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| Monday, 17 February 2025 | Dereel | Images for 17 February 2025 |
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More VirtualBox fun
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Topic: technology | Link here |
As planned, Callum Gibson contacted me today with information about VirtualBox configuration. Ultimately it didn't help much: as he said, he uses NAT, and it had occurred to me that that really isn't appropriate in my home network: I want to be able to wake and connect to the VMs from outside.
But I did some more playing around. The last two times I tried to run despise (25 June 2024, 19 November 2024), I had the same problem. The VM talked on the network interface, but it wasn't listening. I got continuous repeats of:
12:15:37.799085 ARP, Request who-has eureka.lemis.com tell despise.lemis.com, length 46
12:15:37.799087 ARP, Request who-has eureka.lemis.com tell despise.lemis.com, length 28
12:15:37.799213 ARP, Reply eureka.lemis.com is-at bc:5f:f4:c9:9b:bf (oui Unknown), length 46
That also means that a ping won't work. But yesterday I found that I had had some ping responses, only they stopped after some time. Tried it again today, with the typical “not listening” response. I thought that it might be related to my logging in. So I hoped against hope that the Microsoft network “troubleshooter” might point to something. No, as usual it came up with a blank. “Give feedback”? For the fun of it I said yes, and it merrily tried to send a message across the network link that it had just found to be dead. And the window wouldn't go away!
OK, reboot the VM. The network link works! Log in as myself. It carried on working, but I couldn't enter anything. It seemed that the keyboard had given up. It wasn't this strange “VM grabs keyboard”: I couldn't use the keyboard at all, neither in nor outside the VM. After some concern, discovered that I had two instances of VBox running on two different displays. Stop them and all was well. But by this time I had decided that whatever my problem might be, it wasn't straightforward, and it would make sense to upgrade my system. I've had hydra for nearly 1½ years now, and I haven't done any updates in that time. So I'll create an updated version on my test box and test there first.
At some point I received a surprising email message:
We received your request for a single-use code to use with your Microsoft account.
Your single-use code is: 222340
Only enter this code on an official website or app. Don't share it with anyone. We'll never ask for it outside an official platform.
Thanks,
The Microsoft account team
That must have been the response to my feedback request, the one that didn't get out. I can only assume that it was sent after reboot.
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SSD speed improvements
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the few programs that runs on eureka and uses a lot of resources is MediathekView, a Java application. When I come into the office in the morning it's swapped out, and it takes a couple of seconds to come to life.
But lately it has been really slow to wake up. Why? After a bit of searching, found:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) ~ 36 -> dd if=/dev/ada2p3 of=/dev/null count=65536
33554432 bytes transferred in 155.345170 secs (215999 bytes/sec)=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) ~ 37 -> dd if=/dev/ada2p3 of=/dev/null bs=16k count=65536
1073741824 bytes transferred in 32.405464 secs (33134592 bytes/sec)
That's the swap SSD. 215 kB/s? That's closer to the speed of a floppy disk. This is the SSD that I put in to replace the one that was failing. It seems that this one has already failed. Another reboot to change disks!
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Bad language in video subtitles
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Topic: language, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
I usually enable subtitles where possible when watching TV. It saves a lot of guesswork when people mumble. And it brings out the proofreader in me: it's amazing how inaccurate or badly written so many of them. So far McLeod's Daughters has taken the cake: it was clearly subtitled by a US American bot that can't understand much of the mumbling either, and it comes up with sometimes hilarious mistakes.
But today we saw a recent episode of „Watzmann ermittelt“, a German series, where we saw:
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This is in a brewery, and Google translate translates it as “I left the house at 5 because the apple orchard was broken”. That's wrong too, of course, though it's not clear how to translate „Apfelanlage“. It does better with „Ich bin um 5 schon aus dem Haus, weil die Abfüllanlage war kaputt“ („Abfüllanlage“, “bottling plant” instead of „Apfelanlage“). My guess is that this, too, is a sound recognition system that comes from outside the German language space: the last two words are way they would be in English, but that's wrong in German.
| Tuesday, 18 February 2025 | Dereel | |
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Real Sichuan pepper
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Beijing “fried sauce” noodles for breakfast today. My old jar of Sichuan pepper ran out, and I started the bag I bought a couple of months ago:
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What a difference! I don't know how old the old ones were—Yvonne had written the label, without a date, suggesting that they could have been decades old—but the new ones bit my tongue off. I don't think I have ever experienced that particular spiciness before, and in that concentration (2.5 g) it was quite unpleasant. I'll have to tread carefully next time. 0.5 g to start with?
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Upgrading hydra
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've had hydra, my still-almost-new main computer, for nearly 1½ years, and I haven't updated the system software in that time. Time to do so. This time I'll create a new system on different physical hardware, and when it's done I'll just copy the disk image. Started on that, and how about that, it almost just worked.
Partition a new SSD with gpart, so that the root partition (50 GB!) is the same as the partition on hydra.
Compress the old hydra root partition to another partition on the SSD. If things go wrong, I can restore it to hydra. In passing, mount now brings a strange error message if there's no file system on a partition:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 14 -> mount /dev/ada1p4 /mnt
mount: /dev/ada1p4: No such file or directory
After newfs, it mounted normally.
Expand the root copy into the new root partition.
Modify /etc/fstab to reflect the local file systems as they will be after rebooting, add entries for NFS mounts of hydra.
Replace hydra net configuration with dereel's addresses and interface.
Bend the symlinks.
Symlinks continue to be an issue. What I need here is:
Set /usr/src and /usr/ports to point to the correct places in the git tree.
Create directory /home, add symlinks:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) ~ 13 -> ls -l /home
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 16 18 Feb 15:26 grog -> /hydra/home/grog
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 17 18 Feb 15:25 local -> /hydra/home/local
I'm not sure that it's a good idea to link to my entire home directory, but there are some files in there that I need to access, and I don't intend to log in as grog.
Some of this will require undoing before being transferred to hydra:
And after rebooting, all was well. I've seldom had such a smooth update. Even upgrading ports went smoothly, all 696 that it identified. It did want to remove ports as always, seven of them, but for a change nothing that I had installed, and presumably nothing that would do any harm. Left it downloading 689 ports, 6 GB in total.
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Your credit card has expired!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Email purporting to come from BUPA today:
From: BUPA <noreply@updates.bupa.com.au>
Subject: Mr Lehey, our records show your credit card is expired.
Your credit card is expired
Our records show that your credit card ending in 4352 is expired.
This credit card is used to make premium payments for your Bupa Health Insurance policy. To stay covered with us and be able to keep claiming after 26 February 2025 which is when your policy is currently paid to please update your credit card details today.
Spam? My credit card expires in May 2026. But the mail headers suggested that the message really does come from BUPA. My best bet is that they have messed something up. Never mind, I wanted to cancel that card anyway. But I should ring them and find out what's going on.
What a pain! You can't do anything without a mobile phone nowadays, and to add insult to injury they made me click on CAPTCHAs as well as typing in numbers received on the phone—just to make a phone call! In the end, they told me that I was in for a 25 minute wait, and would I like a call back? This number, or another? Given my problems with Aussie Broadband VoIP, it sounded like a better idea to give them my mobile phone number. Sorry, phone number is invalid.
Idiots! That's the one that they insist on sending PINs to! OK, leave it with the VoIP number. I didn't hear back.
Somehow communication with “service desks” is getting worse all the time.
| 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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