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| Greg's diary |
| September 2026 |
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| Tuesday, 1 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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26 years!
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Topic: history | Link here |
It's been 26 years since I restarted this diary online. In some senses it's hard to fathom: over a third of my life.
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Goodbye clutch
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Somehow Clutch doesn't seem to be worth it. It's completely non-intuitive, nothing like Emacs, and everything I try seems to run into a different issue. Possibly it would be useful if I could get it to work, but I spent a lot more time today writing up yesterday's pain. Time to move on to something else. The latest version of phpMyEdit should be easier, but somehow I didn't have the energy today.
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Time for Bruno to go
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
I was really hoping that Bruno would behave better now that he has the option of going into the dog run any time he wants. But he wants to go in and out continually, and he doesn't want to spend that much time with us. He is now spending the nights with Mona, but that's not really enough. There are plenty of people who want him; the only issue is whether they will be happy with him. He goes.
| Wednesday, 2 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 2 September 2026 |
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ALDI pastes: not what they used to be
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Cooked fake Phat Thai for breakfast this morning, using the ALDI paste that I've been using for nearly 10 years. It was never anything spectacular, but in that time it seems to have deteriorated considerably. I still have a couple of sachets left, but when they're gone I'll look for something better.
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Mona accepts Elena?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Seen this afternoon:
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Mona still hasn't made friends with the dogs, but she's gradually accepting Elena's presence. Larissa is still another matter: she's too enthusiastic for Mona's taste.
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phpMyEdit: Still inconvenient
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
After giving up on Clutch, the next choice is phpMyEdit. I'm pretty sure it's what I'm using for some tables, like the freezer contents and expenses, but that seems to have called itself MySQL Table Edit.
They don't make it easy. To get it, they give the URL https://www.phpmyedit.org/article.php?download. That gives a web link phpMyEdit.tar.gz, not something that I can download with fetch (and thus know where it has gone). Follow the link, and it's all in Slovak! Never mind, there's a link at top right: Slovak»English. Follow that and yes, it's in English, but the page has a different content.
OK, back to the Slovak page. It has a link phpMyEdit-5.7.1.tar.gz, but I can't load that either, and in any case, the real link is http://opensource.platon.sk/projects/download.php?project_id=5&package=phpMyEdit&force=1.
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) /var/tmp 62 -> fetch 'http://opensource.platon.sk/projects/download.php?project_id=5&package=phpMyEdit&force=1'
download.php?project_id=5&package=phpMyEdit&fo 87 kB 150 kBps 01s
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 89,809 2 Sep 12:03 download.php?project_id=5&package=phpMyEdit&force=1=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) /var/tmp 65 -> file download.php?project_id=5&package=phpMyEdit&force=1
download.php?project_id=5: HTML document, ISO-8859 text, with very long lines (1368)
Dammit, it insists on being loaded by a browser. But at least it loads the file—if you're using firefox. Chromium refuses:
From http://opensource.platon.skChromium blocked this download because the site isn't using a secure connection and the file may have been tampered with
And yes, the last sentence isn't terminated.
But I can't find the tarball in ~/Downloads. Have they changed the name? Look at the files in the directory by modification date and find:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Downloads 74 -> l -rt
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 89,809 2 Sep 12:03 Unconfirmed 685893.crdownload
drwxr-xr-x 194 grog lemis 10,752 2 Sep 12:06 Gemini
drwxr-xr-x 80 grog lemis 33,792 2 Sep 12:09 Downloads=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Downloads 75 -> l -rt Gemini/
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 89,809 2 Sep 12:06 phpMyEdit-5.7.1.tar.gz
For reasons that firefox has to explain, it downloaded it to ~/Downloads/Gemini! At least the file name is sane. How I wish these toys would understand file system hierarchies!
So, how do I install it? Put it somewhere sane and untar it, clearly. Any instructions? You have to dig for them. In phpMyEdit-5.7.1/doc/README I find>
3. Using a browser, run phpMyEditSetup.php to log on to your MySQL server.
And where's phpMyEditSetup.php? One level up. From there on, things worked relatively normally, but I got the messages
Notice: Undefined index: db in /home/grog/public_html/phpMyEdit/phpMyEdit-5.7.1/phpMyEditSetup.php on line 65
Notice: Undefined index: tb in /home/grog/public_html/phpMyEdit/phpMyEdit-5.7.1/phpMyEditSetup.php on line 66
And on every entry I got the message
Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in
/home/grog/public_html/phpMyEdit/phpMyEdit-5.7.1/phpMyEdit.class.php on line 3100
Looking at the sources, it seems that this package hasn't been updated for nearly 20 years:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/45) ~/public_html/phpMyEdit/phpMyEdit-5.7.1 32 -> ls -l
total 1
drwx---r-x 2 grog lemis 512 17 Sep 2007 doc
drwx---r-x 2 grog lemis 512 17 Sep 2007 extensions
drwx---r-x 3 grog lemis 512 17 Sep 2007 images
drwx---r-x 3 grog lemis 2048 17 Sep 2007 lang
-rw----r-- 1 grog lemis 120963 16 Sep 2007 phpMyEdit.class.php
-rw----r-- 1 grog lemis 20791 16 Sep 2007 phpMyEditSetup.php
That's a lifetime ago! It's much older than the MySQL Table Edit that I wanted to replace: that's 7 years newer, though still 12 years old.
Still, I was able to access my table. But the fun wasn't over: some fields were empty. It seems that in its present form it refuses to display fields that have any non-ASCII character (here UTF-8, like “Cosina Voigtländer Nokton 60mm f/0.95”). I'm sure that that can be fixed relatively easily: start by digging for the documentation. The README tells me
phpMyEdit comes with extensive and exhaustive documentation in SGML, HTML and PDF format with huge amount of options, possibilities and information described. It is available for download as a separate package from phpMyEdit homepage or its project management page
What it doesn't say is where. But the real issue is the reason I went looking in the first place. I already have MySQL Table Edit, but to change anything I still need to select the record, get a new display, change it, save it and reposition on the main page. And that's so slow.
WHY isn't there anything useful out there?
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Chromium or Firefox?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been well over a month since I decided to transition from firefox to chromium. And it's still not done.
I'm not sure that it ever will be. Yes, chromium doens't have some of the strangenesses of firefox—it has different ones. I don't like the way it navigates: if I press c-R to refresh the display, it also repositions to the top of the page. And somehow the search function is even worse than firefox, though this may be a matter of habit. But then today I had the case where chromium refused to download a file without warning me. At the very least I should have had the choice.
I've tried alternative web browsers in the past, but more and more they're getting so complicated that none would do it right. For the time being I'll use two browsers in parallel to work around their individual bugs.
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Heavy duty packaging
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday I managed to destroy the clock in the kitchen, so today Yvonne bought a replacement. Nothing overly interesting, except that I needed a screwdriver to unpack it: it was screwed on! Here the back of the clock after removal:
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Not only was it screwed on, but the screws tapped holes in the back of the clock body.
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Chicken wings again
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
I'm out of pre-cooked chicken wings for nasi lemak. Today I had another 2 kg to cook.
In the past I have cooked them sous vide, but somehow I don't like the idea much any more. It's single use plastic, and it's messy. Why not just use the same marinade in the cooker without the plastic?
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Cooked them initially at 50° until some juices had run out, then at 80° for a total of 6 hours:
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I won't know until tomorrow whether that's enough.
| Thursday, 3 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 3 September 2026 |
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Chicken wings ouvert
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Deep fried my chicken wings this morning. They were perhaps a little firmer than in the past, but I can't make up my mind whether that's a good or a bad thing. As expected, the broth had gelatinized (here slightly torn in the middle):
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And there was much less broth than I had experienced in the past, only about 480 g instead of 800 g. Is that just because of the lacking sous vide cooking?
It was also the first time that I used my new single-egg frying pan. It was an experience. First, I pre-heat the pans before I put anything in them. But this one is so light that it heats up almost instantaneously on the induction cooktop, in a matter of seconds. So the egg frothed up:
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Worse, though, is how to get the egg out of the pan. I tried it with a silicone spatula, which worked, but...
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I'm not sure how to avoid that. The egg was so slippery that it wouldn't stay on the rice. I'm reminded of a restaurant example in Singapore:
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Should I learn from that?
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More flash exposure discoveries
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Topic: photography, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Taking photos of the chicken wings presented more challenges than I expected. I take my kitchen photos with studio flash, and I've established the exposure needed for each area of the kitchen. The cooker was in the brightest area, near one of the flashes, and my exposure for that is f/16. With electronic flash the shutter time is almost completely irrelevant.
But the result wasn't what I expected:
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Even at f/11 it wasn't much better:
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Of course, that's the way they came out of the camera. After normal postprocessing they were almost indistinguishable:
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But in that cooker f/8 looks more appopriate.
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Spring flowers
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
There's not much to like about our garden, but for a few days a year the north bed looks good:
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| Friday, 4 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 4 September 2026 |
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More bank account pain
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
The Unix Heritage Society is an interesting organization. We're registered as a charity in Victoria, but nearly all our expenditure is in the USA. We clearly need a bank account, and as an Australian organization, it should be in Australia. But transferring money to the USA costs money just for the transfer. Who charges the least? I went through this exercise five years ago. The cheapest was “Wise”, formerly (and more understandably) “Transferwise”, and the most expensive was the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, who would have charged fully 5.4% more than “Wise”.
What's the situation today? After considerable research, I still don't know. Five years ago I was able to establish the exchange rates on which the banks based their charges, but I can't find that any more. All I was able to establish was that most banks charge 3% fees over and above an unspecified exchange rate; only CBA charges 3.5%. But are they all based on the same base exchange rate? One thing is sure: despite advertising to the contrary, “Wise” will not accept us as a customer, so it looks like we're going to have to bite the higher fees.
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More weather station pain
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Checking the weather this afternoon, discovered that the weather station had stopped logging. What a pain this device is. Into the lounge room, where it's located, planning to hard reset the device. But that wasn't necessary:
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I'm reminded of old cartoons showing cleaning ladies pulling the power plug on a computer to plug in their vacuum cleaner.
