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| Greg's diary |
| September 2025 |
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| Monday, 1 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 1 September 2025 |
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A quarter of a century!
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Topic: history, general, opinion | Link here |
Twenty-five years ago I restarted my online diary. I had already kept one for nearly 8 years between 1 January 1963 and 1 October 1970, on paper of course, but then it lapsed.
Were the last 25 years worthwhile? For me, definitely. But it's amazing how much I have accumulated in that time. A few statistics, which include the few entries I made between
| Days | 9142 | |
| Articles (2009-2025) | 20207 | |
| Size (kB) | 43840 | |
| Source lines | 969422 | |
| Lines per day | 106 | |
| Articles per day (2009-2025) | 4.6 |
All pales by comparison with Wes Muchmore, who had much more, as I noted a couple of years ago: four carloads of paper diary.
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Anthochaera carunculata
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Seen this morning about 7 m from the outside door of the lounge room. These photos were taken from inside:
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It's an Anthochaera carunculata (red wattlebird). We had something very similar in Wantadilla, but I haven't seen any here before.
| Tuesday, 2 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 2 September 2025 |
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Front gate: finally finished?
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
Paul Donaghy along today to do some odd jobs for Yvonne, one of which was putting some planks round the front gate:
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Finally things seem to be the way we had hoped not much more than 5 years ago.
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AI: enough!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Sunday's detailed investigation of generative artificial intelligence should have been enough, but it occurred to me that there was one thing I hadn't tried: graphics. OK, draw me a caricature of Greg Lehey.
Google Gemini came up with this:
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Of course I don't need to like the results, but this shows very little understanding: no mention of BSD, just Linux (or even “Linix”). Yvonne tells me that it looks nothing like me. Compared to the text results, quite disappointing.
And that was all. My other bots all couldn't do it. But their attempts were worth mentioning:
I'm unable to draw images directly, but I can help you imagine a caricature of Greg Lehey! Picture a gentleman with a thoughtful expression, perhaps with glasses perched on his nose, and a hint of a smile suggesting a keen sense of humor. His hair might be slightly tousled, giving him a scholarly yet approachable look. You could exaggerate his features, like giving him a larger forehead to symbolize his intellect or a prominent chin to represent determination. Add a background filled with books and computers to reflect his interests in technology and writing
I suppose that's acceptable for as far as it goes.
Claude did the best with the diary entry, but it failed completely with the caricature:
Claude: I'd be happy to help you create a caricature, but I'll need a bit more information! There are likely multiple people named Greg Lehey, and I want to make sure I'm drawing the right person..
Claude, you know who I am. There are “likely” multiple people named Greg Lehey? That wasn't a problem on Sunday. And as it happens, there is nobody else that I can find with the same name as mine. But OK, draw me a caricature of Greg Lehey, the FreeBSD person.
I can't create visual caricatures or drawings as I'm a text-based AI. However, I'd be happy to help you in other ways:Written description: I could write a humorous written "caricature" or character sketch of Greg Lehman (assuming you meant Greg Lehman, a notable FreeBSD contributor) that captures his programming style, contributions to FreeBSD, or personality traits in an exaggerated, caricature-like way.
What a cop-out! Now it says that it can't draw. And it comes up with a fictive Greg Lehman. That's completely useless.
As before, DeepSeek is inventive:
While I can't physically draw for you, I can create a detailed "blueprint" for a caricature of the legendary BSD developer Greg "Groggy" Lehey. An artist could follow this description to create the perfect caricature.
Here is a description designed for an artist to illustrate.
Caricature of Greg "Groggy" Lehey
Concept: The caricature should capture his iconic, jovial, and slightly mischievous personality, deeply intertwined with his life's work: BSD and Unix.
Key Features to Exaggerate:
The Beard and Hair: This is the #1 feature. Exaggerate his magnificent, full, and sprawling white beard. Make it vast and wizard-like, almost as if it's its own entity. It should be big enough to have a Daemon (the BSD logo) peeking out from within the whiskers, as if it lives there. His hair (what's visible under his hat) should be similarly wild and unkempt.
The Headwear: He is almost never seen without a hat. Draw a slightly battered, well-loved flat cap or a beret perched on his head at a jaunty angle.
Where did it get the hat from? I am almost never seen with a hat.The Expression: A wide, knowing, and cheerful grin. His eyes should be crinkled with laughter and wisdom, suggesting he's both a kind mentor and someone who knows where all the bugs in the code are hidden.
The Props & Surroundings:
In his hand: Instead of a coffee mug, he should be holding a massive, steaming beer stein. This is a nod to his famous "Buy me a beer" link on his website and his good-humored nature.
Steaming beer? I can't even imagine that. And instead of referring to my brewing activities, it refers to a fictive “buy me a beer” link, which may be related to Poul-Henning Kamp.
Under his arm: A well-worn copy of his magnum opus, "The Complete FreeBSD" book.
Background Element: Have a Tux (the Linux penguin) peeking from around a corner, looking slightly nervous or annoyed, while Groggy pays it no mind. This playfully hints at the good-natured rivalry between BSD and Linux.
Code: Faint lines of C code (#include <beard.h>, printf("Cheers!\n");) can be subtly woven into the texture of his shirt or the background.
Overall Vibe: The image should feel warm, intelligent, and full of character. He is the friendly, brilliant, and slightly eccentric "Unix Beard" wizard, a beloved figure in the open-source community.
