here |
Unexpected item in the post today. I had already puzzled over the notification slip, showing only my name (and thus not an eBay item, which get sent to both Yvonne and me) and with a tracking number ending in MY, meaning Malaysia.
It proved to be a copy of “The Merdeka Interviews”, by Lai Chee Kien and Ang Chee Cheong, along with a thank-you from Chee Kien: it included a couple of photos of my father taken on 27 July 1965:
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The background: the book is a summary of a number of interviews (as the title suggests) about architecture in Malaysia in the 1960s (which has nothing to do with the title). The interviews were started a couple of years after my father's death, and the only people whose names I recognize were Ivor Shipley and Dudley Pritchard (who, it occurs to me, could be related to this idiot Llewellyn Pritchard who wrote an incompetent report on the problems in our house earlier this year).
There's thus not much mention of my father—I haven't even found a reference to his work at FLDA, though the photos were taken from a page which also included perspective drawings of a number of FLDA houses. And Dudley Pritchard, who talked about Dad, was inaccurate enough in his dating that it should have occurred to Lai and Ang: he claimed that he was still at the Technical College when the photos above were taken; in fact he had been working on the FLDA project for a couple of years.
Still, it's a nice-looking book, and I haven't read much of its 688 pages, and the reviews look positive. But it brings back to me again how long ago it all was—the book arrived almost exactly on time for my 70th birthday, and when I took those photos I was 17 years old.
| Thursday, 4 October 2018 | Dereel | Images for 4 October 2018 |
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Iran 1, USA 0
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
With some satisfaction I heard of yesterday's ICJ judgement on the US sanctions on Iran: parts of them were declared unlawful.
Yes, it's more a symbolic ruling: the USA will ignore it, and it has given them cause to tear up the Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations and Consular Rights that they made in 1955 and had clearly forgotten about. But from a moral standpoint, once again the USA is not living up to its own standards as an upright defender of international law.
When will this change? How will this change?
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Bosch induction cooker again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
My failure with the Bosch PIJ611BB1E induction cooktop last week rather discouraged me, and it wasn't until today that I connected it up correctly, in the process marvelling at the complicated cable clamp, which requires tools to disengage.
Connect it to the power. No problems. How do you turn it on? Clearly you press on the
button. Did that. Dammit, no reaction.
OK, RTFM:
To switch on: touch the
Dammit, what's wrong? A bit of investigation shows: the documentation. You need to press the area for at least 1 second before it will deign to do anything.
That's not the only fault in the documentation. It has two different + symbols with different meanings:
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The first is on a schematic layout in the upper part of this image, the second below:
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The 7 segment “8”s aren't actually there on the unit itself; it's just symbolic.
Have problems with the unit? There's a page devoted to that with convenient explanations and references:
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That missing reference is also missing in the thoughtfully included instructions in French.
The real issue, though, is that there's no easy way to turn off a field (“hotplate”). You need to hold down the - symbol to count down to 0, and 1 second per half unit. So to turn off a plate set at 9 (the maximum) takes 18 seconds!. It seems that it makes more sense simply to remove the pan and wait until the unit decides for itself to turn off.
In fact, there's a faster way, though the designers probably didn't intend it: press on the “boost” to the right on the bottom line of controls, then +. This will wrap round to 0.
Somehow this is incredibly short-sighted. It should be enough to press on the + symbol (the bigger one). That's what you use to turn the field on, but you can't use it to turn it off again. And a selection of all the numbers along the front of the unit would be so easy to implement—even the el cheapo ALDI unit has that. What are the designers thinking? Or is it product management?
In passing, it's interesting to note the regular expression used to describe the models to which these instructions claim to refer:
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What are the German instructions like? Hard to say. After fighting my way through no less than 10 pages on http://www.bosch-home.de/, I couldn't find this model. I did find other interesting information, though: their price range is from 937 € to 4060 €, far above what I paid for mine (the equivalent of 647 €), and they seem to be moving towards a uniform heating surface rather than individual “hot plates”.