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First tomatoes of spring
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Topic: gardening, food and drink | Link here |
I never cease to be amazed how late our tomatoes ripen. I'm told that they should start yielding in early summer (December, say), but in practice we don't get much before the beginning of autumn (March). But today was the first time that I picked some after the beginning of spring:
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We've had late tomatoes before, but not this late, and not this good. And they were bitter.
| Saturday, 5 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 5 September 2026 |
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Goodbye Bruno, take 2
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Topic: animals | Link here |
It's been 2½ months since we gave Bruno to the Sayers. That didn't work out, and they returned him 2 weeks ago. Now that the dog run is cat proof, I had hoped that we could keep him, but somehow he has changed. In any case, I grudgingly accepted Yvonne's desire to rehome him again, even though he was just making friends with Mona again:
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Still, Emily Binks came again, this time to pick him up, and Bruno was happier:
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She brought some bribes with her:
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Hopefully that will work out. Once again we have a two month grace period.
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Impromptu Chinese dinner
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
We changed our Saturday night dinner at relatively short notice. What did we have? Asparagus and “Peking flavoured duck breasts”. Neither very difficult to make. I have developed a relatively simple recipe for asparagus and prawns over the years, and we've already eaten the duck, which just requires heating, and found it good.
But it's so much! Admittedly, only 100 g of asparagus after trimming, but the same amount of prawns. What do you eat with the duck? In the end I tried “roti” “wraps” with the duck, and sure enough, we only ate (most of) one of the two breasts. But I must have spent more time thinking about it than preparing it.
| Sunday, 6 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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More MySQL edit pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Mail from Michael Hughes, suggesting that I try phpMyAdmin for editing MySQL tables: “it lets you browse the database and double click on a column for a record to edit it in place. You can also check multiple records and do an edit. This will bring up a new page and you can edit all the records at one time”.
It still requires selecting the columns, not quite what I was looking for, but it's worth a try, though the name suggests a strong similarity with phpMyEdit.
First, find it in the Ports Collection, preferably a package. phpMyAdmin? No, that's too simplistic. OK, how many ports can there be?
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /var/log/www 363 -> pkg search php | wc -l
3632
That's over 60 pages of listing! More searching and came up with phpMyAdmin5-php86-5.2.3. The usual installation, including
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /var/log/www 370 -> pkg install phpMyAdmin5-php86-5.2.3
New packages to be INSTALLED:
...
phpMyAdmin5-php86: 5.2.3
talloc: 2.4.1_1
Installed packages to be REMOVED:
samba423: 4.23.8_1
talloc243: 2.4.3
tevent017: 0.17.1
Once again ports to be removed rather than upgraded! And in this case, it removed a newer version of talloc (is that Tridge alloc? Yes, it seems). OK, I know why I did this on dereel rather than a machine I really need. And I can always reinstall samba:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /var/log/www 371 -> pkg install samba423
Checking integrity... done (1 conflicting)
- talloc243-2.4.3 conflicts with talloc-2.4.1_1 on /usr/local/include/pytalloc.h
New packages to be INSTALLED:
samba423: 4.23.8_1
talloc243: 2.4.3
tevent017: 0.17.1
Installed packages to be REMOVED:
talloc: 2.4.1_1
Done! Now run it:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /var/log/www 372 -> phpMyAdmin
su: phpMyAdmin: command not found
Oh. Where is it? The message printed after install showed nothing of use, and neither did the pkg-plist. Why don't these messages point at some kind of documentation? In the end I had to ask Google Gemini, which came up with a surprising list of actions necessary, including reconfiguring the web server: it seems that phpMyAdmin is only accessible via the web. Completed the tasks and tried to access http://dereel.lemis.com/phpmyadmin.
Go away, kiddie
This server is not a toy, and you can't break in to it. Go and play in somebody else's sandpit. We will report the following information to your ISP:
URL http://dereel.lemis.com/phpmyadmin
Remote host hydra.lemis.com
Remote IP 192.109.197.129
Client Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/143.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Oh. That's mine, hidden somewhere in the 404 document. It can only happen when the path name doesn't exist.
FOOL! You wrote http://dereel.lemis.com/phpmyadmin, not http://dereel.lemis.com/phpmyadmin/. Try that and get a completely different result:
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function filter_var() in /usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/vendor/slim/psr7/src/Uri.php:271 Stack trace: #0
/usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/vendor/slim/psr7/src/Uri.php(106): Slim\Psr7\Uri->filterHost('dereel.lemis.co...') #1
/usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/vendor/slim/psr7/src/Factory/UriFactory.php(114): Slim\Psr7\Uri->__construct('http', 'dereel.lemis.co...', 80, '/phpmyadmin/', '', '', '', '') #2
/usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/vendor/slim/psr7/src/Factory/ServerRequestFactory.php(96): Slim\Psr7\Factory\UriFactory->createFromGlobals(Array) #3
/usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/libraries/classes/Http/Factory/ServerRequestFactory.php(92): Slim\Psr7\Factory\ServerRequestFactory::createFromGlobals() #4
/usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/libraries/classes/Common.php(87): PhpMyAdmin\Http\Factory\ServerRequestFactory::createFromGlobals() #5
/usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/index.php(40): PhpMyAdmin\Common::run() #6 {main} thrown in /usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/vendor/slim/psr7/src/Uri.php on line 271
OK, I tried this as a simpler solution to the problems I've had with Clutch. But Clutch looks as if it would be better if I could get it to work. I'll continue there, if I don't just give up.
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Bloody VicRoads again!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
It's time to renew the registration for Yvonne's car. Today I received a renewal notice. The most important line:
No concession discount has been applied
Can't these people do anything right? I've been fighting this terminal incompetence for nearly a year:
And this is still a problem. What do I do? First step will be a formal complaint, I think.
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Wine too sweet?
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
I've been buying wine online for coming on 8 years now. The original experience wasn't positive, but I've come to like it. Originally I bought it from McLaren Vale Cellars, but they have been getting progressively more expensive. Recently I found a new supplier, Dozendeals, who are considerably cheaper. Recently I received two cartons of red wine at only half the price of McLaren Vale, and I don't think that the McLaren wine was better. Maybe it's related to my fading sense of taste, but my taste is not that bad.
But today I found a wine that didn't match my palate: Eyre & Vine, too sweet for my liking. Not a real pain: it's not that bad, and they have other wines at the same price which I do like. But how do I keep track of these things?
| Monday, 7 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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Braving VicRoads again
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Nothing for it, I need to contact VicRoads. Login.
Sorry, there was an error trying to log you in. Please try again in 10 minutes. If you continue to experience issues please call VicRoads on 1300 650 266.
Now doesn't that look like a known problem? I tried again in 10 minutes and continued to
experience failures“issues”. OK, this kind of web site delights in forgetting
passwords. Let's reset it. At least that worked, but I still couldn't log in with the
password that I had just set.
Is it maybe browser-related? That was with chromium. How about firefox? Yes, it seems so:
We're sorry - an error has occurred.
That's not the same message that I got with chromium. Why not? In any case, I discovered that you can send “feedback”, and did so:
I have been trying for over a year to have concessions applied to both our cars. Every attempt finally works after hours on the phone, but then the next time the concession is removed again. Please ensure that our concessions are applied to ZWT400 and YLS189, as promised many times. Please respond by CoB Friday, 11 September 2026.
I also note that your login system appears to be broken. After resetting the formerly correct password, it still doesn't work on Chromium, and the message produced suggests that the issue is know ("please retry in 10 minutes"). On firefox I get the message that the password I had just set was incorrect.
And at least that message got through to a certain level:
We’ve received your enquiry, and your reference number is RLS00335366.
That was an enquiry? Let's see if anything comes of it. Otherwise it'll be a formal complaint over the weekend.
| Tuesday, 8 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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More TUHSI stuff
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
What is TUHSI? It's The Unix Heritage Society Inc., a not-for-profit association incorporated in Victoria, Australia on 22 April 2026, registration number A0128836T, Australian Business Number 47 295 586 494. It is a recognized charity, registered on 4 May 2026. It provides a legal framework to deal with donations made to The Unix Heritage Society (TUHS) and to ensure that they are spent furthering the TUHS objectives.
That's easy to write here, because I spent much of today writing it up in preparation for publication. It's surprisingly difficult. When it's done and the committee accepts it, I'll move it to the TUHS site, but currently it's easier to write it here.
And in that connection, we need to hold an Annual General Meeting (AGM) by the end of November. We've decided on 21 November, and so we need an agenda. That's bureaucratese. Can Google Gemini help? Yes. And it came up with a number of things that I hadn't thought of. Do they apply to us? Off to read the Rules. Some do, some don't. One that I didn't expect is that all committee positions must be declared vacant before the AGM, and then elected. That will almost certainly be the same people, but we need to follow the procedure.
And then I discovered that we have to hold 4 committee meetings per year. The Rules distinguish between the committee and the membership, though for us it's the same. So some time before November we need to hold a committee meeting.
Somehow all of this doesn't make much sense any more. 25 years ago AUUG did have multiple committee meetings, and they were expensive, having people flown in from all over the country and requiring overnight accommodation. But that was before the days of online video conferencing (which the Rules allow), and we had already established that we (TUHSI) would communicate by email, something that we could have done in AUUG as well, but about the quality and quantity of which I continually complained. So what do we do with our committee meetings? Establish an agenda and agree to accept the content of our email? Somehow we're living between two worlds. It's still work.
| Wednesday, 9 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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More TUHS fun
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
Spent more time today with TUHSI activities, without achieving very much. We really need to get this description up, but it's much more painful than I thought. And how do we report the minutes of the committee meetings? Currently it looks like establishing people present, apologies and missing people, and accepting our email correspondence. So that would involve at least analysing the email. I need to get my head around how to do this.
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VicToads answers
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
An answer from VicRoads to Monday's resolution request. It appears to have been pieced together from related boilerplate, including multiple cases:
We trust that our reply provides you with the information on how to proceed.
Thank you again for contacting VicRoads, we trust this information has addressed your enquiry.
Thank you again for contacting VicRoads, we trust this information has addressed your enquiry.
The most important part is:
NOTE: Please do not reply to this email as the mailbox is unattended.
In other words, every time I need a written response, I need to go through this rigmarole.