Color Palette: Warm tones. Earthy browns for the hat, a rich color for the shirt (green or blue), the brilliant white of the beard, and the gold of the beer.
Still, I suppose that could produce something useful. But where are all the image generators? Do I want to look? I've spent enough time on this already.
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Why don't people read any more?
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Topic: language, general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Recently I saw (but didn't read) a newspaper article, possibly from the New York Times, asking why people don't read books any more. The answer appears simple: information overload. When I was a lad I read lots of books, but it has been some time since I finished reading any, and then the relatively thin “Brave New World”.
But then we watched A Town Like Alice, and Yvonne borrowed the book. I have always liked Nevil Shute, and I have a number of his books, so I read it when she finished. It took me two weeks. While reading I was continually following up on details mentioned in the book—that's what the web is for, after all. In general, I ended up with a much broader view than I would have had if I had just read the book.
And how did I like it? Not much. Clearly it's two different stories stuck together: the ordeals in Malaya at the hand of the Japanese occupation and the transformation of a tiny bush village in Queensland into a small town. The latter, in particular, seems very improbable.
The geographical details are what interested me most. Particularly in Malay(si)a I knew most of the real places. But I'm puzzled about why Shute spends a lot of time in the area Maran and Jerantut in the Jengka Triangle, places that must have been almost completely unknown at the time, but puts the women in a place called Kuala Telang “about half-way between Kuantan and Kota Bahru”. There is a town in that position, but it's called Kuala Terengganu, and it's a big town (capital of the state of Terengganu), not a small village. My guess is that Shute had never heard of it.
Spelling is also strange. In the first half of the book, Kota Bharu was spelt “Kota Bahru”, and in the second half “Khota Bahru”. Tennant Creek became “Tennants Creek”. These spellings are the same both in the online book and the physical book that I read. And there are a couple of irritating US Americanisms that I don't understand: the animals central to the theme are called alligators, not crocodiles. The stockmen use lariats.
Then there's the question of racial attitudes. The local aborigines (or aboriginals, to use the modern politically correct term) are called “boongs” or “abos”. Both are offensive nowadays. And there was talk of racial segregation, a separate milk bar for the boongs. This would have been about 1948, the time of my birth. Did such segregation really exist then?
My favourite one, though, is when the main characters (Jean and Joe) fall in love, and she decides not to sleep with him until after they are married. Given that Joe had been crucified in the first half of the story, I was half guessing that he might have been castrated at the same time, and Jean would not have found out until too late.
In summary: reading books has become much more of an exercise than it used to be. For light entertainment we have TV. I don't think I'll read another novel for some time to come.
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Predicting the past
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
I keep a close eye on the weather forecasts from the Bureau of Meteorology, both of them. There's one on the web and another for mobile phones. They don't often agree with each other, and of course they're both frequently wrong.
Today, though, the mobile phone app excelled itself. We finally have rain, 6 mm over the last 24 hours. Or, as the app put it,
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Part of the app is a rainfall map showing precipitation. That showed that there was much more rain. How can that happen?
| Wednesday, 3 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 3 September 2025 |
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More health issues
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne to an auditory test today. Yes, she's borderline deaf, something that I had already noticed. Hearing aid? First we need to talk to Paul Smith, who had warned us against predatory hearing clinics. And he's not available for a month!
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WhatsApp: bug after bug?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been trying for a week now to set up video telephony on fossil, Yvonne's mobile phone. Somehow the “modern” approach to user interfaces shows itself at its worst here. But I had come to the conclusion that if I can work beyond WhatsApps bizarre interface, and explain it to Yvonne so that she doesn't have a panic attack every time she uses it, we might have something useful, especially since WhatsApp can communicate by an Internet link, which could be much cheaper.
OK, try out on hirse first. It doesn't have a SIM card, so any communication has to go by the Internet. Migrate my main number to hirse. No problem. Make a call. Some message like “need to use the phone network”. Oh.
Try calling in. The problem: hirse has the phone number associated with a SIM card in albo, which has a different WhatsApp number. Which does WhatsApp call? albo! Somehow there's more to this than meets the eye.
When Yvonne got back from shopping, I changed her WhatsApp number to the number of second SIM on her phone. All sorts of things didn't work, and it couldn't call the number on hirse. hirse claimed that she wasn't registered, though I had set the “notify contacts” during the migration. In the end I moved the number back to the old one. And things still didn't work correctly! In particular, I could call the number, but WhatsApp didn't respond in any way, not even registering a missed call. Went through the settings and set tones for all notifications. Still no response. Restart the app. No response.
Nothing for it, the Microsoft solution: reboot. And yes, now it responds. Clearly some kind of bug. And it repeats the call tone for every notification, including messages. Oh, my bad. Get rid of the tone. Sorry, there's no provision for that. Select something at random, since it's too polite to play the tone when you're selecting it. I still get the ring tone for messages! I can't see any explanation except that it's another bug. It was getting late, so I turned off sounds to wait until tomorrow.
All this is made worse by the horrible user interface. So far I haven't found a way to display the associated phone number in the contact details. At one point I made the mistake of using the same name (mine) for both my phones, so there was no way at all to find out what “number” it had called.
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Goodbye Morena
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Not quite three months ago Yvonne received a present: AuSome Morena, a Paso Fino/Paso peruano mare bred by Jorge de Moya.