The closest model I could find to mine was the NUE645CB2E, also the cheapest at 937 €. The instructions are similar, including the missing reference, but there's a reference to an otherwise undocumented knob:
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Where is that knob? There's nothing shown on any of the other illustrations, only the + and - fields, which are not documented here. It looks like the left hand, right hand syndrome. The documentation also says that you can turn off a field by pressing on the big + symbol, as I had suggested. But can I believe it?
| Friday, 5 October 2018 | Dereel | Images for 5 October 2018 |
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Bosch induction cooker: first use
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
So finally I can use the Bosch PIJ611BB1E induction cooktop, for cooking breakfast. The first surprise (which I discovered yesterday): it's quiet. Maybe it was that or something else, but I got the impression that it didn't heat as much as the old ALDI cooktop. The field I used is rated at 2200 W, compared to 1800 W for the ALDI. But it's 22.5 cm in diameter, compared to 18 cm for the ALDI, so the power is only 5.5 W/cm², compared to 7.1 W/cm² for the ALDI. Does that make a difference when you're heating the same utensil?
Another reason might be that the ALDI cooktop has too many settings at the top end of the scale and not enough at the bottom end: 300, 600, 900, 1200, 1400, 1600, 1800 and (“boost”) 2100 W, and I find that 1200 and 1600 are of no use at all: start cooking at 1800 W, then turn down to 900 W. By comparison, on the Bosch I started at level 9 (they're too polite to mention nasty things like Watts) and continued at 7 or 8. Still, the good news is that it works.
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More US haters
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Statista has more negative information about the status of the USA in the world:
None of this surprises me. What does surprise me is how many people in the USA are so blind to what is happening to their country.
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An Echium!
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
In Kleins Road we had many Echiums, including an Echium candicans and an annual Echium pininana (last two images):
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They're hardy in the extreme, and the Echium pininana sows so many seeds that you could consider it a weed, and we decided to remove it from the garden. But since arriving in Stones Road, now nearly 3½ years ago, our cuttings of the Echium candicans have done nothing useful.
Until today:
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| Saturday, 6 October 2018 | Dereel | Images for 6 October 2018 |
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More induction cooking issues
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Decided to make a laksa for breakfast today. That's straightforward: mix the pre-packaged paste with water, bring to the boil, add fish.
But the cooktop (the new Bosch PIJ611BB1E) didn't want to talk to the enameled steel pot! Dammit, what's wrong there? Tried another pot, and that didn't work either. Both work on the old ALDI induction cooker, so completed breakfast on that.
What's wrong? Is this Bosch cooktop so fussy that it won't take normal enameled iron? That's not what they claim, and it makes no sense. After breakfast grabbed an assortment of pots to try out. They all worked, including the ones I had had trouble with before. What's the issue? The best I can guess is that I misplaced the pots on the cooktop. To be observed.
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A new mobile phone?
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
ALDI have an interesting item in their weekly “specials”: a Nokia 3 “smart” phone (a term I've decided not to use where I can avoid it) for only $129. That's by far the cheapest phone I've seen from a brand name supplier, and since it's ALDI, I asked Yvonne to pick one up when she was there this morning. In the course of discussion we decided to make it two, in case Yvonne wanted one too.
In the meantime, did some investigation and discovered that it was on offer at Woolworths in Sebastopol—just across the road—for $90 (or, as they put it, $89.99). That's amazing, since ALDI is usually almost invariably the cheapest. But clearly it's a clearance item (after all, it is last year's model, released 15 months ago), and elsewhere it's going for only a little under $200.
Which should I take? $40 is $39.01, but if I don't like it, I can't take it back. Did some thinking until Yvonne called and told me that I had read the wrong “specials” newsletter: it's not until next week. She wasn't going to Woolworths, so that was that, at least for today.
The question is, of course, do I need a new phone? The biggest issue I have with my current Samsung I9100 is that the battery consumption is so high. And as Peter Jeremy commented on IRC:
<peter> grO0gle: Why do you want a new mobile phone? You only ever whinge about them.
But even a new battery for the old phone would cost me about $12, and potentially the new one wouldn't be as irritating. We have a week to think about it.
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Focus stacked wildflowers
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Topic: photography, gardening, opinion | Link here |
About a year ago I did a lot of playing around with focus stacking, which I intended to use for wildflowers. Today while walking the dogs, saw lots of new wildflowers. And there was almost no wind—ideal conditions for focus stacking photos.
But it's so difficult! Well, not so much difficult as fiddly. I had to force myself to go out and do some photos, and even then I didn't bother about the viewfinder. Took something like 300 images, including down Misery Creek Road, leaving me wondering whether I should keep all the originals or not.