The content itself looks dubious. It starts by repeating what I had stated
Thank you for your email about applying for a registration concession on your vehicle. We trust that our reply provides you with the information on how to proceed.
If you have a valid concession, you (or your spouse or domestic partner) may be able to get a discount on your vehicle registration. A concession card can only be used for one private use vehicle per registered operator only.
If your spouse has a concession card, you can apply to your vehicle as the spouse as long as the spouse has no concession on a car in their name.
Each time it is due to renewal with 2 cards assigned you will need to attend a call centre to adjust which card is noted in the system and assigned to the car. As when the other is paid it will be removed from being eligible to pay online with the discount.
It may be easier to transfer the vehicle your spouse has their concession card attached to into their name/ Vicroads record. Payment would not need to be adjusted each registration period with alternative concession cards.
If you have a myVicRoads account you can now submit your Registration Concession to VicRoads online.
Alternatively you can attend a Customer Service Centre in person to have your concession details sighted and applied to the registration.
For more information on how to have your concession card applied please use the following link https://go.vic.gov.au/r2hHgv
Somehow this doesn't make sense. Why does it need to be changed every time? My guess is that this is the understanding of the person who answered. Yes, maybe it would be easier to “attend a call centre”, but they first suggest that it is necessary (why?), and then say that I can do it online. And in the past we have been able to do it by long and painful phone call. And is there a difference between call centre and Customer Service Centre?
And if that wasn't contradictory enough, it continues:
After confirming the details provided in your enquiry, we have successfully been able to upgrade your myVicRoads account.
You will now be able to see your licence under the 'Licences and Learner Permits' section of your account. This will display your current licence status, demerit points and more. You will also be able to access your myLearners App and begin logging your hours.
What do driver licenses, and especially ”myLearners”, have to do with this matter?
So what do I do now? First, calm down a bit. Then I suppose I can try to access the web site, if it's feeling cooperative today. They didn't even address the login issue.
What a pain!
| Thursday, 10 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 10 September 2026 |
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Another renaming
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Topic: general, multimedia | Link here |
Donald Trump has this obsession of changing names to “America”, apparently in the misguided assumption that this automatically means “USA”. Thus the Gulf of Mexico (clearly in America) became the “Gulf of America”, and Lake Ontario became “Lake America”, at least in the USA.
But some people have seen the writing on the wall and reacted pre-emptively. The TV programme South Park has seen the writing on the wall, and is now called South America.
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The truth about 9/11
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Topic: politics, history, fiction | Link here |
It's coming up to the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the USA, and the whole world is talking about it. There seems to be less emphasis in why they chose to do this, killing themselves in the process. We will see how they choose to observe the anniversary in Iran.
But this anniversary is different. The greatest US president of all time has got up on his hind feet and claimed involvement. Does anybody believe him? Of course not.
But he was involved. Matin Tatari, my old friend from my student days in Hamburg, was involved in the attack, and he has told me in private about the background of the attacks. Trump, then active in real estate, was annoyed that there was a bigger building in New York City than his own Trump Tower. It must go! It's not clear whether he knew that there were other buildings in New York that were also bigger than Trump Tower, or whether he had intended to remove them too.
And who better to do it than a group of Islamic terrorists who would kill themselves in the process, thus avoiding any possibility of them testifying against him? And of course the date was symbolic: 911 is the US American emergency phone number. I wonder how long it will be before the truth comes out. Just recently Trump mistakenly referred to “7/11”. Most people thought that he was confusing it with the US department store, but that was really the date that he had decided on the plan. And for once he was not primarily trying to extol himself: he was trying to divert attention away from his real role in the event.
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Bread again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I've been baking my own bread for 18 years, 17 of which used sourdough. But our eating habits are changing. In those days we would get through a 30 slice loaf in a week or two. Now we eat various kinds of bread. Yvonne eats almost no home-baked bread, and I only eat a couple of slices a week. I baked my last loaf on 20 April 2026, nearly 5 months ago, and the sourdough starter was already looking weak. Replace it? It no longer seems worthwhile. How about using yeast? The twins came up with a surprisingly detailed recipe which looked similar enough to mine to be plausible. So today I tried that.
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 15 g | dry yeast | 1 | ||
| 5 g | sugar | 1 | ||
| 990 g | rye flour | 2 | ||
| 180 g | wheat flour | 2 | ||
| 60 g | caraway seed | 2 | ||
| 20 g | salt | 2 | ||
| 1000 g | water | 3 |
Most of the quantities are the same as previously, but there was less water. The twins had wanted 910 to 960 g of water, but my last loaves have used 1085 g. Today I started with 1000 g and found it sufficient; I later noted that years ago my water quantity was round 955 g, so the Gemini quantities look appropriate.
The other difference were the baking times and temperatures. In the past I baked at 220° for 20 minutes, then 170° for 80 minutes. Gemini wanted 240° for 15 minutes and then 200° for 35-45 minutes, and to use a temperature probe to determine the end (98-100°).
How did it go? I didn't think to take photos at the beginning, but towards the end it looked like this:
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And how about that, the temperature hit 98° just as the hour was up.
That's just barely light enough; I had worried that it might burn. But it disproved my concerns that it might not rise enough (claimed by Gemini) and that the yeast would no longer be active enough. It was 2 years out of date; I found 2 other packets that expired in November 2004 and April July, but I threw them away.
| Friday, 11 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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Unwise use of memory cards?
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
I have many strong opinions, and frequently they're in conflict with those of the general public. That doesn't mean that I won't reconsider, and I frequently read articles just to understand where they're coming from. But I need a good reason to change my opinion. For example I have access to my web site from my mobile phone, and when cooking I can access the recipes there. But I frequently go to my office and look at the recipe there rather than the more “convenient” alternative of looking at it on my phone in the kitchen.
Why? Using the phone is not more convenient. I can't think of any other reason.
And then there's the question of camera memory cards. Maybe my view comes from the relationship to film: you put a film in your camera, take your photos, remove the film and have it developed. Now I read them in to a computer, of course. How many photos can you take in a day? I think my personal record might be 500 or 600, corresponding to about 10 to 12 GB of data. I have 32 GB cards in my cameras, along with an additional 64 GB card in my OM System OM-1 Mark II, though I have almost never used it.
Today I read of a new series of cards, with capacities from between 512 GB and 4 TB. What do people do with such ridiculous amounts of storage? Boast? 4 TB corresponds to 200,000 images on my cameras. If I took continuous photos at 5 shots per second, it would take 40,000 seconds, about 11 hours, and the shutter would stand a good chance of failing. Reading in the data from my camera would take a few days. I can only assume that the end users use the memory cards as archival storage, something definitely unwise.
Then I saw the name of the maker: “Wise”. And that brings me to a different rant: “Wise”, the unwisely named money transfer service. I suppose I should thank the storage maker for showing how unwise the choice of name is.
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The first mow of spring
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Paul Donaghy along today to mow the lawn. To my surprise, the lawn mower started: in previous years the battery was flat after the winter break. But the cutter blades are blunt. Somehow there are always problems with lawn mowers. Paul tried to remove them, but the bolts were too tight. Sometime before the next mow is due.
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More ACDSee videos
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
It has been nearly 3 months since I bought acdsee Photo Studio Ultimate, and I still haven't got round to using it. I tried some of their videos last month, but didn't get very far. Spent some more time today, starting from the beginning of their videos to be on the saft side. They have a 9 part beginner's introduction, but the first 3 episodes don't even mention how to process an image: they're all about their database facilities, such as they are. There's certainly nothing that persuades me to change my approach to sorting photos.
And then there's this term “non-destructive” and also (by inference) “destructive”. What do they mean? I had always assumed that “destructive” meant that the original was permanently changed. But they're using it in a different manner that, I suspect, is just wrong: somehow the terms are reversed. “Non-destructive” looks more like “apply the changes to the original”, and “destructive” like “make a new image from which you can't return”. And then, fresh in this definition, they describe how to apply metadata to the original.
Somehow the whole concept is wrong. For me file processing (not just images) involves one or more input files, processing software and one or more output files. The input files remain unchanged. The output files are created. Is this so complicated that photographers have to come up with new terms which they themselves sometimes don't understand? After all, developing a raw (sorry, RAW) image file to a JPEG file fits my definition perfectly, and presumably no software overwrites the raw image with the JPEG version.
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The proof of the bread
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Sliced and ate the bread that I baked yesterday. It looked surprisingly like the sourdough bread, though it seemed more uniform in texture, except from one place where it seemed not to have been mixed properly. It tasted more strongly of caraway than I remember, but then I realized that I had put in 60 g instead of 40 g of caraway. In principle, a success. And then I found that I had increased the water to 1000 g five years ago today, mainly as an experiment. Maybe I should put less water in after all.
| Saturday, 12 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 12 September 2026 |
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Web browser migration: stalemate
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been two months since I started transitioning from firefox to chromium. It still isn't done, and I'm beginning to think that it never will be. Yes, firefox has bugs that chromium doesn't, but the converse is also true. Earlier in the month I had a case where chromium refused to perform a function because of perceived security issues. Dammit, I want a browser, not a minder. chromium also refuses to log in to the State Library of Victoria: any attempt fails silently.
And then today I read, from my subscription to The New York Times:
You have been blocked from The New York Times because we suspect that you're a robot.
Why am I seeing this? There are a few possibilities:
None of that applied, of course: it's clearly a bug in the Times' software. But it even occurred when I logged in as a different user. But it didn't with firefox! They later fixed it without telling me, but one way or another it's another reason to avoid chromium.
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Instagram pain again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I don't use Instagram except to look at photos that people post. Today was such a day. Log in, please. Sorry, wrong password.
That's another site that keeps forgetting my password (which was, in fact, something like WhyD1Dyouforgetit?). OK, reset again. “We will send you a code to your cell phone”. They didn't. Once again I'm out of contact with Instagram. Do I care? Only because of the nuisance value.
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Bliss: ignorance?
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Topic: general | Link here |
As we get older, our daily walking the dogs is shorter and shorter. A few years ago we would go 1 or 2 km, sometimes even 3. Lately it has been as short as 600 m.