One of the very few Paso horses in Australia. Chris Bahlo was less impressed: she didn't like the bloodline. And despite everything, Yvonne couldn't get her to fit in. So she has given her away, already:
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| Thursday, 4 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 4 September 2025 |
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I hate WhatsApp!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
More fun with WhatsApp today. The first question, which decides whether it's even worthwhile: can I make a call over the Internet? Yesterday's experiments were overshadowed by other bugs. Today I tried making a call from fossil (Yvonne's phone) to hirse, the one without a SIM card. I have set it up with the main number of albo, so a normal call to that number should go to albo, and a WhatsApp call should go to hirse. Does it?
Yes! So yesterday's issues were probably due to other bugs.
And the incorrect notification tones? Gone since the last reboot, Yvonne says. But later she changed her mind: once again the wrong tone when all notification tones were turned off.
Dammit, begone, WhatsApp! Removed it. Reinstalled it. And how about that, setup was almost completely without problem. She lost her image (“Avatar”, “The manifestation of a god in bodily form on earth” according to the OED). We can live with that. And somehow now everything Just Works—until the next unpleasant surprise.
Apart from that and the horrible user interface, established that you can change an audio call into a video call simply by pressing the button with the box with a loudspeaker on the right:
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Interestingly, it only works in one direction. To go in the other direction requires that the person at the other end do the same.
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VirtualBox again
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
DxO PhotoLab 9 is out, and it looks worth trying. Time to reinstate one of my Microsoft virtual machines, which run under VirtualBox.
I stopped using VirtualBox on hydra a year ago, though it was the main reason that I had so much memory (192 GB): I ran into network problems that I couldn't fix.
Now FreeBSD has a port of VirtualBox 7. Time to try again? Tried first on dereel, with only 24 GB of memory. Where's my HOWTO? All fine, but it doesn't tell me how to add an existing VM. It must be in this diary somewhere, but where? I really should keep these HOWTOs up to date.
Starting up the GUI was different from before, of course. And it wanted to set things up in the root file system. To go elsewhere I had to do this horrible tree walking. Finally I got to where I wanted (/src/VirtualBox/echuca). Tried to create a new VM. “Can't overwrite machine folder...". What does that mean? They should know better than to call a directory a folder, but what's a “machine folder”? Lots of experimentation, continually being returned to the /root directory and having to climb my way out again. What does “help” say? Nothing. I wonder if the port forgot to install something important. After a while I discovered that it really wanted the parent directory /src/VirtualBox, but then I ran into other issues.
After some time decided to create a new VM with the old virtual disk. Link? Yes, but VirtualBox detected the UUID and used the old name.
Yes, there are other possibilities. But I think that the best is to go through my diary and extract the information that I need to do things sanely. And maybe I should use the commands rather than the GUI, which seems to be getting more stupid as time goes on.
| Friday, 5 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 5 September 2025 |
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WhatsApp an Avatar?
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday I established that an Avatar is a earthly manifestation of a Hindu god, but WhatsApp apparently wants to elevate Yvonne and me to deities. Until then, only initials appear to identify us on calls.
OK, how do we do that? Settings, of course, “make your own avatar”, “Create from selfie”. OK. Take a suitably horrified photo of myself. Briefly it showed “There was an error with the avatar gen...”, so briefly that I didn't see it the first three times. What does that mean? Why can't it finish its sentences? So instead it presented me with a manual generation.
Why? What does the half message mean? It's repeatable on two different phones. And there seems to be no way to just add a normal photo. What a mess!
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VirtualBox progress
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So what's wrong with my VirtualBox installation? My current situation was exactly what I had a year ago: most VMs worked, but Microsoft VMs had networking problems. They could send data, but they didn't see the replies, so they hung in ARP. I attributed that to the version of VirtualBox (6.1.50 r161033), so I waited until version 7 came out. And then I discovered that I had exactly the same problem.
That didn't help just getting things running. After some searching, discovered that VirtualBox stores a configuration in the home directory, ~/.config/VirtualBox/ with a number of files, including log files that have no business there, but importantly VirtualBox.xml. OK, make a copy of that on dereel, and how about that, VirtualBox came up with all the VMs I knew.
Start disaster, the only VM that would fit in dereel's memory.
VT-x is disabled in the BIOS for all CPU modes (VERR_VMX_MSR_ALL_VMX_DISABLED).
Oh. There was something there, but can the twins help? Yes, specifically for a ThinkCentre:
Once in the BIOS, use the arrow keys to navigate to the Advanced tab.
From the Advanced menu, select CPU Setup and press Enter.
Look for an option labeled Intel(R) Virtualization Technology and select it.
Using the arrow keys, change the setting from Disabled to Enabled.
After that and rebooting, and with a change of network adapter name, it still didn't start. I got this message:
X86_CPUID_AMD_FEATURE_EDX_AXMMX is not supported by the host but has already exposed to the guest [ver=19 pass=final] (VERR_SSM_LOAD_CPUID_MISMATCH).
More help from the twins. The saved state includes information from an AMD processor (hydra), but this is Intel. Discard saved state and start again.
After that, and with a change of network adapter name, it started. I got this message, which I haven't seen before, but which seems harmless:
error: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is invalid or not set in the environment.
That variable isn't set on hydra either.
