Woke up in the middle of the night with diarrhoea, not the first time in the last
week. Not serious, and it went away by itself. But what caused it? After some
investigation discovered that both occasions occurred after I had eaten some of the
shiitake mushrooms that Yvonne had bought last week.
Mushroom poisoning is in fashion at the moment, with a court case about an alleged mushroom poisoning in Leongatha currently
under way in Morwell generating a surprising amount of interest. But I have had sensitivity to other mushrooms
before as well, and hopefully I'm not in any danger.
What are they? Based on my last disaster I asked whether I could press on them. Yes, they're stones, probably
rose quartz, and she had
found them just outside the house entrance, in front of the library window.
More investigation: no, they're not stones. They're some kind of bulb. The one at bottom
left looks vaguely like garlic. And gradually it dawned on me: they're bulbs from the pink
lily that I have noted in the past (first photo):
My flaky weather station has come good. For a while. It keeps losing contact between the
inside and outside units. Today it did so again, and I really can't understand why. It
can't be the distance: it's only about 20 m, through a window, and most of the time it
works. When it doesn't, bringing the two units closer doesn't help. It also can't be
batteries: the batteries in the inside unit were fully charged, and the ones in the outside
unit are charged by solar power. But it failed when the sun was shining after running all
night.
Why don't I buy a new one? I wrote the software for the unit (Fine Offset WH-1081), and it is no longer available.
But clearly I need to do something. Web searches, including with Google Gemini, brought me little
help, beyond pointing to some free software, Cumulus MX, that may help. But it's written in C#, and I don't even
know how to compile that. But it has an export to MySQL function, so potentially it could be
useful.
But while looking for alternatives, saw this:
The inside unit is exactly the same as the unit for the WH-1080:
And that's what I want to interface with. The external unit is quite different, but that's
no problem. What is it? It's a Tesa WS1081 Solar Powered Touch Panel Weather Center with PC interface, and it's made
by La Crosse. It's available from a number of places for a remarkably uniform price of
$249. I have the options of buying from at least Big W (who provided the image), Harvey Norman or Instrument Choice, who make by far the most professional impression.
OK, buy it, but from whom? On closer inspection, Harvey Norman are the cheapest at $225.
But I can't pick it up: they have to send it to me, for which they charge the excessive
price of $24, bringing the total to $249. Big W also wants to send it, but that's free,
bringing the total to $249. And Instrument Choice also sends for free, but they charge
$249.95. And while checking the postage, got this message:
Backorder Now, once ordered your item will dispatch before the 17th of July 2025, call
1300 419 842 (NZ 0800 737 871 to confirm).
Clearly Harvey Norman are pulling a fast one, and Instrument Choice could have made the
status clearer on their sales page. Big W offer a 30 day return policy, which under the
circumstances sounds like a very good idea. So they get my order.
I'm trying more macro photos of plants. I haven't found time to continue my shots of the
Schlumbergera
truncata, but there are others that I wanted to take too, like these seed pods of
Hibiscus
rosa-sinensis:
OK, straightforward enough. Use the mecablitz 15 MS-1,
which requires the toy flash on the camera. Turn the mecablitz on, take a photo.
No flash! With a lot of messing around I got four good photos and six where the flash
didn't fire. And the exposure was incorrect, despite TTL measurement. In the end I dragged
out my old manual Viltrox JY-670 Macro
Ring Lite, which worked without too much trouble. But why is flash always such
a pain? At least now I don't waste expensive film if the flash doesn't fire, but that's
about all.
Yesterday's flash problems irritate me greatly. Time to investigate why I always
have such problems. Found the instruction manual for the mecablitz 15 MS-1—I don't think I ever
got a PDF version—and read the
instructions for the appallingly difficult configuration. The big discovery was that
it is possible to use my with a cable, but then I lose the clever camera
functionality. But why did things go wrong yesterday? It could be the camera settings, but
I would have thought that they would be OK.
Time to write down some details of
what flash equipment I have and how to use it.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
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