But today the weather was nice, and Yvonne had energy. Round the loop Progress Road → Rozenstein Road → Bliss Road and back, a distance of about 3.3 km. It was interesting: there seem to be more houses there than I recall, particularly in Progress Road, though none has been obviously newly constructed.
But it wasn't until we were on Bliss Road that it occurred to us how many properties had “Keep out” signs or similar:
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None of these properties are particularly affluent. Here a wider view of the first image above:
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Why do they do it? Some of the signs look like they were quite expensive to erect.
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Missing days in this diary
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Part of writing up this diary is to compare the contents of the monthly diary with the previous contents. And oh horror, the entry for 8 September 2026 was missing!
Quick check: yes, it was still in the previous checked-in version, so I was able to restore it. But that's one of my horror scenarios. 25 years ago I lost the entries for 11 and 12 June 2001, and it still keeps me up at night. I have PHP code to catch this kind of problem. Why didn't it? The code is:
if (($yesterday != ($day - 1))
&& (($day != 1) || ($isdiary < 2)) /* don't complain on diary wraparound */
&& ($diary_complete != 0)) )
$missing_days .= "Incorrect sequence: $yesterday followed by $day\n\<br\>";
That looks OK. So why didn't it catch it? Spent much time searching through the code before I discovered this in the header of this month's diary:
$diary_complete = 0; /* No gaps */
Oh. That should be 1, not 0. And it seems that there were many such entries. Fix them all? Or kludge the test? For the time being, the kludge is the way:
if (($yesterday != ($day - 1))
&& (($day != 1) || ($isdiary < 2)) /* don't complain on diary wraparound */
&& (($diary_complete != 0) || ($diarydate > "20000901")) )
...
And that worked. And almost immediately I got an email message:
Invalid entries in diary /grog/diary-dec2025.php:
Incorrect sequence: 14 followed by 17
Incorrect sequence: 17 followed by 16
Aaargh! But it was benign: a typo in the date. I had written 17 December instead of 15 December, so all that was needed was to fix the date.
I wonder how many more are hiding there.
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The price of progress
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It has been nearly 3 years since I bought hydra.lemis.com, my new main machine with ridiculous quantities of memory. And I still haven't completely migrated to it:
I had hoped to migrate my X configuration from eureka, which also had 4 displays. But the window manager (fvwm 2) no longer works reliably. And the “drop-in” replacement fvwm3 has lots of compatibility issues.
The 3840×2160 monitors require a surprising amount of software configuration to display text in a legible size.
The intention to run all my other “machines” as virtual machines (and thus the 192 GB of main memory) hasn't come to fruition. There are too many bugs, in particular the networking code in conjunction with Microsoft. So I'm still running ThinkCentres like distress.
Countless newer versions of existing software no longer work the way I want them to, notably Emacs and Hugin. I've fixed some of them, but there are so many changes needed. It's a pain, and there's a quick workaround: use the version installed on eureka, now nearly 11 years old.
The last point raised its ugly head again today. When checking my daily diary, I display a diff in an Emacs buffer. Then I commit the version, still in Emacs. Only things have changed: previously, the commit would work even if the diff was selected. Now it silently fails. I really need to position in the diary buffer. This was the background for my lost day's entry. Nothing for it: use Emacs version 24.5.1 of 1 October 2016 rather than the halfway modern version on hydra.
What a let-down!
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How much bread for fondue?
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Fondue de fromage for dinner this evening, as frequently before. One of the issues is quantities. We need about 225 g of cheese and about ⅔ of that quantity of bread. This evening I weighed the ingredients: 222 g cheese, 159 g of bread. We had 27 g of bread left over, giving us a ratio of quite close to 0.6:1. It can never be that accurate, of course: the 159 g of bread represented 3½ slices of bread. But at least it's something to aim for.
A good thing that horses like pieces of bread.
| Sunday, 13 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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More noodle cooking time changes
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
How long do you cook noodles? I have a page about that, 40 pages long. And I'm constantly changing it: I'm currently at revision 1.118. Today I ate the Jack Hua rice noodles, which I have been cooking for 5 minutes regardless of width. But today's were the thin 1 mm cut. Do they need as long? My guess was no. Cooked them for 4 minutes, and they were fine.
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More ACDSee videos
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
I've now finished watching the acdsee Photo Studio videos. A total of 11 of them, including a 10 part introduction for beginners, of which only 3 were of much use. How to use their database facilities. How to attach an image to an email (excruciatingly complicated, even before their bizarre requirement of “Microsoft Outlook”). How to back up your photos. I didn't even bother looking at that one, though maybe I should.
The other three were interesting for reasons that I hadn't expected. I get the impression that the product derives from two separate products: “Develop” (“non-destructive”) and “Edit” (“destructive”). In fact, they do very similar things, and neither is “destructive”. The big difference seems to be that “Edit” uses layers and “Artificial intelligence", while “Develop” doesn't.
Sadly for me, though, they haven't shown anything that DxO PhotoLab can't do better, with the possible exception of lens distortion correction, which is based on lensfun. And that offers corrections for two lenses that my current version of DxO doesn't support: the Voigtländer Nokton 25 mm f/0.95 and the Sigma 150-600 mm. The latter is not not the same as my OM System M.Zuiko Digital 150-600 mm, of course, but it's closer.
So: at least I have an idea of how to navigate the application now. What I need to find is more about noise reduction.
| Monday, 14 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 14 September 2026 |
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“Xinjiang” bún bò Huế vermicelli
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I have only tried these dried noodles once:
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The instructions said to soak for 6 hours and then boil for two minutes. But I didn't follow the instructions: I just boiled them—for 75 minutes! That's some kind of record, of course, but then I didn't follow the instructions.
Today I did: soak 500 g for 6 hours:
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They didn't change much. At the end of the time they weighed 673 g. OK, cook for 2 minutes. Completely hard! In the end I got them half-way al dente after—75 minutes! By then they weighed 1515 g—most of them. Despite frequent stirring, they stuck to the base of the saucepan:
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So the pre-soaking made no difference at all. That's really a double record: firstly, that they need such long cooking, and secondly that the instructions are so completely wrong. I'm amazed.
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More ACDSee videos
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I didn't expect the acdsee Photo Studio video about making backups to be very interesting, but I should have at least looked at it. Followed up today. Yes, it is interesting, just not very helpful. According to the video, to back up your files you need to go through multiple menus, and back up the database and photos independently of another, thus making it easier to make a mistake. And in the demonstration, the presenter backed up individual parts of his collection—nearly a million photos—with different names! To make up for that, you only need to do that once a month. At least he backed up to a different system, though still in the same building.
A million photos? Is that a lot?
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 122 -> df -i /Photos
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/ada1p1 15,257,008 9,093,288 6,011,149 60% 1,898,011 4,588,131 29% /Photos
My /Photos disk has nearly 2 million files. Admittedly, they're not all individual photos. I'd guess round 450,000 photos in different sizes, with additional files (“database”). And it gets backed up every night to one of two different disks. The other is kept at Chris Bahlo's house, and we swap them once a week. Apart from the additional security and protection against mistakes, it's also easier.
But then, this is Microsoft.
| Tuesday, 15 September 2026 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 15 September 2026 |
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The remainder of the noodles
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
After yesterday's spectacularly burnt noodles, left them soaking overnight. To my surprise, they separated well from the saucepan, giving me another 145 g of noodles:
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More iChoose pain
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Into town today, the first chance I have to use my new iChoose cash card. Which one is it? And what's the PIN? Logged in, or at least tried to. “Invalid credentials”. OK, reset my password, and got email quite quickly:
The One Time Password (OTP) you requested is 390051.
OK, apply that. Try to log in. “Invalid credentials”. Repeat.
The One Time Password (OTP) you requested is 621910
“Invalid credentials”. OK, try their “customer support” line.
Me: Your system refuses to let me log in. I have tried "reset password" twice, and it doesn't accept the password that YOU sent.“Marie”: Please email hello@ichoosecard.com and request that your email address be updated for login OTP purposes. A member of our team will contact you to verify your identity before updating your registered email address.
Now isn't that helpful? Sent a message to that address:
I have tried to log in to my account today, with valid credentials, and your system refuses, claiming that they are invalid. I have reset the password twice, and it still claims that they are incorrect.I have had nothing but trouble with this card. The first one was “cancelled”, and you issued a new one. I have not had a chance to use it yet. Please ensure that it works.
At least they gave me a chance to rate the “support” that I had received:
This is the worst experience I have ever had. For two months now I have been trying to use the card, and at every turn I have had problems. I get the impression that this is deliberate.
But in the meantime I saw that they had sent me a different password, one minute after the first OTP password:
You are receiving this email because you requested a temporary password. You will need to enter the temporary password below to access the site. Once you have logged on you will be prompted to select a new permanent password. Please note that your password is case sensitive.Password: x%6v+kIX2C
So the OTP password (really a 6 digit PIN) was just to authenticate me on the web browser. How confusing can that be? I'm sure I'm not the first person to get caught by that. Tried the new password, and it worked. Set my password and tried to find the PIN. What I got was an image:
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Presumably the “eye icon” was the symbol at mid-right. But clicking on it didn't do anything useful. In the end I found that I could change my PIN elsewhere, but not find the old one. OK, set it to what I thought it was.
The good news: finally I was able to use the card to pay for my dentist's bill and at the Fruit Shack, but not at the “Ballarat Asian Grocery” next door. The only way to read it is to “swipe” (steal) it, and their card reader was defective. Still, I have now spent $300 odd of the $500 credit.
When I got home, I received a reply to my request to fix things, sent a little over 3 hours after my request:
Please proceed with resetting your password. Make sure you copy and paste the temporary password exactly as provided, as it is case-sensitive.
Now isn't that helpful?
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Finding Yuilles Wetlands
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Topic: general, animals, opinion | Link here |
The Yuilles Wetlands are a place that I had never heard of until very recently, though they're less than 1 km east in Sebastopol where we frequently go shopping:
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Decided to go there on my way into town. OK, Google Maps, how do I get there?
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Really? That looks wrong. What's that loop to the west? But looking with Street View I couldn't see anything better, so set off on that route.