We're still not done. Trying to start an xterm from current gave me the message
The Virtual Machine reports that the guest OS does not support mouse pointer integration
What's that? Gemini tells me:
The message "The Virtual Machine reports that the guest OS does not support mouse pointer integration..." in a FreeBSD virtual machine is common and means you need to install and configure the necessary guest additions for the mouse to work seamlessly. FreeBSD does not include these drivers out of the box, so you must install them yourself.
That sounds like the Ports Collection. But there is no additions package for VirtualBox 7.1, only for 6.50 and 5.2. Mañana.
On with disaster. So: ARP issue? While messing around on disaster, found the help message for ARP. It uses Unix-style option delimiters, and -s sets a permanent MAC address. OK, if this is an ARP issue, we can fix that:
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Oh: Microsoft has a different format for MAC addresses. Try again:
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And that as Administrator. Time to ask the twins.
Q: What does "The ARP entry addition failed: Access is denied" when running CMD as administrator under "windows" 10?A: The "ARP entry addition failed: Access is denied" error in Windows 10, even when running Command Prompt as an administrator, typically happens when trying to add a static Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) entry for a reason other than a permission issue.
Interesting. “Access is denied” is not a permission issue? Something's wrong here, either Gemini or Microsoft. My money is on Microsoft.
And that's what Gemini suggests too:
Use netsh instead: In some cases, especially on newer versions of Windows, the arp command may have issues with Access is denied errors even when the user has administrator privileges.
So I ended up with this simple invocation:
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And how about that, it worked. Well, at least it put the address in the ARP table, and I was able to ping out, so disaster knew the address. But it still didn't hear any reply.
Yet another question to Gemini:
What could cause a Microsoft guest under VirtualBox to send network data but not receive it, when other guests have no problem with the same configuration?
The obvious answer: firewall. Check to be on the safe side. No, no firewall enabled. How about an Ethernet adapter issue?
If you are using an Intel PRO/1000, try switching to a different type, such as the AMD PCnet-FAST III.
OK, try that. No improvement. Next idea: this video
OK, try anything once. Follow the instructions step by step, none of which showed any obvious issues. Change the interface back to (specifically) Intel PRO/1000 MT Deskop (8254EM). Not much hope there: that's what I had.
But it worked! My final configuration looks identical to the start configuration. What changed? There's something lurking under the surface that I don't understand. Can I now get it to run on hydra?
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Where there's hope...
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Horses are social animals, and they hate being alone. So since Morena left, Samba has not been happy. Today Chris Bahlo brought some hope: Esperanza,
| Saturday, 6 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 6 September 2025 |
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More VirtualBox pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday I finally got networking working using VirtualBox 7.1 and Microsoft “Windows” 10. Time to refine a few things. First, start the windows on hydra:0.0, a 1920×1080 display, rather than on hydra:0.1, which has 3840×2160, giving windows that are too small.
But it didn't work! I could start on hydra:0.1, but on hydra:0.0 nothing happened. Is there some kind of built-in memory in the configuration file?
So, time to upgrade current.lemis.com, another VM running FreeBSD-CURRENT. It was a year out of date.
Start a make buildworld, not for the first time. But nothing happened!
Further investigation showed that I had a network hang. And disaster was also hanging! Shut down disaster and current regained network access—for a while. Then it hung again.
This seems worse than my experience on hydra with VirtualBox 6.5. Tried it there and it worked.
What a pain! What does Google Gemini say?
Q: Are there known networking issues with VirtualBox under FreeBSD?
A: Yes, there are known networking issues and quirks with VirtualBox when used as a host on a FreeBSD system. While VirtualBox works, it is not an officially "supported" host platform by Oracle, which means users often have to rely on the community and package maintainers to troubleshoot and resolve issues.
(much irrelevant information omitted)
Users sometimes experience slow network speeds, particularly with upload speeds, when using bridged adapters. This can be more pronounced on specific emulated network card types.
While VirtualBox can function as a host on FreeBSD, it is not a "fire-and-forget" solution... If you encounter speed or reliability issues, experimenting with different emulated network adapter types can often resolve the problem.
That's not encouraging, though it doesn't directly relate to my problems. But what else can it be? Two different versions of FreeBSD, two different machines, two different versions of VirtualBox. Does it work better on Linux? That would be a real let-down, but possibly I should try it. How much pain would that be?
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Thank you, Darn old Trump
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Topic: politics, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne bought some asparagus on Wednesday, which I processed as Chinese-style asparagus and prawns. The most interesting thing is the provenance: made in México, at the other end of the world. Why are they on sale here?
The answer is obvious: they have lost one of their main markets, the USA. So they have to sell elsewhere. Presumably the US Americans are suffering a lack of asparagus to add to their problems.
| Sunday, 7 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 7 September 2025 |
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Incredible dying Abutilon
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
A couple of months ago I was having trouble with the Abutilon by the laundry door:
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Jesse Walsh removed a branch and discovered mould around it:
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That seemed to fix the problem. Until now:
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What's causing that? This time it was clearer that a whole branch was affected, down to this joint
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The sick branch is on the left. And there's a section that appears to have dried out. Is this some kind of disease?
Clearly the branch will have to go. And the whole bush? It wouldn't be the biggest disaster: this one is much bigger than I had expected, we have another one on Piccola's grave, and they're easy to propagate.
