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| Wednesday, 24 April 2024 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 24 April 2024 |
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Mona's progress
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Mona is gradually becoming less timid, but the emphasis is on gradually. I was here alone in the morning, since Wednesday is Yvonne's shopping day. Mona came out and inspected the place, wanted to be stroked, and all seemed well.
But then I went into town too, and when I got back, she had retreated behind the bassoon cabinet again. And she didn't come out for hours. By 20:00 I was getting worried and looked for her everywhere (how often have I done that with various cats?). Climbed up on a footstool and looked down behind the cabinets in the corners. Nothing.
But Bruno, who had joined in on the fun, suddenly hissed: Mona was right in front of him in this part of the bassoon cabinet:
Extracted her, moved Bruno to another room, and she stayed with us all evening. She's becoming much more friendly now, and if it weren't for the other animals, the adaptation period would probably be over.
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Next doctor's appointment
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Into town today to visit Kontoku Shimokawa to hear the results of Yvonne's latest pancreas MRI. Things didn't start off well: it took longer to put the animals away, while driving out of the garage I managed to knock over the air compressor that I had carefully placed behind the car, the door opener remote control didn't work, so I had to go and get the spare, and while I arrived in front of the practice exactly at 14:00, by the time I found a parking place and walked back, it was 14:05. Never mind, Kon always lets us wait—except for today, where he was 3 minutes early. He had put in another patient in between, so we had to wait after all.
Never mind, says Yvonne, all is OK, no change since last time. We could have left, but since he had been alerted that we were both there, we went in anyway. Gap in pancreas has increased, the question is when to have surgery. Some time in the next 5 years; after age 80 he wouldn't want to perform surgery, which would take up to 12 months to recover from. Yvonne is clearly worried (“give me three years and I'll be happy”). I don't buy that. Clearly we're going to have some discussions. The question is whether her other ailments might make the point moot. For now she has another MRI appointment in 3 months.
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Remote control battery change
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Why couldn't I open the garage door with the remote control today? Clearly the battery was flat. That's not surprising after 9 years, but how do you change it? The casing clearly comes apart, but there's no indication how it's intended to be opened.
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I still don't know. I opened it by pressing a screwdriver between the two halves, slightly damaging the casing, but that doesn't seem right. Maybe it's intended to be opened somewhere round this buckle, but I don't see where:
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Still, it works, and nobody will ever notice the slight damage.
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Bloody AAMI!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Yet another nonsense email from AAMI today, a reply to my message of 12 April:
I have attached the screenshot showing that your wife willingly shared your vehicle's registration when asked by our client to claim insurance.
The screenshot attached shows where you confirmed the accident.
The evidence holds you at fault. Please share your insurance details or pay the demands in full before we escalate the claim for further recovery.
What kind of nonsense is that? Of course we “willingly shared the vehicle's registration”. Why not? And the (second) screenshot to which he referred is part of my diary entry for 18 October 2022, clearly stating “The damage? Nothing visible”. OK, Nitin, tell me what makes me at fault, and how it explains the various damages that Helen Miller claims to have been cause, from memory including scratches along the side of the car. Where's the assessor's report?
The best thing is to go along. Escalate the claim. Nobody with any sense is going to take this one to court.
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No weather!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Checking the weather readings from my weather station this evening. None! I had forgotten to restart the application after tiwi lost power on Saturday.
OK, start it. “Can't find libmysqlclient.so.18”. Damn, which version is it? I've been messing around with these things so long that I don't recall which I was using. In principle it would be in ~/src/weather/WH-1080-tiwi/, but there is no such directory, just directories with other system names and versions going back 12 years:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/13) ~ 26 -> l -rt ~/src/weather/WH-1080*/wh1080
-rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 62,179 5 Jul 2012 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-amd64/wh1080
-rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 54,368 29 Nov 2020 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-dereel/wh1080
-rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 52,741 11 Sep 2022 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-eureka/wh1080
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root lemis 61,048 23 Oct 2023 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-lagoon/wh1080
-rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 54,312 9 Nov 14:53 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-hydra/wh1080
-rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 52,788 24 Apr 22:15 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-teevee/wh1080
WH-1080-teevee/ maybe? No, that didn't work either. OK, rebuild the executable. “No mysql/mysql.h”. Oh.
More messing around. There is a file /usr/local/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.18. What does ldconfig -m say? Accepts it, works. Why did I have to do that? Probably because /usr/local/lib/mysql/ is a symlink to the directory on eureka.
Done? No, I had blown away /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-teevee/wh1080. How do I get it back again? From a backup (220 GB of compressed tar)? That could take hours. Rebuild? It doesn't work on tiwi, but it does on eureka. And finally I was able to get the thing running again. Only half an hour of work.
I really should tidy up this mess.
| Thursday, 25 April 2024 | Dereel | |
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Another catch-up day
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Topic: general | Link here |
Somehow the last few weeks seem to have been hectic; there has always been something to do. Finally things are over, though. No doctor's visits for a few weeks, cat gradually settling in. And a mound of email to work through.
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Mona's progress
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Topic: animals | Link here |
No Mona to be seen today. Petra Gietz was here, and of course she wanted to see her, but she remained behind the bassoon cabinet all day. It wasn't until the evening that she finally came out. Things seem to be getting better, though. I held her while Yvonne took the dogs past us, and though she tried to escape, it wasn't too hard, and I held her until the dogs were gone again. Then I let her go, and she didn't disappear immediately. So things do seem to be improving.