I didn't get there. Neither, it seems, did Google Maps. Their Street View vehicles stopped long before, looking west down this track:
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That was the good part. Round the bend it got much worse, full of muddy potholes, to the point that I was afraid of getting bogged down, so I turned around and returned, forgetting to take any photos in the process. I can't believe that this is really the correct way to get there; a big fail for Google Maps.
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Dentists again
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Topic: health | Link here |
Off to town for my six-monthly dental checkup, which revealed nothing but excessive staining of the teeth. Mario gave me a treatment with sodium bicarbonate, which was surprisingly unpleasant. I don't know what the concentration was, but it tasted strongly of salt, not in itself that surprising.
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Fruit Shack: going downhill?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Then to the Fruit Shack with a long list of things to purchase. A surprising number of staples weren't available, including soya sauce and tauge, and also the fish balls that I prefer. There's always something out of stock at the Fruit Shack, but this was extreme.
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Mullawallah wetlands
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Topic: animals, photography, opinion | Link here |
Afterwards off to visit the Mullawallah wetlands to the west of Ballarat:
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Not many birds there, though a couple popped up right next to me on the boardwalk:
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Still, an opportunity to try out my new OM System M.Zuiko Digital 150-600 mm. Just keeping it on the subject is an issue, and a lot of the photos are off-centre like this one (taken hand-held at a “full frame” equivalent of 1478 mm focal length):
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It's amazing how many new roads I have travelled for the first time today.
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Reliable sourcing agent
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Seen in my mail today:
35 N 15-09-2026 To abuse 13242948978 (45) Re: Reliable sourcing agent services-streamline your supply Chain
Now doesn't that look reliable?
| Wednesday, 16 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 16 September 2026 |
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The first tulip of spring
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Topic: gardening, photography, opinion | Link here |
We planted most of the bulbs in the garden bed to the north of the house round ten years ago, and they have been multiplying slowly:
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Well, most of them. Most of the tulips died. There's only one in that photo.
Where? We need to look closer:
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There's clearly something that they don't like.
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Tele lens comparisons
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Taking the photos of the tulip was a good use of a long telephoto lens. It was also useful for comparing my OM System M.Zuiko Digital 150-600 mm and OM System MC-14 teleconverter combination with the Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400 mm f/4.0-6.3. Here each of them at 400 mm, first the Leica:
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At that size there's nothing to choose between them. How about a crop?
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If anything, the 210-840 combination looks better. The real problem, though, is the blade of grass in front of the tulip. That's what the camera focused on, and the tulip is marginally out of focus. At this distance the depth of field is 10 cm. Still, the result from the longer combination is reassuring, especially as it was at full aperture, while the 100-400 was stopped down ⅔ EV. Also, the image is marginally larger. The reported focal length was 406 mm, compared to 400 mm for the Vario-Elmar, but the difference looks larger than that.
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AAMI caught out
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Interesting article in the news today: “Suncorp's debt collector engaging in 'worst kind' of bullying”:
Debt collector ARMA Group spent months harassing and intimidating 81-year-old Diane Walker into paying an insurance claim she was not responsible for.
Now doesn't that sound familiar? There are multiple names involved, but in practice they're the same people trying to get money out of me for the same reasons. At least they gave up with Diane, and even compensated her financially. I wonder if they have given up with me; it has been a month since I have heard from them, but that's no indication that they have given up. Sent an email to Adelaide Miller, the author of the article, but so far I have heard nothing back.
| Thursday, 17 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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Phat si-io with Xinjiang bún bò Huế vermicelli
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Phat si-io for breakfast today. I'd do it more often, but frying the kway teow is difficult to do without them falling apart or sticking to the pan. How about the “Xinjiang” bún bò Huế vermicelli that I cooked earlier this week? I had a measured portion of cooked noodles. Just drop into the hot pan.
To my amazement, they didn't char at all. I had the pan on “boost” (3.7 kW), and just about everything burns, but the noodles didn't. Quite the opposite of the kway teow. Unfortunately, they also didn't absorb any of the juices, and the result was mildly disappointing.
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Firewall hell
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been using firewalls on my systems for over 25 years. My first mention was in December 2000, and it suggests that I had one installed when I restarted this diary. And still I have problems. Why?
One reason is that I haven't really checked things through properly. On dereel.lemis.com I have taken to just briefly accepting anything when I run into trouble. But lately I have seen increased attacks on ssh. That's not serious: my ssh requires keys. But it's annoying. OK, accept what I want, deny the rest:
=== root@lax (/dev/pts/0) ~ 18 -> ipfw add 901 deny ip from any to any
Oh. Somehow I managed to cut off the branch I was sitting on. Fight my way through Vultr's horrible console interface and tidy up again. Save current configuration. Plan to Do It Right next time.
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Smart phones: 15 years on
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Topic: history, technology, general, opinion | Link here |
When did the term “smart” phone come into existence? Some time ago now. The Oxford English Dictionary, who spell it “smartphone”, have references going back as far as 1983, though it's not clear that any of the references before 2009 refer to what we now think of “smart” phones. Maybe the best date is the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.
My first exposure must have been about 15 years ago, when Chris Bahlo showed me her new phone with an almost usable computer-like interface (running bash). But by chance I found that I mentioned the term 15 years ago today. I wasn't interested, summing the situation up as
Somehow smart phones seem to be a symptom of the failure to adapt to the Internet age.
To an extent, that's still the case. They have their own protocols, don't interact nicely with other computers, and they have become so complicated that people prefer SMS to making real phone calls. The only relict of their original use is their portrait-oriented display. I see that the latest iPhone is getting a wider display. Is that an indication that things will get better?
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More Exiftool pain
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Since getting my OM System OM-1 Mark II I have had lots of problem with exiftool. Phil Harvey fixed some of the problems that I have had, but it seems that other software, such as DxO PhotoLab, mauled the Exif data so that exiftool couldn't update it. So I now have this code (slightly simplified):
exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile $SRC '-all>all' -title=$BASENAME $1
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
SRC=`basename $SRC .jpeg`
grep $SRC Makejpeg | sed "s:^:orig/:; s:_DxO .*:.ORF:"
ORIG=`grep $SRC Makejpeg | sed "s:^:orig/:; s:_DxO .*:.ORF:"`
exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile $ORIG '-all>all' -title=$BASENAME $1
That reads the Exif data from the raw file if it can't get it from the JPEG file. But lately that also doesn't work, notably for the detailed shots of the tulips yesterday. Why? “I haven't changed anything”. More searching in this diary. Ah! I've been there before. Remove all Exif data and start again:
exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile $SRC '-all>all' -title=$BASENAME $1
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
SRC=`basename $SRC .jpeg`
grep $SRC Makejpeg | sed "s:^:orig/:; s:_DxO .*:.ORF:"
ORIG=`grep $SRC Makejpeg | sed "s:^:orig/:; s:_DxO .*:.ORF:"`
exiftool -all= $1 # remove old Exif
exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile $ORIG '-all>all' -title=$BASENAME $1
I still have issues with geotagging. This photo has Exif data that claim that it is 6.5 km to the east:
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What's the truth? One truth is that I discovered that the camera was set to a time zone offset of UTC+11:00, which could be the real problem. But searching this data is a real pain.
| Friday, 18 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 18 September 2026 |
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More firewall pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Why am I having so much trouble with firewalls? It continues in both directions. I left the firewall on dereel.lemis.com open, prompting a message from CERT:
"asn","ip","timestamp","rpc_response"
"4764","192.109.197.135","2026-09-15 04:48:56","100000 4 111/udp; 100000 3 111/udp; 100000 2 111/udp; 100000 4 111/udp; 100000 3 111/udp; 100000 2 111/udp; 100000 4 111/udp; 100000 3 111/udp; 100000 2 111/udp; 100005 1 627/udp; 100005 3 627/udp; 100005 1 627/udp; 100005 3 627/udp; 100003 2 2049/udp; 100003 3 2049/udp; 100024 1 966/udp; 100024 1 966/udp; 100003 2 2049/udp; 100003 3 2049/udp; 100021 0 659/udp; 100021 0 689/udp; 100021 1 659/udp; 100021 1 689/udp; 100021 3 659/udp; 100021 3 689/udp; 100021 4 659/udp; 100021 4 689/udp;"
It's interesting that there's no tcp there.
But on the other hand, a message from Jerry Dunham: his mail is not getting through. Oh. I host him on mail.lemis.com (a CNAME for lax). SMTP gets through, but POP3 doesn't: I cut it off. It seems that it needs ports 110 and 995. When will I find a way to think things through?
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A reliable partner
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
More spam today:
35 ND 15-09-2026 To abuse 13242948978 (45) ND Re: Reliable sourcing agent services-streamline your supply Chain
Now wouldn't you rely on a supplier sending messages to abuse?
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Magnolia in bloom
|
Topic: gardening | Link here |
Our Magnolia × soulangeana is flowering:
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That's gradually looking good, better than in previous years. Now why did we plant it so far from the house?
| Saturday, 19 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 19 September 2026 |
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Hokkien Mee
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Hokkien Mee for breakfast today. It was the first time that I followed exhortations to make the prawn broth out of prawn heads. And how about that, it made a big difference. It's supposed to be relatively dry, and I had 240 ml of broth, which seemed a lot. But I used it all. Part of that is for cooking the noodles, but I'm still surprised.
All recipes that I have seen want equal quantities of Hokkien noodles and bee hoon, and that's what I made today, using raw bee hoon. But it was far too much. I'm not sure I want any at all, but if I put any in next time, it will be much less. 20% or 25% maybe.
Still, it tasted good, and I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that Singapore food (including this dish) is much more oriented towards seafood than Kuala Lumpur food, though in this case the (Singapore) Hokkien Mee and KL Hokkien Mee have the same quantities of pork, prawns and squid.
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Ellie visits
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Ellie Eastham and her husband Jake moved into the “Schoolyard” on the corner of Stones and Bliss Roads a few months back. Yvonne discovered that Ellie is an active horse person, and today she came by to look at a saddle that Yvonne had for sale:
Can't find dimensions for 'Ellie-detail.jpeg'
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Much photo processing
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
I've been taking photos of the garden for nearly 19 years, and for almost as long I have been making panoramas. Initially it was difficult: I wanted to make them HDR, the camera I was using didn't really want to bracket exposures the way I wanted, and the software used what for the time was a ridiculous amount of time and memory.