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More kangaroos and horses
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Topic: animals, photography, opinion | Link here |
Seven years ago I found a mob of kangaroos with the horses in the west paddock and spent a lot of time processing photos, which proved to include two kangaroos with joeys:
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Today Yvonne saw something similar:
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This time, though, a very large joey is trying to get in the pouch of the kangaroo in the middle:
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I wonder whether it's typical that the kangaroo lies down to let the joey in.
And why are these images so fuzzy? They're taken with a relatively poor lens, the images are heavily cropped (corresponding to focal lengths round 2,500 mm for a “full frame” camera), but the horses aren't (quite) that fuzzy. Depth of field? My calculator tells me that it's round 200 m. But clearly a longer lens would have been helpful. And could maybe some “AI” processing software improve things?
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Testing RSS feeds
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Topic: technology | Link here |
I write all my web markup myself, with the aid of a number of PHP scripts. The result is that the RSS feed looks nothing much like my sources. So when something goes wrong with the markup, it's hard to find where, not helped by things like the W3.org validator, which typically points to where the error is detected, not where it occurred, and which at the moment caches input, so even after fixing the problem it reports the old problem.
Callum Gibson is the main user of RSS feeds whom I know of. He pointed me to this validator. It also points to where the error was found, but at least I can try things and repeat them. That fixed an issue I had with earlier this month, where the error was over 100 lines from where it was detected.
| Monday, 8 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 8 September 2025 |
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Chasing the VirtualBox bug
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Topic: technology | Link here |
So why was VirtualBox version 7.1 on dereel even worse than version 6.50 on hydra? One possibility might be that the VMs themselves were NFS mounted. OK, find a 1 TB disk and copy them there. Put it in in place of the DVD drive, and was amazed to find that it came up as /dev/ada0, relegating the system disk to /dev/ada1 and requiring manual intervention (/etc/fstab) to continue. How could that happen?
Then copying the VMs from hydra. That took a few hours, of course, so I'll continue tomorrow.
While looking for the disks also found one marked “MS “Windows” 10 disgust”, dated 10.XII.2020. Comparing with my diary, that proves to be the disk that came with the machine I'm working on. So I should be able to just put it in and run it. That's the next thing to do if I still can't get VirtualBox to run reliably.
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DxO PhotoLab 9: worth the trouble?
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I've spent a lot of time looking at the new features of DxO PhotoLab 9. Even better noise reduction, of course, but the big new thing is what appears to be excellent object recognition (“masking”). But that's only part of the story. Can I remove objects? Replace them with something else? It seems that the answer is “no”.
Somewhere I also thought I saw a way to merge HDR images, but that seems to be a misunderstanding. Instead they have improved file handling, including collapsing related image groups and automatic file naming. None of them seem to be anywhere near as flexible as the method I worked out 13 years ago, so it's of no use to me.
So: what will the future bring? The masking is good, but is it enough to spend US $240 on? There's a very good chance that they'll come up with a version 10 in the not-too-distant future and want $120 for an upgrade. Maybe I should just wait.
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VicRoads: still in the 20th century
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
After scrapping my Hyundai Elantra at the end of July I was due a refund for the registration.
And they sent me a cheque! I thought they went out of fashion well over a year ago. And yes, the bank refused to accept it.
But why? I really don't understand. They should have transferred it to my bank account, like any sane company. But no, I had to call their customer service line (1300 555 165, which looks suspiciously like a fake US phone number) and go through their silly authentication process (including a form of 2FA, sending a PIN to my phone. That would have helped a lot if I had been calling from that phone). But yes, relatively quickly they took the details and told me that the transfer would occur in the next 2 to 3 weeks. Receipt number HD1155831.
2 to 3 weeks? Why? Ah, we need human intervention. Why? Nowadays we have computers. With only marginally good programming the money could have been in my bank account before the end of the call. But clearly they don't have that.
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Dry winter
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Topic: general | Link here |
It has been raining more lately—we've had 60 mm in the last 2 weeks—but it's still not enough. Here the neighbour's dam:
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Hopefully it will fill up before summer.
| Tuesday, 9 September 2025 | Dereel | |
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More VirtualBox insights
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So what's wrong with VirtualBox networking? Google Gemini had suggested that it might depend on the emulated network adapter, so spent some time trying different adapters, with no improvement. About the only thing that was clear was the ping time: from guest to host the expected 0.15 ms, but in the other direction much longer, and with wildly different times:
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 29.752/61.679/175.892/36.953 ms
Gave that up and looked at some bug reports, which showed surprisingly few network issues. But one, by Ivan Rozhuk, was interesting:
Try to disable HW offloads on NIC:
ifconfig igb0 -rxcsum -txcsum -vlanhwtso -lro -tso4 -tso6 down up
And how about that, that worked. So why is this not better known? There's also a wiki with surprisingly little of use.
Later I discovered that my guest current.lemis.com had 8 CPUs, while the host dereel only has four. That's quite impressive that it worked at all. Reducing the number of CPUs on current got rid of the slow ping times.
So: are we done? I don't think so. I still need to find whether the Microsoft guests work reliably.
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Bruce Evans' C compiler
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Mail in the TUHS mailing list today:
Subject: [TUHS] Bruce Evans 386 Minix patches & compiler source
It's been quite a while since I was messing with Minix386 back in the days
when Bruce Evans released a set of patches to bring 386 support.
I'm pretty sure over on oldlinux.org the patch set exists, but I can only
find the one set of binaries of his 386 toolchain.