This stuff is really fiddly. How many images do you take? How do you set initial and final focus? I'm no further ahead now than I was this time last year. The camera could really offer better help for this sort of thing.
And the results? Mañana. It's a lot of work.
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More flash pain
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
We're having a number of guests on Monday, and we're planning to serve Gazpacho andaluz and Paella valenciana. Today Yvonne started with the gazpacho, and I tried to take photos:
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What went wrong there? It had to be at a time where Yvonne really wanted to continue her work, of course. I tried a total of 15 images, and none of them were what I normally get without trying.
I have two studio flash units in lounge room and kitchen (Australian houses are too polite to have a separate kitchen). The unit in the lounge has a wireless trigger, and the one in the kitchen is triggered optically by the one in the lounge room, because I can't get at the wall switch, and any trigger would be under power all the time. Was it not firing? No, I distinctly saw the flash when I pressed the test button.
Much messing around and cursing. Finally I gave up and got my mecablitz 58 AF-2 on-camera flash:
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Why is it still underexposed? Somehow I never have good results with on-camera flash. What am I doing wrong?
More investigation showed that my slave studio flash wasn't firing after all: the flash that I saw was the reflection of the other flash unit. It seems that the bright conditions in the lounge room prevented the flash from triggering. I'll need to look at how to put a wireless trigger in there after all. But I still have no idea why the TTL exposure on the mecablitz produced such terrible results.
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La cuisine de mère Paulette
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne made a “tagine aux petits pois” for dinner tonight:
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That's a dish she learnt from her first mother-in-law, Paulette Binos de Pombarat. The recipe is here. It tasted OK, but more Southern French than North African. I think our tastes have moved on in the last 40 years.
| Sunday, 7 October 2018 | Dereel | Images for 7 October 2018 |
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Summer time!
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Topic: general | Link here |
Daylight saving time began today, and with it the usual resetting of countless timepieces. Well, not countless: there were 14 of them, including 4 cameras, the oven and one of the microwave ovens. All of the above are a pain. The Olympus E-PM1 and E-PM2 don't have a way to set seconds, and the most accurate way to set the OM-D E-M1 OM-D E-M1 Mark II is with Olympus' appalling OI.Share app. I managed it in about 2 minutes with the E-M1, but for some reason it didn't want to communicate with the E-M1 Mark II, and just pretended it wasn't there. In the end I had to set it manually.
The kitchen devices are also strange. I have two microwave ovens, but I can't find any way at all to set one, and the other needs to be set digit for digit. I also can't find any sensible way to set the oven: either there is none, or it's so well hidden that I couldn't find it. Instead I had to power cycle the device.
And ten minutes after I was done, we had a power failure! Kitchen devices all over again.
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Become a Frenchman?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
When I got married to Yvonne, who is French, I was entitled to French citizenship as a result. I considered it and discovered that it would mean renouncing my Australian citizenship, so I decided not to. The key thing was that I had to apply for citizenship; at some previous time it had been conferred automatically, which would have allowed me to keep my Australian citizenship.
Recently there was some discussion about dual citizenship on Quora, and I responded accordingly. And then I discovered that the law has changed, and I would now be allowed to take on French citizenship without losing my Australian citizenship.
Of course, who knows if it's still open to me? But on reflection, I can't see any good reason to take it on now. 33 years ago I was travelling a lot, and it could have been useful, but I don't see much use any more.
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New Android phone
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne had to go into town today to pick up some food that she had forgotten. Time to pick up a couple of the Nokia 3 phones that I had been thinking about yesterday? Nope, the special offer was over. But she asked anyway, and how about that, there were exactly two left, and she got them for $90 each.
Back home, the usual fun trying to set the thing up. Battery was discharged, of course, and when I connected it to the charger, nothing happened. But that was one of the amazingly few things they documented. The entire instructions are on a single sheet of paper (the safety instructions are much longer). Even the link to the real instructions is generic: www.nokia.com/phones. But it does say
If the battery is completely discharged, it may take several minutes before the charging indicator is displayed.
In fact, it didn't display at all. I had to press the “On” button briefly to see a display indicator. After a couple of hours it was round 36%, so I tried things out.
One positive thing is that the phone is that it is designed for 2 SIMs. But how? Yes, there's space for two, but only a cutout for the first one:
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