But that's literally decades ago. For a while things worked well, but then the Hugin team modified the project so that it would no longer work as well, so now I run it partially on hydra (to process the HDR component and get the control points) and eureka (to do the stitching; modern versions run into trouble with extraneous objects like the ends of the panorama bracket in the corners).
And even so, control point detection has its own problems. So for a couple of panoramas I crop the images in DxO PhotoLab. And today, for some reason, I made a mess of it. The result: something like 3 hours of processing, something that I haven't done for years.
When will things get easier?
| Sunday, 20 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 20 September 2026 |
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Affinity? To what?
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Affinity have released a new version, 3.3,
with 57 over 60 varieties. I don't use it, but since it's free, it seems
reasonable to take a look. There's a video
announcement to go with it, one of the most confusing descriptions I have ever seen.
What's a blend tool? She doesn't say, but she spends about a third of the clip explaining
how to merge different coloured circles, without any explanation about why they're important
or even what they have to do with photography. It certainly doesn't awaken any affinity in
me.
That's only one clip, of course. There's also a relatively long course that explains things in detail, but it requires setting up an account. And it doesn't even say whether it's related to 3.3.
| Monday, 21 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 21 September 2026 |
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Learning Chinese
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Topic: food and drink, language, opinion | Link here |
I have a surprising amount of cabbage left over, and also a considerable amount of capsicum. What do I do with it? Another Chinese recipe, cabbage and capsicum stir-fry.
That wants doubanjiang. Do I have it? While looking through likely candidates, discovered what I had bought to top up supplies. I have these two bean pastes:
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The one on the left is real beans, the one on the right is made from wheat. In particular the left one is running out, so I bought some more last week:
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But is it related to doubanjiang? Clearly the sweet paste in the orange container isn't, but what about the green ones. Oh. The Chinese text is different. Google Lens tells me that the old one is “original bean paste”, and the new one is... doubanjiang. That's a mixed blessing: yes, I have what I need, but I'm still running out of “original bean paste”. I really must use this translation app more frequently, though I suspect that there's more to the old text than “original bean paste”.
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Hokkien Mee? Chow Mein? Chow Mien?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I bought far too many noodles at the Fruit Shack last week, and today I finished freezing the last of the fresh noodles.
What's this?
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On the face of it, it's something like Hokkien noodles. But reading vary carefully, I discover that it's “Chow Mien”:
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That doesn't look at all right, and it looks almost identical to their Hokkien noodles, here some that I bought four years ago::
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While I was looking at it, checked their web site. To my surprise, it's well presented and informative. Now if they could address their spelling...
And in the course of preparing the dish, it became evident that capsicum doesn't belong there. Now I'm going to have to change the name of the dish.
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Skin lesions
|
Topic: health | Link here |
For a while I have had lesions on my skin. Are they serious? I don't think so. This one is on my left hand between the forefinger and thumb:
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The image shows an area about 4 × 5 mm. Strangely, it is going away.
And then there's this one on the outside of my left calf, about 15 cm above the ankle:
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That should have healed by now. Why hasn't it?
Some of the more interesting things about the photos are the details they show, in particular skin peeling away. I wonder if that's significant.
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Extreme macro exposure
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
One of the physical rules of macro exposure is that you need to increase exposure beyond what the instruments tell you. A rule of thumb is that you need to increase exposure by 2 EV for a 1:1 exposure.
Why? The aperture is measured in “F-Stops”, really a fraction of the focal length of the lens. But the light coming through the lens depends not on the focal length (f) but on the distance of the entrance pupil from the focal plane (v). For normal exposures, they're pretty much the same: for a typical 50 mm lens camera, focused at 1 m, v is 52.6 mm. Theoretically that would require 0.1 EV compensation, but that's negligible.
But at 1:1, v is 2f, in this case 100 mm, and that means that the entrance pupil is only half the size: v/16, not f/8. I have a program that calculates this for me.
Today I took the photos of the lesion on my hand with the M.Zuiko Digital ED 30 mm f/3.5 Macro with 26 mm of extension tubes, giving a magnification of 2.11. And my program tells me
Subject Focal plane Magnification Exposure Near Far Depth of
distance (m) distance (mm) comp (EV) limit (m) limit (m) field (m)
0.0442 93.5001 2.117 3.3 0.0439 0.044452 0.000555
OK, measure the exposure with the exposure meter and adjust by 3.3 EV:
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Why? I don't understand. The exposure meter can't know about the lens setup. The only explanation could be that the camera changed from f/16 to v/16, which would be f/4.8. But it wasn't f/16: it was f/4.5. With such an adjustment it would have had to be f/1.4, which the lens can't do. And without the compensation, the exposure is correct. That can only be a coincidence.
I still need to puzzle this one out.
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How to darken teeth
|
Topic: health | Link here |
Three months ago, during my periodontic checkup, I noted that my teeth were badly stained. Leela fixed that. But then last week I had stained teeth again. Mario cleaned them, but also asked questions. One was: was I using mouthwash? It seems that it can stain teeth. And maybe that was the reason for the problems in June. After my periodontal treatment I had to use mouthwash for a while. But now? If mouthwash can do it, how about stupidly coloured toothpaste? A while back Yvonne accidentally picked up this toothpaste:
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No indication on the tube, nor on the packaging, that this stuff was in it. But not a reason to throw it away, I thought. But is that maybe the stuff that was staining my teeth? If so, it cost much more than the price of the paste. I've changed to an ALDI special “tooth whitening toothpaste”. Let's see how that works.
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Finding Affinity
|
Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yes, Affinity does have a free introductory course, for which I had to sign up and accept multiple 2FAs. But then I was able to download the videos, a good idea in view of manœuvrability. Spent some time looking at the first lessons. So far I have:
It's based on an older version of Affinity, of course. That's partially understandable: remaking it for every release is time-consuming and costly. But it shows the issues with changing the appearance in every release. Fortunately it's not as bad here as some that I have seen.
The first step is to reconfigure the appearance of the interface. Why? OK, the presenter likes it that way, but that's her personal preference. If she is going to do it, she should do it at the end of the course, where the reasons might be more obvious.
Like so many GUI programs, it renders really badly on my 3840×2160 display. Here a page from the tutorial followed by how it renders on my screen:
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Hopefully there's a way to fix that, but I can barely follow as a result.
Like so much of this software, they have their own language. So far I have found that their word for “workspace” is “studio”, a particularly poor choice.
They show how to navigate the GUI, but there are keyboard bindings that do the same thing. At the appropriate point in processing, C sets a crop mask, and when it's displayed Ctrl brings up a leveling line. And to their credit, and unlike DxO PhotoLab, cropping is free-form by default, though you can set fixed ratios—exactly what I have wanted from DxO for ever
| Tuesday, 22 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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Affinity: why bother?
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
To continue with the Affinity videos, moved my distress window from hydra:0.2 to hydra:0.0, which has a 1920×1080 display. At least I can recognize the icons now.
But the next step was to apply brushes to the sample image. That has two problems: firstly, it's what I'm trying to avoid: the software should be able to recognize contours itself. More important, though: it didn't work! Or at least it didn't behave as shown in the course. That could be due to the fact that I'm using a newer version of Affinity than the one used in the course. But it raises the question: why bother? I have a currently unused copy of acdsee Photo Studio Ultimate („das Letzte“) that I haven't got round to using. I should be looking at that first.
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Understanding skin lesions
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Topic: health | Link here |
After yesterday's photos of skin lesions, checked out sites on the web, and came up with this page, which looks interesting. At least it doesn't raise any alarm bells.
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TUHSI committee meeting
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
The Unix Heritage Society Inc. has agreed to conduct business by email. But we're an association registered in Victoria, and the CAV, under which we're incorporated, has rules that we have adopted almost without change. Now we discover that, along with the requirement of an AGM, they also include the requirement of a committee meeting every 3 months, either in person or (oh modernity!) by video conference. Our next meeting is planned for Saturday 26 September at 23:00 UTC, 9:00 on Sunday here. And there seems to be no point in having separate AGMs and committee meetings where everybody is on the committee, so we'll consider the AGM to be a special committee meeting where the officers get (re)elected.
How do we adapt that? My best guess is that we conduct our business by email, as planned, and get together for a brief Zoom meeting where we confirm what we have discussed. Spent much time today writing this up, and got almost no replies.
| Wednesday, 23 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 23 September 2026 |
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Garden flowers at the equinox
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Today was the September equinox, time for the monthly garden photos.
For once,there are a couple of positives. Our Magnolia is finally flowering as one might expect:
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The bulbs in the north garden are gradually fading, but they're still putting on a good show:
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The Alyogyne huegelii is flowering particularly strongly:
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And a couple of roses are flowering despite the season and lack of attention:
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Recipe development
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I've been keeping recipes online for nearly a quarter of a century now. Originally it was because I couldn't find anything that I was looking for, later because they were no good, and always because I wanted to make notes and keep the recipe in an easy-to-use form.
But times have changed. The recipes available on line are now much better—some of them, anyway—and there are more of them. For some time I have been looking for recipes that use (green) cabbage, and to my surprise I found a number of recipes for KL Hokkien Mee that use cabbage! That certainly wasn't the case when I collected my current recipe five years ago.
What other surprises do I have in store?
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Still more subtitle pain
|
Topic: multimedia, technology, opinion | Link here |
Lately I have had even more trouble than usual with video subtitles. I had already established that mpv has trouble with subtitles that start with the text WEBVTT (which, unsurprisingly, implies WebVTT), and that in many case just removing the text causes it to display the titles.
But recently I discovered that that alone wasn't enough.
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/17) /spool/Series 232 -> mmp 01-04.mkv
/usr/local/bin/mpv --write-filename-in-watch-later-config --sub-font-size=30 --osd-font-size=20 01-04.mkv
Can not open external file 01-04.srt.
Can not open external file 01-04.en.VTT.
● Video --vid=1 (h264 1920x1080 25 fps)
● Audio --aid=1 --alang=eng (aac 2ch 48000 Hz)
AO: [oss] 48000Hz stereo 2ch float
VO: [gpu-next] 1920x1080 yuv420p
That happened after I removed the WEBVTT. OK, replace it. No improvement. Did I do it right?