I know it eventually evolved into the bin86 toolchain that Linus would go on
to use to create real mode boot code, but I don't know if any of the source
code to his 1991/1992 386 toolchain ever got published?
Is it somewhere on the disk images that Peter Jeremy saved? I haven't looked at them for over three years, and I only had the smaller ones that I could download. Sent off a message to the other people who have access, Warren Toomey (who also coincidentally runs TUHS) and Warner Losh, and only got a brief response from the first.
Back to look at what I have: three files, /src/bde/ad1.img, /src/bde/ad2.img and /src/bde/ad3.img. I had only looked at /ad0.img, requiring gnop to access the individual partitions. There was a good reason: I had renamed ad2.img.xz to ad2.img without uncompressing it. Did that now and ended up with 60 GB of data.
And the contents?
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /bde 13 -> mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /src/bde/besplex/ad2.img
md0=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /bde 14 -> l /dev/md0
md0 md0s1 md0s2 md0s2a md0s2b md0s2d md0s2e md0s2f md0s2g md0s2h
All the BSD partitions there! So I can just mount them:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /bde 15 -> mkdir a b d e f g h=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /bde 16 -> l
total 1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 10 Sep 13:28 a
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 10 Sep 13:28 b
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 10 Sep 13:28 d
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 10 Sep 13:28 e
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 10 Sep 13:28 f
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 10 Sep 13:28 g
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 10 Sep 13:28 h=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /bde 35 -> for i in `echo a b d e f g h`; do mount -o ro /dev/md0s2$i $i; done
mount: /dev/md0s2a: No such file or directory=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /bde 36 -> df
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
...
/dev/md0s2b 3,952 3,542 93 97% /bde/b
/dev/md0s2d 3,952 2,971 664 82% /bde/d
/dev/md0s2e 3,952 3,658 -21 101% /bde/e
/dev/md0s2f 3,952 3,514 121 97% /bde/f
/dev/md0s2g 11,754 8,842 1,972 82% /bde/g
/dev/md0s2h 29,525 14,599 14,926 49% /bde/h=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /bde 37 ->
And in one of the partitions I found a file /bde/e/besplex/home/bde/dist/minix.tar.gz, which may be just what Jason is looking for. That was much easier than I thought. Is it correct? That would be too easy.
| Wednesday, 10 September 2025 | Dereel | |
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Israel makes me sick
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Topic: health, politics, opinion | Link here |
During morning ablutions I discovered that Israel has attacked a site in Qatar, in violation of international law. Even the USA is unhappy: Qatar is an ally. The news media talk of Trump's impotence in stopping these attacks. But they don't mention the obvious way to solve the issue: stop supplying Israel with weapons. By comparison, the current Russian attacks on Ukraine and even Poland seem like nothing.
This really worries me. I felt physically sick all day, somehow uncoordinated, dizzy, unable to walk properly and and even unable to type normally. It could be something else, of course, but somehow it all started when I heard of Israel's attack. Once again I'm reminded of what I wrote earlier this year: Israel is a state sponsor of antisemitism. Once I strongly supported Israel.
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Yvonne: pacemaker?
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
One of the things I had intended to do today was to go with Yvonne for an appointment with Rodney Reddy, but I ended up not leaving the house.
Yvonne had been thinking about a pacemaker, something that Professor Peter Kistler had suggested. But Rod pointed out that they don't help with atrial fibrillation, and instead once again changed the medication. It seems that she should have stopped taking Digoxin when she moved to the Sotalol last month. Hopefully that will help. It's not the first time we have had issues with the medication prescription.
Somehow I'm getting the impression that Kistler is a good mechanic, but not the best choice of diagnostician.
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More fun with VirtualBox and bde
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
More playing around with VirtualBox today, with no breakthrough. I had paused dereel with zzz, and when I restarted it the networking had gone to hell again. Here a repeat of what I had done yesterday:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/3) /eureka/home/grog 1 -> ifconfig
em0: flags=1008943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,LOWER_UP> metric 0 mtu 1500 options=4e524bb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,LRO,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWFILTER,VLAN_HWTSO,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6,HWSTATS,MEXTPG>=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/3) /eureka/home/grog 2 -> ifconfig em0 -rxcsum -txcsum -vlanhwtso -lro -tso4 -tso6 down up=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/3) /eureka/home/grog 3 -> ifconfig
em0: flags=1008943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,LOWER_UP> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=4c120b8<VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWFILTER,TXCSUM_IPV6,HWSTATS,MEXTPG>
After that it worked normally again, but the Microsoft boxen still didn't want to know. Do I have to cold start them every time?
And Bruce Evans' C compiler? I posted what I had and got no answer. I'm not convinced that I have the right files, though the name usr/src/mx386/bcc (from the archive e/bde/dist/minix.tar.gz) does raise some hope.
| Thursday, 11 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 11 September 2025 |
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Weakness: over
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Topic: health | Link here |
What it really the news about Israel's aggression against Gaza that made me well so weak and dizzy yesterday? Or am I just getting old and weak? In any case, today I felt much better again, though I avoided any further sickening news.
Yvonne has now changed her medication (no more Digoxin) and is feeling marginally better. It's early days; we'll keep an eye on it.
