Greg's diary, recent entries

Sunday, 13 July 2025	Dereel
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Another catchup day

Topic: technology, general, opinion

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Another day spent catching up (reducing my mail inbox size), with only moderate success. I still have messages months old (over 2 years in one case) that I really need to answer.

Instead I made an equally half-hearted attempt to complete the installation of the new lagoon.lemis.com for Yvonne. The next step was X, particularly the Nvidia driver. lagoon has an ancient GeForce GT 710 card, but it does the job for Yvonne. How do I set up a second machine with the same card? Simple, as it turns out: I have a second one, though it has a sticker on the fan housing saying “noisy”.

And so it was. The fan is clearly sticking, and it took a couple of attempts after power-up for it to run at all. And the nvidia-driver-440 no longer exists, so I tried nvidia-driver-470. And to my surprise it Just Worked.

Next step? Procrastinate. But I need to set the machine so that it comes up automatically (/erc/gettytab and /etc/ttys. And in passing, since lagune (the new machine) was hibernated, I needed to wake it. That's simple enough, maybe: it's already in /etc/ethers as disdain. Well, at least on hydra. That's another file that needs to be NFS mounted across the network. And once again I get the message “/usr/local/libexec/Xorg.wrap: Only console users are allowed to run the X server”, which I need to fix in /usr/local/etc/X11/Xwrapper.config.

Where's my library login?

Topic: general, opinion

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We've been watching “A Town like Alice” on TV. Where's the book? We don't seem to have one. Yvonne wanted to buy a copy, but what are libraries for? The Central Highland Libraries must have a copy.

Yes. Well, they can get one from the library network. But inappropriately for a library, they lose information. Both Yvonne's and my login details are no longer valid, and attempts to reset a password don't produce the promised email.

We've seen this before. They let cards expire and don't even bother to inform you of the fact. And somehow their web site is as broken as ever. Mañana.

Pronouncing Ukrainian vowels

Topic: language, opinion

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Interesting question in the German Quora: “Is it true that the words for “whale” and “cat” are the same in Ukrainian?”

Simple answer: no. “Whale” is “кит”, cat is “кішка”. But that reflects the sex of the cat: in German, it's „Katze“, feminine. A male cat is кіт. So we're looking at the pronunciation of the letters и and і. And that seems more complicated than I thought. In the process, came up with the following sites that may help with pronunciation:

What a choice. Well, no. easypronunciation wants a subscription and doesn't do Ukrainian anyway, uni-halle has a very limited range of offerings, and babla doesn't play nicely with ad blockers, so I didn't try.

Result from https://hellpanderrr.github.io/wiktionary_pron/?lang=Ukrainian:

Word	translation	pronunciation
кит	whale	[ket]
кіт	(tom)cat	[kʲit]
кішка	female cat	[kʲiʃkɐ]

In principle that's fine. But Stefan Speck, who has a particularly good understanding of languages, comes up with the possible pronunciation [кɨт] for кит.

Why is this all so difficult? Even 60 years ago I had difficulty getting my mouth round [ɨ] (ы).

Monday, 14 July 2025	Dereel
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Who is responsible for scams?

Topic: general, technology, opinion

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Interesting article in the news today: Ian Williams, a man in Bendigo, was defrauded of $1,338 a few years back. Two items were paid for via Google Pay on his mobile phone. The bank (National Australia Bank) refused to refund the money: he had identified himself with a fingerprint, so he must have been there.

Williams wasn't happy with that, and he sued NAB. The case is ongoing, but his evidence is convincing. He's asking for $379 million in payout, using rather implausible reasoning, and I'm sure he's not expecting to get more than a fraction of that.

But somehow he's barking up the wrong tree. Yes, banks should take more responsibility for abuse. In cases like my Centrelink exploit nobody seemed to care that my money had been transferred to another bank account due to their negligence. With appropriate legislation the bank could have reverted the transfer. In the current case, where food was bought with fraudulent use of the mobile phone, things are different: the shop (Coles) was only marginally involved. The real culprit is Google Pay. Their security checks are inadequate.

How could they improve them? I don't know. That's why I don't put any sensitive information on my mobile phone. But it's time that the government got its act together and found a better security system, like a single reliable (hah!) method of identification, rather than relying on driver licences or dates of birth.

Fixing exiftool

Topic: photography, technology

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Finally I have got round to posting a message about my issues with the OM System OM-1 Mark II on the exiftool forum. Response from Phil Harvey, the author: “It seems that you mean "Any plans for better OM Workspace support?"”.

Well, no. But at least he'll look at the issue. Am I the only person to run into this problem?