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series 353 -> diff -wu 01-04.en.VTT foo
--- 01-04.en.VTT 2026-09-23 11:03:44.822135000 +1000
+++ foo 2026-09-23 11:18:37.280972000 +1000
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-WEBVTT
+WEBVTT
STYLE
Huh? Spaces? Check with Emacs. No difference. Only when I positioned the point at the first character did I discover an undisplayed character:
Char: (65279, #o177377, #xfeff, file ...) point=1 of 68399 (0%) column=0
But the only clue on the text display was that the cursor changed from red to blank. That's disappointing. So far I had relied on Emacs to show things that I wouldn't otherwise have seen.
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Fast fake food
|
Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
A while back Yvonne asked me about a new food place in Sebastopol: Guzman y Gomez. Clearly Spanish in some form, and it proves that it claims that it serves Mexican food.
OK, it doesn't cost anything to look in, and if she liked it, she could bring something back. It's not clear whether she liked it, but she did bring something back, a “burrito”:
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What resemblance does that have to anything Mexican? It seems that the dish is really
Tex-Mex, and
flour tortilla“wrap” is authentic, but salad with salad dressing? Not
even a hint of any Mexican spice? Only a hint of meat. Not even frijoles? She could have had
rice instead of salad, but that was all. And for that we paid $14.
I have long considered anything “Mexican” in Australia to be off limits, but this was a new low.
| Thursday, 24 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 24 September 2026 |
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Chengdu Hokkien Mee?
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Topic: food and drink, history, opinion | Link here |
Two years ago today I finalized my version of KL Hokkien Mee. And yesterday's thoughts about using cabbage in it got me thinking. How about using Sichuan spices as well? Doubanjiang and Sichuan pepper instead of caramel and soya sauce? After all, Chengdu is almost on the coast, so prawns and squid will be part of the normal diet:
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Today I tried that. Here the differences from KL Hokkien Mee in bold:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 150 g | cabbage | 1 | ||
| 70 g | marinated pork | 2 | ||
| 15 g | lard | 2 | ||
| 15 g | garlic | 3 | ||
| 3 | ||||
| chicken broth | 4 | |||
| 5 | ||||
| 5 | ||||
| 5 | ||||
| 0.5 g | Sichuan pepper | 5 | ||
| 18 g | doubanjiang | 5 | ||
| 6 g | cornflour | 5 | ||
| 180 g | loosened cooked Hokkien noodles or bucatini | 6 | ||
| 50 g | squid tubes, cut into strips | 6 | ||
| 50 g | medium prawns (4 to 6) | 6 | ||
| 6 | ||||
| 6 | ||||
The result:
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And it was somewhat boring. Although Chengdu is on the sea, the prawns and squid didn't seem to fit. And I didn't use enough doubanjiang. I had thought it too salty to use more, but elsewhere I see I have used up to 40 g.
| Friday, 25 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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Who is TUHSI?
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
The Unix Heritage Society Inc. is gradually getting off its feet. One thing that we currently don't have is a page describing who and what we are, and I'm currently working on it. One part is clear:
The Public Officers of TUHS Inc. are:
President Warren Toomey
Vice-President Clem Cole
Secretary Greg Lehey
Treasurer David Arnold
But that's a bit bare-bones. We need a description of these people, a sort of one-paragraph biography. Can Google Gemini help? No. I asked the question “Give me one-paragraph texts for the officers mentioned in (temp page)”
The results weren't what I expected. The entry for Warren looked plausible:
Warren Toomey is the founder and primary driving force behind the Unix Heritage Society (TUHS). A computer science academic in Australia, Toomey created the project in the mid-1990s to archive, restore, and preserve historical Unix releases, documentation, and source code before they were permanently lost to bit rot. Through his continuous archival work and maintenance of the TUHS mailing lists and repositories, he established the definitive home for computing history enthusiasts and vintage system preservationists worldwide.
But Clem and David weren't even mentioned! Instead the twins mentioned Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and Armando Stettner! Nothing against them, although the regulations exclude dead people from serving on a committee, but what do they have to do with running TUHSI?
And mine was vary inaccurate. Here highlighted the claims that are Just Plain Wrong:
Greg Lehey is a prominent open-source developer, author, and long-time TUHS administrator who maintains the primary Australian mirror and web presence for the project. Best known for his extensive contributions to FreeBSD—including the design and implementation of the Vinum volume manager—and his detailed technical books on FreeBSD and Linux, Lehey has provided critical infrastructure, hosting, and organizational support to ensure the digital assets collected by TUHS remain publicly accessible.
In other words, half of it was made up!
That wasn't the only problem I had with Gemini today. One thing I wanted to find are the model rules that we have for Victorian associations. The link we have on our page is internal. Why not link to the original model rules on the Consumer Affairs Victoria web site?
Multiple queries, all answered wrong. The correct answer is: there is no document on the CAV web site, only a downloadable file in proprietary Microsoft “Word” format. So our legible copy stands. But today Gemini showed itself from its worst side.
| Saturday, 26 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 26 September 2026 |
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More web server performance problems
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Once again my external web servers are overloaded. And I didn't even notice. I have top displays on hydra:0.3, but by accident I had one from ffm.lemis.com, which is not a web server, and not fra, which was ridiculously overloaded.
OK, add lax.lemis.com and dereel.lemis.com to the list of www.lemis.com. And how about that, lots of traffic for dereel, to the point that my upload bandwidth went up to 16 Mb/s, while it was theoretically limited to 5 Mb/s. And dereel's CPU load barely increased.
There's something funny here. My external web servers seem to handle a similar load, but they respond far more slowly. Could the problem be elsewhere? Vultr supplies multiple virtual machines per host. What if they all hit 100%? How can I tell what the effective performance is? Asked Google Gemini and got the confirmation that some Vultr sites are particularly prone to overload, including Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and Frankfurt am Main, exactly where my servers are located. It looks as if I should go for Stockholm and Honolulu. So for a first step I chose Stockholm (arn.lemis.com).
I really should set up a higher speed local uplink.
In passing, looking at the hit logs, there were a surprising number of hits for diary-sep2014.php and diary-aug2010.php, several per second from wildly different IP addresses. Why?
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Where is Tomato?
|
Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Today was Roberto “Tomato” Tomasi's 88th birthday. Sent him a Happy Birthday message and got the sad news that the account no longer existed. I fear that's the end of him.
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Yana returns
|
Topic: general | Link here |
Our daughter Yana back for a few days this evening. Much talk.
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Trump renamings continue
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Topic: politics, fiction | Link here |
Yana has a number of mesoamerican connections, and we started talking about the current political climate. Donald Trump still doesn't understand that America is a pair of continents, not a country. He has already “renamed” the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” and Lake Ontario to “Lake America”. What else can he do?
How about renaming a country? Canada is not an option, because he wants to make it the 51st state of “America”. How about México? From now on México will be named (in Spanish) « Estados Unidos Americanos ». In English, “The United States of America”.
| Sunday, 27 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 27 September 2026 |
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TUHSI committee meeting
|
Topic: technology, general | Link here |
TUHSI committee meeting this morning at 9:00 (23:00 UTC yesterday). Everybody's on the committee, and almost everybody showed—only Larry McVoy didn't, and he has been missing for some time. Now to proceed to the minutes.
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More eye flashes
|
Topic: health | Link here |
The eye flashes that I had sporadically noticed since mid-August haven't happened often, but today I had them again—in two different places, this time off at 225° (again, but closer to the optical axis) and off to the right (80°?). It's always at the same time, early in the morning when I'm looking at a bright screen. The fact that it's no longer in the same place is somewhat comforting.
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More mail problems
|
Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Today is Sonny Rajah's 79th birthday. Unlike Robsersi Tomato, he is still very much alive and kicking: he sent me a birthday greeting yesterday. Time for me to do the same.
<sonnyrajah@hotmail.com>: host
hotmail-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[52.101.41.5] said: 550 5.7.1
Unfortunately, messages from [45.32.70.18] weren't sent. Please contact
your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block
list (S3140). You can also refer your provider to
http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors. [Name=Protocol
Filter Agent][AGT=PFA][MxId=11BE3541C7B5062F]
[SJ5PEPF000001D7.namprd05.prod.outlook.com 2026-09-26T22:52:17.826Z
08DF1AA0E5786944] (in reply to MAIL FROM command)
Bloody Microsoft! That's collective punishment. But they're punishing me for others in the same net block. Nothing for it: change my delivery mechanism. I should be able to send directly from eureka, but first I have to brave RIPE and finally get my reverse DNS set up. Try Aussie Broadband again? OK, upgrade the mail configuration and try again.
relayhost = mail.aussiebroadband.com.au
# relayhost = lax.lemis.com
Bounce the message and look at the logs:
Sep 27 17:27:17 eureka postfix/qmgr[52721]: 16695263598: from=<grog@lemis.com>, size=2351, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Sep 27 17:27:17 hydra postfix/smtp[50465]: 052D0B89: to=<sonnyrajah@hotmail.com>, relay=mx0.lemis.com[192.109.197.137]:25, delay=0.09, delays=0.07/0/0.01/0.01, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 16695263598)
Sep 27 17:27:17 hydra postfix/qmgr[2007]: 052D0B89: removed
Sep 27 17:27:22 eureka postfix/smtp[52735]: 16695263598: to=<sonnyrajah@hotmail.com>, relay=hotmail-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[52.101.185.25]:25, delay=5.8, delays=0.01/0/1.3/4.5, dsn=2.6.0, status=sent (250 2.6.0 <arhMoAjTjKkxGc3I@hydra.lemis.com> [InternalId=11755325493688, Hostname=SEWP216MB400811.KORP216.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM] 10694 bytes in 0.310, 33.655 KB/sec Queued mail for delivery -> 250 2.1.5)
Sep 27 17:27:22 eureka postfix/qmgr[52721]: 16695263598: removed
Huh? It didn't even try Aussie Broadband. It went straight to Hotmail—and was accepted. What happened there? And why did Hotmail accept me all of a sudden?