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Installing the Realtek driver
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
As planned, installed the net/realtek-re-kmod driver for the Realtek 8125 2.5 Gb/s NIC. The installation message was surprising:
Add the following lines to your /boot/loader.conf
to override the built-in FreeBSD re(4) driver.
if_re_load="YES"
if_re_name="/boot/modules/if_re.ko"
How is that going to work? If the driver is built into the kernel, you can't load another driver. And of course that is what happened:
=== root@hydra (/dev/pts/5) ~ 4 -> kldload if_re.ko
kldload: can't load if_re.ko: module already loaded or in kernel
I had thought that it was a separate driver. While searching, found this page, which, for the latest update, states “Note: the driver is still unstable (crash or hang) on some cards/machines”. Other bugs fixed in the last year are also less than encouraging: “fix kernel panic when generating MAC address", “fix panic when kldloaded outside of loader”.
Not quite what I want in a production machine. And to even attempt to load the module, I will have to reboot, with all the untidy ends that that entails. Even then, it's not clear that the module will load; maybe I'll need to build a kernel without the re driver. So for the time being I'll leave things as they are.
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More Microsoft pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Can I find other ways to avoid the hangs I had over the weekend? For reasons I don't understand, despise.lemis.com tries to access the eureka:/dump file system when I run DxO PhotoLab. What do I need /dump for? For backups, in principle. But this is a VM, and it's so much easier to back it up (and restore it if necessary) from behind the scenes rather than running a Microsoft backup program. So umount it, or whatever Microsoft calls it.
What does Microsoft call it? No idea. I went through likely searches and drew a blank. Then played around with the file manager or whatever it's called, the one that with the right clicks will display a graphical representation of file systems and “folders”. Right click. Disconnect! That's the word. But even then, I couldn't find any hits from Microsoft on windows disconnect share.
Will that be enough? It will certainly save time waiting for the drive to spin up. Clearly I should move the /Photos file system to hydra. But that will require considerable restructuring, and in principle I want a 12 TB or more SSD, which is not yet practicable. So maybe I should consider some symlink mess.
Where's Vinum when you need it? Dead and gone, unfortunately. Yes, I could almost certainly do something similar with ZFS, but that requires more learning than I'm prepared to do.
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The sting in the tail of the symlink
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Finally got round to writing up my monthly garden flower page for this month. The big difference was removing the Acacia melanoxylon (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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How do I align them? I have scripts that align photos taken on a single day, but these are a week apart. And to add to the annoyance, my scripts really assume that the build directory and the directory for the day's files are on the same file system, and here they are not, so I need to use symlinks. OK, after setting up for one day, I had:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/28) /photowork/Hugin-build-eureka 37 -> rm newlaundry-door-*=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/28) /photowork/Hugin-build-eureka 38 -> pd
~/Photos/20240420/C /photowork/Hugin-build-eureka=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/28) ~/Photos/20240420/C 39 -> for i in laundry-door-?.tiff; do l $i; ln -s $i /photowork/Hugin-build-eureka/new$i; done
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,960,918 21 Apr 10:51 laundry-door-0.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,960,910 21 Apr 10:52 laundry-door-1.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,961,404 21 Apr 10:52 laundry-door-2.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,960,052 21 Apr 10:53 laundry-door-3.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,961,224 21 Apr 10:53 laundry-door-4.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,961,184 21 Apr 10:53 laundry-door-5.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,960,454 21 Apr 10:54 laundry-door-6.tiff=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/28) ~/Photos/20240420/C 40 -> pd
/photowork/Hugin-build-eureka ~/Photos/20240420/C=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/28) /photowork/Hugin-build-eureka 41 -> l newlaundry-door-*
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,961,072 13 Apr 08:35 newlaundry-door-0.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,960,926 13 Apr 08:35 newlaundry-door-1.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,961,140 13 Apr 08:35 newlaundry-door-2.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,961,456 13 Apr 08:35 newlaundry-door-3.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,961,268 13 Apr 08:35 newlaundry-door-4.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,960,984 13 Apr 08:35 newlaundry-door-5.tiff
lrwxr-xr-x 1 grog wheel 19 25 Apr 15:29 newlaundry-door-6.tiff -> laundry-door-6.tiff
Huh? The files are the same as the old ones, dated 13 April. How did that happen? How about copying them?
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/28) ~/Photos/20240420/C 55 -> for i in laundry-door-?.tiff; do cp -p $i /photowork/Hugin-build-eureka/newer$i; done=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/28) ~/Photos/20240420/C 56 -> pd
/photowork/Hugin-build-eureka ~/Photos/20240420/C=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/28) /photowork/Hugin-build-eureka 59 -> l newerlaundry-door-*
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,960,918 21 Apr 10:51 newerlaundry-door-0.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,960,910 21 Apr 10:52 newerlaundry-door-1.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,961,404 21 Apr 10:52 newerlaundry-door-2.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,960,052 21 Apr 10:53 newerlaundry-door-3.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,961,224 21 Apr 10:53 newerlaundry-door-4.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,961,184 21 Apr 10:53 newerlaundry-door-5.tiff
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 120,960,454 21 Apr 10:54 newerlaundry-door-6.tiff
That looks right, and it worked. But what went wrong with the symlinks?
FOOL! Unlike ln, ln -s copies names, not inode numbers. In this case, instead of linking to ~/Photos/20240420/C/laundry-door-0.tiff (for example), it linked to laundry-door-0.tiff (in the destination directory). Normally this would have failed, but I already had files named laundry-door-0.tiff to laundry-door-5.tiff (but not laundry-door-6.tiff) in the destination directory, so I just created a symlink to the files already in that directory. Normally they would all have failed.
| 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 “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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