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Semmelknödel revisited
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Topic: food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
German-style Gulasch for dinner tonight. What do we eat with it? For Yvonne, the choice was clear: „Kartoffelknödel“ im Kochbeutel (translated as “cooking bags” on the packet). But I eat Semmelknödel (bread dumplings), and we didn't have any instant ones. OK, back to my recipe, with which I was not overly happy. In particular, the last batch was lumpy and not very firm. OK, start again. Instead of putting the dried bread through the mincer, reduce it with the mixer:
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Do the same with the onions:
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Reduce the fresh parsley with a mezzaluna:
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To my surprise, the original estimate of 160 g of milk was too little. With 180 g (little less than last time) they were barely formable. Here with 162 g and 180 g of milk:
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And yes, they formed well, and after leaving in boiled water for a couple of minutes I was able to make dumplings that looked relatively like they should:
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| Friday, 12 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 12 September 2025 |
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Semmelknödel: the morning after
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Topic: opinion, food and drink | Link here |
Yesterday's Semmelknödel were almost exactly what I wanted. I had left most of the mass over for today in case it needed tuning, but such proved not to be the case, so I cooked them exactly as yesterday. But the results were not what I expected:
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The two leftovers from yesterday are at the top, and they're fine. The others are disintegrating, and they've left their mark on the pot:
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What went wrong there? I really don't know. “I didn't change anything”. Somehow there's more to do before I'm happy with the recipe.
| Saturday, 13 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 13 September 2025 |
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Quick and easy ramen breakfast
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I have a number of “instant” dishes in the pantry, including this one:
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It doesn't look too bad, but it's enough for two people. After a brief attempt to convince Yvonne, decided to split it over two days. Another of these dishes that talks of cups (in this case of 250 ml), requiring me to calculate things. That's more of a pain than all the rest put together.
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OK, drag out a cup and measure:
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That proved to be mislabeled spinach, but in principle it makes no difference: how do you decide when the cup is full? That's 52 g, and in the end I decided on 72 g.
While considering further action, came across this video, titled “10 Instant Ramen Hacks | Transform Instant Noodles from Good to Incredible!”:
It looks quite interesting, but it's rather long. Decided that today I would prepare the dish as close to the original as possible, and keep the other half for tomorrow.
The package contains three subpackages:
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The noodles (on the left) are moist rather than wet. They require cooking in the broth from the packet on the right before adding the other ingredients, including spinach and a whopping 100 g of pork:
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And the dried vegetables in the middle pack included a surprising amount of maize kernels, not something that I would have expected of Japanese food.
After that, and with the required egg, things looked like this:
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How did it taste? The broth seems to be mainly miso. With a bit of soya and chili sauce it didn't taste too bad. Did it save me any time? No, of course not, since I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Will it save me any time next time? I doubt it. But it has given me food for thought.
| Sunday, 14 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 14 September 2025 |
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Instant ramen, take 2
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
As planned yesterday, cooked the other half of the ramen meal kit with ideas gleaned from The Woks of Life. I had all the ingredients that they had round minute 12, but chose to incorporate only some of them, and also some dòufu puffs along with the suggested spring onions, chili and coriander stalks:
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Before serving, I added raw onions. The result?
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Better than yesterday, though it still needed soya sauce. I don't think it would have tasted very much different with water instead of the miso mixture.
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Lamb Keema
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Somehow I'm spending all my time cooking lately. We've had some minced lamb from Chris Bahlo for ever, and it really needs to go. Today I decided on a Kima (“Keema”) curry with this mixture:
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It wanted a ridiculous amount of meat, of which I only put in two-thirds. And somehow it was boring, also too hot for Yvonne, who ended up eating—as it happened—a couple of kima kebabs. It looks like I'll have a lot left over for breakfasts.
| Monday, 15 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 15 September 2025 |
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Still more cooking
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
For some reason I wasn't feeling overly hungry this morning. Time to try out one of these ALDI pouches:
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No noodles. Only 100 g, 255 with the additional water. Much less than my normal breakfast, just what the doctor ordered. Wonton, with chicken dumplings and shiitake mushrooms, clearly inventiveness on the part of the designer. Put in a couple of real (prawn) wontons so that it has some consistency.
But no, it did contain some solids. Here with the added wontons:
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And how was it? Not bad, but not to be repeated. In particular it had little taste and not enough salt. I have two other sachets (“laksa” and “tom yam”). Together they might make a breakfast.
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Yet more cooking
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I have the feeling that I have spent the last five days cooking. Time to stop. But no, first more Laugengebäck, according to a monthly ritual that is gradually becoming routine. Today was no exception. But it took up much of the afternoon.
| Tuesday, 16 September 2025 | Dereel | |
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Cooking: enough!
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Topic: food and drink, general, history, opinion | Link here |
I seem to have spent the whole of the last week cooking. Not so today. In the morning I ate some of the rest of the Keema curry that I cooked on Sunday, and in the evening we ate leftovers of the chicken that Yvonne cooked (and didn't document) on Saturday. About the only thing that I cooked was crinkle cut potatoes.
I'm not completely inactive, just putting up a good imitation. I spent much of the afternoon watching a video of how Adolf Hitler spent the last 2 years before the war. I had hoped to find some similarities with the current situation in the USA, but there was little obvious. About the biggest point of interest was the Anschluss, where they claimed only a small majority voted in favour. My understanding was that the majority of Austrians were in favour. It's interesting that this had been discussed (and rejected) as the großdeutsche Lösung in 1848. But that was because of the relative strength of Austria and Prussia at the time, something that had changed completely by 1938. So there does seem to have been some sense in it, which the people who made the documentary don't want to see.
| Wednesday, 17 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 17 September 2025 |
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More birding
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Up in the middle of the night to go to another OM System birding session with Aaron Harivel in the Western Treatment Plant near Lara. I have already done this one, 2½ months ago, but Aaron said that we would see many birds that weren't there last time.