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Yana's camera equipment
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Yana brought some photographic equipment with her, including no fewer than three Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I bodies; the one that I bought in December 2013, and which failed in May 2024, the one I bought to replace it a few days later and which failed for Yana some time last year, and the one that she bought to replace that one. I'm planning to try to salvage a working camera from the two defective ones. The older one has a defect in the image stabilization, something that I don't think worth repairing, and the newer one has a damaged rear screen. Simple: put on the rear screen from the older one. But that's for another day.
And then she brought a lens that she had bought because it was so cheap: a Hanimex 135 mm f/2.8 Macro, apparently fully functional, which she had got for $20.
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What mount? She didn't know. Tried it out on Canon, Nikon and Pentax, no go. And then I noticed the OM on the rear lens cap. Tried it on the Olympus OM-1. Fits! But it doesn't fire. It's not the camera: it work fine with the other lenses, and the shutter continued firing when I started to remove the lens. All points to some issue with the connections at the back:
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But they look the same as the ones on the 50 mm f/1.8 Zuiko:
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It seems that one lever conveys the aperture setting, and the other stops down the lens. And both work. Why doesn't it work? And of course it wouldn't obstruct the E-M1. Now where's that OM-Four thirds adapter? Oh. I must have sold it with the 80-210 mm Tamron, only about 18 years ago
But while pondering that, discovered another problem: it can't focus to infinity! Somehow this reminds me fatefully of the Sun Zoom 80-240 mm, which also had similar issues. Still, it also means that there's not much point trying to fix it.
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More food orgies
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Now that Yana is here, Yvonne had the idea of some nice food; it looks like being spread out over three days. Today we had asparagus with prosciutto, followed by salmon lasagne:
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It certainly tired Yvonne, and I was also tired from doing nothing. Very early to bed.
| Monday, 28 September 2026 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 28 September 2026 |
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| last day |
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Happy Birthday
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Topic: general, food and drink | Link here |
Today was my birthday. I'm now 10078 years old, a number that seems wrong. And
once again more food. Looking at Yana, it's clear how our
appetites are dwindling.
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Random photo stuff
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Topic: photography | Link here |
Took another look at the Hanimex 135 mm f/2.8 Macro again today. The front lens group was loose! More investigation shows that this is part of the macro facility, which works by moving this section. So: the focus issue was as simple as screwing the front section back.
I can hear H. L. Mencken laughing in the background. No, even with the group screwed in fully, it doesn't focus to infinity.
But in the meantime Yana had discovered something about infrared photography. I'm not sure what, but as a result I dragged out my full spectrum Olympus E-PM1 and took a few photos, none of which, as usual, were very interesting.
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Birding in Ballarat
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Topic: photography, general, opinion | Link here |
After seeing a number of depressingly good photos from Carol Ann Moyse, decided to go to Lake Wendouree to see what bird photos I could get there. Yana came along, though not for the photography.
Stopped in at the new ALDI shop in Delacombe Town something; they seem to delight in finding new terms for different sections. The ALDI shop opened last week, and I wanted to take a look. Traffic is even worse than previously, and I discovered that I had forgotten my thongs. No worry, that has happened more than once before: that's why I have a spare pair in the back of the car. But not this time. It seems that I didn't replace them after the last such incident. Fortunately we were in a good place to buy a new pair at Kmart.
Getting out of Delacombe Town Centre (the old part) is almost impossible. They seem to deliberately make it difficult to leave, and I ended up in some drive-through food supplier. But we made it to the west side of Lake Wendouree, where Yana found something to sketch while I looked for birds:
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There are plenty of birds there, of course, but they're mainly boring. Certainly nothing like the spoonbills that Carol found in the middle of the lake. Maybe we should rent a boat, something that Mark Twain admired centuries ago.
Probably the biggest discovery was the difficulty of using my new OM System M.Zuiko Digital 150-600 mm lens. It's really difficult following things, and probably two-thirds of the shots were taken at focal lengths below the 400 mm that I could get with the much less unwieldy Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400 mm f/4.0-6.3. But it's all good practice, and there are definitely other places where the additional length of the Zuiko are needed.
A couple of not overly successful shots, here heavily cropped, still pose puzzles. What is that bird?
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And while looking at that, discovered a whole lot of other birds sitting in the tree:
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Off relatively soon with the intention of finally finding Yuilles Wetlands, despite Google Maps, which was being particularly obnoxious today. Here's the entrance:
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And starting from there, here's how Google Maps wants you to get inside:
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Not only a deviation of 4.5 km, but also really terrible roads, while the correct road is quite acceptable. Here from the parking space:
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The entrance is on the right.
It's pretty enough there, but there were almost no birds to be seen.
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About the only things were dragonflies, and they're not easy to catch. Unless they're stuck in the water:
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But Yana saved that one:
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It had been caught in duckweed, and once cleaned off, was happy to leave:
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But on the whole, there's not much to see there. Maybe I'm just too impatient for birding.
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More mail puzzles
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So I have mail on eureka configured to deliver mail via Aussie Broadband. Or at least that's what the configuration file says. But what I see is that it's delivered directly. And nobody seems to care that my reverse lookup is broken.
Sep 28 16:56:58 eureka postfix/smtp[64327]: 64897263598: to=<christiane.bahlo@gmail.com>, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.251.169.26]:25, delay=2.1, delays=0.01/0/0.96/1.1, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1790578618 41be03b00d2f7-cc7b815691csi961571a12.307 - gsmtp)
<christiane.bahlo@gmail.com>: delivery via
gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.251.169.26]:25: 250 2.0.0 OK 1790578618
41be03b00d2f7-cc7b815691csi961571a12.307 - gsmtp
But while checking the route, I got this:
<groggyhimself@freebsd.org>: host mx1.freebsd.org[96.47.72.80] said: 550-5.7.1 Service
unavailable; client [192.109.197.137] blocked using DNS-based denylists 550
5.7.1 in case of permanent delivery errors (e.g. 5XX SMTP errors) please
send your problem report from a non-blocked location (e.g. gmail/yahoo) to
postmaster@FreeBSD.org and include the following information: time (Sep 28
02:05:22) and client (192.109.197.137). (in reply to RCPT TO command)
They rejected my mail because of the forward DNS! My private domain! Why? That was the biggest surprise.
| Tuesday, 29 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 29 September 2026 |
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| last day |
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Overload
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Topic: general | Link here |
Somehow the last couple of days have been very busy. It took me until late afternoon to finish processing my photos and diary, and I didn't get round to reading my historical diaries for yesterday until the evening.
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Following mail issues
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Why didn't my email go through Aussie Broadband after I made the configuration change on Saturday? I had set the configuration:
relayhost = mail.aussiebroadband.com.au
# relayhost = lax.lemis.com
FOOL! You left a space at the beginning of the line! Remove that and it attempts to send the message via Aussie.
And fails:
Sep 29 15:15:19 eureka postfix/smtp[69952]: 358882635AD: to=<groggyhimself@FreeBSD.org>, relay=mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25]:25, delay=2.7, delays=0.01/0/0.76/1.9, dsn=4.3.3, status=deferred (host mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25] said: 450 4.3.3 <root@lemis.com>: Sender address rejected: Mail rate limit Policy rejection - Contact Aussie Broadband on 1300 880 905 (in reply to RCPT TO command))
I've seen that before:
Aug 15 09:31:03 eureka postfix/smtp[84759]: A70202635A9: to=<grog@freebsd.org>, relay=mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25]:25, delay=2.2, delays=0.01/0/0.52/1.7, dsn=4.3.3, status=deferred (host mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25] said: 450 4.3.3 <grog@lemis.com>: Sender address rejected: Mail rate limit Policy rejection - Contact Aussie Broadband on 1300 880 905 (in reply to RCPT TO command))
And didn't I raise a fault? Yes, ticket 38834750, for which I had to check the connection and claim that I had disconnected my network from the net for 30 minutes. What happened to the ticket? They closed it without telling me. Instead of sending me an email message, they expected me to check for a response, and that where it took over 3 days for them to respond and apparently not understand the message.
Sent another message. I wish I could find a way round the first level support and their fixation on phone calls.
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More web site pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
At the moment my web site seems to be working OK. www.lemis.com maps to fra.lemis.com and arn.lemis.com, and performance is bearable. But today Yana came and told me that she couldn't access my photos. She's looking at the external site, which in this case proved to be arn. And I had forgotten to sync the metadata there.
Somehow this is all too much work.
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The cruft of ages
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Apart from my other work, spent far too much time catching up with various scripts and kludges that I have written over the past 20 year. How do I get Hugin to behave in a sane environment? It always tries to return to the last directory, almost always the directory for the date at the time. And my kludge (frob the config file) no longer works. It seems to have hidden this information elsewhere. And setting Exif data for a single file still causes problems, though I wasn't able to find out which: after trying to debug createexif.php, it suddenly started working. “I didn't change anything”. All worked in the end, but it took up a lot of time, and I'm no closer to understanding things.
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Black belt Yana
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Topic: general | Link here |
Yana practices Taekwondo, and while she was here she went to a meeting of the local club, conveniently next door to the physiotherapy clinic where Heather Dalman practices. Here she is with her black belt and second Dan (what you get when you run out of belt colours):
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I had some difficulty reading the Korean inscriptions on the belt; they're a little stylized (and I forgot to take a photo just of the belt). Here's the best I have:
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| Wednesday, 30 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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Another day cooking
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Since Yana wasn't there yesterday evening, we had a pause from cooking. But today I cooked pollo en adobo, something that I apparently haven't done for over 14 years. In the meantime I have done more research, so started off by taking a look at some recipes. Both of the two I looked at in detail wanted the onions fried and slightly charred before being added to the chile mixture. OK, we can do that.
Looking at it, it seemed so simple. But somehow it kept me going all afternoon, not helped by making no fewer than 10 tortillas. And for once a big disappointment: it was really pedas, something that it shouldn't be, and it spoilt the balance. As a result Yvonne couldn't eat it at all. Apart from that, though, it was relatively successful. But which of the three chiles (ancho, pasilla and mulato) was responsible for the pedasness? Wikipedia says of the pasilla: ”it is a mild to hot, rich-flavored chile”, so that could be it.
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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