I was disappointed. Although spring has sprung, it was considerably cooler than last time and very windy, maybe a reason we saw so few birds. I still managed 258 images, some of them good, but I wonder if I need to go along with these “workshops”. They have others further from Dereel, but this one was special because it gave us access to areas that are not open to the public.
There were some new birds, including Ibises, but I can see them elsewhere as well:
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And not every shot was perfect, even when in focus:
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And some playing around with my menus, getting my camera into a position where I couldn't take any photos. Neither could Aaron:
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Those were the first and last of 8 images that he took trying to reset the camera. It proved that I had accidentally enabled focus bracketing instead of focus limiting.
Also took another few images with the M.Zuiko 150-400 mm lens, this time with the OM System OM-1 Mark II. I was talking with another participant, who had the lens and was happy with how responsive it was. I suggested changing with my Leica Vario-Elmar 100-400 mm and was able to confirm that there wasn't much in it. The participant wasn't so lucky: his camera (also a OM-1 Mark II) hung up and wouldn't do anything until I removed the battery. No harm done, but what caused that?
Should I do any more “workshops”? In particular, there's a “workshop” at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne next month. It starts 2 hours later, but that's about the time I would need to get there. Can I park my car? Is it worthwhile? Aaron suggests that it's relatively basic, and came up with the opinion that the new 90 mm macro is very unforgiving with focus, while the 60 mm is forgiving. That's not the first thing he has said about macros that sounds unconvincing: yes, depth of field of a 90 mm camera is less, but it more than makes it up by its smaller aperture. A comparison at full aperture (90/3.5 and 60/2.8):
| Focal length | Subject | Focal plane | Magnification | Exposure | Near | Far | Depth of | |||||||
| distance (m) | distance (mm) | comp | (EV) | limit (m) | limit (m) | field (m) | ||||||||
| 30 | 0.1000 | 42.8571 | 0.429 | 1.0 | 0.0997 | 0.100312 | 0.000622 | |||||||
| 60 | 0.2000 | 85.7143 | 0.429 | 1.0 | 0.1998 | 0.2002 | 0.0005 | |||||||
| 90 | 0.3000 | 128.5714 | 0.429 | 1.0 | 0.2997 | 0.3003 | 0.0006 | |||||||
That gives a total depth of field for the 90 mm of 0.0006 m (0.2997 m - 0.3003 m), and 0.0005 m (0.1998 m - 0.2002 m) for the 60 mm. And that's before starting to think about the convenience of such a long lens, nor of its price ($250 list for the 30 mm, $400 for the 60 mm, $1,400 for the 90 mm).
Still, it's not clear that I will gain much benefit from the course. I have a month to decide, but it's beginning to look like “no”.
In passing, it's worth thinking about how much time these sessions take up. This one was shorter, only 3 hours, but on top of that there 2½ hours driving time (would be more like 4 to the Botanic Gardens) and 7 hours processing time for the first cut of the photos. There will be more.
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Moorabool ridge
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
I didn't have anything to do in Geelong today, so took the scenic route home, which Google Maps puts as an alternative, despite being shorter and faster than the way over the freeway. There's one area just west of Maude where there's a very steep part of the road:
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It seems to be part of the Brisbane Ranges that run north-south round here, though the sign I saw suggested “Moorabool Ridge”, a name for which I only found winery links. Most references point to the valley.
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Fisheye compensation?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
While looking through the menus for my camera, found an item “Fisheye Compensation”. Just what I need for my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. Tried it out. “Fisheye compensation not supported for this lens”. And yes, it seems it only works for Zuiko lenses; at least it worked for me with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO. But I don't need it for that lens. It's looking more and more like the 4 mm fisheye wasn't worth the trouble.
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Chips?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne bought some sausages today, and also a cutter for crinkle-cut chips. Without anything to set the thickness, the latter is a waste of time, and it'll almost certainly go back.
But crinkle cut (with the mandolin) or normal chips? Recently we've been doing mainly crinkle-cut, but I have (and found) a chip maker for making chips from fresh potatoes, which I bought only 6 months ago. Yes, it works, though it seems rather flimsy. But the deep fryer wanted “180°”, which proved to be initial 189°, for 5 minutes for the second fry. After 2½ minutes they appeared dark, and they floated. But they were still soft. I need to decide whether to try again for the full cooking time, or go back to crinkle-cut.
| Thursday, 18 September 2025 | Dereel | Images for 18 September 2025 |
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Pad see ew: finally!
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Pad see ew for breakfast today. This time I used real Kway Teow noodles:
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And they didn't disintegrate in the Wok! Instead they caramelized nicely, just what I was looking for.
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And Yvonne pointed out that I take photos of these dishes when I make them, but not after I have eaten them. Just for Yvonne:
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In passing it's worth wondering how to romanize the name. Phat Thai frequently gets romanized as Pad Thai, but I've never seen Phat See Ew.
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The morning after the night before
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Spent much of the day processing yesterday's photos. There must be a simpler way, especially since I haven't even got as far as cropping any of them. Somehow I'm feeling really tired lately.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
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